Slipping the knife away, he now returned to the interpreter, grabbed her by the hair and collar of her blouse and dumped her in a heavy dining room chair. He tied her to this with lamp wire, cut with a cheap utility knife he carried—not the Kai Shun, of course. He never even used the blade to slice string for tying beef roulade, one of his favorite recipes.

Tears streamed down her face and, gasping from the throat-punch, Lydia Foster shivered and kicked.

Jacob Swann reached into his breast pocket and removed his Kai Shun from the wooden scabbard. Her reaction, the terror, didn’t deepen. We are dismayed only by the unexpected. She would have seen this coming.

My little butcher man…

He crouched beside her as she sat making ungodly sounds and shaking madly.

“Be still,” he whispered into her ear.

He thought of the Bahamas, yesterday, of Annette uhn-uhn-uhning in a clearing near the beach, surrounded by silver palm and buttonwood trees strangling to death from orange love vines.

The interpreter didn’t comply exactly but she calmed enough.

“I have a few questions. I’m going to need all the material about your assignments for Robert Moreno. What you talked about. And who you met. But first of all, how many officers have you talked to about Robert Moreno?” He was concerned that somebody had called her after Amelia Sachs.

She shook her head.

Jacob Swann rested his left hand on the back of hers, tied tightly down. “That’s not a number. How many officers?”

She made more bizarre sounds and then, when he brushed the knife against her fingers, she whispered, “No one.”

She glanced toward the door. It meant she believed she could save herself if she stalled, to give the police time to arrive.

Jacob Swann curled the fingers of his left hand and rested the side of the Kai Shun blade, pounded with indentations, against his knuckles. The razor edge lowered to her middle and ring fingers. This was the way all serious chefs wielded their knives when they sliced food, fingertips of the guide hand curved below and away from the dangerous blade. You had to be very careful when you cut. He’d sliced through his own fingertips on several occasions. The pain was indescribable; fingers contain more nerve endings than any other part of the body.

He whispered, “Now, I’m going to ask you once more.”

Chapter 41

CHAPTER 41

THE DRIVE TO THE SNIPER’S NEST on the outcropping of land near the South Cove Inn took considerably longer than it otherwise might have.