27. MacDugon Is Impressed

Brampton took a breath. Kathy had been right. Once again he thought what an interesting person she was, and how glad he was to know her. And once again his thoughts drifted to asking her out, he wondered how she felt about their friendship – then the pictures of cruel stab wounds came back into focus and he shuddered.

“You okay Sandy? You look a little strange.” He snapped back and felt MacDugon’s hand on his arm. She was peering at him, and he gave his head a shake. “Yes, sorry, just thinking.”

She continued. “They’re almost ritual, the cuts. First, they’re in the same place on the chest, right into the center of the heart. They’re both horizontal, east to west rather than north to south. That’s unusual. We know the dagger has a bunch of rituals in its history, some crazy-ass ceremony when a rich guy asks a girl to marry them.” Brampton couldn’t help laughing, but she was not amused. “Do we know if the ritual includes a particular way he’s supposed to use it? Is there like a special way to wield the knife?” She shook her head in disgust.

Brampton sat quietly, watching her think.

“Okay,” she slapped her knees and stood up. “Kathy needs to look into the ceremony stuff. See if there’s anything in the history about how you’re supposed to hold the knife, how to strike. Normally if you stab someone in the heat of passion,” she snorted, “not that normally is the right word, but let’s say usually if you plunge a knife into somebody’s heart, the cut is north-south which slows it down because it will likely hit the rib cage. The way these wounds went, the blade slid between the second and third ribs and stabbed quick and deep into the heart. That motion would drive straight to the heart and cause it to rupture. Death would come in seconds. Pain would be minimal.”

Kathy, the nosey journalist, was the perfect person to ask questions about the history of the dagger without tipping anyone’s hand there was evidence linking two murders.

Gordon Stormont had touched on details of the bizarre ceremony, but Brampton was not a history buff. He’d listened in a half-hearted way, thinking more about the present than the past. It was Kathy who obsessed on the bits and pieces of a story and picked up on obscure information with her ‘wild blue yonder’ thinking.

MacDugon was talking again. “One of the weird things about Catrina’s murder is why the killer put her on the bed, covered her with a duvet. At first we figured it was done to shift the time of the murder. A duvet would have kept the body warmer making it more difficult to pinpoint time of death. Now I wonder if it could be part of this fucking ceremony.” The coroner was blunt and could be rude but she rarely swore. “Calling it a ceremony is just nonsense, but if there are instructions on how to kill a woman who rejects your proposal we need to know what they are. If the dagger’s history was in play for these murders, we need to find out more.”

She stood and held out her hand to him, making it clear his time was up.

In the car, he scribbled notes and mused on how Dr. MacDugon was now fully engaged in the investigation. She was no longer skeptical about Kathy’s ideas. He’d seen her mild irritation at having to revisit an old case turn into real anger on behalf of the murdered women. Maybe she did feel the humanity of the dead but was just good at hiding it.