Brutal

1

She strode out from the elevator and stopped for a minute to analyze the place. It was a quiet block, a peaceful one. The floor had a CCTV camera in a corner. She would have to review the footage, she thought. Besides that, nothing else was out of place.

She walked to an officer standing nearby, flashed her badge.

"Lieutenant Ford," the officer acknowledged.

"Were you the first on scene?"

"No, sir."

"Okay. Where's Sergeant Cooper?"

"Inside, sir."

She walked through the doors of a pretty apartment, now a crime scene. A woman lying on the floor, brutally stabbed, multiple times. Her throat was slit, diagonally, with a sharp knife. One clean stroke. Whereas the stabs showed the use of a blunt knife, dull enough to induce immense pain. Two stabs in the gut, one on each breast, one on each palm, two on each thigh and one straight in the groin. Ruthless, was all she could think of.

"Identification clear?"

"Yes, Lieutenant—"

"Cut it out, Cooper."

"Okay. Victim's Emily Suskind. Age twenty. Sophomore year in Barnard College."

"Okay." She circled the body. "Who called in?"

"One of her friends, Laura. Had come to pick her up for classes—the usual, I think. Door was shut. She knocked, rang the bell, banged, called out, tried reaching Emily over the phone, but no response. Thought something was off, so she called the cops."

"Where is she, Laura? Does she know about Suskind?

"No. When I arrived, she was standing here, said she was getting late for classes, so I told her to leave. She should be at Barnard."

"We'll have to speak to her. Anyway, you noticed one thing?"

"What?"

"These aren't impulsive stabs, Cooper, they're deliberate and calculated. Her killer wanted to see her cry and scream in pain. Didn't want to go easy on her." She crouched down beside Emily's body. "Barnard, right? Hm. We'll have to pay a visit. Soon."

"Yeah." He circled the corpse. "And, the way he—assuming her killer's a man—has knifed her, it looks like the guy was a big believer in precision."

"Precision. Yeah. And brutality." She stood up again. "Now, the question is, even after so many stabs, why would he slash her throat? That too, in a very sleek manner. One clean slant stroke across the carotid. She'd be dead if he just stuck to slitting her throat, anyway. Why stab?"

She took a deep breath, analyzed the second option. "Or, he wanted the cruelty, so the stabbing. With the number of jabs, she would have died in the first five, at max. Then why the cut?"

"True. That's a riddle we need to solve, Ford."

She smiled at him. "Now, that's better. Anyway, the next question is, what did he do first? Stab or slash?"

"My dibs are on stab. He would have taken his time with that. Slowly, patiently. Step by step. Deciding where and how he wanted to pierce her. And then get it over with in one quick move."

"Neighbors know about this?"

"No, none."

"Which is odd, Cooper. She should have screamed at the top of her voice. It would have hurt horribly bad."

"Yeah. Odd, it is."

"Does her family know?"

"Not yet. It's your job, Lieutenant, to break it to them."