The Cancellation
By Bryan Thomas Schmidt
A John Simon Story
They called it dog watch. Ten p.m. to six a.m. And John Simon was beginning to wonder if that was because it left cops tired as a dog. Either way, the detective and his partner, Lucas George, were standing freezing in a cemetery downtown when their shift was supposed to be over.
“We’re shorthanded,” their boss, Sergeant Brian Delmater, had said. “But someone dug a grave overnight, and they need someone there. Just see if we need to call in a team and then go home.”
So Simon and Lucas had reported. Just standing there had flashed Simon back to an earlier case, and it was not a fond memory. The discovery of that girl had marked the return of a serial killer he had been hunting—one of his earliest cases as a detective. The man t
