Free Good Day to Die by Stephen Solomita

mentalities, ballistics being one of them. Outright dismissal being another.
    It was the dismissal part that bothered me as I sat in front of a desk contemplating the very large box of assorted reports that Pooch had thoughtfully prepared for me. If ranking officers as high as Deputy Chief Bowman were out to bury Captain Vanessa Bouton, they’d sacrifice Detective/First Roland Means in a hot second. Which meant Bouton’s promise of protection carried all the force of a politician promising to end the budget deficit.
    There’s nothing more embarrassing to a hunter than blundering into his own snare. I’d jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire (actually, it was more like out of the refrigerator and into the freezer), but that didn’t mean I had to stay there. If you stepped into a bear trap, would you scream “ouch, ouch, ouch” until you bled to death? Or would you find a way to pry open the jaws of the trap and deal with your wounds?
    There was no going back. The first thing I had to do was please Vanessa Bouton. If I could keep her going for a few weeks, I might find a way to distance myself from the awful thud she was going to make when she fell on her face. I might, for instance, look up Deputy Chief Bowman and offer to be his eyes and ears. In return for a little consideration when it came time for the sentencing.
    That doesn’t sound nice, does it? But it wasn’t altogether nice of Vanessa Bouton to use me for cannon fodder, either. It’s one thing to risk your own ass for a worthy cause; it’s quite another to lure some poor innocent out of ballistic hell to aid you in committing suicide.
    In any event (even without a definite, long-term plan of action), I was considerably cheered by the fact that I already had my angle. It’d come to me while I was sparring with Pooch. Assuming Bouton was right in her assessment of the case (a position I was forced to take), neither of the first three victims could have been the primary target. The killer would have had to wait until the media put it together, until the cops were committed to the search for a serial killer, before he made his move.
    But once his intended scenario was established, he would have had to act fairly quickly. He couldn’t risk having to abandon the field because of a close call. That close call might take any number of forms. An intended victim could escape or another cruising whore come up with a partial license plate or an accurate description. Any close call would either subject the killer to extreme risk or force him to give up before he’d accomplished his actual objective.
    What it came down to was victim number four or victim number five. Which was just as well, because Pooch had given me something over six hundred pages of documents to peruse. There was no way two cops (one of whom was almost certain to prove something less than proficient at street investigation) could even begin to penetrate that mass. Reducing the number of targets by five, on the other hand, would provide Bouton and myself with a few weeks of serious work, followed by a few months of bullshit repetition. After which, we could abandon the field secure in the knowledge that we’d given it the old college try.
    I began to sift through the evidence, starting with the autopsy reports and the crime scene photos. The bodies were gruesome enough. The eyelids, eyebrows, and nipples had been carefully removed. The instrument, according to the autopsy notes, had been a thin, very sharp knife, perhaps a filleting knife of the sort commonly used by fishermen. The torsos, on the other hand, had been stabbed numerous times with a much longer, much thicker blade. Ribs had been snapped by the force of the blows, suggesting a survival or hunting knife. The genitals were untouched, except for deep grooves where the killer had wrapped the penis and testicles with a strip of leather. All of this, of course, had taken place after death. The cause of death for each victim was