“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.”
“Are you working my case, Cheryl Beth?”
“No, Hank. I told her to call you. Now go down there to the café and I’ll bring you a student when I can break her free, and I’ll give you April’s number. In the meantime, unless you’re an R.N., I’ve got work to do here, and you’re in the way.”
Will parked beside the imposing Victorian edifice on Elm Street that was Music Hall and limped into the offices of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Music Hall itself looked like a great red-brick cathedral to music with a grand pitched roof and circular window, guarded on either side by sharp-topped towers. It had been built in 1878 on top of a pauper’s graveyard, where the dead had been buried without coffins. The stories went that during construction, onlookers would play around with the disinterred bones before workers could toss them into barrels set aside for that purpose. When a new elevator shaft was built in 1988, more remains were found. Ghost stories were as much a part of the building as great music. The offices, reached by a side entrance, were far plainer. Instead of the staid elegance of the concert hall, they formed a clutter of cubicles and little rooms added over many decades, half renovated, half modern, slightly shabby.