No Hero by Mallory Kane Read Free Book Online

than the victim. It doesn’t take much body strength to inflict a lethal wound with a scalpel. Especially if the victim knew the killer.”
    Dev clamped his jaw. He’d already decided that the killer must have known the boys to be able to get so close to them, but it was one thing to think it, another to have it confirmed by the ME.
    “Let me show you.” Elizabeth put her hand on Dev’s arm and turned him around, his back to her. “You’re about six inches taller than me, so it would be hard for me to slit your throat from behind. Wait.” She grabbed a step stool. “Hand me that letter opener on the desk.”
    “The one here that looks like a scalpel?” Dev asked, handing it over with a trace of grim amusement.
    “With me on the step stool, we’re about the same height.” She put her hand on his shoulder. “Say we were standing like this, looking out at the river. I point at a boat, you crane your neck to look, and maybe I put my arm around you, like this.” She slid her arm around his neck and over his shoulder, as if in a caress.
    “Hey, Doc, I’ll give you thirty minutes to stop that.”
    She chuckled. “Yeah, and if I weren’t married, I might take longer than that. Anyway, you’re looking out over the water, and all I have to do is—” She pushed the dull blade of the letter opener into the soft part of his throat, where the carotid artery nestled, then drew it upward and to the right. “For someone who knows anatomy, not much more force than that and the kid bleeds out. Then, if they’re standing near the edge of the dock, a push, and—”
    Dev almost overbalanced when she nudged him in the middle of his back. Jesus . Her calm, dispassionate description of how Darnell and Brian might have died was playing hell with the careful detachment that usually enabled him to process the details of a homicide logically, rather than emotionally. But he’d taken in these kids, sat up nights talking to them, and wanted to do so much for them… The detachment wouldn’t come. The ME’s reenactment left him feeling raw, as though his very skin had been peeled away.
    Liz stepped off the stool with a hand on his arm. “It’s different when you know them, isn’t it?”
    He blinked and gave himself a mental shake. “Very different. But if I’m going to find the killer, I need to know everything. An embrace would work if the killer was a female, but what if it was another guy?”
    Liz crossed her arms and gazed at him pensively. “Probably a lot of ways the killer could get close enough. Ask for a light. Walk up behind and be ready to strike when he turned around. Put a hand on his shoulder to point at something. If he’s fast and accurate enough, maybe just reach around and strike.”
    “Son-of-a-bitch,” Dev muttered grimly.
    “Let me show you the differences between the wounds,” Liz said. She pulled an eight-by-ten color photo out of a file on her desk and held it next to Darnell’s neck.
    Dev looked back and forth between the two wounds. “Darnell’s cut is clean and precise,” Dev said. “Brian’s is ragged.”
    “Exactly. He might have been the killer’s first victim, or the victim struggled, although I would expect defensive wounds if that were the case. The first wound might have even been made by a different person.”
    “And if you had to choose?”
    She tucked the photo back in the file. “I think either the killer learned really fast, or Brian was killed by someone else.”
    Dev thought about that. “But everything else is the same.”
    “That’s right,” Liz said. “If there are two partners, maybe the submissive one did the first killing, the dominant the second.”
    “Two killers? I don’t know,” Dev admitted doubtfully. “Anything else?”
    “And this is why I’d rather talk to you than Givens,” Liz said, smiling. “He was done asking questions three minutes in. I’ve got a lot more. Let’s look at the murder weapon. Why a scalpel? Granted it’s much sharper