Smidge sat down at his desk, with a hardthump. “I wanted to,” he snapped in answer to her earlier question.
“No, youneededto. Why?”
His fingers thrummed on the big pad atop his desk. “The knitting needle.”
“Had you already seen that at the crime scene?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t at first. But, when I was looking for a cause of death, the fact that one breast had been opened up caught my attention. I wasn’t exactly sure what was going on, but I could see the hole.”
“Have you ever seen that before?”
“Once.” He paused. “Years ago.”
At that, she stopped and stared. “What do you mean?”
“I had a case, a long time ago, where another young woman lost her life, with a knitting needle through her heart.”
“I guess it’s not a common murder weapon,” she noted carefully, “but it might have just been what was handy?”
“Maybe,” he agreed. “It doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen since then. It’s just nothing that I’m aware of.”
She turned in her seat to look outside, but he was in a tunnel, so no windows were in his office, made even smaller with bookshelves upon bookshelves. “You think they’re related?”
“That young woman’s wrists and ankles were broken too,” he stated.
“You’re kidding. Vocal cords?”
He looked at her for a long moment and then slowly nodded.
She sank back in her chair. “Shit. Okay,… we’re gonna need to know what that case was. Was it ever solved?”
“Yeah,” he admitted. “I’m pretty sure it was.”
“Do you remember any of the details?”
He turned to his computer, clicked on the keyboard for a few minutes, and soon the printer spit out a piece of paper. He got up, walked around, picked it up, and handed it to her.
She looked at it. “Allison Lord.”
“Yes.” Smidge nodded. “Sounds familiar.”
She read the details, which were almost exact. “So a copycat or a long sleep in-between.”
“But, like I said, that doesn’t mean there weren’t others.”
“Right, just no others that came across your desk.”
He nodded. “And, if you think about it, a lot of other desks could have come across this.”
“Back then, would everything have gone into the one database?”
“No.” He shook his head. “Even now we’re not the best at having a central depository.”
“You would think that Canada would have something like that.”
He snorted. “You know how much time and effort that would take?”
“And, if we started today,” she noted, “in twenty years I wouldn’t be looking back and cursing the fact that we didn’t do it earlier.”