Knife Edge (A Dead Cold Mystery Book 27) by Blake Banner (most inspirational books of all time .TXT) 📗

she went out to work, fed the family and paid the rent.” She swallowed, took a bite and went on. “14th May, 2010, Cherise comes home early from work. It says here she was sick, but two gets you twenty she was suspecting something. You don’t live eight years with a guy without getting a feeling for what he’s about.”

“You’re probably right.”

“So she walks in and she sees Earl raping Shevron. She’s only six years old. Son of a bitch. And Leroy was watching. Later testimony from Leroy suggested that this had been going on for a couple of years, and he had been raping both kids.” She paused and looked at me. Her eyes were bright with anger. “You know? Basically, in principle, I am against capital punishment. If you’re going to kill a human being, it should be in hot blood. It should not be a cold, clinical social institution. That’s in principle. But then you come across bastards like this guy, and it makes you question that. What use…? I mean, what do people like this contribute to…” She sighed and shook her head. “Anyway, where was I?”

“Cherise had walked in on Earl raping the kids. But we know all this. We have already…”

“Shut up. So Cherise ran to the kitchen, grabbed a knife and attacked him. They struggled and the little girl, Shevron, tried to protect her mother. In the fight, either intentionally or by accident, Earl killed her. He hit her and broke her neck. Cherise then stabbed Earl in the back with the kitchen knife. But he must have been a pretty tough customer because it seems he took the knife away from her and stabbed her several times in the belly before collapsing. They both bled out just a few feet from each other, while Leroy watched them.”

I grunted and asked, “Is that striking to you, Dehan?”

She stared at me. “What?”

“They way Earl died…” I shrugged. “The whole thing.”

“Of course it is. What do you mean?”

I shrugged, shook my head, made a face. “I just find that very striking.”

“Striking…”

“Yes, striking.”

She scowled at me. “You’re doing that thing again,” she said.

“What thing? I’m not doing any thing. I’m just saying, it’s very striking.”

She pointed at me. “But when you say that, it means something. It means you have spotted something I have missed, and you’re not going to tell me.”

I was shaking my head. “It’s not that simple, Dehan. “

“But you know something.”

“I’m telling you, it’s not that simple.”

“Son of a gun!” She stared at the perfect blue sky outside the window, and the motionless plane trees. “You know I hate it when you do that. We’re supposed to be partners.”

I shrugged and spread my hands. It was a gesture designed to convey helplessness. “It’s nothing.”

“Stone! What do you mean by striking?”

I sighed. “Look at the medical report. Where, exactly, was Earl stabbed?”

She leafed through the file and extracted the ME’s report. She studied it a moment and said, “Half an inch above the heart, partly severing the right pulmonary artery.”

“Right, with a broad-bladed kitchen knife. Now, if he was a really strong guy, or a grizzly bear, I could understand his turning on his wife, struggling with her and killing her, if she had left the knife in his back. Because that would have helped stem the hemorrhage. But, the problem is, he took the knife from Cherise. He didn’t pull it out of his own back. That would have been physically impossible. Which means she must have pulled it out of his back after she stabbed him, perhaps intending to stab him again in a kind of series of hammer blows. But, if she had done that, if she had pulled out the knife after cutting his pulmonary artery, he would have bled out in seconds, long before he’d had a chance to grab hold of her wrist, much less fight with her and disarm her.” I gave a short laugh. “I mean, just imagine the rate his heart was pumping in that moment.”

She was quiet for a long moment. “You’d have thought so,” she said at last. “But his prints were on the knife, and besides, the ME would not make a mistake like that…”

“I agree. Frank is much too meticulous and professional to make that kind of error. So I called him and asked him about it.”

She frowned. “What did he say? And why didn’t you tell me?”

“He said he really struggled with it. He told me it’s one of those freakish things that conventional medicine cannot explain. Very, very rarely, a person possessed of an uncontrollable rage can keep going, keep fighting, even after they have sustained wounds that would normally kill a person outright. There have been cases of men receiving multiple gunshot wounds, or being stabbed several times in vital organs, who just keep going. There is apparently a huge amount of anecdotal evidence from various wars going back throughout history. The Vikings used to call them berserkers.”

Her frown deepened. “So what made him think this dopehead was a Viking

berserker, for Christ’s sake? The most berserker thing this piece of pigeon’s feces ever

did was probably to turn on the TV for himself.”

“I agree, and that’s what I asked him. Frank doesn’t make many mistakes, but what he said, basically, was that he and the investigating detective decided there was no other possible explanation.”

“Oh, that’s perfect. That’s just dandy.”

“As I said, Dehan, striking. There was, and I quote, ‘nobody else who could have done it.’”

She was quiet for a long time, staring at me. Finally she said, “Yeah, striking, but what the hell does it mean?”

“That, Dehan, is the million-dollar question. What, as you say, does it mean? It should mean that Earl was dead before he took the knife from Cherise and stabbed her with it.”

“Which, if you’re right, and, annoyingly, you usually are, means that he couldn’t have killed her…”

I nodded. “Which means that somebody else killed Cherise. Another striking parallel between the two cases: an