The Real Life Horrors That Find Their Way into Fiction

June 23, 2020 | By Meghan Holloway | Reply More

For several years, I spent my nights fighting crime.

I worked in the records department of a police station in Colorado. My job was varied. I was a reference librarian for the officers, and a department dispatcher for the public. I processed police records; performed research using local, state, and national criminal databases; entered warrants, missing people, and stolen vehicles into the National Crime Information Center; etc. It was a job that made me feel like Nancy Drew.

There are a number of cases I still vividly recall the details of today. The one I think of most is Mary’s.*

I saw Mary at least once a week. She was a pretty woman in her forties who was trying to start over after a divorce. She began dating again and thought she had a connection with one man, but after a few months, she ended the relationship.

Ending the relationship was only the beginning. It started innocently. She would turn a corner in the grocery store, and he would be in the next aisle. She went to the movies, and when the lights came up after the showing, she found him sitting in the row behind her. Her phone would ring at odd hours in the night, but when she answered, no one was on the other end of the line.

It lasted for over a year, and—as it so often does—it escalated. She changed phones, closed her social media accounts, and moved from the new house she had pinched pennies to buy after her divorce.

She filed report after report against him. I entered so many harassment citations against him in the system, I lost count. He would go to jail for a few days or a few months, and once released, it would start again.

The last night she came into the police station to make a report, all of the officers were out on a call. She was afraid to wait in the lobby by herself, so I left the safety of my bullet-proof office and took up the space beside her on the bench to wait.

“If he shows up,” I told her, “my Glock is right here in my purse.”

She nodded, and after a moment, voice subdued and defeated, she said, “He’s going to kill me.”

I had no comfort to offer her, because the only response that came to mind was I know.

The call on the radio came a week later. The dispatcher cued an emergency response and rattled off an address we all knew by heart at that point.

“Break-in in progress,” the dispatcher said.

I listened to the 9-1-1 call days later.

“He’s in my house,” Mary whispered, voice tight with fear. “I can hear him.”

I could hear him, too, listening to the recording. My heart was in my throat as she cried, hiding in her closet with her little dog. I could hear the splintering of wood as he kicked in the door to her bedroom. I could hear his rage and her terror when he found her hiding place.

And I could hear the crack of each bullet he fired at her. There were seven. Six in her back when she tried to run. One straight through her head, in one temple and out the other.

I do not know how she survived it. A female officer rode in the ambulance with her. She said Mary kept moaning, “It hurts. It hurts. My dog. Is my dog okay?”

The policewoman came to my office after she returned from the hospital. We both sat on the floor with my own dog and cried.

Mary lived. The bullet that went through her head blinded her. One of the shots in her back severed her spinal cord and left her a quadriplegic. She may have survived, but her stalker shredded her emotional wellbeing before ripping the life she knew away from her.

I do not spend my nights fighting crime any longer, but Mary’s story has followed me in these subsequent years, lingering in my mind, haunting me with the ineffectiveness of the system. There were a number of cases that made me bitter over how little justice there is in the world. Mary’s story is near the top of the list, and her harrowing experience is what inspired the character of Evelyn in my upcoming thriller, HUNTING GROUND.

*name changed

—

Meghan Holloway found her first Nancy Drew mystery in a sun-dappled attic at the age of eight and subsequently fell in love with the grip and tautness of a well-told mystery. She flew an airplane before she learned how to drive a car, did her undergrad work in Creative Writing in the sweltering south, and finished a Masters of Library and Information Science in the blustery north.

She spent a summer and fall in Maine picking peaches and apples, traveled the world for a few years, and did a stint fighting crime in the records section of a police department. She now lives in the foothills of the Appalachians with her standard poodle and spends her days as a scientist with the requisite glasses but minus the lab coat. She is the author of ONCE MORE UNTO THE BREACH, available now from Polis Books.

Follow her at @AMeghanHolloway on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, or visit her website at https://www.meghanholloway.com/.

HUNTING GROUND

Fifteen years ago, Hector Lewis’s wife and young daughter vanished without a trace. People have long thought he was responsible, but the man he knows is behind their disappearance still walks free. As a police officer, he is sworn to uphold the law. But he has seen how little justice there is in the world. And when a newcomer’s arrival sparks a harrowing series of crimes, Hector finds himself in a race to catch a man he is convinced is a killer.

Evelyn Hutto knows what it is to be prey. She moved west to start over. But the remote town of Raven’s Gap, Montana, is not as quiet and picturesque as it appears. The wild borderlands of Yellowstone National Park are home to more than one kind of predator. Women are going missing, and Evelyn’s position at the local museum unearths a collection of Native American art steeped in secrets. As she traces the threads of the past and the present, she finds them tied to one man.

Hector is a man obsessed with finding answers. Evelyn is a woman with secrets of her own. As winter whittles the land to bone and ice, the body count rises, and both become locked in a deadly game of cat and mouse with a dangerous man. A man who is as cunning as he is charismatic. A man whose new hunting season is only just beginning.

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