“No, I hear you,” Rodney agreed. “I don’t have a basement.”
“I’ve seen enough houses with basements,” she added, “to know that, in some cases, they’re really nasty-ass locations and would probably be good murder rooms.”
“Especially if it was a cold-cellar-type basement,” he mentioned. “The colder temps would keep her from bleeding too badly. And then… wait. Was there a sexual connotation to this current victim?”
Kate frowned. “I don’t know. I don’t think Smidge answered that.” She considered that, picked up her phone as they took the elevator down to the main floor, then sent him a message.Was she sexually assaulted?
Did you not read the report?
She winced at that. “Well, now you don’t have to worry,” she shared with Rodney. “I’m on his bad side too.”
“Why is that?”
“I just asked if the victim was sexually assaulted.”
He looked at her in surprise. “That’s a fair question.”
“Yeah, his response was fair too. He asked if I’d read the report.”
“Ouch,” he replied. “Yeah, nobody likes to have their time wasted.”
Her phone buzzed again. She looked at the text and winced. “Jesus.”
“What?” Rodney asked curiously.
“Well, she was assaulted with an object.”
“Oh, great.”
“Strong enough, hard enough, that it pierced the uterus.” She groaned and immediately put away her phone and stormed out the front door of the station.
“Hey, hey, hey,” Rodney called out after her.
She stopped and took a deep breath of fresh air, as if it would brush away all the nastiness clogging up her throat. “Why do people do that?” she asked, rounding on him. “No need to take it to that level.”
He reached out, grabbed her by the shoulders, and stated, “There is a need. There has to be, and that’s what we must figure out. What was the need inside him that drove him to this level?”
“It couldn’t have been the brother in that earlier case,” she argued, shaking her head. “I can’t believe one family member would do that to another.”
He stared at her and asked, “Really? After your years with the police force?”
She nodded slowly. “You’re gonna tell me about way-worse cases, aren’t you?”
“Thereareway-worse cases of horrible things family members do to each other,” he stated, “so don’t even begin to think that. You need look no farther than Simon.”
She shook her head, grimacing at the reminder.
“In this case, we don’t know because we don’t know anything about the family. Right now you don’t want to believe the brother could have done something like this. But something pinned him in that suspect chair. And there had to be something to convict him.”
She nodded and tried to calm down and to get more oxygen into her lungs.
“Come on,” Rodney said. “Let’s go to our current victim’s workplace and then meet the ex-boyfriend and see what we can dredge up.”
“Right.” She gave herself a mental shake. “And we also need to check the autopsy report from the old case and see if that sexual detail was duplicated as well.”
“What’s your guess on it?”
She shuddered. “Unfortunately I’ll say it probably was.”