Pop Goes the Weasel

  “No.” A softness came into her eyes. She shook her head back and forth. “That would be all wrong. For both of us.”

  We held each other on the porch, and I knew we were in trouble. I didn’t know how to resolve it. I had no idea. Maybe if I left the force, became a full-time therapist again, led a more normal life for Christine and the kids. But could I do that? Could I really quit?

  “Ask me again,” she whispered. “Ask me again, sometime.”

  Chapter 8

  CHRISTINE AND I had dated since that night, and it just felt right, easy, comfortable, and romantic. It always was that way between us. Still, I wondered if our problem could be fixed. Could she be happy with a homicide detective? Could I stop being one? I didn’t know.

  I was brought out of my reverie about Christine by the high-pitched, stuttering wail of a siren out on Twelfth Street, just turning off E. I winced when I saw Sampson’s black Nissan pull up in front of St. Anthony’s.

  He turned off the siren on his rooftop but then beeped the car horn, sat on it. I knew he was here for me, probably to take me somewhere I didn’t want to go. The horn continued to blare.

  “It’s your friend John Sampson,” Jimmy Moore called out. “You hear him, Alex?”

  “I know who it is,” I called back to Jimmy. “I’m hoping he goes away.”

  “Sure doesn’t sound like it.”

  I finally walked outside, crossing through the soup-kitchen line and receiving a few jokey jeers. People I had known for a long time accused me of working half a day, or said that if I didn’t like the job, could they have it.

  “What’s up?” I called to Sampson before I got all the way out to his black sports car.

  Sampson’s side window came sliding down. I leaned inside the car. “You forget? It’s my day off,” I reminded him.

  “It’s Nina Childs,” Sampson said in the low, soft voice he used only when he was angry or very serious. He was trying to deaden his facial muscles, to look tough, not emotional, but it wasn’t working real well. “Nina’s dead, Alex.”

  I shivered involuntarily. I opened the car door and got in. I didn’t even go back to the kitchen to tell Jimmy Moore I was leaving. Sampson jerked the car away from the curbside fast. The siren came on again, but now I almost welcomed the mournful wail. It numbed me.

  “What do you know so far?” I asked as we rushed along the intensely bleak streets of Southeast, then crossed the slate-gray Anacostia River.

  “She was dumped in a row house, Eighteenth and Garnesville. Jerome Thurman is out there with her. Says she’s probably been there since the weekend. Some needle pusher found the body. No clothes or I.D., Alex,” Sampson said.

  I looked over at him. “So how did they know it was Nina?”

  “Uniform guy on the scene recognized her. Knew her from the hospital. Everybody knew Nina.”

  I shut my eyes, but I saw Nina Childs’s face and I opened them again. She had been the eleven-to-seven charge nurse in the E.R. unit at St. Anthony’s Hospital, where once I’d run like a tornado, with a dying little boy in my arms. Sampson and I had worked with Nina more times than I could remember. Sampson had also dated Nina for over a year, but then they’d broken it off. She’d married a neighborhood man who worked for the city. They had two kids, two little babies, and Nina had seemed so happy the last time I saw her.

  I couldn’t believe she was lying dead in a tenement cellar on the wrong side of the Anacostia. She had been abandoned, like one of the Jane Does.

  Chapter 9

  NINA CHILDS’S BODY had been found in a battered row house in one of the city’s most impoverished, destroyed, and dismaying neighborhoods. There was only one patrol car on the scene, and a single rusted and dented EMS van; homicides in Southeast don’t attract much attention. A dog was barking somewhere, and it was the only sound on the desolate street.

  Sampson and I had to walk past an open-air drug mart on the corner of Eighteenth Street. Mostly young males, but a few children and two women were also gathered there defiantly. The drug marts are everywhere in this part of Southeast. The neighborhood youth activity is the crack trade.

  “Daily body pickup, Officers?” said one of the young men. He was wearing black trousers with black suspenders, no shirt, socks, or shoes. He had a prison-yard physique and tattoos everywhere.

  “Come to take out the trash?” an older man cackled from behind an unruly patch of salt-and-pepper beard. “Take that muhfuckin’ barkin’-all-night dog while you here. Make yourselves useful,” he added.

  Sampson and I ignored them and continued walking across Eighteenth, then into the boarded-up, three-storied row house straight ahead. A black and white boxer leaned out of a third-floor window, like a lifetime resident, and wouldn’t stop barking. Otherwise the building appeared deserted.

  The front door had been jimmied a hundred times, so it just swung open for us. The building smelled of fire, garbage, water damage. There was a gaping hole in the ceiling from a burst steam pipe. It was so wrong for Nina to have ended up in this sad, abominable place.

  For over a year I had been unofficially investigating unsolved murders in Southeast, many of them Jane Does. My count was well over a hundred, but no one else in the department was willing to agree to that number, or anything close to it. Several of the murdered women were drug abusers or prostitutes. But not Nina.

  We carefully descended a circular stairwell that had a shaky, well-worn wooden railing that neither of us would touch. I could see flashlights shining up ahead, and I already had my Maglite turned on.

  Nina was deep in the basement of the abandoned building. At least somebody had bothered to tape off the perimeter to protect the crime scene.

  I saw Nina’s body—and I had to look away.

  It wasn’t just that she was dead; it was how she’d been killed. I tried to put my mind and eyes somewhere else until I regained some composure.

  Jerome Thurman was there with the EMS team. So was a single patrol officer, probably the one who had identified Nina. No M.E. was present. It wasn’t unusual for a medical examiner not to show up for homicides in Southeast.

  There were dead flowers on the floor near the body. I focused on the flowers, still not able to look at Nina again. It didn’t fit with the other Jane Does, but the killer didn’t have a strict pattern. That was one of the problems I was having. It might mean that his fantasy was still evolving—and that he hadn’t finished making up his gruesome story yet.

  I noted shreds of foil and cellophane wrappers lying everywhere on the floor. Rats are attracted to shiny things and often bring them back to their nests. Thick cobwebs weaved from one end of the basement to the other.

  I had to look at Nina again. I needed to look closely.

  “I’m Detective Alex Cross. Let me take a look at her, please,” I finally said to the EMS team, a man and a woman in their twenties. “I’ll just be a couple of minutes, then I’ll get out of your way.”

  “The other detectives already released the body,” the male EMS worker said. He was rail-thin, with long dirty-blond hair. He didn’t bother to look up at me. “Let us finish our job and get the hell out of this cesspool. Whole area is highly infectious —smells like shit.”

  “Just back away,” Sampson barked. “Get up, before I pull your skinny ass up.”

  The EMS techie cursed, but he stood and backed away from Nina’s body. I moved in close, tried to concentrate and be professional, tried to remember specific details I had gathered about the previous Jane Does in Southeast. I was looking for some connection. I wondered if a single predator could possibly be killing so many people. If that was the case, then this would be one of the most savage killing sprees ever.

  I took a deep breath and then I knelt over Nina. The rats had been at her, I could see, but the killer had done much worse damage.

  It looked to me as if Nina had been beaten to death, with punches and possibly kicks. She might have been struck a hundred times or more. I had rarely seen anyone given this muc
h punishment. Why did it have to happen? She was only thirty-one years old, a mother of two, kind, talented, dedicated to her work at St. Anthony’s.

  There was a sudden noise, like a rifleshot, in the building. It reverberated right through the basement walls. The EMS workers jumped.

  The rest of us laughed nervously. I knew exactly what the sound was.

  “Just rattraps,” I said to the EMS team. “Get used to it.”

  Chapter 10

  I WAS AT THE HOMICIDE SCENE for a little over two hours, much longer than I wanted to be there, and I hated every second. I couldn’t fix a set pattern for the Jane Doe killings, and Nina Childs’s murder didn’t help. Why had he struck her so many times and so savagely? What were the flowers doing there? Could this be the work of the same killer?

  The way I usually operate at a crime scene is to let the homicide investigation take on an almost aerial view. Everything emanates from the body.

  Sampson and I walked the entire crime scene, from the basement to each floor and on up to the roof. Then we walked the neighborhood. Nobody had seen anything unusual, which didn’t surprise either of us.

  Now came the really bad part. Sampson and I drove from the woeful tenement to Nina’s apartment in the Brookland section of Washington, east of Catholic University. I knew I was being sucked in again, but there was nothing I could do about it.

  It was a sweltering-hot day, and the sun hammered Washington without mercy. We were both silent and withdrawn during the ride. What we had to do was the worst thing about our job—telling a family about the death of a loved one. I didn’t know how I could do it this time.

  Nina’s building was a well-kept brownbrick apartment house on Monroe Street. Miniature yellow roses were blooming out front in bright-green window boxes. It didn’t look as if anything bad should happen to someone who lived here. Everything about the place was so bright and hopeful, just as Nina had been.

  I was becoming more and more disturbed and upset about the brutal and obscene murder, and about the fact that it probably wouldn’t get a decent investigation from the department, at least not officially. Nana Mama would chalk it up to her conspiracy theories about the white overlords and their “criminal disinterest” in the people of Southeast. She had often told me that she felt morally superior to white people, that she would never, ever treat them the way they treated the black people of Washington.

  “Nina’s sister, Marie, takes care of the kids,” Sampson said as we rode down Monroe. “She’s a nice girl. Had a drug problem one time, beat it. Nina helped her. The whole family is close-knit. A lot like yours. This is going to be real bad, Alex.”

  I turned to him. Not surprisingly, he was taking Nina’s death even harder than I was. It’s unusual for him to show his emotions, though. “I can do it, John. You stay here in the car. I’ll go up and talk to the family.”

  Sampson shook his head and sighed loudly. “Doesn’t work that way, sugar.”

  He snugged the Nissan up to the curb, and we both climbed out. He didn’t stop me from coming along to the apartment, so I knew he wanted me there with him. He was right. This was going to be bad.

  The Childs apartment took up the first and second floors. The front door was slightly ornate, aluminum. Nina’s husband was already at the door. He had on the proletariat uniform of the D.C. Housing Authority, where he worked: mud-stained work boots, blue trousers, a shirt marked DCHA. One of the babies snuggled in his arms, a beautiful girl who looked at me and smiled and cooed.

  “Could we come inside for a moment?” Sampson asked.

  “It’s Nina,” the husband said, and started to break down right there in the doorway.

  “I’m sorry, William,” I spoke softly. “You’re right. She’s gone. She was found this morning.”

  William Childs started to sob loudly. He was a powerful-looking workingman, but that didn’t matter. He held his bewildered little girl to his chest and tried to control the crying, but he couldn’t.

  “Oh, God, no. Oh, Nina, Nina baby. How could somebody kill her? How could anybody do that? Oh, Nina, Nina, Nina.”

  A young, pretty woman came up behind him. She had to be Nina’s sister, Marie. She took the baby from her sister’s husband, and the little girl began to scream, as if she knew what had happened. I had seen so many families, so many good people, who had lost loved ones on these merciless streets. I knew it would never completely stop, but I felt it ought to get better. It never did.

  The sister motioned for us to come inside, and I noticed a hall table on which there were two pocketbooks, as if Nina were still about. The apartment was comfortable looking and neat, with light bamboo and white-cushioned furniture. The whir of a window air conditioner was constant. A Llardo porcelain figure of a nurse stood on an end table.

  I was still sorting through details of the homicide scene, trying to connect the murder to the other Jane Does. We learned that Nina had attended a health-care charity dinner on Saturday night. William had been working overtime. The family called the police late Saturday night. Two detectives had shown up, but no one had been able to find Nina until now.

  Then I was holding the baby while Nina’s sister took the chill off a bottle of formula. It was such a sad and poignant moment, knowing this poor little girl would never see her mother again, never know how truly special her mother had been. It reminded me of my own kids and their mother, and of Christine, who was afraid I would die during some murder investigation like this one.

  The older little girl came up to me while I was holding her baby sister. She was two or three at the most. “I got a new hairstyle,” she said proudly and did a half-turn to show me.

  “You did? It’s beautiful. Who did those braids for you?”

  “My mommy,” said the girl.

  It was an hour later when Sampson and I finally left the house. We drove away in silence and despair, the same way we’d come. After a couple of blocks, Sampson pulled over in front of a ramshackle neighborhood bodega covered with beer and soda posters.

  He gave a deep sigh, put his hands to his face, and then cried. I’d never ever seen John like this before, not in all the years we’d been friends, not even when we were just boys. I reached out and laid a hand on his shoulder, and he didn’t move away. Then he told me something he hadn’t shared before.

  “I loved her, Alex, but I let her get away. I never told her how I felt. We have to get this son of a bitch.”

  Chapter 11

  I SENSED I WAS AT THE START of another homicide mess. I didn’t want it, but I couldn’t stop the horror. I had to try to do something about the Jane Does. I couldn’t just stand by and do nothing.

  Although I was assigned to the Seventh District as a senior detective, my job as liaison with the FBI gave me some extra status and also the freedom to occasionally work without too much supervision or interference. My mind was running free, and I’d already made some associations between Nina’s murder and at least some of the unsolved killings. First, there had been no identification on the victims at each crime scene. Second, the bodies had frequently been dumped in buildings where they might not be found quickly. Third, not a single witness had seen anyone who might be a suspect. The most we ever got was that there had been traffic, or people out on the street, where one of the bodies had been found. That told me that the killer knew how to blend in, and that he possibly was a black man.

  Around six that night, I finally headed home. This was supposed to be my day off. I had things to do there, and I was trying to balance the demands of Job and homelife as best I could. I put on a happy face and headed inside the house.

  Damon, Jannie, and Nana were singing “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ de Boat” in the kitchen. The show tune was music to my ears and other essential parts of my anatomy. The kids looked happy as could be. There is a lot to be said for the innocence of childhood.

  I heard Nana say, “How about ‘I Can Tell the World’?” Then the three of them launched into one of the most beautiful spirituals I know
. Damon’s voice seemed particularly strong to me. I hadn’t really noticed that before.

  “I feel like I just walked into a story by Louisa May Alcott,” I said, laughing for the first time that long day.

  “I take that as a high compliment,” Nana said. She was somewhere between her late seventies and early eighties now, but not telling—and also not showing—her age.

  “Who’s Louise Maise Alcott?” Jannie said, and made a lemon-sucking face. She is a healthy little skeptic, though almost never a cynic. In that way, she takes after both her father and her grandmother.

  “Look it up tonight, little one. Fifty cents in your pocket for the correct answer,” I told her.

  “You’re on.” Jannie grinned. “You can pay me right now if you like.”

  “Me, too?” Damon asked.

  “Of course. You can look up Jane Austen,” I said to him. “Now what’s with the heavenly harmonizing? I like it very much, by the way. I just want to know what the special occasion is.”

  “We’re just singing while we prepare dinner,” Nana said, and stuck up her nose and twinkled her eyes. “You play jazz and the blues on the piano, don’t you? We harmonize like angels sometimes. No special reason necessary. Good for the soul, and the soul food, I suppose. Can’t hurt.”

  “Well, don’t stop singing on my account,” I said, but they had already stopped. Too bad. Something was going on; I’d figured out that much. A musical mystery to be solved in my own house.

  “We still on for boxing after dinner?” I asked cautiously. I was feeling a little vulnerable because I didn’t want them to turn me down for the boxing lesson that has become a ritual.

  “Of course,” Damon said, and frowned like I must be out of my mind to even ask such a question.