Cut to the Chase by Joan Boswell Read Free Book Online

earlier. The police weren’t any closer to solving the crimes than they had been on day one.
    Six murdered men, five identified thus far, all stabbed with a long, thin blade. One unidentified—his face pulverized and his fingertips chopped off. No one had reporting a missing loved one, at least not a man with physical characteristics that corresponded to the mystery man’s. A gangland execution—but which gang and why?
    Rhona repositioned the elastic scrunchy anchoring her dark hair away from her face and covertly studied the partner assigned to her.
    Ian Galbraith, the newest detective in homicide, zealously applied a yellow highlighter to the document in front of him. There wouldn’t be much unmarked when he finished. Single-mindedness characterized his attitude. Like most new boys, he was determined to prove himself.
    Physically, blazingly blue eyes, fair skin and black hair falling in his eyes marked him as a man with a Gaelic heritage matching his name. Tall, thin and intense, he’d launched himself into the investigation as if his position depended on it, and maybe it did.
    â€œWhat are you staring at?” Ian said.
    â€œSorry, I do that when I’m thinking,” Rhona said.
    â€œI’m relieved. I thought I must have left half my lunch on my face,” Ian said with a small smile that revealed perfect teeth and a dimple. He returned to scrutinizing the document.
    They’d spent the morning on the street, interviewing women and men on the stroll and searching for fresh clues to identify the killer. Hours later, they were cross-indexing information from the murdered men’s files, seeking a revealing, overlooked detail. For the last few minutes, they’d been reviewing information, searching for similarities in lifestyle, hangouts, diet, habits, medical conditions—factoids that linked the victims to each other and to their killer or killers.
    Rhona leaned back in her swivel chair and shifted her weight to keep from resting on her left hip. She’d enrolled in a Pilates class several weeks before, and the previous day her ego had prompted her to do a leg-lifting exercise that the instructor had cautioned was for the “more advanced” in the group. Rhona had figured that as she was only in her late thirties, she was as fit as anyone, but watching the lithe twenty-year-olds, she should have known better.
    She stretched her legs and contemplated the black tooled-leather cowboy boots chosen to coordinate with her washable black pantsuit. Aware of her foibles, she knew she wore boots almost daily not only because they were comfortable but because they gave her the added inches she craved. In the man’s world of policing, being a short First Nation woman left her triply disadvantaged, and there wasn’t anything she could do about it except wear higher heels. Enough self-examination. They had work to do.
    â€œSix weeks since the first murder—it’s too long,” Rhona said.
    â€œIt is.” Ian evened the edges of the paper piled on his desk and frowned. “Do you get a sense the killer doesn’t care about his victims?”
    Rhona felt her eyebrows rise.
    â€œNo, that didn’t come out right. What if the killer hates what his victims do but isn’t attacking them as individuals. That’s what I mean?”
    â€œLike the anti-abortionists who have nothing against particular doctors but kill them because of what they do?”
    â€œAn analogous comparison. A fervent crusader maybe?”
    Analogous? Fervent? Not words commonly heard from her fellow detectives. She’d have to learn more about this new guy. “Maybe. They were all addicts.” Rhona riffled through her papers. “No victim was sexually assaulted or fought back. No skin under fingernails, no semen, nobody who’s come forward to say he saw anything—we’ll have to catch the perp in the act.” She rocked forward on her chair and