She had burned every piece of bloodstained clothing in a remote gully near the woods. The rope, tape, and other supplies had been bought with cash at a hardware store in another county.
There were no receipts. The empty pill bottles investigators eventually found were old and could not be tied to Leah by prescription records. In the end, the police could not establish a single direct piece of evidence.
The case slid into a dead end. Officially, the identity of the person responsible was never determined. Unofficially, rumors spread through Ash Creek almost at once.
Plenty of longtime residents had a pretty good idea who had done it and why. But no one said her name out loud. In fact, the town’s reaction was strangely simple.
People felt no sympathy for the four men who had terrorized them for years. If anything, beneath the whispers there was a grim sense of satisfaction.
Everyone remembered what those men had done in that town. People had feared them for years and hated them just as long. And now somebody had finally put a stop to them.
What happened was savage, far beyond anything decent people would want to imagine, but in the eyes of many it carried its own rough kind of justice. A month after the attack, Leah quietly left her job at the sewing shop, packed her few belongings, and moved away without telling anyone where she was going…
