City of the Dead (Alex Delaware, #37)(8)

“She lets him stay rather than kicking him out?”

The question vexed him. The way a persistent sore does.

“I know, I know—maybe he was tired, Alex, and she took pity. A date gone wrong could fit with that, too. She appeased him because they had a relationship. But instead of settling down on the sofa, he tossed and turned and worked himself up. What better way to cook up male rage than sexual rejection?”

I pointed to the white door. “Her bedroom’s upstairs?”

“Right at the top of the stairs but no sign of romance or struggle there or anywhere on the second floor. That’s why I’m figuring it started and ended on the first floor.”

I said, “The party duds out, she asks him to leave, he bargains for the couch, she agrees and goes to sleep upstairs. Then for some reason, she comes back down here?”

“Maybe he was making noise. Hollering, pacing around, she has enough and comes down and now she is ready to kick him out.”

“He’s not hearing it, gets a knife from the kitchen and murders her? But not in the kitchen and not here, the blood’s too skimpy.”

“She’s got defensive wounds, some of the kitchen could be from those if there was a confrontation. Or, it’s his blood—knife slippage.”

I closed my eyes, took a moment to imagine. “He chases her, stabs her to death, then runs outside and gets slammed by the van.”

“You’re the psychologist. You see it as impossible?”

When it comes to human behavior few things are impossible. But that scenario felt wrong. Contrived.

On the other hand, first impressions can be way off the mark. And Milo’s got the highest solve rate in the department; his gut feelings deserve respect.

My silences can get him edgy. He kicked one heel with the other.

I said, “Not impossible. So where did it happen?” Though I already knew.

He opened the white door and we continued another few, terrible feet.



* * *



—

When women are murdered at home, it’s most often in the bedroom, with the kitchen ranked second. This woman had been slaughtered in a narrow wood-floored corridor leading from the living room to what appeared to be an office. At the far end, a narrow staircase right-angled upstairs. Awkward design and placement. A tacked-on feature suggesting a later add-on.

My eyes had traveled to the staircase because my brain was delaying a look at the body.

No sense putting it off.

She was barefoot, with long, thick blond hair fanning around her head. Golden blond where the blood hadn’t hennaed it. She wore a black silk bathrobe patterned with green and gold dragons and nothing else. The robe’s belt lay at her sides, crinkled by hardened blood into what looked like sections of tapeworm. My first thought was someone had yanked the garment open to expose her sexually but as I took a closer look, I wondered.

Lust killers lack imagination and when manipulating their victims’ clothing, they tend to follow scripts: stripping the body bare in order to degrade, ripping fabric to shreds in hormonal rage, or choreographing poses that grotesquely ape consensual passion.

The strip of bare skin of this victim, exposed by the robe falling away, was narrow and pristine.

Maybe just a garment loosening during a struggle.

Any struggle appeared minimal. Through plastic bags tied over the hands, I made out purple thatches of defensive wounds on both palms. But they looked scant and shallow.

Not a prolonged battle. A single, viciously effective wound had ended this woman’s life: diagonal slash to the left side of the neck exposing veins and trachea.

This picture would stay with me for a while.

I pushed past that and forced myself to imagine the scene.

The look of surprised horror on her face as she tried to fend off an attack.

Failure. Pain. Collapse. Eternity.

Her face was canted away from where I stood. Taking several breaths, I kneeled and got a close look. Shot upward as if yanked by a rope, feeling the heat drain from my body.

Milo took hold of my arm. “You okay?”

I exhaled.

“Alex?”

“I know her.”





CHAPTER


    5


I’d met Cordi Gannett two years ago, in the mahogany-paneled chambers of a Superior Court judge in the main court building, downtown.

No, not met. Encountered is a better word.

The in camera session was an attempt to mediate a custody dispute between a pair of divorcing gym owners. My job had been to assess each of their abilities to raise their two-year-old daughter.

I’ve been doing custody evals for years and have established my rules.

Wary of being seen as a pay-to-play whore, I never work for either side, functioning instead as an impartial agent of the court. Sometimes it means everyone ends up happy with me, sometimes just the opposite. When I sign my reports I know I’ve been careful, fair, and as close to objective as any human can come.

Some custody cases involve feeling my way through blind alleys of emotional nuance and behavioral subtlety. Not so on the case that brought me into contact with Cordi Gannett.

The mother, a dancer/SoulCycle instructor, was intense and ambitious. Also loving and attentive to a daughter tending to shyness. The father, a former collegiate wrestler who taught weight training and a bit of mixed martial arts, was none of the above.