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

She stared at me with wide eyes, then looked at Dehan. “I couldn’t work. I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I was just sick to my stomach all the while. And I guess Cherise was the same because just before ten she called me. She was crying. She says, ‘Sonia, I am going crazy. I am so worried about Shevron and Leroy. I think Earl is doing something bad to them. I think he’s hurting my babies.’ So I told her to hold tight, I was coming to get her. I told Dr. Garrido that I had a family crisis and I went to get her.”

Dehan asked her, “He was understanding about that?”

“He is a very good man. He was very understanding and told me to take as long as I needed. I collected her from the parking lot and we drove back to her place.” She stopped again and took a very deep breath. “I will never forget, as long as I live… I will never forget what I felt when she opened that door. You cannot imagine, unless you have experienced something like that, you cannot begin to imagine the sickening horror. I still remember, my skin went cold.” She searched our faces by turns, seeking some sign that we might understand. “I felt sick. Hollow in my stomach. Your mind tries to tell you this cannot be real, but it is. He was there…” She gestured with her open hand, as though we could see what she was seeing in her mind. “He was there on the sofa, with Shevron, and Leroy was watching them.”

“What happened?”

She sighed. “It was pretty much how the detective figured it. I was so stunned I didn’t realize for a while what was happening. Cherise ran for the kitchen. She was hysterical, screaming. Earl kind of fell off the sofa, pulling up his pants. Then Cherise was there again, come out of the kitchen, crazy, with a big knife in her hand. I remember I screamed and told the kids to come to me. Cherise and Earl started fighting and Earl hit Cherise. She was so crazy she didn’t seem to notice, but he kept hitting her. And I was shouting to the kids to come to me, but they were just staring at their mom and Earl.

“Next thing Shevron kind of snapped out of it and ran at them. She started hitting and kicking Earl, telling him to leave her mom alone. He lashed out at her with his hand, grabbed her, but she wouldn’t stop. It all happened so fast. Suddenly he had her—Shevron—in an arm lock around her neck. I could see she was turning blue. I ran at him, but in that moment Cherise just kind of punched his back. That was what I thought. That she had punched him in the back, and I was surprised that it seemed to hurt him so much, because Cherise was not that strong. He staggered, and…”

She trailed off and started looking this way and that, as if she’d lost the thread of the story and couldn’t find it again. I waited. She bit her lip and looked down at the table.

“What happened then, Sonia?”

She shook her head and shrugged. “What the detectives said. Cherise pulled the knife out and…”

“That’s not true.” She looked up at me. I repeated, “It’s not true, is it?”

She faltered and looked away. “It’s what the detectives said, and the medical examiner…”

“I know the medical examiner. I know him very well. Frank is a good man. He very rarely makes a mistake. But on this occasion he made one. He didn’t know there was another person there. None of them did. So they came up with the only explanation they could. Frank knew it couldn’t be right, but the only alternative was impossible. So he went with it and said that Earl had had some kind of berserker attack. But the fact is, Sonia, that when Cherise stabbed Earl she cut his pulmonary artery, and when she removed the knife, when she pulled it out of his back, he would have bled out and died in a matter of seconds. There was no way he could have turned on her, disarmed her and stabbed her repeatedly in the belly. He would have collapsed before he’d even grasped her wrist.”

Her skin had gone pasty and her eyes were moist, staring at me, defiant. When she spoke her voice was little more than a rasp.

“What are you saying? Are you going to try and pin this on me?”

“No, Sonia. You know I’m not.”

Her lower lip curled in. She bit it hard and tears welled in her eyes. She whispered, “You can’t. You can’t, please, don’t…”

“Cherise never pulled the knife from his back, did she?” She shook her head. “He fell to the floor, and, what happened? Leroy ran at her. He pulled the knife from his father’s back and attacked his mother…”

She took a handkerchief from her bag and blew her nose, then wiped it, speaking as she did so. “He was hysterical. He just kept screaming, ‘Daddy, Daddy…’ He pulled the knife from his back and stood staring down at him. We were all just paralyzed. There was Shevron, and Earl, and it was kind of unreal. Then he started screaming, like he’d gone crazy, ‘You killed my daddy, you killed my daddy…’ He didn’t say anything about Shevron.”

She stopped, staring at nothing, staring at the horror movie that was playing in her head. She said again, very quietly, “He didn’t say anything about his sister, only his father, and then he ran at his mother and…”

She covered her mouth with her fingers and the tears finally spilled from her eyes and ran down her cheeks, shiny tracks of grief and pain, to the corner of her mouth. Now she turned to Dehan.

“How?” she said, in a strange echo of her first question. “How can a child do that? How can a boy… His own