“But not sexual abuse,” he confirmed, “right?”
“No.” She shook her head. “Not really.… I mean, like you, I was a victim way back then, but in a different way. And no, I was never raped, although a lot of people would say tough relationships spawn their own sense of emotional and mental abuse.”
“They absolutely do,” he agreed. “So why don’t you tell me what this is about?”
“I spoke to the ex-husband today, Barry Little.” Then she slowly went on to explain about his claim that the victim, Jenna, had been the one to beat him up.
“It happens,” Simon stated, staring out at the city. “I think it happens more than we’d like to think. Guys are conditioned to not hit women. You’ll get the abusers for sure,” he noted, “but any decent guy has learned somewhere along the way, and many from a young age, that we’re not allowed to hit women. They’resmaller, frailer, and they can get damaged a lot more than we think from the blow of our fist, simply because we’re so much stronger. So, to think that some female would actually hit me would be difficult, but, yeah, I’d probably take it without telling anyone,” he answered, with a nod, “at least until it became something that was obviously a bad scenario for me.”
“What do you mean, a bad scenario?” she asked. “When does something like that become too much?”
“It should never happen in the first place, but just because somebody loses their temper and reaches out and smacks me across the face, I can’t say that I would sit there and cry foul. I mean, it’s not right maybe, but it’s still not something I would do.”
“And if it were ongoing?”
“That’s a different story,” he declared. “If ongoing, I would break off the relationship.”
“But what if you really cared?”
“This really bothers you, doesn’t it?”
She shrugged. “I guess I need to understand it, and I don’t know if it even changes anything.”
“In a lot of ways,” Simon noted, “it makes it worse for Barry, doesn’t it?”
She nodded. “That’s what I was thinking, and I was just discussing that with the coroner. Because it does add another element, making it not so much about revenge but about stopping the abuse.”
“Exactly,” he agreed, “but this was a well-thought-out murder, wasn’t it?”
She nodded.
“So, we’re talking premeditation, so first-degree murder in this case, and the question is, if it was this guy trying to kill his ex-wife, he might have been happy to take out the running partner and best friend as well because she may have hadelements of the same bitchiness,” he suggested quietly. “You may want to check with the other husband on that.”
“I was thinking about that,” she said. “What are the chances that the two women were also that much alike at home in the family relationships?”
“It’s definitely something to check up on,” Simon noted. “Yet you can be certain that Agnew will be ashamed of it too, and he won’t want anybody to know. And so, if it was him doing the killing, he’ll be incredibly cautious about anybody finding out. Motive can be everything, and he won’t want anybody to understand that he had one.”
“So, if he killed them, he’ll be even harder to prosecute,” she stated, with a nod.
“Obviously you’ll have to do everything you can to track it down because he knows that, if he does get caught, his motive will come out, and that will be a double whammy. So, for Agnew, it may not even be as much about the guilt over killing her but more about the shame of being an abused husband.” After a moment of silence, Simon added, “And to answer your question, no, I’ve never been in an abusive relationship with a girlfriend. But have I ever been hit by a woman? Yes, but never twice.”
She nodded. “That’s what I expected. It just brings up a whole new perspective.”
“I get it,” Simon agreed. “The question is whether there’ll be another murder as well.”
She looked at him, startled.
He shrugged. “Remember that woman in my last vision?”
“Yeah, I remember.” She winced. “I was just hoping that there hadn’t been any further connection.”
“Well, there isn’t, and yet there is,” he added. “I feel her again, like she’s right here, breathing, always beside me, always just connected.”
“You can’t tell her to take up tennis instead of running?”
He burst out laughing. “No, and she’s a runner, but she’s not as hardcore as these other two women were.”
“And yet she was ready to get up at some godforsaken dark hour and go out onto the paths.”