Very creative. I like the exposure to the media and our obsession with tragedy and bizarre cases and disturbed people . I also enjoy the name Air Hunt, it sticks and is hard to forget.

The conclusion wraps well for a short story with so many turns.

Great story.  

Twisted, subversive, brilliant.

There is something about this concept that really appeals to me. I do like clever plotting, and I think there is a lot to admire here. It took a while for the penny to drop, which is a good thing, but I did have a smile on my face by the end.

I do think though that there are ways in which this could be improved further. I’m not sure about the reason you left out speech marks throughout the story, but I would certainly bring them back in. Separate the narrative from the dialogue, and I think that will help the flow to it, and certainly make this an easier read.

It could also be a little more dynamic. The good thing about writing in the present tense is that it immerses the reader into the story. The danger of doing so while writing in third person is that it is too easy to write passively. This is a dialogue driven piece, but sometimes your narrative feels like script notes. You describe what is happening, but it feels almost cursory, something added to break up the speech. For instance – “She grates her teeth and stomps away.” It is a simple line, but it doesn’t really add anything. If you break it down, what does that actually look like? If I saw someone obviously grating her teeth and stomping, I’d give her a wide berth. In the next paragraph you have the description, “rumpled hand”, and further describe the man shortly afterwards as “the wrinkled fellow”. Basically he is a generic old man. In a short story there should really be no throwaway lines. Everything needs to be tight and serving the story.

I’m inclined to agree with Devon on the bit in the house with the cop. First of all you have a sole cop breaking protocol to pursue him, which is unlikely, but possible. Then you have the rest of the cops not going in to back him up, which is more unlikely, but again just about possible. Then you have the two of them holding guns, but just talking. At any moment you’d expect the cop to shoot, because this is an armed and dangerous man standing next to a dead body. When reading fiction it is necessary to have a suspension of disbelief. Unlikely is fine, it’s called artistic licence. You can stretch that suspension of disbelief to breaking point though, if you have two or three unlikely moments in a row just to serve where you want the plot to go. Having the cop there is a convenient way to introduce his partner, but you could strip him out of it and not have it affect the story as a whole. You’ve arguably got three unlikely things happening in short order just to introduce a character in a revelatory way. Reading the whole story though, I think you clearly have the skill to introduce her in a different way, which doesn’t involve this much artistic licence.

If it sounds like I’m being very negative here, that’s not my aim. I gave this a very solid thumbs up. It’s a good story, written in an engaging way which holds the attention all the way through. I think you could turn it into something very good indeed. Best of luck with it.