any hard-and-fast conclusions. There is a solution to the whodunit out there. I promise you that. But you have to earn the right to that revelation, and the way we do that is by sacrificing our assumptions at the altar of OMG-I-know-what-happened.”
“But you have to decide some things, though, right? Like who to talk to? And what to ask them?”
“The truth will tell you who you need to interview and what you need to ask and where you have to go. You don’t decide a thing.” Butch shook his head. “I’ll say it again. You’ve got to watch for confirmation bias. It sneaks in and causes you to deliberately or subconsciously deny the existence of facts which do not support a given conclusion that you’ve pulled out of your ass. Truth is absolute, but it’s like the existence of God. You don’t know you’ve got it until you do.”
“Have you ever failed to solve a case?”
“I had a ninety-two percent success rate. Which, considering how much I was drinking while I was a detective for the CPD, is a miracle.”
“Wow. You must be really good at what you’re doing.”
Butch thought of the last image he’d had of his fifteen-year-old sister, Janie, waving at him as she had been driven off to her death in that car full of teenage boys.
He shook his head. “Nah, I just refused to quit. Even if it killed me, and it nearly did, I wasn’t going to stop what I was doing until I nailed every one of my victims’ killers.” He looked back over at his trainee. “That’s something else you should keep in mind. Your chances of finding the bad guy increase to an astronomical level if you outwork their need to stay ahead of you. Sooner or later, all killers, even the good ones, slip up. You just gotta be ready to take advantage of that version of Murphy’s Law.”
“I’ll keep all this in mind. I promise.”
Annnnnnd see, this was why he liked working with the kid, Butch thought. Boone listened, accepted advice and criticism, and always tried to do his best.
Butch reached over and gave the trainee’s shoulder a squeeze. “I know you will, son.”
As Boone strode along next to the Brother, it was a relief to focus his mind on something other than himself. Too bad the topic was violence and death, but that was his job, wasn’t it. And he was on the right side of that ledger. One of the good guys.
That mattered.
“So what else about the call?” Butch asked him.
Up ahead, now only three blocks away, it was easy to make out the club’s wait line of humans, the lot of them stomping their feet in the cold, their extravagant wigs and wild makeup the only things that showed of their costumes because everything else was covered up by Joe Blow parkas and full-length coats. In the warmer months, he imagined, they would be like a stand of peacocks, flashing their particular extravagancies in a mating ritual designed to be successful according to the LARPers’ value system.
Is the killer standing there even now? Boone thought as he remembered the choking horror and fear in that female’s voice recording.
“What else did you learn on that call?” the Brother prompted.
Boone’s eyes went down the lineup of humans, memorizing each face. The body types. The hairstyles.
Rage coiled in his gut. And to answer Butch’s question? Well, the other thing he’d picked up on from that call was that whoever had put the terror in that female’s voice, whoever had killed the most recent victim, needed to die in the same terrible way.
Somehow, that didn’t seem like a good thing to throw out there—
He snapped his head toward the Brother. “‘The other one.’ In the call, she said ‘just like the other one.’”
“Righto. So what does that tell us?”
Boone narrowed his eyes on that wait line again, his fangs descending. “There will be others unless we stop the killer.”
“Yup. That is the one conclusion that I am allowing myself to draw at this point.”
On that note, Butch unbuttoned his fine cashmere coat. Which was protocol for when anyone interacted with humans. You know, just in case you needed to get to your weapon. As Boone did the same to his leather jacket, he felt that anger of his shift inside of his skin. He was so hoping that they found the guy who did this tonight—