“Naw, man,” Kendall Raines said, as he met with Stash Gorecki. “So far, ain’t nobody seen either one of ‘em. Are you sure Ashton is back in town? I mean, absolutely positive? ‘Cause it might have been somebody that just looked like him. It’s been – what? Three, four years now? People can change a lot in that amount o’ time.”
“Yeah, we’re pretty sure. In fact, we aren’t sure now that he ever left,” Gorecki declared. “The boss thinks Carter pulled a fast one and transferred Ashton over to Imp City, then got out while the gettin’ was good.”
“Eh,” Raines said, considering. “Could be, I suppose. The Imp City guys are about the most strait-laced dicks I ever saw, so it figures he’d be in with ‘em, from what I hear. But no, none of my boys an’ girls have seen ‘em, either one of ‘em. Sorry, Stash. We’ll keep looking.”
Matters went on like this for several days, and while Ashton had to duck into a store front once, when he spotted one of Gorecki’s hand-picked gang coming around a corner on his way to work, nothing else happened that anyone could tell.
Eventually the word from Imp City’s street informers indicated that the search for the two men had been back-burnered, to the considerable relief of Ashton, Carter, Peterson, and Ames.
But that didn’t mean things were over.
“You’d think,” Peterson grumbled, “that Gorecki and his goons getting their badges taken for that shit they did to Solisbury would have slowed things down.”
“No,” Carter said. “It’s only going to have made them worse.”
“Why?”
“Because they resent it. They’re still on the payroll, but they’re not official any longer.”
“Oh shit.”
“Exactly.”
Things finally settled down after a few more days, and there were no more immediate indications of anyone from IPD coming after Ashton, so Ashton and Ames met back at the Laughing Cat, taking what Ames called “the undercover route” to get there. George met them and put them in the corner booth of the backmost back room again, closing off the folding partitions to allow them privacy.
This time, when Nick walked Cally home – continuing to take the “undercover routes” to get there – he kissed her.
The next night, at her invitation, Nick skulked his way over to Cally’s apartment and she cooked for him. The first course was a simple spinach salad with a homemade champagne vinaigrette followed by a hearty, warming soupe à l’oignon. Then she served broiled tilapia drizzled with a delicate lemon-dill sauce and a delicious ratatouille on the side. Dessert was a chocolate crème brûlée. All were, according to Cally, from old family recipes.
More, she put out her good china – the set, she told him, that her mother had given her – and put flowers and lit candles on the table. The wine Nick brought per her instructions was poured into two crystal goblets, to be enjoyed with the meal.
It was by far the most sophisticated and delicious meal Nick had had since he had left home on Flanders.
It was definitely better than either the frozen dinner or the cold-cut sandwich.
After dinner, they sat on her sofa and talked.
Mostly.
The rest of the time, they did what young people attracted to one another often did, since the origins of the human race long ago, on Earth.
And that was a lot better than sitting home alone.
The Sandman
A couple of days – almost a full week – after the attack on Carter, Peterson called a meeting of the investigative department.
“He’s back, guys,” she told them. “‘Jack’ is back in the game.”
The older detectives cursed quietly.
“What happened, and who did he get?” Gorski asked.
“Lana Rounder, head of marketing for the Flying Porker restaurant chain,” Peterson said. “She reports directly to the vice president of marketing, Jack Witte. Apparently she collapsed this morning in her office and didn’t respond, so they called for emergency transport to the hospital. She’s already gone into a coma, her liver is failing as we speak, and they found the G.A.S. treatment in her bloodstream. The failure cascade is already starting.”
“Damn,” Demetrius muttered, patently distressed.
“Um, ma’am, who’s Jack?” Ames asked. “And...what did the rest of that mean?”
“Okay, that’s right, you newbies don’t know. Lemme see. About five or six years back–“
“It started about ten years ago, Maia,” Demetrius reminded.
“True, but it went on until around five years ago,” Peterson averred, “we had a serial killer, Cally. Some of us started off calling him ‘Jack’ after the very first recorded serial killer in human history. Others, like the news media, called him ‘the Sandman’ after his method of killing, and that’s mostly the name that stuck. We never caught him, and eventually he stopped killing, and the murders became cold cases. Until now.”
“How did he kill, then?” Ashton asked.
“No one knew, at first,” Demetrius said. “The victims would fall unconscious, drop into a coma, and then internal organs would start to fail, one by one, in an increasing and accelerating cascade. Eventually not enough was functional to keep them alive, and they died.”
“What was the profile on his victims?” Compton asked.
“We were never able to figure that out,” Gorski said. “That’s why we were never able to solve any of the murders. If you have a serial killer with a known modus operandi, a specific method of killing, but you can’t figure out why he chooses his targets, or how he actually kills beyond ‘somehow he administers this toxic substance,’ you’re going to have a hard time solving the cases.”
“Shit,” Weaver muttered.
“Exactly,” Peterson said. “Now, Taylor Haptman and Jill Amundsen are still on that same case that they’re fighting with over in Charia, which I’m
