Page 55 of Sharp Force

“… I’m Don Horace with the Alexandria police. What’s your name?” the officer asks.

“Zain Willard. Did you see it?” His breathing is rapid and shallow, his glassy eyes terrified. “Did you see that thing?” He can barely talk, his voice a shaky whisper.

“What thing?” Officer Horace is young with dark hair and a flat demeanor.

“The ghost! Over there!” Zain points as sirens wail closer. “Floating away from the house, following me!”

“When was this?”

“Right before you got here. The thing was there holding a knife,watching me with a dead face and red eyes!” He points again at the fog in the wan glow of lamps bordering the sidewalk.

“Well, I don’t think a ghost did this to you or killed your friend inside the house…”

“Oh God!” Zain convulses into tears.

“What do you remember about what happened in there, Zain?”

“Oh God. No…!”

“Tell me anything you can while it’s fresh in your memory,” Officer Horace goes on.

“I came downstairs, and it smelled like a swimming pool. It was pitch-dark.” Zain is sobbing.

I continue noticing his teeth. They’re perfectly straight. I seriously doubt they made the irregular bite marks I’ve been seeing in the Slasher cases.

“Then I was hit in the throat and arm. At first, I didn’t know I was cut.”

“Why did you come downstairs to begin with?” the officer asks.

“The screaming.” Zain is getting weaker, swaying as if about to topple over.

“What was she screaming?”

“‘Stop!’ She screamed, ‘Stop…!’” Zain wraps his arms around his knees, rocking back and forth, blood dripping, his face panicked. “She was shrieking for him to stop…!”

“You need to sit still and calm down, okay?” the officer is saying.

Sirens are deafening, pulsing red lights bleary in the overcast.

“The ambulance is here and you’re gonna be fine, Zain. I’ll be right next to you…”

I pause the recording on Benton’s phone, zooming in on the diamond stud in Zain’s blood-smeared right earlobe. Just below it thetwo shallow incisions appear to be from one stroke angled downward, terminating in the middle of his throat.

I’d estimate the wounds are a total of about five inches long. But it’s impossible to know when there’s nothing in the video I can use as a scale.

“Unlike the deeper incision made straight across when a victim’s throat is cut from behind, the usual scenario.” I’m telling Benton my interpretations as I return his phone. “What I just saw is consistent with his throat being slashed by a right-handed assailant who was facing him.”

I make a backhanded slice in the air as if swinging a sizable blade with my right arm.

“Cutting the throat from the front is consistent with what I’ve seen in the first three victims, and also in photographs of Georgine Duvall,” I continue to explain. “Except the four of them were cut multiple times and with considerable force.”

“Overkill,” Benton replies as we move around the bedroom, getting ready.

“Yes, but not when Zain Willard was injured,” I reply. “What happened to him seems more like a halfhearted attempt by comparison.”

“That’s likely because it wasn’t emotionally driven by sexually violent fantasies.” Benton returns to his closet. “I suspect the Slasher was out of gas by the time he was confronted with a second person in the house. He hadn’t anticipated that for some reason.”

“The question is why? How could that happen?”