“It’s been four days,” Hardwick observed, pouring a cup of coffee before heading toward a chair in the little commissary, “and not a peep out of Price.”
“Maybe the bastard’s moved on,” Wilson offered, moving to pour his own cup.
“Nah, he’s just yanking us,” Harding said before shoving the rest of a muffin in his mouth.
“Yeah, that’s the impression I’m getting,” Cortez added, taking a sip of his apple juice. “I think the sick son-of-a-bitch is playing us. Making us suffer for letting Richardson die.”
“He’s a son-of-a-bitch all right, and he’s out there, right now, planning some major retribution,” Harding concurred, “and it ain’t gonna be pretty.”
“You don’t think he’s done with the APD then?” Wilson replied, settling at the table with his oatmeal and coffee. “I mean, doesn’t he usually quit each city after three victims?”
Hardwick shook his head, “Yeah, that’s been his M.O., but we screwed up the last one, remember? I don’t think he’s going to forgive us for that one. No, I think Harding is right. He’s working on something else, and I think this time he’s not going to be so forthcoming with the details needed to find the victim so easily.”
“You think that last find was easy?” Wilson blurted.
“Way harder than it should have been,” Cortez snapped. “We should have found Richardson easy, and if we had, this nut job would be out of our lives.”
“Yeah, but not out of commission altogether; he’d still be out there doing the same thing to precincts in other cities,” Hardwick replied sharply.
“Yeah, and I’d be shouting a good riddance and then happily send a ‘sorry that it’s your turn’ gift basket to the precinct that gets him next,” Cortez retorted.
“We all know it’s best if we’re the ones that nail him. We need this after the Richardson fiasco. The other precincts may have solved case number three in their jurisdiction, but they never caught the guy,” Hardwick countered.
“I don’t think they really tried,” Harding added. “Like us, I think they just wanted the guy gone; their cities returned to some sort of normalcy.”
“Do you remember how mad he got when I shifted the search focus to him?” Hardwick asked suddenly.
“Yeah, he was pissed all right,” Harding laughed. “I think you got too close for his comfort.”
“Precisely,” Hardwick replied thoughtfully.
“What are you thinking?” Wilson asked.
“I’m thinking we stop playing marionettes for this puppeteer. The next time he calls in, we go back to being detectives and we locate the perp. We stop him, we stop this insanity.”
“What about the victims?” Cortez asked. “Do we just let him keep killing until we catch him?”
“No, we put black and whites on the search while we do what we do best.”
“Bring down the bad guys,” Cortez grinned.
“Damned straight,” Harding snapped, slapping his hand on the table.
“Am I missing something?” Wilson interrupted. “We followed that technique with Brooke Madison, but she still died, so how is it going to be a better plan this time around?”
“Do you ever really listen to full conversations before making asinine comments?” Harding retorted. “Hardwick just said that we nearly caught the son-of-a-bitch during the Madison case, or weren’t you listening to that part?”
“He’s back,” the captain called from the doorway, preventing Wilson from responding to Harding. As he followed his fellow detectives from the commissary, Wilson wondered whether they’d finally met their match and if there was any possible way of stopping Christian Price at all. After all, no other police force had been able to. What Wilson didn’t realize was that Hardwick was pondering along the very same lines.