Secrets to the Grave by Tami Hoag Read Free Book Online Page A

bothered at all.”
    “She was comfortable with him,” Vince said.
    “Apparently.”
    “I’d like to see him in his natural environment,” Vince said. “I’m curious. And I think he definitely knows more than he told us this morning. I’ll take Junior here,” he said to Dixon, hooking a thumb in the direction of Mendez. “He makes the guy nervous.”
    “I hear his dates have the same reaction,” Trammell said.
    “If he didn’t always have to read them their rights ... ,” Hicks said.
    “I thought it was the handcuffs,” Mendez joked.
    Dixon cleared his throat. “And do we have any names of friends to start checking out?”
    Mendez read off the short list he had gotten from Sara Morgan.
    “No boyfriends?” Vince questioned.
    “Not that Mrs. Morgan knew of.”
    “But they were friends.”
    Mendez shrugged. “She said they never talked about it.”
    “I’ve never known a woman who could stop herself from blabbing on and on about what guy she’s sleeping with,” Trammell said.
    “Unless the guy she’s seeing belongs to someone else,” Vince suggested.
    “A married lover?” Dixon said. “Always a possibility—and a motive. Let’s talk to the other women on that list and see what we can come up with. It’s tough to keep a secret in a town this size—especially a juicy one.
    “I know most of you are already working other cases,” he went on, consulting his notes, reading glasses perched on the end of his nose. “But I need all of you on this initially. The press is going to have a field day with a gruesome murder in Oak Knoll practically on the anniversary of the See-No-Evil cases. I want to clear this one before they can get up a head of steam.”
    “We’ve got a vic with forty stab wounds, her breasts missing, and a knife sticking out of her vagina,” Mendez said. “Somehow, I don’t think they’re going to let this one go.”
    Dixon turned to Vince. “What are your impressions so far, Vince?”
    Vince shrugged. “Obviously, it’s a sexual homicide, but what’s it about? Rage, yes. Rage over what? She done him wrong? She must have done him way wrong.
    “Taking the breasts sometimes suggests a kind of envy,” he said. “Breasts are symbolic of a woman’s beauty, her power.”
    “Take her breasts, take her power,” Mendez said.
    “Right. And sometimes removing body parts is about possession, possessing the victim by keeping a part of them.”
    “Like Ed Gein.”
    “Like Ed Gein.”
    The notorious 1950s Butcher of Plainfield. The Wisconsin man had made lampshades and chair seats out of the skin of his victims, and bowls out of their skulls, to name but a few of his atrocities.
    “Only Ed not only wanted to keep his female victims with him,” Vince said. “He wanted to be them. He made himself a ‘woman suit’ out of the skin and parts of corpses.”
    “Man, that’s disgusting,” Hicks said.
    “You think that’s disgusting. I can tell you about a couple of cannibals and what possessing their victims meant to them.”
    “Maybe after lunch,” someone suggested sarcastically.
    “Sometimes the body parts can be strictly a trophy,” Vince went on. “We’ll hope to God that’s not the case, because that would suggest he’s a hunter, and hunters don’t stop hunting.”
    “Jesus, that’s all we need,” Dixon said. “Another serial killer. One was more than enough.”
    “The odds of you having another serial killer on your hands are about as long as they can get,” Vince said. “We’re talking about an extremely rare animal, no matter how many of them appear every week on television.
    “In my opinion, the attack on Marissa Fordham was personal. That many stab wounds is personal. But that butcher knife looks to have belonged to the victim, which makes this seem more like a crime of opportunity, of the moment. Someone got angry, grabbed that knife and used it. I think the knife protruding from the vagina is the killer making a personal statement about the