The arrest itself was a let down. When he kicked in the door to the shabby hotel room and found his quarry attempting to finish off yet another victim, she surrendered without a fight. She simply dropped the bottle of thallium laced wine she was trying to force down the other woman's throat, climbed off the bed upon which she had her intended victim pinned, and simply stood there waiting for him to throw her to the floor and cuff her.
She never said a word as he read her rights to her, he was going strictly by the book on this one, and he led her down to the waiting car. The ambulance crew was tending to the woman she had meant to kill, and his focus was riveted on his prisoner. She was actually quite attractive. 22 years old and from the way she was dressed he supposed that she was either one of the "school girl" hookers or trying to pass herself off as one.
He placed her in the back seat of the car taking care to guy her head in so as to avoid a brutality charge stemming from her head connecting with the edge of the roof. There was no way some scumbag lawyer was getting her off on a technicality.
He slid in behind the wheel, started the engine, and pulled out into the street in the direction of the station. It was night but in the city it was never really dark. Lights shone from street lights, ugly lighted signs, neon shining from bar windows advertising their various flavors of poison or heaven depending on your point of view, and from the thousands of windows into the anonymous lives of the city.
It had rained a couple of hours earlier and the streets were still wet and shining from the multitude of lights. He could feel the dampness in the night air and he felt a slight shiver crawl up his spine. He had always liked the sound of tires on wet pavement and he listened to it as he considered his prisoner.
She had poisoned 10 women over the course of the past two weeks and it had been his only case after the third one. He hated the serial killer cases. The press always had some stupid name or other for them and this one was no exception. They had called this one the Merlot Murderer. Assholes.
It hadn't been too difficult to get a handle on the M.O. Poisoned wine, cheap hotel rooms in the hooker district, and women. He knew he was looking for a woman, probably young and pretty, hooking for women. But she had been slippery for a while. No witnesses remembered a new girl on the street or any of the victims.
But his tireless canvassing of the girls and suggestions about how it was going to make business very hard for them had paid off. Tasha had called him about a strange girl working in the neighborhood. The girls all knew each other and this one wasn't "in the club".
He pulled the car into the underground garage at the station, carefully pulled her out of the back seat, and guided her inside. He preferred the garage to avoid any nosy news hounds that might be hanging around in front of the station like ballpoint vultures.
He led her into the interrogation room and seated her in the hard metal chair. He then walked back into the hall to compose himself. This was much harder than he ever imagined a bust could be. But she was a killer. Not just a murderer but a serial killer. How does such a pretty young woman ever come to this? He steeled himself and walked back into the room.
"Daphne, do you want to talk about this?" he asked with a tremble in his voice.
She replied so quietly that he almost missed it, "No, Daddy."