Page 42 of So Twisted

Faith frowned. She hated to admit it, but Michael was right about that. The Knights of Nature were a dead end. “What about Global Wildlife, though? It could be one of their colleagues from there.”

“Maybe, but if it is, I don’t think the animal rights thing is the angle we should be looking at.”

“What else could it be? What other possible reason could someone have to fabricate tools to look like animal bites?”

“The answer to the first question is that they didn’t like the victims. The answer to the second question is the part that really bugs me. James Hawkins was an animal trainer. If he was going to fabricate a tool to look like an animal bite, it would be a good tool. It would look like a real panther bite, not box cutters. A real mamba bite, not a hot dog fork. And he would have at least rubbed some blood on the wolverine’s muzzle. We should have thought about all of that before we even went to talk to him, but we didn’t. We just decided that we knew it was him.”

“We didn’t decide that we knew it was him,” Faith said. “He had a connection with all three victims, and he had a motive.”

“He had a connection with two victims and happened to be in the vicinity of the third victim.”

Faith pressed her lips together. She was getting frustrated. “Okay, so the lead didn’t work out. The lead to Forrester was stronger, but that didn’t work out either. Why are you suddenly getting pissy? I mean, yeah, it sucks, we haven’t caught the guy. But you tell me all the time that’s just how cases are.”

"Yes, but I'm telling you now that we wasted time because this was a thread that should never have been pulled. We're smarter than that."

Faith narrowed her eyes. “It was my deduction that this was related to animal cruelty. Are you saying I was foolish?”

Michael sighed and rubbed his temples. “No. Sorry. That came out wrong. Idothink you were wrong, though. I don’tthink the animals are the central issue in this case, I think the people are. I think our killer’stryingto make it look like it’s about the animals, but frankly, he’s doing too poor a job for me to believe it.”

“But what else is connecting our three victims?”

“I don’t know, but we need to find out. The animal thing was the killer’s way of distracting us, and we’ve fallen for it.”

Faith crossed her arms and thought a moment. Michael had a point, but there was more to consider here than the killer’s moments of incompetence. She shook her head. “I don’t believe that. It’s too much of a coincidence that all three of them happened to have a history of abusing animals either through greed, negligence or some sort of mental illness. It just makes more sense for them to be targeted because of that. And they have the workplace association too.”

“If it’ll make you happy, then have the police scour Global Wildlife’s employee records, but I’m telling you, Faith, this is a dead end. We need to find another reason why someone wanted these people dead, because it’s too much of a coincidence that the killer sucks at making these look like animal attacks each time and each lead we find on that end turns out to be a dead end.”

“That’s putting us back to square one, Michael.”

“I hate to break it to you, Faith, but we’re at square one. This is square flipping one right now. No suspects, no leads, no idea what the motive is.”

“The motive is taking revenge on them for animal cruelty,” Faith insisted. “I will take that to court.”

“And you’ll get the case dismissed because we have nothing solid to back that up.”

“We have nothing solid to back up the idea that there’s another reason,” she countered.

“Because we haven’tlookedat any other reason!” Michael thundered. “If we looked, we’d find one!”

“So you think.”

“Yeah! So I very much think. I’m sorry, does my opinion not matter? Should I bow down to the almighty intelligence of Faith Bold and stop trying to offer an alternative to all of the ideas you have that aren’t working?”

She glared at him and resisted the urge to fire back. From in between the beds, Turk moaned forlornly.

“Why don’t we take ten minutes to cool off,” she said thinly, “before we say anything else we might regret?”

They didn’t get their ten minutes. Faith’s phone buzzed before Michael could respond. It was the Boss.

She took a deep breath and put the phone on speaker. “Hello, Boss.”

“Bold, we have a problem.”

“What is it?”

"We had reporters here this morning asking for you. They wouldn't take no for an answer. I forced them to take no for an answer and had security pull them out of the building, but they ran into Chavez, and Chavez spilled the beans about you being assigned cases away from Philadelphia to keep your name out of the news. Now the news is coming up with a bunch of wild theories about why you might be hiding from them."

Faith sighed and pressed her palms to her forehead. “Shit. Why was Chavez talking to them?”

---