Wolf in the Big City

Chapter 27 - Hostage

Dylan, Evelyn and I returned to the office a short while later. We had just about everything we needed for our case. Probable cause, lots of evidence to tie him to both the Prices' murders and Alexandria's murder, along with eyewitness testimony. But the one thing we still didn't have, the most important detail? Motive.

Why? Why would a twenty-something young mythical creature, freshly turned, kill three people over two weeks, ravage a bar, and hurt two detectives? Was it hunger, as Connie had suggested? Rage? Fear? Some combination of both? Did he have a deeper reason, like jealousy? We wouldn't know anything about what was motivating him until we caught and interrogated him. Until then, all we could do was continue putting the pieces of this puzzle together, without that one corner piece to finish the jigsaw, metaphorically speaking.

As we gathered up in our team's office, Dylan pulled up all the information we'd compiled so far on Benjamin Prasad and sent it to the giant glass screen in the conference room. Everyone else was there; Eddie and John had just finished up their first round of interviews for the witnesses at the bar who hadn't been injured, while Dylan had called Max away from his computer lab for this debrief.

The most prominent item was the CCTV footage that we'd gotten from the Rusty Knot after today's incident, since no one else on the team had seen it apart from me, Dylan and Evey. As the footage played on repeated on screen, Dylan pointed out the familiar figure in the center of the fracas as he addressed Max.

"I've uploaded the video file to our cloud server. We need to get this footage cleaned up so we can do facial recognition comparisons against the CCTV images from a few weeks ago. If they match, that means that's our man, Benjamin. And we've got proper reason to arrest him now, instead of just suspicion."

Max nodded and left the meeting room, since he now had more work to do. Meanwhile the rest of us kept our focus on Dylan, who gestured to the glass board and spoke again.

"Now, we've gone over eyewitness testimony about the incident and everything seems to line up. Our guy here goes into the Rusty Knot, eats some food, gets angry and trashes the place before escaping. That's enough grounds to arrest Benjamin Prasad if it really is him. Dan and Evelyn came up with a good theory earlier; that he's hungry and maybe human food just isn't doing it for him, so he's getting desperate. He tried to sate his hunger at the bar and realised it wasn't working. That's why he got so pissed. I admit, it's a good theory. It holds water and it explains why he's been doing the things he's been getting up to over the last two weeks."

"But now that we've determined that, how do we catch him? We've not been able to get a hold of this guy in weeks and the closest we got was how Daniel and Evelyn got their asses kicked." Eddie asked, a hand raised to get Dylan's attention.

"Yeah, I've been thinking about that myself. Honestly, I'm not sure unless we go public with the investigation and ask New York to help bring this guy in. Put out a public call for help, that sort of thing."

And almost as if it were on cue, the conference room phone rang. Loud, blaring, startling John from his work-induced doze right in his chair. Dylan reached for the phone and tapped the speaker button before speaking.

"Homicide. LT Hayes here. We're in a meeting, this better be urgent."

"Yes sir, it is." The voice on the phone replied. "We just got an alert call from 17th Precinct. There's apparently a domestic going on up in an apartment complex in Murray Hill linked to a case you're working?"

I exchanged a look with Evelyn and we both got out of our chairs. I felt Eddie's hand on my shoulder slowly bringing me back down to my chair as Dylan raised a hand at us to stay put while he kept talking.