Chapter 3

Two more crime scenes popped up over the next twelve hours, rounding out the day's body count to an unlucky three. Training officer Michael "Guppy" Guerra had a feeling it was only going to rise but making it through the next twenty-four hours to find out was debatable. His newly assigned rookie had a bad habit of tapping her pencil against the table when she was thinking and she was thinking all the time.

In the short spurts between solos, she gnawed on the wood hard enough to give herself lead poisoning. Sometimes, she even took to twirling her pencil between her fingers and there was more than one hole in the ceiling to show for her talents. It wouldn't be so bad if she actually wrote something down every once in a while but Guerra was pretty sure her brain was disconnected from her hands. Maybe even her entire body.

It often moved of its own accord despite every rule and instruction he'd given her. It was the first time in Guerra's entire career that he had to check the passenger seatbelt in the squad car before every shift to make sure his rookie didn't try to jump out before the brake lights cleared. Toddlers in strollers at the zoo weren't even that impulsive. If he wanted to babysit, he would have applied to the local daycare.

"Did forensics find anything yet?" rookie officer Annie Cofield asked, twiddling her pencil again. The instrument of torture suddenly flew from her fingers, across Guerra's face, and landed on the other side of the squad room.

Rookie Officer Cofield also had a bad habit of sitting in the front of the squad room.

Guerra closed his eyes to the backdrop of several murmured chuckles. Annie quickly cleared her throat and retrieved her weapon of mass destruction without further embarrassment. She knew the answer to her question anyway. It was the same one Guerra had given her the past two hours: No. No and no again.

It was still too early to come to any conclusions regarding the recent murders. Tests took time. Analysis were expensive and three back to back deaths had the press knocking on the station's front door. The stakes were too high to risk leaking false information. Murder was hot news on a normal day. Multiply it by three and even the top brass was sweltering, especially when the coroner's preliminary reports indicated that all three victims died of the same MO: lacerations to the neck, punctures to the base of the skull, and compression injuries to the chest. They were injuries consistent with an attack from a very large, very powerful, physically based pokemon, but that didn't rule out foul play between humans just yet. People used pokemon to do their dirty work since the first pokemon domestication back in the Stone Age.

"But don't you think it's strange?" Annie continued, unable to stay silent for long. "All three victims have almost exactly the same profile, like they were targeted. Their hair, their clothes, their age, how much do you wanna bet that they belonged to the same social circle?"

"Sure," Guerra droned, playing along with his rookie's delusions. She wouldn't stop otherwise and the only thing worse than her pencil tapping was her talking. "I bet they even went to the same hair salon." He had never seen such gaudy work outside of the circuit before: red spikes, blue dread locks, what was next, flaming highlights with real flames?

Annie stiffened with a gasp.

"I didn't think about that," she said. "What if you're right?"

A sudden, somewhat devious, but unquestionably brilliant idea came to Guerra's mind. If Annie was so obsessed with these cases, then why not let her work them? It didn't matter if the lead was bogus or not. That wasn't the point. False alarms, dead ends, and prank calls were a part of the business. That was the hard lesson every rookie had to learn in this job. It was the nature of the beast. He was doing Annie a favor, breaking her in early.

"I've got an idea," Guerra suddenly exclaimed, leaning in close. "Why don't you ask around the local salons to see if they recognize any of the victims? They might be able to give us some new information. It'll take me a while to sign out the unit, protocol and all, but you can get a head start on foot. There's a popular stylist just a few blocks from here and I'll pick you up when I'm finished."

"But the briefing-," Annie tentatively began before Guerra quickly came up with an excuse.

"The higher ups expect us to do this sort of thing," he explained. "It's only a matter of time before they march down here asking for that kind of information. Just think of how impressed they'll be to see we already have it?"

Annie beamed with the responsibility.

"Well, what are you waiting for, rookie?" Guerra asked, dressing his best smile. He did love a good funeral. "Those stripes don't earn themselves."

Annie jumped out of her chair so fast that she hip checked the corner of the table before dashing out the door. Guerra didn't bother readjusting it. He simply put his hands behind his head, leaned back in his chair, and closed his eyes with a sigh. The officer sitting behind him slapped his back with a notepad.

"You're evil man," he snickered. "Pure evil."

"I'm not evil. She's just gullible," Guerra replied, picking up the pencil she left behind. "She'll realize soon enough and come running back. This is an important part of the training process too."

"Atten-TION!"

Every officer in the room jumped to their feet in customary xatu fashion as Sergeant John Lipton walked into the room, portfolio in hand.

"Hang onto your dresses, ladies," he announced, coming up behind the podium. "This is going to take a while." He immediately looked at the empty spot in the front of the room. The only real lady in the unit wasn't in the room. "Where's Officer Cofield?"

Already aware of his responsibility to answer, Guerra spoke up.

"She forgot to bring a pencil, sir," he said.

"Right before a briefing?" Lipton asked, eyeing the device spinning between Guerra's fingers. Guerra shrugged. Sergeant Lipton leaned a little harder into his podium. He didn't like a dirty house, especially when he had company, but there was no time to clean it up. Several members of the brass walked into the room, followed by an attorney and two agents from a federal organization. They officially closed the door on the matter when they locked the squad room and announced that everything said from this point on was on a need to know basis.

The results of the three murders had finally come in:

Precinct 336 officially had its first serial killer.