Authors: Dorothy Phaire
At some point as Brenda drove past buildings, stores and neighborhoods, things that should have been familiar to her suddenly seemed strange, as if she had never driven that way home before. She stared out the window, her mind in a fog. The car seemed to propel itself forward. Heart drumming and teeth clinched in desperation, Brenda could not shake a crushing premonition that something dreadful had happened to her child. She should have just been late for work this morning and taken him to the babysitter’s herself, she thought. She was a fool to trust Jerome to do it, knowing how badly he had wanted to keep their son home. What if Jerome had gone out looking for drugs and left the baby alone? What if Jerome had not locked the crib rail in place as she had shown him a hundred times and Baby Buddha had fallen out of his crib? What if Jerome had left the stove on and the house had caught fire? “
Oh God, Please Please,”
Brenda prayed aloud, “
Please don’t take my baby! Please let him be safe and asleep in his crib. I won’t ask you for another thing God. But Please don’t make me live through this if something bad has happened to my child.”
Brenda couldn’t shake the feeling of disaster that had swept over her and had lingered there. Then, as she crossed into her Southeast Capitol Hill neighborhood, she knew the reason why. Long before turning the corner onto her street, she heard the sirens and smelled smoke. Seconds later, she noticed grayish-black clouds rolling up into the sky up ahead and then saw the fierce flames shooting out the windows of her home. Brenda slammed on the breaks right in the middle of the street and jumped out the car, running and shouting frantically with her arms flailing about her. “My baby! My baby! No, God No!” she hollered again and again. She tried to run into the burning house but a neighbor grabbed her and prevented her from entering.
PART TWO
And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With old odd ends, stol’n forth of holy writ;
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.
William Shakespeare
(1564 - 1616)
A
fter torching the Johnson home, the killer cruised down 8
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Street in Capitol Hill driving a rented black Chevy Blazer SUV. His darting eyes watched from behind an insulated hood. Too dangerous to leave a baby deserted here, he thought while searching for a safe place to dump the kid. The decision to park the rented get-away vehicle two blocks away from the Johnson house started out as a good one, he had thought. But now, it turned out to be chancy, running two blocks away from a roaring fire with a screaming infant hidden under an oversized jacket, and hoping not to be seen. Every step carrying that yelping bundle wrapped in a blue blanket, posed a threat to being noticed and caught. How the hell could such a perfect plan go so wrong? Letting that kid remain behind and burn to death wasn’t in the plan. All that mattered was that the intended target, Jerome Johnson, was dead.
One hand rested on the steering wheel of the Blazer and the other nervously tapped on the dashboard to the rhythm of an old school hit, “War” by the Temptations that bellowed out from a CD changer. The killer didn’t seem to care if the loud music bothered the crying baby that was lying lengthwise on the passenger seat without benefit of a car seat. He wanted to go faster but was concerned that the baby might roll off onto the floor. Glancing cautiously down the street from side to side, the killer weaved in and out of traffic to try to beat the lights. Being too close to the crime scene increased the arsonist’s fear of getting stopped and questioned by the cops. Not to mention his fear of being pulled over for carrying an infant in a moving vehicle without a car seat! Perspiration stuck to his cotton underwear and went through the woolen sweat suit.
When the infant stopped crying, the killer glanced down and noticed the baby’s puffy red, tear-stained face. His eyes were closed and his little chest rose and fell. The killer figured the baby had cried himself to sleep. “Good,” he mumbled aloud. “Soon as I find me someplace safe to drop you off at without puttin’ a noose around my own neck, you outta here, Partner. Don’t blame me if your daddy was an asshole.” The killer approached a crowded bus stop where a group of bums stood nearby. Street-corner drunks laughed out loud, cussed, and passed among themselves a whiskey bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag. Coming up on the intersection of 8
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and Florida Avenue Northeast, the killer didn’t notice the light turn red. Suddenly, a pregnant homeless woman walked out into the street. The killer slammed on the breaks. Distracted from looking around to see who was watching, he came just inches short of hitting the woman.
“Hey, watch it asshole,” she swung her fist at the driver.
“Why don’t you act like you wanna live then? Get your slow homeless ass outta the street,” the killer yelled back at her.
The woman screamed back at the driver as she stood defiantly in the middle of the street with her belly poking out and both hands on her hips. “I’ll kick your punk-ass right here, pregnant or not. Get on outta that truck and come say that shit to my face, Punk!” The homeless woman then picked up a broken bottle from the curb and threw it at the driver’s vehicle. For just a few seconds she stared into the seething eyes of the driver behind the wheel and recognized the dilated pupils and agitation, signs of a fellow dope fiend. She had been there herself months ago before she got pregnant. Homeless, with no family, and approaching her nine month, all she had in the world was her unborn baby. Once she realized she was pregnant she had stopped drinking and doing drugs.
The killer’s hand trembled on the wheel from an aching desire to leap out of the SUV and beat this woman half to death. Realizing the danger and certain capture that action presented, he remained calm and drove on. As he approached the intersection of 8
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and Florida Avenue, the killer noticed a guard sitting inside a booth at the front gates of Gallaudet University. He peered out from under his knitted hoodie and saw the homeless woman’s image in his side mirror as she chased after his vehicle, still shaking her fists and yelling something he couldn’t hear. He realized the guard at Gallaudet’s front entrance must have seen the dispute with this crazy homeless woman, but there was nothing he could do about that now. He needed to make a quick getaway and this was as good a place as any he’d seen so far to unload this kid. He brought the van to an abrupt stop and grabbed the blanketed armload from the front seat. “Come on, kid. It ain’t gettin’ no better than this,” he said between clinched teeth. The killer jumped out the van, holding the baby in his arms as he ran towards the guard’s station. He set the bundle down on the sidewalk in front of the guard’s station and raced back to the van. Once back inside the van, … tires left skid marks as the killer raced off, running the red light.
I
n this usually quiet Southeast Capitol Hill neighborhood, the approaching sirens and the smell of smoke had enticed everybody out of their homes. Onlookers swarmed around the burning rowhouse like flies on a week-old corpse.
Deek had just left F. B. I. Headquarters and was headed towards his car. His meeting with Special Agent Ana Santos and the other members of the SOS Task Force had wrapped up early and now he was on his way back to police headquarters on Indiana Avenue. He enjoyed working on the “Save Our Streets” (SOS) Task Force, a joint effort between the FBI and the Metropolitan Police Department that the Mayor had spearheaded over the summer. The police chief recommended him to serve on the task force and he had accepted, although it typically required him to work long days, juggling responsibilities for two law enforcement agencies.
Just as Deek pulled out of the parking lot, his pager went off signaling a message from one of the guys at the fire station where his older brother Luke was a Lieutenant. It was Firefighter Cooper Brown paging him. Cooper had been temporarily elevated to platoon commander in Luke’s absence while Luke was away on special training. Since Luke had always kept Deek in the loop and alerted him whenever there was a major box alarm in progress, apparently Cooper was not going to break with tradition, thought Deek. After receiving Firefighter Brown’s page, Deek detoured from his route, turned on the siren and police flashers installed on the dashboard of his sports car, then raced off to the duty station. Deek represented the Metropolitan Police Department’s Homicide division so none of the guys in Luke’s crew thought it odd that Luke would give Deek advanced notice when something major was happening. If the fire turned out to be intentionally started and fatalities occurred as a result, the investigation would quickly get handed off to MPD homicide. This way Deek would already be in place. Deek would stay clear of the burning building, but once the fire was out, he’d look for evidence along with the fire investigator, who would have also been dispatched, to determine what happened.
In less than two minutes Deek arrived at the firehouse. He noticed a full buffet style spread of barely-eaten food abandoned on a large wooden table that sat in the middle of the kitchen area where large aluminum pots hung from the ceiling. A well-used grill, black iron stove, oven, and chipped cabinets filled up the moderate cooking space. While inside the duty station he heard the dispatcher from CADS (Computer Aided Dispatch Systems) send out communications over the PA system repeatedly to announce the box fire on 6
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Street, SE in Capitol Hill. The dispatcher announced house on fire, second level, heavy smoke, and gave the address. Dispatch had also alerted the arson investigator and building inspector as was customary for a box fire alarm of this magnitude. Like the fire fighters, Deek’s ears were trained to listen to the commotion stirring around him and still quickly carry out his duties simultaneously without getting distracted by noise. Practically living in a police station for the past six years, the noise coming from the PA system and ongoing dispatcher announcements didn’t bother Deek.
Firefighter Cooper Brown and his crewmembers stepped into their smoke stained, heavy padded suits and pulled them over their regular District of Columbia Fire and Rescue uniforms of navy knit shirt, dark blue slacks, and black-laced shoes. Cooper handed Deek an armful of fire fighter gear, and he quickly slipped on a padded jacket and pulled a helmet over his head. Instead of taking his car, Deek accepted Cooper’s invitation to ride in the engine with the crew. He took his position in the back seat, between two fire fighters. “Let’s roll,” said Firefighter Cooper Brown. The caravan of ladder trucks and fire engines pulled out of the station at full speed and blared down the streets at ear-piercing volumes like they owned the roads.
When the crew rounded the corner onto 6
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Street, they saw billowy smoke and yellow-white snarls of fire erupting from the dwelling at full blaze. Unfortunately, they had not arrived at the fire’s incipient stage. The police, fire trucks and engines from other units pulled up to the scene at the same time. The entire block was now full of commotion. A hysterical woman was trying to break into the burning house while two neighbors attempted to hold her back. The woman kept screaming, “Let me through! My baby and my husband are inside.”
The truck’s team lifted their arial ladder up to the roof. The crewmembers climbed to the rooftop and ventilated above the fire so the smoke would climb upwards. Even though the added oxygen from the knocked out windows in the attic fed the fire, smoke could be more deadly than fire.
Deek ran alongside the suppression team. While Cooper and his men headed straight for the burning house, Deek rushed to assist the distraught woman who obviously lived there. As he got closer he recognized the woman. He had met her recently at Renee’s office when she was introduced to him as Renee’s secretary. Deek dialed Renee from his cell phone and let her know what was happening out there.
The woman who lived in the house kept hollering that her baby and her husband were inside. The crew’s adrenaline pumped up whenever the mission included rescue. Rescue, life—that was the first priority. They’d deal with fire as they encountered it. But the first thing to do was to get inside and look for any survivors. As leader of the battalion, Firefighter Cooper Brown axed through the door and forced it open. Ash and thick, acrid, black smoke blinded them. Flames swallowed the oxygen. All they could see was smoke and flames coming from the second floor. The suppression team put on their air masks. Cooper instructed his lineman at the nozzle to follow closely behind him.
They proceeded up the burning staircase. Their routine consisted of a ‘vent, attack and search’ plan with Cooper searching for survivors upstairs, while the other firefighter attacked the fire. Cooper maintained radio contact with his unit. They relied on touch and smell to guide them. Another team searched the main floor where the fire had not reached yet. Just as Cooper and one of his crewmembers were about to step onto the second floor landing, they felt the rumble of wooden floorboards crumble and a burst of flames soar outwards. The second floor completely collapsed to the basement in a pit of ash, wood and nails. The firefighter nearly fell through the floor but Cooper grabbed him just in time.
Cooper’s heart sank when he realized he could not complete the search without placing his entire crew in a dangerous situation. He felt frustrated, angry, and helpless, but he forced himself to deal with the incident and not the emotion surrounding it. He was the officer in charge and could not expose his own emotions. He calmly reported on the radio that the top steps and second floor collapsed and they could not continue to search for survivors. Cooper told his men to fall back. They would have to put out the fire from the outside and forgo any hope of a rescue. He radioed in that no further units must go into the building and his crew was coming out. How would he explain to the woman outside that he could not proceed forward without putting his men in danger?