Page 7 of So Savage (Faith Bold #21)

After leaving Dr. Parker's practice, Faith, Marcus, and Turk went to a local café for breakfast. Turk ordinarily ate his food with all of the enthusiasm of a teenager, but now he ate slowly, his eyes still burdened with the grief he'd seen in Rooster's eyes and perhaps also with the memory of his own grief.

Faith reached down to scratch him behind his ear, and he lifted his eyes to hers and moaned softly. "I know, boy," she said. "Don't worry. We'll get him."

“So where do we go from here?” Marcus asked.

“From here, we brainstorm,” Faith said. “First, what can you tell me about the first crime scene?”

"It was almost a shot-for-shot remake of the second one. Or the second one is a shot-for-shot remake of the first. Master Sergeant Reeves was sedated in an open field, as was his K-9. He was murdered by having his throat cut with a sharp implement with a non-serrated blade, most likely a knife. The K-9 took about a day to fully recover and was then released to the Marine Corps. Substances used were the same, with doses tailored to the individuals involved. You know about the boot prints already, but nothing else distinguishing was found."

“I suppose it would be a waste of time to look for people who wear size twelve army boots in your system,” Faith said.

“Oh yes. That would leave us with thousands of leads to work through. Also, it’s not unheard of for killers to shove their feet into shoes two sizes too small for them or even one size too large. We can’t know from the shoe size who our killer is.”

“Not without more information,” Faith conceded.

She sipped her coffee and thought about something Dr. Parker had said. “Did Reeves’ dog suffer any aftereffects of cold exposure?”

Marcus shook his head. “Not that I’m aware of, no. I have to imagine not since it was turned over to the Marine Corps swiftly. If there were any injuries, it couldn’t be anything serious. I assume the tranquilizer had the same metabolic effect as it had on Rooster and protected Shadow. That’s Reeves’ dog’s name.”

“I’m wondering if the killer chose that cocktail of drugs on purpose.”

Marcus raised an eyebrow. “Well, I assume so. You don’t want your enemy conscious and trying to escape or kill you for several minutes after being shot.”

“Yes, but I also wonder if the fact that it protected the dogs against the cold was a factor.”

Marcus got the point. “You think he was going out of his way to make sure the dogs survived.”

“I think so. He sedated both dog and handler but left the dogs alive. That’s a pretty clear sign that his beef is with the people.”

"So he created a sedative that would protect dogs from cold, give him enough time to work, and work fast enough that they couldn't call for help or attack him."

“That’s my hypothesis. I want to look into this a little more. I want to figure out what the two victims might have done to convince someone that they didn’t deserve to have their dogs.”

“Let’s go back to the station,” Marcus suggested. “I’ll call the Marine Corps and the Army on the way and see if they can send us both of their files.”

“Perfect. This killer is acting based on a personal motive, a very deeply held belief that this is what the victims deserve. Possibly he feels that this is what he deserves, and he’s projecting his self-loathing onto them.”

“Hell of a way to project.”

“There’s never a positive way to make your problems someone else’s,” Faith remarked. She finished the last of her coffee and got to her feet. “Come on, Turk. Let’s go put in some legwork.”

Marcus chuckled. “Does it count as legwork if we’re sitting in front of a computer and reading?”

“I like to think positively,” Faith said. “Maybe we’ll find something that will give us another lead. Then we’ll be using our legs.”

“So headwork first, then legwork.”

She grimaced. “I guess so, but headwork sounds weird.”

He laughed again. “Fair enough.”

***

The Duluth Police Department was located near the city center. Here, Faith saw some of the traffic and larger buildings of a real city. It still didn’t hold a candle to Philadelphia, but she wouldn’t use the word cozy to describe it.

When they parked, Marcus warned Faith, "This is the part where I have to give you the disclaimer that I can't commit to hiding your involvement in the case. There are a lot of employees here, from officers to dispatch to internal affairs to janitorial staff to corrections officers. I can't promise that they'll all keep a secret. We'll try not to parade you all over the station, but one of them might recognize you and think nothing of putting the word out there. I'll tell everyone to keep their mouths shut, but you know how that goes."

“Like waving a chew toy in front of a dog,” Faith replied. Turk gave her a hurt look, and she scratched his chin, “Except for you, boy.”

He snorted and hopped out of the car. Faith smiled and followed her sensitive puppy into the building. Marcus led them to an office on the third floor that was both more spacious and more well-equipped than the offices of Lieutenant Torres and Dr. Parker. Police detective was a good gig. Maybe Faith would compromise and take a detective gig at a local police department somewhere. Lots of agents did that when they started slowing down and didn’t want the stress of an FBI job anymore.

“You want Reeves or Walsh?” Marcus asked.

“I’ll take Reeves. I was USMC.”

That had absolutely no bearing on their case, but she needed to make a decision for some reason, right? She set her laptop on the other side of Marcus’s desk and looked through Reeves’ files.

Master Sergeant Thomas Reeves was forty-four years old and had declined a promotion to Master Gunnery Sergeant three years prior in favor or retiring when he reached his high year of tenure. He’d listed his reason for the choice as wanting to explore opportunities in the civilian world. A fairly common reason that covered everything from wanting an easier job to wanting to change careers entirely to wanting to work as little as possible and pick up a part-time gig at a tire shop to cover whatever his pension wouldn’t.

His record was exemplary, which was pretty much a requirement if you wanted to make Master Sergeant. Her old First Sergeant used to joke that any Marine smart enough to stop eating crayons could make Staff Sergeant. If you wanted to make Gunny or above, you needed to be smart enough to have never eaten crayons. That was the Marine way of saying that if you weren’t a cut above the rest for your entire career, then you didn’t have a chance of making senior NCO.

He’d trained sixteen K9s personally and overseen the training of dozens more. He was respected enough that he often visited different branches and offered his expertise to their own training programs. He had come off of a three-week stint helping the Air Force with their training program and had a few days off before returning to his permanent post.

One thing stood out to Faith as a possible motive for their killer. One of Reeves' dogs had been lost in combat ten years ago in Syria. Reeves was a staff sergeant at the time, and his squad was clearing a building in Aleppo. An intelligence mistake led to them sending dogs into a building believed to be occupied only by lightly armed rebel stragglers when it was, in fact, occupied by an entrenched rebel force. Reeves' dog was killed, and the American presence in Aleppo was revealed, causing a minor scandal since the United States was publicly opposed to the government.

That scandal could be a motive, too, if Walsh had been involved with any clandestine operations in Syria. "Hey, Marcus, was Walsh ever in Syria?"

“If he was, it wasn’t with the U.S. Army. One of his dogs died in combat, though.”

So it was option one, after all. "Oh yeah?"

"Yeah. The dog he had before Rooster. He was a bomb-sniffing dog, but he missed one. Stepped on an IED masked with goat blood and got blown to smithereens. Apparently, that was something insurgents did from time to time in Afghanistan. After that incident, the Army began training their dogs to detect scents through different types of animal blood."

Faith grimaced. “Damn. That’s awful.”

“It is. Awful enough that Walsh rotated home early and missed out on a chance to promote to Sergeant First Class.”

“My guy lost a dog too,” Faith said. “Do you remember that scandal about ten years ago where the U.S. was caught secretly supporting government forces in Aleppo?”

“I remember glancing at a headline or two.”

“Well, Reeves was there. His dog went into a building that was supposed to be lightly defended and ended up running into a machine gun emplacement.”

“Ouch. That is also awful.”

“And it’s also motive.”

“You think our boy’s hunting people who lost dogs in combat?”

“It’s another connection between our victims,” Faith replied, “And it could explain why these particular handlers.”

“I like it.”

There was a knock at Marcus’s office door. His brow furrowed. “Come in.”

The door opened, and a young officer with a ponytail said, “There’s a Lieutenant Rebecca Torres here to see you, Detective. She says it has something to do with your case.”

“Perfect. Send her on up.”

The officer nodded and backed out of the doorway. Marcus grinned at Faith. “Looks like we might be getting some legwork soon.”

“That’s good,” Faith quipped. “I’ve never been a big fan of headwork.”

Turk cocked his head at the two humans for a moment, then went back to staring out the window at the traffic. Sometimes humans were just weird, but you had to love them anyway.

The ones who weren’t serial killers, anyway.