“Detectives! In here now!” the captain called loudly from his office. He was in the process of turning up the volume when his detectives sprinted in.
“That’s right, Patricia. This is quite a surprise for everyone here at Channel 5 who knew the perpetrator as Christian Price; and were it not for an anonymous tip that came into the newsroom very early this morning, we never would have made the connection.”
“What’s going on?” Wilson asked.
“Shhh, listen.” the captain said, his gaze pinned to the television.
"Again, for those of you just joining us, we’ve received reports from our sister station in Chattanooga, Tennessee that police in the small suburb of East Ridge found the body of Daniel Whittaker shortly before 1 a.m.; the serial killer that we, in Atlanta, knew by the moniker Christian Price. Police say that Whittaker was the victim of a mugging and was stabbed to death outside a local Cracker Barrel supermarket off Ringgold Road.
We, at Channel 5, were astonished to learn that Daniel Whittaker was a scientist from Chicago who went missing shortly after the death of his wife, who was murdered. Her case remains unsolved. We have also learned that, in his role of scientist, Whittaker often worked with the U.S. military on developing methods in which to perfect torture techniques in order to obtain information from terrorists. The media in his home state of Illinois often criticized him regarding the use of human subjects in his experiments. Whittaker was forty-seven years old."
The captain reached over and retrieved the remote, turning off the television before facing his detectives.
“I’m trying not to get up and dance a jig,” he grinned.
“Karma’s a bitch,” Harding said in a self-satisfied tone.
“I take it you leaked the identity to the media?” Wilson asked, addressing Hardwick.
Hardwick nodded, “Figures you’d jump to the assumption that I did that.”
“Call it a hunch,” Wilson replied, “but I have a feeling that you weren’t going to let this guy get free of our clutches without a fight.”
Hardwick grinned, “I couldn’t let it go, no. I needed the citizens of Atlanta to know they were safe now, and the best way to do that was to let them know that Christian Price was dead.”
“Even though we hadn’t gotten the report from Chicago PD yet as to whether Whittaker was indeed our perp?”
Hardwick nodded again, “Maybe I was risking something by playing that gut feeling, but when I typed in the search parameters and only one name came up, I’d say it was a fair intuition.”
“What if you’re wrong? What if Whittaker wasn’t Price?” Wilson prodded. “What if the guy in Chicago was simply a man who lost his wife and has nothing to do with this case whatsoever?”
“You never let things go, do you?” Cortez snapped. “Give the man a little credit, will you? He wouldn’t have leaked it if his intuition wasn’t backed up by something solid.”
“Indeed,” Hardwick said with a satisfied grin.
“How can you be so damned certain?” Wilson snapped.
“Price…Whittaker…had an inclination that I started a trace on his location the minute he called. Since he was calling from a phone booth, he was convinced the trace wouldn’t bear fruit. He all but told me that I could run a trace because he wasn’t in our jurisdiction any longer. Just before I disconnected the call, the trace came back as a payphone in East Ridge, Tennessee.”
“There could be hundreds of phone booths in—” Wilson started.
“East Ridge,” Hardwick interrupted, “is a small city, with only about 21,000 residents and a whopping eleven phone booths. Most located along the stretch where Whittaker happened to be calling from—Ringgold Road. So, do you think it would be difficult for police to run down eleven phone booths rather quickly, given the proper impetus?”
“What impetus would that be?” the captain chimed in.
“Once the trace pinpointed a general location, I immediately placed a call to their local police department and told them to be on the lookout for him. Told them what he’d done here, which must have spurred them into finding him fast because I’m certain they didn’t want him setting up shop in their town. Anyway, they must have made a swing by the Cracker Barrel first thing after I called, and found a body…”
“Okay, so a guy got mugged and killed,” Wilson persisted in his usual antagonistic fashion, “that doesn’t automatically make him our perp, especially since we don’t know what our perp looks like—precisely. Too many different descriptions. And he could have changed his appearance again shortly after leaving Atlanta.”
Hardwick grinned wide, refusing to allow Wilson to bait him. It was the first sincere smile he’d had since the whole affair with Price started. “It’s Price, and Price is Whittaker, and Whittaker is our serial killer. Why? Because first of all, our serial killer called from one of their eleven phone booths. Not too many people were making calls after midnight in East Ridge, Tennessee. Second, this guy gets killed right next to a phone booth, and third, the police called and told me it was Whittaker just before I leaked the news story here to Channel 5.”
“They couldn’t have run his fingerprints—”
“Didn’t have to,” Hardwick interjected. “He was using his own car; registered in his own name.”
“Arrogant son-of-a-bitch,” Harding said, shaking his head.
“You could’ve easily been wrong,” Wilson reprimanded, refusing to let the matter end.
“Yeah, well he wasn’t wrong, so just drop it, Wilson,” Harding defended.
“Hey, did you arrange the mugging too?” Cortez quipped, satisfied that they’d gotten their man.
“If only I’d thought of it. It would have been poetic justice, in my humble opinion,” Hardwick said sincerely.
“It still was poetic,” the captain interjected, “in my not-so humble opinion. Price…or Whittaker…whoever he was, met a justifiable end. He spent years murdering innocents in the name of perverted justice. He got what was coming to him.”
“Yeah, like I said, karma’s a bitch,” Harding repeated.
“You four, go home now,” the captain said. “Take the day off. The case is finally over. When you come in tomorrow, I expect to hear some really good ideas on how to make this department…”
“…a well-oiled machine,” Hardwick finished.
The captain nodded.
“Yes, Captain.” Hardwick stood aside and shooed his fellow detectives from the captain’s office.
“I don’t know what he’s talking about,” Cortez whined, good-naturedly, as he passed. “I am a well-oiled machine.”
Hardwick trailed behind, grinning sadly. Today he’d enjoy the banter and the relief at knowing another serial killer was put out of commission, but his sadness stemmed from knowing that he wasn’t the man that meted justice. He was also contending with the reality that he’d made some grave errors in judgment, errors he’d never made before, errors that had him questioning whether it was time to retire.
Tomorrow the captain wanted changes, and he planned to give him a major one.
–Tomorrow, he planned to resign.