Creatures of Appetite by Todd Travis Page B

surprised to find out you carry a badge because you don’t look or sound like a cop at all and there’s a part of you that believes maybe everyone’s right, maybe you shouldn’t be wearing one, maybe you don’t have what it takes to be a badge. So you drift into forensics where among the lab rats and techs you kind of fit in but you still wonder about yourself, don’t you?”
    “Hey,” Scroggins, who had been listening open-mouthed, snapped out of his shock. Simms was lock-jawed and a stunning shade of purple.
    “And that, Mr. Simms, that is the foul source of inadequacy. You’re so caught up in who you aren’t and what you are not that you’re properly doing your job. You’re just filling out the forms, ‘crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s,’ collecting a paycheck and not doing anything about what’s happening here. You’re missing the obvious.”
    “Hey, Thorne,” Scroggins objected.
    “Hey what?”
    “Maybe you’re forgetting that you’re a guest here, you know?” Scroggins’s color was also up.
    “Guest? I’m not a fucking guest, sport, what do you think this is, a bed and breakfast? I’m here to fix this problem.”
    “What problem, the problem caused by the last fibbie that was sent here? Riggs-”
    “I don’t want to hear another goddamn word about Riggs,” Thorne said. “Riggs was probably the best thing to happen to you all here because he gave you a convenient excuse.”
    “You know what? Fuck you,” Gilday said. “All of us, Simms and the two of us and everyone in this building, we’ve been busting our butts for a year here and if there was any possible way to catch the Iceman up to this point then we would have done it by now, so fuck you.”
    “You’re right about the Iceman but I’m not talking about the Iceman, I’m talking about the other guy.”
    “Other guy, what other guy?” Scroggins asked.
    “The other guy,” Thorne unwrapped a fresh stick of gum.
    Scroggins and Gilday looked at each other, confused. Simms struggled to move his mouth and get his normal pale color back. Kane tried to think of something to say but was at a loss for the moment.
    “You do know that there’s two of them killing kids in your state, right?” Thorne asked after getting his gum going.
    “Two serial killers?” Simms asked, finally finding his voice.
    “Yes.”
    “Two serial killers?” Simms asked again.
    “Absolutely.”
    “Two guys working together?” Scroggins asked.
    “Two guys yes, working together no. You have two separate serial killers here.”
    “How do you know?” Kane asked.
    “It’s right in front of you, all you had to do is read the fucking report. Four kills belong to somebody other than the Iceman. In other words, you have a copycat.”
    “But …” Simms was back to stuttering.
    Thorne stood and went to the map on the wall, using it to illustrate his points.
    “Look at victims thirteen, fifteen, nineteen and twenty-one, the four bodies that when discovered were the most intact. There was a reason for that, you fucking wanna-be. Look at how close these four kills are, they are close in time and more importantly close in distance; that’s not happened in any other abduction.
    “Those four abduction-murders occurred in a thirty-mile radius of this town called Brainard, which sits right in the exact center of all four kills. That’s killer number two, your copycat. This guy lives in this area, he’s been following the papers and staging his kills so they look like the Iceman’s.”
    “Holy shit,” Scroggins said.
    “Oh my God,” Simms whispered to himself.
    “He’s put some time into making his kills look like Iceman’s but he’s not as smart as he thinks he is; there’s a world of differences between his kills and Iceman’s. First of all, the Iceman has never hit the same town more than once so far, so why would he start with the Brainard area? Second, the Iceman started west and is moving east in a slow but steady path mostly along