David Ashby had been a detective for four years before joining the US Marshals Fugitive Recovery Unit. He’d been with Fugitive Recovery another five years. Now, he was the head of a newly formed Serial Crimes Tracking Unit. He had six men under his command; Charles Lacefield, a former Army Ranger who had been with the Marshals service for six years. Brock Lowman who had only been a US Marshal for a year, but he had transferred from the FBI where he worked as a profiler for the last six years. Steve Dailey had been a US Marshal for three years. James Evenston had been a detective in LA before being recruited for this job. Martin Avilla had been special forces in Canada before immigrating to the US and joining the SCTU and Nick Dibbly was a social worker turned US Marshal after he stumbled across a horrific scene of carnage when he went to check on a client.
They’d been training for six months as a unit. Working to figure out the clues that would lead them to a serial killer and the best way to take them down. Nathan Green was in charge of their training. Each day they had to solve a new case based on just the clues that Green gave them. If they succeeded, Nathan took them out for drinks. If they failed, Nathan killed a crash test dummy in surprising ways, making sure they got spattered in the pig gore with which he filled them. Before telling them who the killer was and storming out of the room.
To Nathan Green, every case, even though they were solved or completely made up, was a case of life and death. He had taken their training very seriously. Perhaps more seriously than they had at first. They had become more than guards and trackers, they were also becoming hunters.
That was when their first request for assistance came in. The FBI had profiled a young male, most likely white, driving around Denver, shooting at random people. Sometimes he hit bad neighborhoods, sometimes more affluent areas, sometimes he struck around the colleges, but they couldn’t find him. Everything they had done had been in vain. Finally, they had admitted they needed help and called in the SCTU.
The team was already headed to their hotel rooms in Salt Lake City when the realization that they had their first real case sank in. It seemed to hit all of them at the same time. There would be no one holding their hands. No one to tell them what they overlooked. It was life or death; in David’s head, he wasn’t sure whether they would be going out for drinks afterwards or end the day covered in gore, metaphorically speaking. David hoped it was the first option. There were no pigs this time to donate the blood and other things.