Fifty Two Weeks of Murder by Owen Nichols Page A

or sullied any further by it. 
    Smith’s body slumped to the floor as if a marionette with the strings cut. Anders swung again, crashing the axe into his head as he lay prone on the ground. She stood straight, panting as she did so, leaning on the axe as she surveyed her work. Mentally, she lay the blood spatter analysis over the scene and muttered to herself. It wasn’t right.
    Focusing once more, James Smith stood up, perfectly unharmed, and walked slowly back to the middle of the floor, his eyes following her as she stood in front of him. She swung the axe once more, blood splashing the ceiling in the same spot that they’d discovered earlier. Smith’s body slumped down, crashing against the counter and sitting upright as he jammed against it.
    Anders swung again and again, turning his head into a bloody mess, blood splashing on the floor, covering her face and dripping from her in rivulets of gore. Skull fragments flew in all directions and lumps of brain smeared into the unit behind. An eye popped out from the skull and snaked across the floor, coming to a slithering halt beneath a shelf for Ben to find later.
    Her energy spent, Anders surveyed the carnage. She turned to see a blurred shape to her left. Streaks of blood had stopped at that point and the figure watched as Smith was brutally murdered. Recalling the witness testimony, she pictured the blurred figure shouting, then cheering. Stepping backwards, she placed an image of Mitch over the blurred image. Too tall. Blood spotted the wall behind. Taking Smith’s height and that of his son, the trajectory didn’t match. It was travelling too fast to dip, so it had to be someone shorter. Beth, the cashier. Height matched. Did the wife wear heels? That would make her the right height if she was.
    Thrusting the axe into the floor by Smith’s body, Anders stepped back, blood dripping from her sleeves and hands. She paused the scene in her mind and stepped away to look back at the figure who’d bludgeoned a man to death. Though blurry, she was forming an image in her mind and it came to sharp relief. The second figure was troubling her and she moved around the scene to get a better image, looping round the left to come behind the figure on the right. She then saw a smudge of blood on the floor and frowned at the smear. The direction was all wrong. It didn’t match any other splatter.
    Retracing her steps, she replayed the scene, wielding the axe on Smith over and over again, using different scenarios of the two people, where they would move and how, but that smudge kept coming back. She couldn’t find a reason for it, no matter how she moved the protagonists. Suddenly the answer hit Anders and she snapped her eyes open to find herself back in the workroom, paper littered around her. She gave a rueful shake of the head and muttered quietly in the silence.
    “Well I’ll be damned.”
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     

Chapter 11
    Beth, Janice and Mitch sat in Abi’s office as Anders and Jesse watched them through one of his monitors. Anders had sent two uniformed officers to bring them in and they’d arrived protesting at the early hour. Anders had wanted them unsettled and thought that a three a.m. call would be good for them. Jesse had disagreed and grumbled at Anders as she sat next to him. Despite the early hour, he was impeccably dressed and Anders thought him the best dressed Blackhat she’d ever met. 
    “A man like me,” he said. “He needs his beauty sleep. You think looking this good comes easy? No, that would be a carefully planned routine of exercise, nutrition, positive mental attitude, women and sleep. The five pillars of life. See how they all intertwine. See how they all require each other for a stable foundation to healthy living.” Anders squeezed his thigh and grinned at him. He sighed theatrically.
    “It’s not right you being so good looking and having such scant regard for the welfare of those around you. Makes