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This woman kept a damn chef’s knife in her dresser drawer. No wasting time trying to flick it open, hoping it didn’t malfunction. Just grab and go to town.
Which it seemed like she had.
The blood went pretty damn deep on the blade.
“This kind of injury,” I said, looking at it. “Would he be in a hospital?”
“I would be,” Casso said, shrugging. “But it’s hard to say. Depends on where she stabbed him.”
“She said she got him twice,” I recalled. “Get a call out to the local hospitals,” I called to Maggie’s partner, Travis, who’d been waiting with Mari when I’d arrived.
“On it,” he agreed, nodding.
Mari’s bedroom was a lot like her living room. Homey. Personal.
It wasn’t like the other two crime scenes.
Ashley’s bedroom was an all-matching set, looking a bit like a furniture showroom. The only personal touches were on top of her dresser where she had some of her costume jewelry sitting.
Madison’s bedroom had been like the rest of her house. Cool and minimalistic.
Mari’s walls were darker than her living room, painted a deep sage green. Her bed was a brushed gold metal frame with several comforters stacked on top of each other, all mussed and kicked around.
There were more books on her nightstand, three in total. Moving closer, I checked the spines.
A Killer in Calabasas, The Man in the Backseat,andThe Rise of Family Annihilators.
True crime.
I moved back out into the living room, checking out the books on the shelves.
Dozens and dozens of more true crime books.
Was that why she had a knife in her dresser and a bat by her front door? Her keys were sitting on the dining room table, and it looked like there was one of those extendable batons attached to the chain.
Aware of the threats all around.
Trying to be prepared.
I knew a lot of civilian men who were confused by or even off-put by modern women’s interest in true crime. As for me and most of the guys I knew on the force, ones who saw what happened to women day in and day out, we got it.
They consumed that content not to learn how to kill and get away with it, but because it gave them an idea of what to look out for, how to survive.
Things like perpetrators pretending to be hurt and asking for help. Or asking for help finding their lost pet.
We had a saying on the force, things we said to the women in our lives, regardless of how sexist it sounded:Men never ask women for help.
Sure, there were probably exceptions. But as a whole, it was a golden rule. Men asked other men for help. Predators asked women for help.
Mari was one of those true crime obsessed women. And her obsession might very well have had a part in helping her survive what should have been an unsurvivable attack.
We were at her house for hours, looking for any clues. Shoe or tire prints. Blood pointing in a direction. Seeing if any of the neighbors had a door camera.
We struck out on the first two, but the house on the corner did have a camera.
Unfortunately, it caught nothing.
No cars. No men on foot.
