Chapter 3

I left Staff Sergeant Mike Volasko's office, appreciating how much he cared about his members. There were several police officers in upper management that did not, and truth be told, this job was hard enough without getting it from the other end too.

Making my way into the homicide bullpen, I sat down in my office chair and took a breath. Some days were worse than others, but at the end of it all, as long as you were still breathing, that was all that mattered.

What the boss said was right. I had managed to find The Butcher once, and there was nothing stopping me from doing it a second time. I pulled out all the information I had on the guy and started re-reading it to see if I missed something.

The information we had on him was scarce. We knew he was called The Butcher because he liked to hack up his victims with a butcher knife. However, if he was experienced with the butcher knife because he was a butcher or even a chef, I had no idea. Even the knife he used was too general to get a definitive place of purchase. Hell, he could have bought it at the last minute in a grocery store and liked it enough to keep using it.

All I knew for certain was that he liked to use his butcher's knife, he had a thing for college-aged girls, and he needed a place away from everyone to be able to 'work'.

Unfortunately, life was not like a tv show, and it took a long time for me to find the clues about where The Butcher could be.

A week and a half went by before we caught wind of The Butcher again. This time though, I refused to let him go.

His latest victim was a 20-year-old university student from NYU that was studying business. Her body was found three blocks away from the alley I originally caught him in.

I think he wanted the notoriety of killing a cop. After all, it would be a safe assumption that shooting someone in the chest and then cutting off her arm would lead to her death.

When the news remained silent, I wondered what he thought. What was going through his head when he didn't see his name in lights?

Was that why he picked his latest victim? To get whatever it was that he didn't get through me?

Did it upset him? Did he want to make a point?

Did I think he dumped her body where mine should be accidentally?

No way. He and I were caught in a game of cat and mouse, and I was determined to be the winner this time around.

There were about 50 people in my homicide unit and, even though we mostly work on our own cases, there were some cases that required us to work together. We referred to those cases as the Magnificent Seven, and The Butcher was one of the seven that we were determined to catch.

The Butcher's body count had entered the double digits and the higher-ups wanted an explanation. I rolled my eyes as I thought back to the briefing this morning.

An explanation… right… because it is so easy to hunt down and stop a killer that has been killing people for more than a decade without being caught. Yeah, I'll get right on that.

I opened the door to the conference room and took a look around. Although we called it a conference room, it looked more like a classroom with rows upon rows of desks facing a whiteboard.

There were around 20 people in the room all told, most of them men between the ages of twenty and thirty. At a whopping 233 years old, I was definitely the oldest out of all of us. Too bad I still looked like I was 18.

I nodded as I walked between the rows of desks and sat down in my seat. It was right dab in the middle of the room where I could easily see the whiteboard and didn't have to stand up.

I was vertically challenged, and that was all I was admitting to.

Out of the 20 people around me, only 9 of them were from my unit. Apparently, The Butcher deserved to have the big guns called out to deal with him. And by big guns, I mean the SWAT team.

The door opened about ten minutes later, and in walked my Sergeant. Sgt. Connolly, or Sgt. Hard Ass, as I referred to him as, dropped his stack of files on the podium and turned to look at the room.

His eyes landed on me, and I held back a grin.

Yup, the feeling was entirely mutual.

"The Butcher was last seen entering a warehouse in The Meatpacking district near the Hudson River East."

I swear I was trying to suppress the snort that threatened to come out, but by the look on the faces of the guys around me, I really didn't succeed.

The Butcher, at The Meatpacking district… how did no one else find this funny?

Sgt. Hard Ass stopped and glared at me until I managed to calm down and then he started again.

He taped an enlarged map of The Meatpacking district onto the whiteboard and then proceeded to outline everyone's role in the takedown.

Everyone took notes, myself included, but I didn't understand why we needed to write everything down.

SWAT was to go in through the front door first to secure the suspect and then the homicide unit, lead by the Sgt., would cover the back of the warehouse as backup. Hopefully, we would be able to cover all the exits, and bing, bam, boom, The Butcher would be arrested and locked away for the rest of his life.

All in all, it was a very standard takedown operation of a serial killer. That was... if he was still there by the time we got there.

Fingers crossed.