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In an ideal world, she’d stumble upon someone else from The Cell. But seeing the doctor was a one-off thing, just like getting away with his murder. And from what Eric had told her—she did not have any contact with Maddox anymore—they didn’t have any leads on the other men she, Jaclyn, and Shelby had described.
It was disappointing, but it didn’t mean she was going to stop. Killing was a craving. And the state government did most of the work finding victims for her.
Orion was proud of herself.
Finding someone who deserved this wasn’t hard.
Although Orion hated a lot of things about this world reliant on technology and social media, she loved the sex offender registry website. Loved that the government posted their faces and their crimes for all to see.
Well, she didn’t love that there were so many of them that the website needed to exist at all, but she understood it. This was never going to be a world devoid of monsters. But she was going to do her best to make sure there were a few less.
Obviously, Orion would’ve loved to get her revenge on the ones who abused her. Who treated her like an object they had bought and paid for. If she’d been smart, she would’ve interrogated the doctor to find out how he got involved. Who he contacted. Then she could’ve tried to bring the entire place down.
But she hadn’t been smart.
She’d been impulsive and stupid.
The world had forgotten about it when new, fresh horrors took over their headlines.
Orion told herself that’s why she had waited this long, until the dust had settled, until she could be sure that no one was going to arrest her. To ensure no one was monitoring her movements.That was an important part of it, sure. But it wasn’t the main reason.
It had shaken her, what happened with the doctor. What had come out of her. The monster that looked too much like the man she killed. There was no control, only a need for blood.
It took a lot to be at peace with the fact she really was a monster. That it was all she was going to be. That she would always have to wear a mask with everyone else in her life. She was split into two people.
Hence the sex offender registry and her meticulous searching.
She learned to read the different statutes, learning the differentiation between crimes. She searched for the most vile and heinous.
She had come to understand that some men on the list were convicted of statutory rape—sixteen-year-old girls with eighteen-year-old boyfriends and angry fathers. She ignored those names.
Then there were the drunk idiots who pissed in parks or playgrounds. And the flashers and child porn cases who deserved their own form of punishment, but she ignored those too. She couldn’t go after them all. An army battalion couldn’t. There were thousands and thousands of offenders in the state of Missouri alone. So, she searched for the worst of the worst: rape 1st degree, child molestation 2nd degree, sodomy. And she searched for men no larger than she was. Men she could throw into the back of her vehicle. Men who couldn’t get the upper hand.
Their addresses were listed just below their crimes.
So, she chose one. Far from St. Louis, Grandview, and Monroeville—all the places tied to the doctor’s killing. She looked in southwest Missouri, three hours away from what she had dubbed her “kill farm.”
Brecken Anderson was a Boy Scout troop leader for twenty years, a Baptist minister, a married father of four, and a monster. Fourteen boys came forward, sodomized and tortured for years at the hands of Mr. Anderson. He was convicted on seven counts of sodomy in the 2nd degree, along with child pornography charges for the videos he took and dispersed of the abuse. He got out after three years for good behavior. After a divorce and his pathetic excuse for a prison sentence, Brecken moved to the small town of Henderson, Missouri and worked at the local grocery store.
He was small—weighed only one hundred thirty pounds—and in his sixties.
She stalked him for a week, watched his every move. She told April and Shelby she was going to spend some time at a lake house to think and decompress. Little did they know the kind of decompressing she was doing.
She tased him when he got off work one evening, right outside of his trailer, at the end of a quiet street. He writhed and then hit the dirt road with a thud. She stuck him again with the taser, and he wriggled like a fish out of water before passing out, drool puddling near his lips. She dragged his body toward her SUV, and then opened the back, lugged him up and into it, and cuffed his hands behind his back. He was harder to maneuver than she expected, but she was thankful to have spent so much time getting into shape before deciding to hunt monsters.
