Page 92 of The Woman Who Couldn't Scream
“Why did she think Susie was local?” Kateri asked.
“Susie told her so. All the information we’ve got here—her address, the philandering husband and the four children—comes from Susie herself via Mrs. Glass. Mrs. Glass was really concerned.”
“Also she can’t find someone else to clean.” Kateri waved that away. “Sorry, not the point.”
“The body is dressed like a cleaning woman,” Officer Knowles said.
“She didn’t have the hands for it,” Mike Sun said.
“How do you know? She didn’t have fingertips!” Knowles said.
Mike Sun didn’t like Knowles lipping off to him, so he unzipped the bag from the bottom and brought out one of the mutilated hands.
Norm Knowles turned his back.
Mike said, “I recognize these calluses. These weren’t caused by cleaning. She’s practiced self-defense for a long time. Karate at the least.”
“That’s interesting.” Kateri contemplated the news. “So we have a corpse with no ID and no fingerprints who has apparently been lying to her employer about just about everything. She ran into our slasher. He shot her and used her to experiment on, and if his goal was to remove his victims’ faces intact, he apparently managed it this time.”
Mike Sun said, “You’ve got one thing backward. He took her face first. Then he shot her.”
That did it for Bill Chippen. He headed for the bushes and they heard him throwing up.
Kateri rubbed the side of her head. “This is one sick bastard.”
“We can officially label this ‘escalating violence,’” Bergen said. “Although it almost seems as if he shot her to put her out of her misery.”
“Suspects?” Kateri had one, but she wanted to hear everyone else’s thoughts.
“John Terrance,” Knowles said instantly.
“Maybe.” Kateri believed it less and less. “But according to Bertha, she filled him full of buckshot, and according to Mrs. Blethyn, he was hurting pretty badly when she removed it. She was worried about him, thought he needed antibiotics and he wouldn’t be able to get them.”
“Poor guy!” Knowles said sarcastically.
No use popping back at him. Knowles was a good officer and right now she needed every one she had. “I’m saying if this woman knew karate and was capable of defending herself, John Terrance might not be able to handle it.”
Chippen came back out of the bushes, his complexion tinged with green. “Maybe Terrance has picked up a partner.”
“I think whoever is doing this has got to be an out-of-towner,” Knowles said. “It doesn’t seem as if someone local could have hidden this perversion for long.”
“It’s summer, and as Councilman Venegra has kindly pointed out, we’re coming into our busiest tourist time of the year.” Kateri sighed. “So that doesn’t eliminate very many people.”
“If it’s a tourist, it has to be someone who summers over.” Mike consulted his files. “The first slashing was a week ago.”
“The first slashing that weknow of,” Bergen said. “If Mrs. Glass hadn’t called this in and Weston hadn’t wanted to come out and if we hadn’t seen the buzzards…”
“Right.” Kateri didn’t even want to consider that. “Listen to this. Which probably means nothing. But tonight at quilting, I was watching this woman—tourist, older, Elsa Cipre—use a rotary cutter. She was whipping that thing along a straight edge, cutting material. I was looking at her in a new way. Then her husband showed up. He grabbed her and dragged her out of there. She was afraid of him, and I was thinking—”
“A rotary cutter?” Mike Sun made a note, then looked delighted when Kateri pulled it out of her pocket and handed it to him.
“Be careful.” She showed him her bandaged finger. “It really is sharp.”
He twirled it. “Promising…”
“Know anything about this Cipre guy?” Bergen asked.
“He’s a college professor,” Kateri said. “So’s she, or was. She doesn’t teach anymore.”
