“So others have said. Did anyone ever tell you that you look like Jodie Foster?”
“Only all my life, Hank. I don’t see it.”
“So where are they?”
“Hank, they’re attending to patients, and I need to be checking on them. You can’t barge in here.”
“I can and will.” His nose was three inches away. He really was about her height. “I want to interview each student. Did they know the dead girls? Did they know Noah? Yes. I need their statements.”
“Why?”
“Because this is a homicide investigation.”
Cheryl Beth put her hands on her hips. This was her environment, not his, and in a moment the reality caused him to let out a long sigh.
He steered her to a corner by the code cart. “Cheryl Beth, this guy is a bad dude, get me? He was Army Special Forces, served in Iraq. I suspect one of his specialties was knife combat. We searched his apartment and found two different knives there.”
“So was one of them used in the attack?”
“No.” He stared at his feet like a little boy caught doing something wrong.
Her phone buzzed and she checked it: A text from one of her students: a patient was complaining about his pain meds.
“I’ve got to go, Hank.”
He held her shoulder in a firm grip. “Goddamnit, Cheryl Beth, I’m going to have to kick this guy loose by Thursday morning if I can’t get some evidence. Maybe sooner.”
“What?”
“You heard me. There’s not evidence enough to hold him. I’m going to get my ass handed to me by a public defender, no less.
“I saw the police catch him right there.”
“Yeah, I wish the real world worked like one of those TV shows, but that’s not enough. He claims he was attacked, too. He was a decorated soldier. You very helpfully found that goose egg on the back of his head. We don’t have a weapon. We don’t have a motive. The D.A. won’t file on him. So they’ll probably release him for now. And while we’re trying to make a case, this bad dude is going to be out on the street, maybe coming to a place near you.”
“Maybe he didn’t do it.”
“You know he did!” He whispered it harshly, slapping a fist in the other palm. “Do you know how those girls died? He raped them with a knife. That’s right. He cut them to pieces down there and let them bleed to death.”
Cheryl Beth visibly winced. “But these were two strong young women. I don’t understand. Could there have been more than one attacker?”
“Lauren was also stabbed in the back. My guess is she tried to get away while he was attacking Holly. It’s not unheard of for two women to be raped by one man armed with a knife. They’re both scared. They want to live through it. When Lauren realized what was really happening, she tried to make a break, he ran her down, and stabbed her.”
Now it was her turn to look at the floor. She was hardly a novice to gore, but this…
“You need to know this, too,” Brooks said. “These girls were arranged after he killed them. Like…like some kind of sick artwork. He wanted us to see what he had done. He wanted to make sure, I don’t know, that we understood he was in total control. That they were his toys, his conquest. I’ll tell you something else. I had a talk this morning with a Cincinnati detective. That policewoman who was murdered on the Licking River? The one who’s on TV? She was raped with a knife, too, and handcuffed. Sometime early Sunday morning.” He stared at her with a red face. “I need your help.”
She ran schedules and logistics through her head. “All right, we can set you up, uh, maybe at the café on A, and I’ll bring each one down separately. But you’re going to have to be patient. They’ve got work to do, it’s close to the end of semester, it’s the start of the shift, everybody’s busy.”
“God, you don’t make it easy, woman. Fine. Show me the way.”
“I’ll tell you the way. I’ve got to go down the hall right now.” She gave him directions to the café.
She added: “Did Lauren’s sister call you?”
“What?”
“Her sister, April. I talked to her last night and she said Lauren thought she was being stalked. She described a bald man, older, nothing like Noah.”