Amanda returned. “She politely declined your offer.”
Lucas spread his hands. “See? I don’t always win.”
“But the thing is, you pretty much do.” Amanda placed a beverage napkin on the bar in front of Lucas. “She left her digits for you, handsome.”
He looked at the name and phone number, folded the napkin, and stuffed it into a pocket of his shorts. “Sometimes a fella just gets lucky.”
“What is it with you?”
“I don’t know.” And this was true. He was always somewhat surprised when a woman was interested in him. It wasn’t like he was trying.
Lucas stood and reached for his wallet. He left twenty on thirty. If Amanda wasn’t going to take a bite of his fee, at least he could treat her right.
“Thanks, Marine.”
“My pleasure.”
“Do me a favor. I’m going to give you Grace’s contact information. Call her.”
“I’ll hit her up.”
On the bike ride uptown, Lucas thought of the woman at the end of the bar, the challenge of a new job, the comfort of a payday, the night of sleep that was to come. Sex, work, money, and a comfortable bed. Everything he dreamed of when he was overseas. A guy didn’t need anything else. He shifted into a lower gear and found his groove. It had been a good night, filled with promise.
He couldn’t know of the trouble yet to come.
TWO
The next morning, Lucas read the Post while sitting on the back porch of his apartment as a robin tended to her nest in the eaves and a pair of mockingbirds tormented a cat crossing the alley. In Metro an article detailed the noted drop in homicides and higher closure rate under the stewardship of Chief Cathy Lanier. A cultural shift, a civil servant–based economy mostly immune to the recession, and gentrification had played a role in the city’s resurgence as well. Still, for many, tragedy was not a stranger, and several high-profile murders, both long ago and in the not-too-distant past, were on the mind of Washington’s residents.
The vicious murder of Catherine Fuller, a ninety-nine-pound housewife and mother, in a Northeast alley in 1984 was perhaps the most brutal and senseless crime in D.C. history, emblematic of a decade gone wrong. Fuller had been beaten to death and sodomized with a metal pipe for fifty dollars and the cheap rings she wore on her fingers. Her ribs had been broken, her liver torn. Several young men went to prison for the crime, and those who were still alive were now being retried. Allegedly, confessions had been coerced, false testimony given, evidence suppressed. The retrial, for some, had reopened wounds.
The loved ones of Nori Amaya, found murdered in October 2009 in her apartment at the Woodner, her fingernails removed to erase DNA evidence, had yet to find justice or peace. Nori’s killer was in the wind, and questions of investigative neglect persisted. Similarly, closure had not come to the friends and family of Lucki Pannell, eighteen, shot and killed in a drive-by. Racist reader comments in the Washington Post notwithstanding, Lucki was not a thug or corner girl, but a straight, vivacious high school student whose murder remained unsolved. District Councilman Jim Graham, when asked to comment, said that the victim was “in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Lucas could only shake his head when he’d read the quote. Wrong place? Lucki had been on the porch of her own house when she was shot.
For Lucas, the most haunting murder of late had been that of Cherise Roberts, found in a Dumpster, strangled, with traces of semen on her face and in her rectum, blocks north of Cardozo High School, where Lucki Pannell had also been enrolled, in March. Cherise had been a student of Leo Lucas, an English teacher at the school. After her death, Leo had counseled many of the students who had been her friends and classmates. Spero, who had seen much death, had done the same for Leo over beers on many late nights, and he knew Leo remained deeply troubled by her murder. Cherise’s killer still walked free.
Lucas ate some breakfast and packed a lunch. He lashed his kayak to foam blocks fitted on the crossbars of his Cherokee, stowed his bike and paddling gear, and drove down to Charles County, Maryland, via Route 210, which most still called the Indian Head Highway. The trip was only thirty-some miles south of the Capital Beltway, but culturally much further. He saw fundamentalist churches, Harley-riders with Confederate flag decals on their helmets, barbecue joints whose smoke made his mouth water, and many liquor stores. Lucas turned on Mattingly, the last possible left before hitting the entrance to the Naval Surface Warfare Center.
Lucas unloaded his boat near Slavin’s Launch, on Mattawoman Creek, and pulled the green Wilderness Systems fourteen-foot touring kayak down to the waterline. Fishermen, county locals, cast from the shore, while others used boats of various size and horsepower from the launch. Mattawoman was one of the richest fishing areas of all the Potomac River branches, home to largemouth bass, perch, river herring, and shad. It was a pristine area for paddlers as well.
Lucas approached a man who had just now pulled an aluminum V-hull out on his trailer. The man had a great belly and pants held up by camouflage suspenders showing geese in flight and shotgun barrels pointing out of tall grass.
“How was it out there?” said Lucas.
“This creek is a fickle bitch,” said the man. “I caught twelve healthy bass in one day, just a week ago, but today, nary a one. I did get these bad boys, though. Come see.”
Lucas went with the man to the side of the boat and watched as he reached over the gunwales and removed the cover on a Styrofoam cooler. In it were a half dozen long, fat fish whose bodies were scaled and marked in the manner of pythons. Lucas had not seen anything quite like them.
“Snakeheads,” said the man, grabbing one firmly with one hand and opening its mouth with a set of pliers he had removed from a hip sheath. Lucas saw rows of sharp teeth.
“What the hell?” said Lucas.
“Don’t know how they got introduced to these waters, but they’re here to stay. They’re predators, but nothin preys on them. And the females carry hundreds of eggs in their sacs, so it ain’t like they’re going away. Know what else? They got legs.” The man smiled at Lucas’s wide-eyed expression. “That’s right. They can walk on land.”
“What are you gonna do with them?”
“Oh, I’ll grill ’em up. I don’t take nothin from out the water that I don’t eat.” The man looked at Lucas’s kayak and grinned. “Don’t fall in. These suckers bite.”
Lucas paddled out into the creek, going left, away from the Potomac, deep into the freshwater marsh, along bottomland forest, wetlands, and acres of American lotus. He powered through wet grass, his stroke even and sure, the sun hot on his shoulders and back. He saw bald eagles in their distinctive gliding flight, and many egrets, and turtles, and a water snake swimming in an S-curve across his bow. After forty-five minutes the veins had popped out on his forearms and biceps, and his back had a pleasant ache. He pulled in to a sand berm at the end of a small island and beached his boat. From a collapsible cooler in the stern bulkhead he retrieved a spicy salami sandwich and a cold bottle of beer. He sat on a blanket, which he’d spread over shells and goose poop, and ate and drank under the spotted shade of a sparsely leafed tree, looking out at the sun mirroring off the creek and the deep green forest of oak and pine on a nearby shore.
On the paddle back to the launch, Lucas saw three more snakes cutting through the water. This was unusual and disturbing. Once, when he was a kid, he had awakened from a nightmare to find his father sitting on his bed. He told his dad that, in his bad dream, he had been chased by a snake, and he could not seem to get away.
“Only one snake?” said Van Lucas.
“Yes,” said Spero.
“Then you got nothin to worry about, boy. The Greeks say that when you dream of one snake, it’s your friend. More than one, it means something else.”
“What does it mean when you see more than one snake, Baba?”
“Something bad’s about to happen,” said his father. “But not to you. Now, you go back to sleep.”
“Don??
?t leave me, okay? Stay here.”
“I’m not goin anywhere, son.”
Twenty years later, while in the desert in Iraq, Spero saw two horned vipers sidewinding up a dune at dusk, and felt a melancholy drop in his stomach. Van Lucas died the next day, in Washington, of the cancer that had slowly eaten his brain.
By the time he had loaded his boat and gear, and taken a bike ride on a railroad trail, it was late afternoon. Lucas drove back up the Indian Head Highway and, with the help of his GPS system, found the wooded area where Edwina Christian had been discovered. The forest was set back from acres of farmland, currently yielding a crop of soybean. The road that led into the woods was not a road exactly, but a cut-through in the field, worn down to dirt by years of use.
Lucas put his Jeep in 4WD and drove onto the road. Using the photographs he had brought with him, he found the approximate spot where Calvin Bates had allegedly left tracks from his Cherokee. Lucas parked his own Cherokee there. He got out and used his iPhone to take photographs of his vehicle in position. He studied the blown-up photographs of the Bates tracks, and compared them to the images on his phone. He then retrieved a twenty-five-foot Craftsman tape measure from his vehicle and took the width of the road, and the distance-width between his tires. He entered the numbers into the Notes app of his phone.
He had something now.
When Lucas got back to his place, he did some research on his laptop, then called Petersen and told him what he’d found.
“You’re talking about the wheelbase,” said Petersen.
“No,” said Lucas. “The wheelbase is the distance between the center of the front wheel and the center of the rear wheel. I’m talking about the axle track: the distance between the centerline of two tires on the same axle.”
“The width.”
“Basically. Just from eyeballing the photos of the tracks, and putting my truck in the same spot, it looks to me that the tracks laid down on that road were wider than a Jeep Cherokee would leave.”
“It looks to you.”
“Go to the discovery and check it out. The police report will have the recorded distance between the tracks. Compare that distance to the axle-track specs on a 2000 Cherokee. I can damn near guarantee that the two measurements will differ. We’re talking about a bigger vehicle, a heavy-duty truck or one of those oversized SUVs that nobody actually needs.”
“You’re saying what?”
“I don’t know that Calvin Bates didn’t kill that woman. Maybe he did, and maybe he took her down to those woods in his truck. But the tracks they found were not consistent with tracks from a Jeep of that year and model.”
“What about the tire tread?”
“Any specific tire can be mounted on thousands, tens of thousands of different cars. Right? If you bring that up to a jury…”
“Thank you, Jack McCoy.”
“Just sayin.”
“It’s something,” said Petersen.
“I’m not done,” said Lucas. “I’ll talk to Edwina Christian’s mother next. The transcripts of her interviews were a little off. You notice that?”
“She’s had problems. She was once a police officer in PG County, but she left the force under a cloud. Something to do with a credit card scam.”
“I’ll get on it.”
“Tonight?”
“No, not tonight. I’ve got an appointment with a woman.”
“I should have known.”
“Not like that. Business.”
“One of your side jobs?”
“I’ll talk to you soon.”
Lucas ended the call and sat down in his favorite chair, set next to a side table holding books. He watched the dim light of dusk outside his windows, and felt a familiar stirring inside him. He looked again at his phone, scrolled through his contacts, and found the name and number he had entered the night before. He touched the number on the screen and waited.
“Charlotte Rivers,” said the voice on the other end of the line.
“It’s Spero Lucas. The guy at the bar of Boundary Road. White T-shirt, black shorts. You know, GQ’s Man of the Year?”
“I remember you.”
“And I you.”
“Hold on.” He waited, and soon after that he heard the closing of a door.
“Hello?” said Lucas.
“I’m here.”
“Thank you for, you know, being so nice last night. Giving me a chance, I mean. I should have come over and introduced myself.”
“You tried to buy me a drink instead.”
“I admit, that was clumsy. I was a little intimidated, to tell you the truth.”
“By me?”
“You’re a beautiful woman. I was sweaty from a bike ride, not properly dressed. I wasn’t exactly at my best.”
“But I left you my phone number anyway.”
“I know. Why?”
“I’m not sure myself.”
“Listen…”
“What?”
“Can I meet you sometime, for coffee, or whatever you’d like? I promise I’ll come correct.”
“I have some time tomorrow evening,” she said. No hesitation. She suggested a time and place. Lucas wrote it down and they ended the call.
He stared stupidly at his cell. He thought of her walking past the bar, black tank top, black jeans, brown motorcycle boots, exquisitely built, those brilliant blue eyes, that upturned mouth with the hint of a smile. Lucas had swelled and he felt flushed. The last time he’d gotten an erection while talking to a girl on the phone, he’d been a teenager. But this was a full-blown woman, not a girl. There was something about Charlotte Rivers that heated him. Maybe she was just another challenge, and he was hot with the thrill of the new.
He had an appointment with Grace Kinkaid. He took a shower and began to think of Charlotte and her throaty voice. He tried not to fall in love with a bar of soap while he was in the stall.
THREE
Grace Kinkaid lived on the 2300 block of Champlain Street, in Adams Morgan, in a newish condo building set on the slope between Columbia Road and Florida Avenue. Her place was orderly, gender neutral at first glance, and minimally furnished. The walls were painted in pale shades of green and gold.
Lucas and Grace sat on her balcony in fold-out chairs, a small black table between them. Below them, in the light of a streetlamp, a father and son kicked a soccer ball back and forth.
On the table lay a manila folder. Grace was drinking Chardonnay from a large glass meant for red wine. Lucas had gone with ice water. From inside her living room, music played through her open sliding glass doors. Her stereo dial was set to 89.3, WPFW, the jazz station broadcasting from a building on Champlain, a half block north of where they sat.
“The painting,” said Lucas. “Can you describe it?”
“Take a look at it,” said Grace, opening the folder and pushing it across the table. The top sheet, one of many papers in the file, was a photograph of a framed oil painting mounted on a wall painted light green. Lucas supposed it had been taken while it hung in her condo.
“It’s nice,” said Lucas, to move the conversation along.
The painting was of two men, one middle-aged, one young, shown from the bare shoulders up, both of them looking directly into the eyes of the viewer. The middle-aged man had a gaunt face, a receding hairline, and a beard. The young man was clean shaven with a full head of black hair. The artist had painted a black backdrop for the older man and a brown backdrop for the younger one, giving the effect of separation within the frame. The portions of their chest and arms that showed were creamy white, while their necks and faces were burnished from the sun. Workers, thought Lucas. That, and the vaguely east-of-Europe features of the men, brought to mind one of those Russian proletariat posters…or something. He liked the painting, but he had no idea what he was looking at. Lucas didn’t “know” art.
“It’s called The Double,” said Grace. “The artist is Loretta Browning. Born in nineteenth-century America, studied in New York and Chica
go, moved to Paris after the First World War. Known for her portraitures, landscapes, and still-life paintings. Died in California, mid-twentieth century.”
“You say she was known.”
“Not well known. Up until recently, that is. Some scholarly reassessments and a few key gallery showings have elevated her reputation to the general public in the past ten years.”
“And elevated the worth of her paintings.”
“Considerably. I got the painting fifteen years ago.”
“So you bought it relatively cheaply.”
“I didn’t buy it at all,” said Grace. “It was a gift from my uncle Ron before he died. He said, ‘Take good care of this, honey. It’s going to be worth a lot of money someday.’ He was right.”
“How much is it worth?” said Lucas.
“I had it assessed before it was stolen. The man who came here and looked at it said it was worth somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred thousand dollars.”
“That’s a pretty exclusive neighborhood.”
“I know.”
“And your uncle just gave you the painting? Why?”
“After my parents passed, my uncle became the father figure for me and my brothers. Then he came out as a gay man, officially, and my brothers, who weren’t the most enlightened guys at the time, sort of rejected him. My uncle was a fair guy and he offered the painting to all of us. But my brothers looked at it, connected the images to Uncle Ron, and saw a picture of two gay guys. They felt that it promoted a lifestyle, and they didn’t want it in their homes, what with their babies and all. Like a painting could corrupt their kids. Me, I just liked the way it looked, so I took it. Of course my brothers’ feelings on the issue have evolved, just like our president’s, but it’s too late.”
“It’s too late for them to cash in because you own it.”