Not a crime of violence. D.D. paused, moved to the whiteboard, wrote that down. Whatever drove Abigail to kill, it wasn’t bloodlust or savagery. She didn’t hate her victims. She didn’t torture, maim, or inflict any postmortem damage.
She got in, got the job done, and cleaned up afterward. Almost clinical in nature.
Not personal. D.D. added this line next to the whiteboard.
Abigail killed both of these women, but it wasn’t personal to her. If so, she would’ve been compelled to perform such classic dehumanizing touches as slashing their faces, or maybe attacking their hands or cutting off their hair. Or, on the other end of the spectrum, a killer who was driven by an overwhelming compulsion to murder often felt shame or remorse afterward and covered the victim’s body, particularly the victim’s face, as if to hide what she had done. But no on both counts. No anger, no shame. Clinical.
Abigail had killed two women because it had needed to be done. She’d kept it relatively painless. Performed her ritual simply and expediently. Then she’d cleaned up. Perhaps also a matter of business—covering her tracks. Or maybe the first sign of remorse, D.D. thought. An apology woman to woman. Sorry I had to kill you, but here, I did the dishes, righted the sofa cushions, mopped the floor.
Motivation, that’s what D.D. needed. If it wasn’t personal, why had Abigail done it? Financial gain? According to Quincy’s reports, nobody gained substantially from either death. Personal gain—bumping off a rival for a man’s affection, competition in the workplace, the cheerleader that just took your daughter’s slot? Again, no one thing tied together Randi Menke and Jackie Knowles. They certainly weren’t rivals for a man’s attention, they didn’t share the same job, they didn’t even live in the same state. They were just Charlene’s friends, and even that connection was dated.
D.D. frowned. Made a note in a fresh column. Frowned some more.
Decided to attack the problem from a different angle.
Forget the why for a moment. How? How did one female—and D.D. was certain now the killer was female, had to be female, as Quincy had predicted—how did one female so effortlessly murder another?
Physically larger and stronger? Even then, someone choked you, you fought, you struggled, you clawed at hands with your fingernails, you kicked back with your feet, you jabbed with your elbows. Even if the rooms had been cleaned up afterward, there would be massive physical evidence left behind on each murder victim. Contusions, lacerations, postmortem bruising.
There should have been hair and fiber tangled in each victim’s clothing; skin cells, even blood samples recovered from beneath each victim’s fingernails. And the bruises could be just as helpful. D.D. had seen them in the shape of the perpetrator’s ring, imprints from belt buckles, even the shape of one woman’s barrette clearly indented into the cheek of her rival after a particularly vicious catfight.
But as D.D. went over the photos again and again and again, she came up with the same results: nothing, nothing, and nothing.
It was as if Randi Menke and Jackie Knowles had stood there and simply let themselves be strangled. One, a woman who’d had the fortitude to leave an abusive marriage. Another, a woman who’d climbed up the corporate ladder before she was thirty.
D.D. didn’t believe it. These women knew how to fight. So why hadn’t they?
Female killer…
Drugs, she realized. Weapon of choice of most female murderers. Abigail had drugged her victims, then killed them.
Only thing that made sense.
Except…D.D.’s head ached. She pulled first Randi’s tox report, then Jackie’s tox report. Jackie had died with a blood alcohol level of. 05, consistent with a woman who’d had a glass of wine or two at the bar. Randi Menke nothing.
D.D. pulled out a chair, flopped down in it, and scowled at the report again.
Phil came in. He had a brown bag in his hand, which he held up. Apparently, she’d said yes to lunch. She could eat.
“She drugged them, definitely,” D.D. muttered, accepting the bag.
“She?”
“Abigail.”
“Abigail?”
“Woman who killed Randi Menke and Jackie Knowles.”