Kill Drive (Verdugo Book 3) by Blake Banner

Author:Blake Banner [Banner, Blake]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-03-15T16:00:00+00:00

FIFTEEN

A couple of hours later I lay listening to the rain on the glass. It had slowed to a damp patter, with an occasional wind-driven lash. Her head was on my shoulder and her breath gentle on my chest. I let my hand explore the curve of her back and her hip, but my mind was drifting. All I could see was Blanka, staring with dead eyes into the rain.

My thoughts followed the beam of my flashlight. The caked, dark blood against the pale gray of her skin. The gray-purple of her parted lips, the swollen tongue, the sprinkling of sweet brown sugar, and the eyes: staring windowpanes onto a dark, empty house.

It was a strange contrast—or was it an echo?—of the kitchen knife plunged into her belly: the rich, brown sugar in her mouth. Maybe it symbolized the loving words the killer had never heard from a mouth that was full of cold blades—sharp, cutting, cruel words.

And the knife: the big, cold-steel blade of a kitchen knife, driven deep into her abdomen, or perhaps her womb. Again, that curious juxtaposition of symbols. The essence of womanhood, life-giving, love-giving, brutally destroyed with a single plunge of that large, cold-steel blade.

But the knife and the sugar were almost clichés in their symbolism, as though the killer had actually sat down and thought them out, in some bizarre hope of being understood, as though trying to convey that he didn’t really want to do this, he didn’t really want to kill her. He only wanted to silence and sweeten her mouth.

Araminta stirred in her sleep, squeezed me and pressed her belly close against my side. Her belly. What had he wanted to do, or tell us, about her belly?

I reached for my Camels, fished one out one-handed and lit up, blowing smoke at the ceiling. The belly was all wrong. It was like it had been done by somebody else. There was no symbolic message there, no clichéd symbolism, no grief nor remorse. She had simply been disemboweled.

It was hard to tell. I was no expert in forensics, as far as I knew, but thinking back to the amount of blood I had seen in Trixie’s apartment, there was not very much around Blanka in comparison. Maybe it had been washed away by the rain, but Soundview Park on a rainy night in December didn’t strike me as a likely hangout for Otropoco’s daughter, and considering they were expecting her at the club, I figured maybe she’d been killed somewhere else and dumped at the park.

If that was true, it didn’t really get me anywhere, and it didn’t explain the weird contrast between the sugar and the savagery of the bestial attack on her abdomen. I lay and smoked and wondered why it mattered.

I gently removed Araminta’s head from my shoulder and swung my legs off the bed. Then I pulled on my pants and made my way downstairs to the kitchen. There I brewed some coffee and sat smoking and drinking, and thinking.

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