So here was her choice. Call Anna Curtis. Answer the prosecutor’s questions. Tell her what happened to Caroline—what she, Nicole, had done to make it happen.
What would go down then? Perhaps they would lock her in jail immediately. Worse, she would have to face Caroline’s family and all of their shared friends at Georgetown and Discretion. The newspapers would learn the truth. The world would know what she’d done. Everyone would despise her. It made life with Pleazy seem almost appealing.
No. It didn’t.
Through a blur of tears, Nicole tapped out a text message on the cell phone.
39
T
he text message was from a number Anna didn’t recognize. It read:
Help! Ur looking 4 me. Im trapped 1923 2 st nw 2d flr bedrm closet. 2 women 1 man he raped me. nicole
Nicole, Caroline’s mysterious vanishing roommate? Anna wondered how long it would take to get to 2nd Street.
“Hey, Sam,” Anna said, “take a look at this.”
Sam stopped at a red light, and Anna showed her the text message.
“You know that phone number?” Sam asked.
“Nope.”
“The address mean anything to you?”
“Nope.”
“Pretty thin.”
“I know. Can’t get a warrant. Should we call 911? Or McGee?”
“MPD? No, I’ll check it out myself.” Samantha gave Anna a grudging smile. “
We’ll
check it out.”
Sam swung the Durango onto Rhode Island Avenue. Anna held tight to the handle, glad to have such an aggressive agent. Some officers had to be begged just to do their jobs, and you could forget asking them to do anything unusual. It was better to work with an agent she occasionally had to hold back than one she constantly had to prod.
Jack would say it was too dangerous for Anna to go along. But he didn’t have a vote anymore. She was her own woman. She didn’t have to report to her boyfriend about where she was going or who
she was going with. She could do what she wanted to do, and no one would worry about her.
The neighborhood of Bloomingdale was in transition. The addict-to-architect ratio was about even, but the architects had the momentum. The shops on the corner of Rhode Island and 1st Street, Northwest, reflected the mixed demographics. There was Windows Café, a coffee shop with purple awnings, smoothies, and free Wi-Fi. Next door was the Chinese Dragon carryout, a Chinese/subs/burgers/fried-chicken joint with scuffed bulletproof glass protecting the proprietors from their customers. The clientele of the two adjacent restaurants were self-selecting and rarely overlapped.
Second Street was lined with narrow rowhouses ranging from shambles to chic. There were three for-sale signs on the block. White carpenters’ vans and green renovators’ porta-potties dotted the rapidly gentrifying street. Though it was a bit too early for commuters to be returning from work, there were a few people hanging around outside. Many of the homes had no air-conditioning, so residents without steady work gathered on the stoops and street corners.
The address in the text was an end unit that hadn’t experienced any renovations. Its few remaining shutters clung to scarred brick walls at chaotic angles; the tiny yard was trash-strewn and overgrown with weeds; metal bars covered the lower windows, which were streaked with dirt. Boxy old air-conditioning units sprouted from the upstairs windows. The house was dark and silent. Samantha parked at the curb in front, blocking off a fire hydrant.
“Stay in the car,” she said as she hopped out of the Durango.
“Why? If it’s Nicole, I want to talk to her.”
“You’re not armed.”
“Then shouldn’t you at least call for backup?” Anna said to Sam’s retreating back. The agent ignored her. As Samantha strode up the sidewalk, Anna reconsidered the benefits of having such an aggressive agent.
Sam went to the first-floor window. She cupped her hands against the glass and peered in. Then she marched up the steps and buzzed at the front door. A minute later, the door opened. A thick white woman with bottle-blond hair stood in the doorway, hands on her
hips. Anna could see Samantha and the woman having a short conversation. After a minute, the woman stepped aside to let Samantha into the house.
Anna climbed out of the car and jogged up to the front door. She didn’t know what assistance she could provide, but she wasn’t letting Samantha go in there alone. The agent scowled at her, but before Samantha could tell her to get back into the car, Anna introduced herself to the woman.
“Hi, I’m Anna. I’m working with Agent Randazzo. What’s your name?”
“Layla.”
The woman wore a sleeveless white T-shirt revealing a tattoo on her fat pink arm:
Pleazy.
Anna tried to gauge Layla’s age but could only tell that she’d lived a hard life. Layla could be anywhere from mid-thirties to early fifties. Her cheeks were deeply pockmarked, her face was jowly and lined, and her brassy hair had dark, greasy roots. She had sneaky gray eyes.
Layla stared at Anna suspiciously but stepped back and allowed her to step in with Samantha. Anna ignored the nervous feeling in her belly.
The entranceway was a narrow hall with wooden stairs going up. To the right of the entry hall was a shabby but uncluttered living room. It was much neater than some witnesses’ homes, although it held the unmistakable smell of poverty, a mixture of cigarette smoke, weed, stale sweat, and fried food. At the back of the house, Anna could see a portion of a grimy kitchen with a sink full of unwashed cups and dishes. All of the rooms appeared empty.
“We’re looking for someone named Nicole,” Samantha said. “Do you know her?”
Layla folded her hands across her bosom. “No.”
“We got a report that Nicole might be here in this house,” Samantha said. “You know anything about that?”
“Sorry.”
“So you don’t mind if we take a look around?”
Anna could see the calculations going through the woman’s head. If she refused, it would raise the alarm bells. The police might search
anyway, and if they found anything, she would look guilty for trying to hide it. But if she said the officers could search, she would seem innocent. The officers would think she had nothing to hide, and they might go away. Anna had seen dozens of cases in which guilty people, with incriminating evidence in their cars or homes or on their persons, consented to a police search based on this miscalculation.
Finally, Layla nodded. “Okay.”
“Great. Thanks.”
Sam headed straight toward the stairs. Layla’s face twisted with rage and fear. Her bluff had been called.
“Pleazy!” she screamed. “Pleazy! Po-po coming!”
A slim, good-looking African-American man appeared at the top of the stairs. He held a dull black 9-millimeter Luger in his right hand, pointed at the floor.
“Gun!” Anna shouted. She glanced at Samantha, who already had her Glock pointed at the man at the top of the stairs.
“Police! Put your gun down!” Samantha barked in the Voice of Authority. “Now!”
“Okay! Don’t shoot!” Pleazy’s voice was an octave higher than Anna had anticipated. He was either a tenor or terrified. He held his left hand up, bent down, and placed his gun on the floor with his right hand. He stood, holding both hands up.
“Come down the stairs!” Samantha instructed. “Keep those hands up. No sudden moves.”
He raised his palms and slowly came down the steps.
Anna should have known what would happen next. She’d dealt with enough domestic-violence cases to know that you could never turn your back on the woman. But she was so transfixed by the immediate threat of the man with the gun that she’d let Layla slip out of her vision.
The burly woman crept up behind Samantha and slammed a thick green glass goblet down on the agent’s head.
40
S
am’s gun fired as she staggered to her knees. Anna jumped at the sound—gunfire in an empty room was thunderous. Her ears rang. Layla, too, stumbled backward, covering her ears. The rowhouse acquired a new bullet hole, this one in the drywall at the top of the steps. Before Anna could do anything else, an arm clamped around her neck from behind.
“Go, Pleazy, go!” Layla yelled. “We got these bitches!”
Pleazy flew down the stairs, stumbled through the foyer, and fled out the front door. Anna clawed at the arm around her neck. Her fingers were ineffectual against the strong elbow cutting off the air from her lungs and the blood to her brain. She experienced raw, unreasoning panic. Then she started to see red. Oh God. What was it Eva had said? It took six seconds for you to lose consciousness when the blood flow to your head was cut off. What was the move, what was the move?
Anna turned her shoulder in to her attacker’s chest and yanked the arm down. She didn’t get out, but she got enough breathing space that the red faded from her vision. Anna rammed her shoulder into her attacker’s chest. She pulled the arm down a little farther and jammed her fingers over her shoulders, toward her assailant’s eyes. She wasn’t sure she was doing anything right. Actual fighting was way more chaotic and scrappy than a controlled drill in the gym. But something worked. Her fingers sank into soft tissue—she hoped an eyeball—and her assailant screamed, loosening the grip.
Anna ducked her head out of the elbow and took a step back, ready to deliver the groin kick. She was shocked to see that her attacker was a woman, about her age and maybe forty pounds heavier. Anna didn’t think a groin kick would be much use. Instead,
she lashed out with the heel of her palm, rotating her waist for torque and punching through her target, like she’d practiced in class. The meaty part of her hand barreled into the woman’s nose.
There was a crunch, and the woman staggered back into the living room with a shriek. She fell down, clutching her face. Blood trickled between her fingers. Anna had never punched anyone before. She stared at the bleeding woman before shaking herself out of shock and turning to Samantha.
The agent was on her knees, her head bleeding and her face scrunched into an expression of pain. In her right hand she clutched her weapon, pressing it to the floor. She was trying to get up but couldn’t seem to get her bearings. Layla looked at Anna, then at Sam’s gun. Layla dove forward and grabbed the agent’s right arm, trying to wrestle away the weapon.
Anna charged toward her. “No!” she yelled. She drove her knee squarely into the side of Layla’s head. It hurt her knee but seemed to hurt the woman even more. Layla fell to the side, and the gun went skittering across the bare floor. Layla lay in a heap, moaning.
Anna turned to face Samantha. The agent rose to one knee with a grimace. “Are you okay?” Anna asked. Her voice was raspy from having been choked.
Sam nodded silently. Anna darted across the room to retrieve the gun. It trembled violently, although she held it in both hands. She’d held a gun only once before, when Jack took her to a firing range with McGee and insisted that she learn how to handle a weapon. Anna sent up a thanks for his insistence. She kept her index finger off the trigger and along the side of the barrel so that, shaking like she was, she didn’t accidentally shoot someone.
Layla kept her eyes on the weapon in Anna’s hand but didn’t move. The nose-bleeding woman glared at Anna, but sat against the couch and showed no interest in renewing her attack. No one else appeared in the rooms.
“You got a registration for that firearm?” Samantha straightened up. She held out her hand for Anna to give back the gun. Anna hesitated. Samantha had taken a significant blow to the head. Was she in
any state to have a gun? Anna fell back on what she’d seen on
Grey’s Anatomy.
“Who’s the President?” she asked. “What’s the date?”
“It’s the date I arrest you for carrying a pistol without a license if you don’t give me back my gun, Annie Oakley.”
Anna turned the weapon muzzle-down and handed it to Samantha, who seemed to feel better as her hand closed around the black steel.
“Thank you,” Samantha said.
“It’s your gun.”
“No. I mean thank you. You saved my ass.”
“Tony never would’ve given me another eggplant patty if I hadn’t.”
Sam’s eyes kept skimming around the house as she pulled out her cell phone and hit something on speed dial.
“Calling for backup?” Anna asked. Samantha nodded. “What a fabulous idea. I wish someone had thought of that before.”
Jack’s worries about Anna going out to crime scenes no longer seemed so excessive. Now they seemed pretty wise. Maybe it wasn’t so bad to have someone worrying about her.
Within minutes, the house was covered in law-enforcement officers, both uniformed MPD and FBI agents. Layla and the other woman were cuffed and led to an ambulance.
An emergency medical technician tried to examine Samantha, but she shook him off, insisting she was fine. “I’ve had worse bumps on the head from rollerblading,” she said.
Law-enforcement officers spread out through the house, securing the first-floor rooms and heading down to the basement and up to the second floor. Samantha went upstairs with her fellow officers. Anna followed right behind.
At the top of the stairs, Anna could see four small bedrooms, each decorated sparsely with a queen-size bed dominating the space. The beds had sheets but no blankets. She realized this wasn’t a family home. It was a business. They were running incalls out of here, probably advertising online. With the explosion of the Internet, that was a popular business model, perhaps even more popular than the track.
The bedrooms all appeared empty. One had an open window leading to a fire escape. Anyone else who’d been in the house during the scuffle had fled.
In a bedroom with olive sheets, an MPD officer opened the closet door. He kept his gun trained on something inside. “Sam!” he called. Anna followed Sam into the bedroom. She peered over Sam’s shoulder into the dark closet where the officer was pointing his gun.
Cowering on the floor was a skinny woman in a ruined leather dress, holding up a hand to shield her eyes from the light. Anna recognized her from the DMV photo, although it looked like the woman had survived a nuclear holocaust since she’d gotten her driver’s license. Nicole Palowski stared up at Anna with hollow, haunted eyes.