This was a new piece of information, and it surprised me. “How far have you gone with this?”
“Not to Pittman, if that’s what you mean. I’ve done a little discreet checking on the suspect. Trouble is, he seems to be a solid citizen. Very good at his job—supposedly. At least that’s the official word from the embassy. Nice family in Kalorama. I’ve been watching Shafer a little, hoping I’d get lucky. His first name is Geoffrey.”
I knew that she was supposed to be a little bit of a loose cannon, and that she didn’t suffer fools gladly. “You’re out here alone tonight?” I asked her.
Hampton shrugged. “That’s how I usually operate. Partners slow me down. Chief Pittman knows how I like to work. He gave me the green light. All green, all day long.”
I knew she was waiting for me to give her something—if I had anything. I decided to play along. “We found a cab that the killer apparently used in Southeast. He kept it in a garage in Eckington.”
“Anybody see the suspect in the neighborhood?” She asked the right first question.
“The landlady saw him. I’d like to show her pictures of your guy. Or do you want to do it yourself?”
Her face was impassive. “I’ll do it. First thing in the morning. Anything revealing in the apartment?”
I wanted to be straight with her. She’d initiated the meeting, after all. “Photographs of me and my family covered a wall in a closet. They were taken of us in Bermuda. While we were on vacation. He was there watching us all the time.”
Hampton’s face softened. “I heard your fiancée disappeared in Bermuda. Word gets around.”
“There were photographs of Christine, too,” I said.
Her blue eyes became sad. I got a quick look behind her tough facade. “I’m really sorry about your loss.”
“I haven’t given up yet,” I told her. “Listen, I don’t want any credit for solving these cases; just let me help. He called me at home last night. Somebody did. Told me to back off. I assume that he meant this investigation, but I’m not supposed to be on it. If Pittman hears about us—”
Detective Hampton interrupted me. “Let me think about everything you’ve said. You know that Pittman will totally crucify me if he finds out. You have no idea. Trouble is, I don’t trust him.” Hampton’s gaze was intense and direct. “Don’t mention any of this to your buddies, or Sampson. You never know. Just let me sleep on it. I’ll try to do the right thing. I’m not such a hard-ass, really. Just a little weird, you know.”
“Aren’t we all?” I said, and smiled. Hampton was a tough detective, but I felt okay about her. I took something out of my pocket. A beeper.
“Keep this. If you get in trouble or get another lead, you can beep me anytime. If you find something out, please let me know. I’ll do the same. If Shafer’s the one, I want to talk to him before we bring him in. This is personal for me. You can’t imagine how personal.”
Hampton continued to make eye contact, studying me. She reminded me of someone I’d known a while back, another complicated woman cop, named Jezzie Flanagan. “I’ll think about it. I’ll let you know.”
“All right. Thanks for calling me in on this.”
She stood. “You’re not in on it yet. Like I said, I’ll let you know.” Then she touched my hand. “I really am sorry about your friend.”
Chapter 68
WE BOTH KNEW I was in, though. We’d made some kind of deal in the City Limits diner. I just hoped I wasn’t being set up by Hampton and Pittman or God knows who else.
Over the next two days, we talked four times. I still wasn’t sure that I could trust her, but I didn’t have a choice. I had to keep moving forward. She had already visited the landlady who’d rented out the apartment and garage in Eckington. The landlady hadn’t recognized the pictures of Shafer. Possibly he’d worn a disguise when he met with her.
If Patsy Hampton was setting me up, she was one of the best liars I’d met, and I’ve known some good ones. During one of our calls, she confessed that Chuck Hufstedler had been her source, and that she’d gotten him to keep the information from me. I shrugged it off. I didn’t have the time or the energy to be angry at either of them.
In the meantime, I spent a lot of time at home. I didn’t believe the killer would come after my family, not when he already had Christine, but I couldn’t tell that for sure. When I wasn’t there, I made sure Sampson or somebody else was checking on the house.
On the third night after I met her, Patsy Hampton and I had a breakthrough of sorts. She actually invited me to join her on her stakeout of Shafer’s town house in Kalorama Heights.
He had arrived home from work before six and remained there until just past nine. He had a nice-looking expat family—three children, a wife, a nanny. He lived very well. Nothing about his life or surroundings suggested that he might be a killer.
“He seems to go out every night around this time,” Hampton told me as we watched him walk to a shiny black Jag parked in a graveled driveway at the side of the house.
“Creature of habit,” I said. A weasel.
“Creature, anyway,” she said. We both smiled. The ice was breaking up a little between us. She admitted that she had checked me out thoroughly. She’d decided that Chief Pittman was the bad guy in all of this, not me.
The Jaguar pulled out of the drive, and we followed Shafer to a night spot in Georgetown. He didn’t seem to be aware of us. The problem was that we had to catch him doing something; we had no concrete evidence that he was our killer.
Shafer sat by himself at the bar, and we watched him from the street. Did he perch by the window on purpose? I wondered. Did he know we were watching? Was he playing with us?
I had a bad feeling that he was. This was all some kind of bizarre game to him. He left the bar around a quarter to twelve and returned home just past midnight.
“Bastard.” Patsy grimaced and shook her head. Her blond hair was soft and had a nice bounce to it. She definitely reminded me of Jezzie Flanagan, a Secret Service agent I’d worked with on the kidnapping of two children in Georgetown.
“He’s in for the night?” I asked. “What was that all about? He leaves the house to watch the Orioles baseball game at a bar in Georgetown?”
“That’s how it’s been the last few nights. I think he knows we’re out here.”
“He’s an intelligence officer. He knows surveillance. We also know he likes to play fantasy games. At any rate, he’s home for the night, so I’m going home, too, Patsy. I don’t like leaving my family alone too long.”
“Good night, Alex. Thanks for the help. We’ll get him. And maybe we’ll find your friend soon.”
“I hope so.”
On the drive home, I thought a little about Detective Patsy Hampton. She struck me as a lonely person, and I wondered why. She was thoughtful and interesting once you got past her tough facade. I wondered if anyone could ever really get through that facade, though.
There was a light on in our kitchen when I rolled into the driveway. I strolled around to the back door and saw Damon and Nana in their bathrobes at the stove. Everything seemed all right.
“Am I breaking up a pajama party?” I asked as I eased in through the back door.
“Damon has an upset stomach. I heard him in the kitchen, so I came out to get in his way.”
“I’m all right. I just couldn’t sleep. I saw you were still out,” he said. “It’s after midnight.”
He looked worried, and also a little sad. Damon had really liked Christine, and he’d told me a couple of times that he was looking forward to having a mom again. He’d already begun to think of her that way. He and Jannie missed Christine a whole lot. Twice now they’d had important women taken away from them.
“I was working a little late, that’s all. It’s a very complicated case, Damon, but I think I’m making progress,” I said. I went to the cabinet and took out two tea bags.
“I’ll make you tea,” Nana offered.
“I can do it,” I said, but she re
ached for the bags, and I let her take them away from me. It doesn’t pay to argue with Nana, especially not in her kitchen.
“You want some tea and milk, big guy?” I asked Damon.
“All right,” he said. He pronounced it Ah-yite, as they do at the playgrounds and probably even at the Sojourner Truth School.
“You sound like that poor excuse for an NBA point guard Allen Iverson,” Nana said to him. She didn’t much like street slang, never had. She had started off as an English teacher and never lost her love of books and language. She loved Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, and also Oprah Winfrey for bringing their books to a wider audience.
“He’s the fastest guard in the league, Grandma Moses. Shows what you know about basketball,” said Damon. “You probably think Magic Johnson is still playing in the league. And Wilt Chamberlain.”
“I like Marbury with the Timberwolves, and Stoudamire with Portland, formerly with Toronto,” Nana said, and gave a triumphant little smile. “Ah-yite?”
Damon laughed. Nana probably knew more about NBA point guards than either of us. She could always get you if she wanted to.
We sat at the kitchen table and drank tea with milk and too much sugar, and we were mostly quiet, but it was kind of nice. I love family, always have. Everything that I am flows from that. Damon yawned and got up from the table. He went to the sink and rinsed out his cup.
“I can probably sleep now,” he reported to us. “Give it a try, anyway.”
He came back to the table and gave Nana and me a kiss before he went back upstairs to bed. “You miss her, don’t you?” he whispered against my cheek.
“Of course I miss Christine,” I said to Damon. “All the time. Every waking minute.” I didn’t make mention of the fact that I had been out late because I was observing the son of a bitch who might have abducted her. Nor did I say anything about the other detective on surveillance, Patsy Hampton.
When Damon left, Nana put her hand in mine, and we sat like that for a few minutes before I went up to bed.
“I miss her, too,” Nana finally said. “I’m praying for you both, Alex.”
Chapter 69
THE NEXT EVENING at around six, I took off early from work and went to Damon’s choir practice at the Sojourner Truth School. I’d put together a good-sized file on Geoffrey Shafer, but I didn’t have anything that concretely linked him to any of the murders. Neither did Patsy Hampton. Maybe he was just a fantasy-game player. Or maybe the Weasel was just being more careful since his taxi had been found.
It tore me up to go to the Truth School, but I had to go. I realized how hard it must be for Damon and Jannie to go there every day. The school brought back too many memories of Christine. It was as if I were suffocating, all the breath being squeezed out of my lungs. At the same time, I was in a cold sweat that coated the back of my neck and my forehead.
A little while after the practice began, Jannie quietly reached over and took my hand. I heard her sigh softly. We were all doing a lot more touching and emoting since Bermuda, and I don’t think we have ever been closer as a family.
She and I held hands through most of the choir practice, which included the Welsh folk song “All Through the Night,” Bach’s “My heart ever faithful, sing praises,” and a very special arrangement of the spiritual “O Fix Me.”
I kept imagining that Christine would suddenly appear at the school, and once or twice I actually turned back toward the archway that led to her office. Of course, she wasn’t there, which filled me with inconsolable sadness and the deepest emptiness. I finally cleared my mind of all thought, just shut down, and let my whole self be the music, the glorious sound of the boys’ voices.
After we got home from the choir practice, Patsy Hampton checked in with me from her surveillance post. It was a little past eight. Nana and the kids were putting out cold chicken, slices of pears and apples, cheddar cheese, a salad of endive and Bibb lettuce.
Shafer was still home, and of all things, a children’s birthday party was going on there, Patsy reported. “Lots of smiling kids from the neighborhood, plus a rent-a-clown called Silly Billy. Maybe we’re on the wrong track here, Alex.”
“I don’t think so. I think our instincts are right about him.”
I told her I would come over at around nine to keep her company; that was the time when Shafer usually left the house.
Just past eight-thirty, the phone in the kitchen rang again as we were digging into the cold, well-spiced, delicious chicken. Nana frowned as I picked up the phone.
I recognized the voice.
“I told you to back off, didn’t I? Now you have to pay some consequences for disobeying. It’s your fault! There’s a pay phone at the old Monkey House at the National Zoo. The zoo closes at eight, but you can get in through the gardening-staff gate. Maybe Christine Johnson is there at the zoo waiting for you. You better get over there quick and find out. Run, Cross, run. Hurry! We have her.”
The caller hung up, and I charged upstairs for my Glock. I called Patsy Hampton and told her I’d gotten another call, presumably from the Weasel. I’d be at the National Zoo.
“Shafer’s still at his kid’s birthday party,” she told me. “Of course, he could have called from the house. I can see Silly Billy’s truck from where I’m parked.”
“Keep in contact with me, Patsy. Phones and beepers. Beeper for emergencies only. Be careful with him.”
“Okay. I’m fine here, Alex. Silly Billy doesn’t pose too much of a threat. Nothing will happen at his house. Go to the zoo, Alex. You be careful.”
Chapter 70
I WAS AT THE NATIONAL ZOO by ten to nine. I was thinking that the zoo was actually pretty close to Dr. Cassady’s apartment at the Farragut. Was it just a coincidence that I was so close to Shafer’s shrink? I didn’t believe in coincidences anymore.
I called Patsy Hampton before I left the car, but she didn’t pick up this time. I didn’t beep her—this wasn’t an emergency —not so far.
I knew the zoo from lots of visits with Damon and Jannie, but even better from when I was a boy and Nana used to bring me, and sometimes Sampson, who was nearly six feet tall by the time he was eleven. The main entrance to the zoo was at the corner of Connecticut and Hawthorne avenues, but the old Monkey House was nearly a mile diagonally across the grounds from there.
No one seemed to be around, but the gardening-staff gate was unlatched, as the caller had said it would be. He knew the zoo, too. More games, I kept thinking. He definitely loved to play.
As I hurried into the park, a steep horizon of trees and hills blocked out the lights of the surrounding city. There was only an occasional foot lamp for light, and it was eerie and frightening to be in there alone. Of course, I was sure I wasn’t alone.
The Monkey House was farther inside the gates than I remembered. I finally located it in the dark. It looked like an old Victorian railway station. Across a cobblestoned circle there was a more modern structure that I knew was the Reptile House.
A sign over the twin doors of the old Monkey House read: WARNING: QUARANTINE—DO NOT ENTER! More eeriness. I tried the tall twin doors, but they were securely locked.
On the wall beside the doors I saw a faded blue and white sign, the international pictograph indicating there was a phone inside. Is that the phone he wants me to use?
I shook the doors, which were old and wooden and rattled loudly. Inside I could hear monkeys starting to scream and act out. First the smaller primates: spider monkeys, chimpanzees, gibbons. Then the deeper grunt of a gorilla.
I caught sight of a dim red glow across the cobblestoned circle. Another pay phone was over there.
I hurried across the square. Checked my watch. It was two minutes past nine.
He kept me waiting last time.
I thought about his game playing. Was this all a role-playing game to him? How did he win? Lose?
I worried that I wasn’t at the right phone. I didn’t see any others, but there was always the one locked inside the o
ld Monkey House.
Is that the phone he wants me to use? I felt frantic and hyper. So many dangerous emotions were building up inside me.
I heard a long, sustained aaaaahhhh, like the sound of a football crowd at the opening kickoff. It startled me until I realized it was the apes in the Monkey House.
Was something wrong in there? An intruder? Something or someone near the phone?
I waited another five minutes, and then it dragged on to ten minutes. It was driving me crazy. I almost couldn’t bear it any longer, and I thought about beeping Patsy.
Then my beeper went off, and I jumped!
It was Patsy. It had to be an emergency.
I stared at the silent pay phone; I waited a half minute or so. Then I snatched it up.
I called the beeper number and left the number of the pay phone. I waited some more.
Patsy didn’t call me back.
Neither did the mystery caller.
I was in a sweat.
I had to make a decision now. I was caught in a very bad place. My head was starting to reel.
Suddenly the phone rang. I grabbed at it, almost dropped the receiver. My heart was pounding like a bass drum.
“We have her.”
“Where?” I yelled into the receiver.
“She’s at the Farragut, of course.”
The Weasel hung up. He never said she was safe.
Chapter 71
I COULDN’T IMAGINE why Christine would be at the Farragut in Washington, but he’d said she was there. Why would he do that if she wasn’t? What was he doing to me? To her?
I ran toward where I thought Cathedral Avenue was located. But it was very dark in the zoo, almost pitch-black. My vision was tunneling, maybe because I was close to being in shock. I couldn’t think straight.
My mind in a haze, I tripped over a dark slab of rock, went down on one knee. I cut my hands, tore my pants. Then I was up again, running through thick high bushes that grabbed and ripped at my face and arms.