woman. The hard fist connected with the soft flesh and blood flew from
her nose and mouth.
Whether it was all the booze she had consumed or what,@ Luther didn’t
know, but the blow that ordinarily would have crippled a person merely
incensed her. With convulsive strength she managed to stagger up. As she
turned toward the mirror, Luther watched the horror in her face as she
suddenly viewed the abrupt destruction of her beauty. Eyes widening in
disbelief, she touched the swollen nose; one finger@’ dropped down and
probed the loosened teeth. She had become a smeared portrait, her major
attribute had vanished.
She turned around to face the man, and Luther saw the’ muscles in her
back tense so hard they looked like small pieces of wood. With lightning
quickness, she again@ slammed her foot into the man’s groin. Instantly
the man was weak again, his limbs useless as nausea overcame him. He
collapsed to the floor, rolled over onto his back, moanin& His knees
curled upward, his hand protectively at his crotch.
With blood streaming down her face, with eyes that bad gone from stark
horror to homicidal in an instant, the woman dropped to her knees beside
him and raised the letter opener high above her head.
Luther grabbed the remote, took a step toward the door.!@ his finger
almost on the button.
plunged toward his chest, screamed with every bit of strength he had
left. The call did not go unheeded.
His body frozen in place, Luther’s eyes darted to the bedroom door as it
flew open.
Two men, hair cropped short, crisp business suits not concealing
impressive physiques, burst into the room, guns drawn. Before Luther
could take another step they had assessed the situation and made their
decision.
Both guns fired almost simultaneously.
KATE WHifNEY SAT IN HER OFFICE GOING OVER THE FILE ONE
more time.
The guy had four priors, and had been arrested but ultimately not
charged on six other occasions because witnesses had been too frightened
to talk or had ended up in trash Dumvsters. He was a walking time bomb
ready to explode on ar@other victim, all of whom had been women.
The current charge was murder during the commission of robbery and rape,
which met the criteria for capital murder under Virginia’s laws. And
this time she decided to go for the home run: death. She had never asked
for it before, but if anybody deserved it, this guy did, and the
commonwealth was not . squeamish about authorizing it. Why allow him
life when he had cruelly and savagely ended the one given to a
nineteen-year-old college student who made the mistake of doing to a
shopping mail in broad daylight to pick up some nylons and a new pair of
shoes?
Kate rubbed her eyes and, using a rubber band from the pile on her desk,
pulled her hair back into a rough ponytail.
She looked around her small, plain office; the case files were piled
high around the room and for the millionth time she wondered if it would
ever stop. Of course it wouldn’t. If anything it would get worse, and
she could only do what she could do to stem the flow of blood. She would
start with the The man, seeing his life about to end as the letter
opener execution of Roger Simmons, Jr., twenty-two years old, and as
hardened a criminal as she had ever confronted, and she. unmarked by the
burden she found increasingly difficult to t carry. Her
twenty-nine-year-old face, after four years of nineteen-hour days and
countless trials, had held its own.
She sighed as she realized that probably would not last. In college she
had been the gracious recipient of turned heads, the cause of raised
heartbeats and cold sweats. But as she got ready to enter her thirties,
she realized that what she had taken for granted for so many years, that
what she had, in She shook her head and checked her-watch: well after’!
fact, derided on so many occasions, would not be with her had already
faced an army of them in her as yet short career.
She remembered the look he had given her that day in court.