Free Ikon by Graham Masterton

Ruse was not at all happy with the obvious complexities of the homicide on Oasis Drive. Here was a woman found with her head sawn off, one of the most brutal attacks he’d ever seen. Yet there was no apparent motive, no robbery, no rape, no vandalism, not even ‘Death to Pigs’ scrawled in blood on the wall. Just her head sawn off; and, worse, her head was missing. Police dogs had searched the area all morning and all they had come up with so far was an unpleasantly dead coyote. Chief Ruse hoped very much that this wasn’t going to be the beginning of one of those inexplicable new fashions in homicide. He had enough to contend with right now, keeping the husbands and wives of Phoenix from blowing themselves away with their own handguns. It always happened in the summer, when the temperature hit the high 80s. Chief Ruse took off his large
    Western hat and wiped the inside of the brim with his handkerchief, and sniffed.
    The headless body had just been taken away. Chief Ruse heard the ambulance siren warbling away down 36th Street. He stood with his hands on the bulges of fat which overhung his hips, and contemplated with absent-minded seriousness the hysterical splashes of blood on the walls and bedspread, and the dark tide of coagulated gore which spread out over the white carpet beneath his feet like a monstrous scab. He heard the front door of the house close behind him, but he didn’t turn around. He knew who it was. Lieutenant Berridge, humming to himself. Berridge was arguably the best homicide detective that Phoenix had seen in fifteen years - young, fit, intelligent, well-trained and well-experienced. Chief Ruse found him unbearable, not only because he was so damned good, but because he looked like one of those toothy California tennis-players, all flashing incisors and tanned knees, and because he was only 31 years old, and because he had thick sun-blond hair and sharp blue eyes, and because his wife Stella was exactly the same, a twin almost-blonde, athletic and wholesome; and because he was such a conceited paralysing pain in the ass. And because he would never keep still, but was always hopping or jumping or shuffling around as if he were warming up for a basketball contest.
    ‘You want to tell me your opinion, chief?’ asked Berridge, lacing his fingers together and popping all his knuckles, one after the other, in a controlled salvo. Chief Ruse closed his eyes. He hated people who made gratuitous noises with their body. He said, without opening his eyes, ‘Whatever opinion , happen to have, I know that you’ve got yourself an opinion which is a hundred times more dynamic, so why don’t you tell me what it is now and get it over with?’
    ‘Right, okay,’ said Berridge, raising his finger instantaneously to make point one. “There isn’t any question that we have some unusual difficulties here, particularly as far as identification is concerned. But I do think that we can
    safely assume that the dead woman is in fact Mrs Margot Schneider, widow of the late Major Rudolph Schneider, of the United States Air Force. Everything we have here supports that assumption. We have no ID. No Social Security card. In fact, we have nothing with a picture. But we do have her pension papers, and when I checked with Luke Air Force Base, they confirmed her age and her general appearance - and they tally. Her doctor confirmed her blood group, which is another plus. What’s more, there are letters in her writing-table from old girlfriends in the service, going right back to 1951.’
    Chief Ruse opened his eyes, and turned around with fat Michelin chins to stare at Berridge as if the young lieutenant were babbling complete nonsense. But Berridge, though hyper-active, was too arrogant to allow Ruse’s famous death-ray stare to put him off. He raised a second finger, and said, ‘As far as I’m concerned, the most important question is not who she is, or why she was murdered, but why would anybody want to take her head?