20 In 5 -- Vol. I -- Silence is Goadin'

The captain’s face was distorted by rage and disgust. I tapped the thin file against my leg as he said “Get this bastard, Ray. Get him.”

There are different
kinds of intelligence, right?

I nodded and opened the Interrogation Room door. Its weight seemed to warn me away. At one end of the long metal table sat Lawrence “Larry” Wilkerson, the suspect in a series of serial murders stretching back nine years. Cold blue eyes under a thinning patch of wispy brown hair, an ugly fuzzy moustache and the build of an office clerk gone to seed. Caught as he roamed the house of the latest murder victim, a young girl up in the Heights. Claimed he was just curious about the case, but knew too much about all the other unsolved cases. And hinting there were many, many more. We were holding him on trespassing; my job was to nail him for murders.

I walked in as Wilkerson drawled “So you’re the local genius, right?” I walked in silence, sat at the opposite end of the long table and opened the file. There were eight sheets of paper, four of them cipher puzzles we found in Wilkerson’s car when he was arrested. Over six hours of questions had yielded nothing except tons of sly smirks, abundant sarcasm and the repeated boast that his IQ was “off the charts, certainly way off bureaucratic charts.”

To be continued...

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