Death Notice. Todd Ritter

When he bought it, the clerk at Radio Shack told him about all the “awesome” vacation photos he’d be able to take with it. That was a year ago, and so far, corpses were the only things the camera’s lens had seen.

      Leaning over George’s body, he took a picture of the lips, the flash from the camera filling the room in a quick burst. Nick took five more shots from various angles, as the medical examiner watched. Each flash of the camera caused him to flinch.

      “What happened to his eyes?” Cassie asked.

      Nick stopped taking pictures long enough to look at George Winnick’s eyes, where a small line of red circled each socket.

      “That’s where the pennies were,” Wallace said. “Placed right over the eyes.”

      “But why the red marks?”

      “The coins were frozen to the skin. I had to use hot water to pry them off.”

      “Do you still have them?” Cassie asked.

      The medical examiner nodded. “They’re in my office. Tagged and bagged and ready to be examined.”

      Nick raised his camera again and moved on to the neck. He crouched down next to the table and snapped off another five shots.

      “I need you to remove the thread,” he told Wallace. “And save it. We’ll need to examine that, too.”

      Wallace obliged by picking up a pair of suture scissors and carefully slicing through the thread, one stitch at a time. The gash widened, although no blood dripped out of it. The blood had all settled by that point.

      “Here you go,” Wallace said, tugging the thread from the skin and dropping it into an evidence bag that Cassie had waiting for him.

      He then moved out of the way, letting Nick and his partner get an unobstructed view of the wound. It was a clean cut, smooth along the edges. There was no hesitation involved. The killer had done it in one careful slice.

      “I’m thinking scalpel,” Cassie said. “That incision is too clean for a knife, no matter how sharp it is.”

      “That’s a change,” Nick added. “The Betsy Ross victims had ragged wounds.”

      Cassie nodded in agreement. “That’s because there was rage involved. He was angry when he did the cutting. But this wound is different. It’s clinical. Detached.”

      Nick had a better word to describe the wound. Precise. Who ever had caused it chose that spot for a reason.

      Free of the stitches, the incision widened like a toothless smile. Nick raised his camera and fired off a few shots. He zoomed in. On the camera’s display screen, the depths of the wound came into sudden, startling focus. Nick saw an artery—most likely the carotid—bulging just beyond the parted curtain of flesh and fat. Colored a pale purple, it was marred by tiny lines of black.

      Nick lowered the camera.

      “I think there’s more stitches.”

      He backed away as Wallace Noble swooped in. Using a small hook, the medical examiner gently tugged the artery until it emerged from the open wound. In the harsh light of the examination room, it was clear that Nick was right. The artery had been sliced open as cleanly as George Winnick’s neck had been. And just like the neck, the wound had been sewn shut with tight loops of black thread.

      “I’ll be damned,” Wallace said, shock setting off his smoker’s cough. “Now I know what killed poor old George.”

      EIGHT

      “George wasn’t a great man. But he was a good one. And he did right by me.”

      Alma Winnick, a potato sack of a woman in a powder blue house dress, gave her stunted eulogy from an armchair covered in cat fur. Kat knew it was an act and that Alma mourned her husband. But the widow refused to show her grief while a stranger was in the house.

      “I think he knew death was coming for him,” she said flatly.

      “How so?”

      “My brother died last month. Car accident. You probably read about it in the paper.”

      “My condolences,” Kat said, feeling even more sorry for the woman sitting across from her. So much loss in such a short period. Kat’s own family had spread it out. Her father died suddenly when she was eighteen, killed by a heart attack. Her mother stuck around for two more decades, succumbing to cancer the previous summer. Losing them separately had been hard enough. Losing them both within a month of each other would have been too much to bear.

      “At my brother’s funeral, George was the first person to sign the condolence book. As he wrote his name down, he said, ‘Alma, dying is a terrible thing.’ He never talked that way before. Never mentioned death. That’s what makes me think he knew his time had come.”

      Kat, who didn’t put much faith in premonitions, doubted George Winnick knew he was about to die. If he did, his death surely ended up being far worse than he ever imagined.

      “I told him not to worry,” Alma continued, eyes cast down. At her feet lay a calico with a milky eye and only three legs, and Kat couldn’t tell if the widow was addressing her or the calico. “He was strong. And tall. Do you know how tall he was?”

      “No idea.”

      “Six feet, two inches.” Alma said it with a mixture of admiration and awe that made Kat’s heart break just a little. “I come from a short family. So when I first laid eyes on George, he looked like the tallest man in the world.”

      “Do you know of anyone who might have wanted to harm your husband? Any enemies? Grudges?”

      Alma shook her head at each suggestion Kat threw out.

      “I don’t understand why someone would want to hurt my George. He was a good man. People liked him. He worked this land a long time. His folks were here before the mill. That’s a good number of years, and people respected that. Even the boys he had out here in the summer respected that.”

      Kat’s ears perked up. “Boys?”

      “Every summer, George would hire a couple boys from the junior high to help out on the farm. It took some of the load off his back and it did the boys some good, too. Taught them the value of hard work.”

      Kat asked Alma if she remembered the names of some of the summer employees.

      “Troy Gunzelman,” she said. “Him, I remember.”

      That was no surprise. Troy’s notoriety extended beyond Perry Hollow and into the next county. Even a woman as sheltered as Alma would know about his exploits on the field.

      “Any others?”

      Alma shrugged. It was obvious she was getting tired of being peppered with questions. Kat was tired of doing the peppering. But both of them had to continue.

      “When was the last time you saw your husband?” Kat asked.

      “Last night. I thought he would have come to bed after checking out the noise, so I went to sleep. When I woke up, his side of the bed was untouched.”

      “Is his truck missing?”

      “No,” Alma said. “It’s parked in the same place it was last night, so I assume he didn’t drive it.”

      “You mentioned a noise. What did it sound like?”

      “Animals.”

      Alma turned to look out the window next to her chair. Kat followed her gaze across the snow-covered yard and past a John Deere tractor old enough to be in a museum. Beyond it was the barn, where several more cats and a handful of chickens loitered outside. Kat heard the whinny of horses from within, followed by the sharp bark of a dog.

      “It was a racket,” the widow said. “They were making noise something fierce. George thought it might