Elizabeth walked into BRIC the following day with a paper cup and made a face, clearly hungover. "Nick, what do you have?"
Nick looked over his shoulder and frowned as he stared at the monitor wall. "Nothing." He looked over his shoulder and grinned. "You look just as shit as Kate feels."
"Gee, thanks," the lieutenant grumbled.
"That wouldn't have happened if I'd been there."
"It was a girls' night out."
"You don't have to remind me that I'm a minority on the team."
Elizabeth gave him a long look and furrowed her eyebrows. "Excuse me?" He pointed down at himself, and the lieutenant rolled her eyes. "Now, don't pull the race card. I'm white, female, lesbian, widowed, remarried, and have three kids while working a fucking male-dominated job. So who's in the minority?"
Nick pulled the corners of his mouth down and pointed at his lieutenant. "You win."
Elizabeth grinned broadly, but then she turned serious again. "So, what are you looking at."
He turned back to his workstation. "Nothing. Nothing in Saratoga Springs, anyway. The first broadcast trucks are already leaving. The rest of the damn journalists are waiting like rabbits in front of a snake."
She sat down on a chair next to him. "False alarm, then?"
He lifted his shoulders. "I'm not the psychologist. And certainly not a fortune teller."
Nikki came into BRIC and looked at him for a long time. "Have you got anything on BlackRat yet? Chris Barnes, I mean."
Elizabeth looked at her daughter, astonished that the young woman had arrived at the BPD before her.
Nick looked over his shoulder. "I don't."
Nikki's eyebrows drew together. "What do you mean you didn't? Weren't our people with him?"
He raised his eyebrows briefly. "Yeah, the guy lives in Belmont. But he wasn't there. His smartphone was dead, too."
"So you didn't catch him?"
"Caught him, yes. But not by us."
Nikki rolled her eyes. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"Look here." Nick opened a video link on his laptop.
The video showed Chris Barnes. He was surrounded by darkness and spoke a few words. The way he moved his mouth looked like a lousy animation from a cheap movie. The words were also highly distorted.
"I can't tell you anything more," said the distorted voice to which Barnes moved his mouth. "Slaughterman will speak through his actions again from now on." The camera slowly zoomed in on Chris Barnes. And now everyone noticed.
"That's not animation at all... his head!" Nikki backed away from the laptop.
"And it's just his head," Elizabeth clarified resignedly.
Nick nodded slowly through clenched teeth. "He cut his head off, stuck it on a pole, and then attached thin wires to his jaw, like a marionette. From a distance, it looks like Barnes is talking. But only his head speaks. That means ... Slaughterman is speaking."
"Then the guy must be here in Boston," Nikki replied. "This Slaughterman, I mean."
"We don't know where Barnes was before," Nick replied, looking at his niece. "There's no description of the location on the video."
Elizabeth closed her eyes and ran her fingers over her forehead. "Anyway, that's the end of the matter with BlackRat. Nothing more will come from him. He who lives by the sword will die by the sword. It's written in the Bible. We want to get to Slaughterman through him, but Slaughterman got to him first. And very close. Now we need a necromancer for BlackRat if he will tell us anything else."
Nikki rolled her eyes once more. "Very funny." She tried to push the image of the severed head in the video into the lower chamber of her memory. "Has an upside, though. Slaughterman gets cocky when he does something like that. It might convince the God of Blood that Slaughterman will emulate him. And he might not want a god next to him. And that speaks for our story."
Nick looked at the two women in astonishment. "What story?"
Elizabeth's eyebrows shot up. "Oh yes, you haven't heard it yet. We have an excellent idea." She took a deep breath and sat down next to Nick. "Here's how it works," she said after informing her brother-in-law. "Melanie has to produce a dismembered body to send to the killer as an application video. We'll either get dummies or real bodies from Maggie. I'll talk to her about it in a minute."
Nick nodded slowly. "And Melanie and her parents?"
"Nikki and Kate are about to go and talk to them. Kate's talking to them, mom to parent. That's the best chance we have of getting anything done."
"Can't we just use an actress?"
"No. I'm sure the God of Blood knows much about Noah and might recognize Melanie. He might think he's recruited the whole family now, at least the underage part, which will flatter him. If it's an actress and he has some facial recognition software and compares it with the pictures on Facebook or Instagram, where pretty much everyone is an actor now, our game could be blown very quickly."
"It's just as dangerous if the God of Blood knows it's Noah's sister," Nikki cut in, crossing her arms in front of her chest. "We have to make her up so she's unrecognizable."
Nick looked at the younger woman and frowned a little. "Okay, got it. And then?"
"Then we'll shoot the application video," Elizabeth replied, taking a deep breath. "We'll need some morbid location for that. I'm sure you know them. Don't you do geocaching?"
Nick gave his lieutenant an irritated look. "I play fantasy games. And science fiction. As a tabletop and on the computer."
"Isn't that the same thing?"
Nikki grunted in amusement and pressed her lips together.
"No, it's not." He crossed his arms in front of his chest in offense.
Elizabeth rolled her eyes. "Still, you and a few colleagues should start thinking about where we can shoot something like this. We also need a camera crew. Maybe someone else can write a good story. Melanie will then tell it."
"It has to be authentic," Nikki said with a frown. There may be agencies that can help us with that. Of course, it has to remain confidential."
He took a deep breath and picked up his cell phone. "Okay, I'll see what we can come up with."
Elizabeth's cell phone rang. "Looks like Maggie." She took the call and put it on speaker.
"It's your wife. I hear you need dummies or bodies?"
Elizabeth rolled her eyes as she heard the redhead's aghast simper. "That's right. Better real corpses. We'll have to cut them up to make it look real. It should look as if our protagonist has just boned them."
"I've heard that," Maggie replied. "I think I have one. It'll even save you work. Someone else has already done the dismemberment."
"Who?" The lieutenant thought for a moment that it might have been the God of Blood or Slaughterman or whatever psychopath it was.
"A train," Maggie said curtly and painlessly.
"It ends where it started."
"That's one way to look at it. The train ran over a young man. We don't know yet whether it was suicide or an accident. Either way, you'll get him in pieces. My people have just finished picking him up."
Elizabeth made a face. "Hm, very reassuring. Has the identity been established yet?"
Maggie paused for a moment. "Not yet, I'm afraid. But it won't be long now. We'll have to ask the next of kin if they're happy for the body to be used in this way before the funeral. If we do this secretly, Liz, and it gets out that we haven't asked anyone, we could get into hot water."
The lieutenant pursed her lips and nodded slowly. "Good, both times we can argue that the relatives are helping to catch a bad serial killer."
"Right," Nikki said, taking a deep breath. "We have to ask people twice if their relatives can take on certain roles: the murderer and the victim."
Nick slowly raised his eyebrows. "It's going to be an interesting day."