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was never apprehended.”
    John thought a moment. He had not really made the connection between Theresa and this letter until just now. Could it be that the killer wanted something more now? He was totally bored and the old tricks just weren’t doing it for him anymore. He wanted to up the ante and hit the ground running with a new style and a new playmate. John was a much better adversary for him now than he was when he was eight.
    He was not ready to run with this ball quite yet, but it was close.
    “You may be onto something chief.”
    “Ok, well maybe, but don’t tell anyone. We don’t want to spark off a huge media circus about there being a serial killing roaming the area. We don’t really know this. Right now all we have to go on is pure speculation.”
    “Right. I wasn’t ready to jump the gun on anything yet.”
    “Good man. Why don’t you take the rest of the afternoon off and get some rest. Are you sure you can drive?”
    “Yea, I’m fine now.”
    With that he walked slowly out to his car and got behind the wheel. He wasn’t really sure that he was fine to drive, but he hated that other people always wanted to do things for him. He hated to be waited on and besides he didn’t rust other people to be around him outside of the station; there was a serial killer looking for him.
    When John got home he grabbed a few beers from the fridge and a bottle of whiskey out of the liquor cabinet. He settled in with a good movie and started his nightly routine. He was the most boring guy ever—he realized that—but he was happiest at this time. This was the time of the day when he actually got to relax and enjoy life for a few moments. There was nothing better than this he decided. He had even given up women for it.
    But he had been thinking a lot about female companionship. He was starting to get lonely and starting to develop tendinitis in his wrist from too much down time in his life. He needed someone to share things with, but every time he thought about it he was gripped in panic and fear. It was ridiculous he knew that, but he did not have a handle on his anxiety.
    As he watched the detective movie his mind began to drift, until he was really unable to even pay attention to it anymore. He could not get his mind off that letter. He had to go into research mode and find out all he could about the person who might have sent it.
    Of course John was sure that merely searching for clues was pointless and he had avoided capture for over thirty years. He had to be doing something that put him above the rest of the psychos out there. No one was successful for that long. Either they slipped up and made a mistake or they started to unravel mentally and they ended up doing something totally stupid and unrelated that put them away.
    He was just waiting in the shadows wondering when he was going to strike next. That was how John felt at that moment. He had to just wait for something to happen. He felt fucking useless. And of course he couldn’t tell the community anything about this. There were probably people who were still leaving their doors unlocked tonight. The killer would find one of them and tear them apart if he were so inclined this evening.
    And who’s to say that a new victim would shed any light or uncover any more evidence about anything? It could all lead to nothing and you just end up with another person dead. There had to be a way to predict his next move.
    As John sipped his bourbon he thought about it all. He tried to step outside of his own brain and see and think like a killer. What was this person all about? They enjoyed sadistic torture and sexual torture mixed together on the most innocent and helpless victims that he could find. The men were occasionally killed if he wanted a challenge or just needed them out of the way, but if he were able to secure them well enough he would torture them all the same too. But the men he felt he could not overpower, according to the videos he just put a bullet