Still no George Bayer.
Shafer couldn’t stand it any longer. He climbed out of the Jaguar. He stood on the street and stared up at the windows of
the flat. He wondered if he, too, was being watched. He sensed a trap, wondered if he should flee.
Christ, where the hell is Bayer? What game is Famine playing?
Was there a back way out of the building? If so, why had he left the taxi as evidence? Evidence! Damn him!
But then he saw Bayer finally leave the building. He quickly crossed S Street, got into the cab, and drove away.
Shafer decided to go upstairs. He jogged over to the building and found the wooden front door unlocked. He hurried up the
steep, winding stairs. He had a flashlight in one hand, and turned it on. His semiautomatic was in the other.
Shafer made his way to the fourth floor. He immediately knew which of the two flats was the one. A poster for Mary J. Blige’s
What’s the 411?
album was on the splintered and scarred door to his right. The girls lived here.
He turned the handle and carefully pushed the door open. He pointed his gun inside, ready.
One of the young girls came out of the bathroom wearing a fluffy black towel on her head, nothing else. She was a hot number
with pert little titties. Christ, Famine must have paid for it. What a fool! What a wanker!
“Who the hell are you? What are you doing in here?” the girl shouted angrily.
“I’m Death,” he grinned, then announced, “I’m here for you and your pretty friend.”
I HAD GOTTEN HOME from the John Doe murder scene at a little past three-thirty in the morning. I went to bed but set my alarm
for six-thirty. I managed to get myself up before the kids went off to school.
“Somebody was out very, very, very late last night.” Jannie started her teasing before I had made it all the way downstairs
and into the kitchen. I continued down and found her and Damon in the breakfast nook with Nana.
“Somebody sure
looks
like he had a late night,” Nana said from her customary catbird’s seat.
“Somebody’s cruising for a bruising,” I said to quiet them. “Now, there’s something important I need to tell you before you
head out to school.”
“Watch our manners. Always pay attention in class, even if the teacher’s boring. Lead with our left if it ever comes to a
fight in the schoolyard,” Jannie offered with a wink.
I rolled my eyes. “What I was going to say,” I said, “is that you should be especially nice to Mrs. Johnson today. You see,
last night Christine said that she’d marry me. I guess that means she’s marrying all of us.”
At that point, everything became hugging and loud celebrating in the kitchen. The kids got chocolate milk and bacon grease
all over me. I’d never seen Nana happier. And I felt exactly the same. Probably even better than they did.
I eventually made it to work that morning. I had made some progress on the John Doe homicide, and early on Tuesday morning,
I learned that the man whose body had been dumped on Alabama Avenue was a thirty-four-year-old research analyst named Franklin
Odenkirk. He worked at the Library of Congress for the Congressional Research Service.
We didn’t release the news to the press, but I did inform Chief Pittman’s office as soon as I knew. Pittman would find out
anyway.
Once I had a name for the victim, information came quickly, and as it usually is, it was sad. Odenkirk was married and had
three small children. He had taken a late flight back from New York, where he’d given a talk at the Rockefeller Institute.
The plane landed on time, and he deboarded at National around ten. What happened to him after that was a mystery.
For the remainder of the week, I was busy with the murder case. I visited the Library of Congress and went to the newest structure,
the James Madison Building, on Independence Avenue. I talked to nearly a dozen of Frank Odenkirk’s coworkers.
They were courteous and cooperative, and I was told repeatedly that Odenkirk, while haughty at times, was generally well liked.
He wasn’t known to use drugs or drink to excess; wasn’t known to gamble, either. He was faithful to his wife. He hadn’t been
involved in a serious argument at the office for as long as he’d been there.
He was with the Education and Public Welfare Division and spent long days in the spectacular Main Reading Room. There was
no apparent motive for his murder, which was what I had feared. The killing roughly paralleled the Jane Does so far, but of
course the chief of detectives didn’t want to hear that. There
was
no Jane Doe killer, according to him. Why? Because he didn’t want to shift dozens of detectives to Southeast and begin an
extensive investigation on the basis of my instincts and gut feelings. I had heard Pittman joke that Southeast wasn’t part
of
his city
.
Before I left the Madison Building, I was compelled to stop and see the Main Reading Room once again. It was newly renovated,
and I hadn’t been there since the work had been done.
I sat at a reader’s table and stared up at the amazing dome high over my head. Around the room were stained-glass representations
of the seals of forty-eight states, along with bronze statues of famous figures, including Michelangelo, Plato, Shakespeare,
Edward Gibbon, and Homer. I could imagine poor Frank Odenkirk doing his work here, and it bothered me. Why had he been killed?
Had it been the Weasel?
The death was a terrible shock to everyone who had worked with him, and a couple of Odenkirk’s coworkers broke down while
talking to me about his murder.
I wasn’t looking forward to interviewing Mrs. Odenkirk, but I drove out 295 and 210 to Forest Heights late on Friday afternoon.
Chris Odenkirk was home with her mother, and also her husband’s parents, who had flown in from Briarcliff Manor in Westchester
County, New York. They told me the same story as the people at the Library of Congress. No one in the family knew of anyone
who might want to harm Frank. He was a loving father, a supportive husband, a thoughtful son and son-in-law.
At the Odenkirk home, I learned that the deceased had been wearing a green seersucker suit when he left home, that his business
meeting in New York had run over, and that he had been nearly two hours late getting to La Guardia Airport. He generally took
a cab home from the airport in Washington because so many flights arrived late.
Even before I went to the house in Forest Heights, I had two detectives sent out to the airport. They showed around pictures
of Odenkirk, interviewed airline personnel, shopworkers, porters, taxi dispatchers, and cabdrivers.
Around six I went over to the medical examiner’s office to hear the results of the autopsy. All the photos and sketches from
the crime scene were laid out. The autopsy had run about two and a half hours. Every cavity of Frank Odenkirk’s body had been
swabbed and scraped, and his brain had been removed.
I talked to the medical examiner while she finished up with Odenkirk at about six-thirty. Her name was Angelina Torres, and
I’d known her for years. The two of us had started in our jobs at about the same time. Angelina was a tick under five feet
and probably weighed around ninety pounds soaking wet.
“Long day, Alex?” she asked. “You look used and abused.”
“Long one for you, too, Angelina. You look good, though. Short, but good.”
She nodded, grinned, then stretched her small slight arms up over her head. She let out a low groan that approximated the
way I felt, too.
“Any surprises for me?” I asked, after allowing her to stretch in peace and moan her little heart out.
I hadn’t expected anything, but she had some news. “One surprise,” Angelina said. “He was sodomized after he died. Someone
had sex with him, Alex. Our killer seems to swing both ways.”
ON THE DRIVE HOME that evening, I needed a break from the murder case. I thought about Christine, and that was much better,
easier on the frontal lobe. I even switched off my beeper. I didn’t want any distractions for ten or fifteen minutes.
Even though she hadn’t talked about it recently, she still felt my job was too dangerous. The trouble was, she was absolutely
right. I sometimes worried about leaving Damon and Jannie alone in the world, and now Christine as well. As I drove along
the familiar streets of Southeast near Fifth, I considered whether I could actually leave police work. I’d been thinking about
going into private practice and working as a psychologist, but I hadn’t done anything to make it happen. It probably meant
that I didn’t really want to do it.
Nana was sitting on the front porch when I arrived home at around seven-thirty. She looked peeved, an expression of hers that
I know all too well. She can still make me feel like I’m nine or ten years old and she’s the one with all the answers.
“Where are the kids?” I called out as soon as I opened the car door and climbed out. A fractured Batman and Robin kite was
still up in a tree in the yard, and I was annoyed at myself for not getting it down a couple of weeks ago.
“I shackled them to the sink, and they’re doing the dishes,” Nana said.
“Sorry about missing dinner,” I told her.
“Tell that to your children,” Nana said, frowning up a storm. She’s about as subtle as a hurricane. “You better tell them
right now. Your friend Sampson called a little earlier. So did your compatriot Jerome Thurman. There’s been more murders,
Alex. I used the
plural
noun, just in case you didn’t notice. Sampson is waiting for you at the so-called crime scene. Two bodies over in Shaw, near
Howard University, of all places. Two more young black girls are dead. It won’t stop, will it? It never stops in Southeast.”
No, it never does.
THE HOMICIDE SCENE was an old crumbling brownstone in a bad section of S Street in Shaw. A lot of college kids and also some
young professionals live in the up-and-down, mostly middle-class neighborhood. Lately, prostitution has become a problem there.
According to Sampson, the two dead girls were both prostitutes who occasionally worked in the neighborhood but mostly turned
tricks over in Petworth.
A single squad car and an EMS truck were parked at the homicide scene. A uniformed patrolman was posted on the front stoop,
and he seemed intent on keeping intruders out. He was young, baby-faced, with smooth, butterscotch skin. I didn’t know him,
so I flashed my detective’s shield.
“Detective Cross.” He grunted. I sensed that he’d heard of me.
“What do we have so far?” I asked before I went inside to trudge up four steep flights. “What do you hear, Officer?”
“Two girls dead upstairs. Both pros, apparently. One of them lived in the building. Murders were called in anonymously. Maybe
a neighbor, maybe the pimp. They’re sixteen, seventeen, maybe younger. Too bad. They didn’t deserve this.”
I nodded, took a deep breath, and then quickly climbed up the steep, winding, creaking stairs to the fourth floor. Prostitutes
make for difficult police investigations, and I wondered if the Weasel knew that. On average, a hooker out of Petworth might
turn a dozen or more tricks a night, and that’s a lot of forensic evidence just on her body.
The door to apartment 4A was wide open, and I could see inside. It was an efficiency, with one large room, kitchenette, bath.
A fluffy white area rug lay between two daybeds. A lava lamp was undulating green blobs next to several dildos.
Sampson was crouched on the far side of one daybed. He looked like an NBA power forward searching the floor for a missing
contact lens.
I walked into a small, untidy room that smelled of incense, peach-blossom fragrance, greasy food. A bright red and yellow
McDonald’s container of fries was open on the couch.
Dirty clothes covered the chairs: bike shorts, short-shorts, Karl Kani urban clothes. At least a dozen bottles of nail polish
and remover, a couple of nail files, and cotton balls lay on the floor. There was a heavy, cloying smell of fruity perfume
in the room.
I went around the bed to look at the victims. Two very young women, both naked from the waist down. The Weasel had been here
—I could feel it.
The girls were lying one on top of the other, looking like lovers. They looked as if they were having sex on the floor.
One girl wore a blue tank top, the other black lingerie. They both still wore “slides,” stacked bath sandals that are popular
nowadays. Most of the Jane Does had been left naked, but unlike many of the others, these two would be fairly easy for us
to identify.
“No actual I.D. on either girl,” Sampson said, without looking up from his work.
“One of them rents the apartment, though,” I told him.
He nodded. “Probably pays cash. She’s in a cash business.”
Sampson was wearing latex rubber gloves, and was bent down close to the two women.
“The killer wore gloves,” Sampson said, still without looking up at me. “Don’t seem to be fingerprints anywhere. That’s what
the techie says. First look-through. They both were shot, Alex. Single shot to the forehead.”
I was still looking around the room, collecting information, letting the details of the murder scene flow over me. I noticed
an array of hair products: Soft Sheen, Care Free Curl, styling gel, several wigs. On top of one of the wigs was a green army
garrison cap with stripes, commonly called a cunt cap among military personnel because it’s said to be effective for picking
up women, especially in the South. There was also a pager.
The girls were young and pretty. They had skinny little legs, small, bony feet, silver toe rings that looked like they’d come
from the same shop. Their discarded clothes amounted to insignificant little bundles on the bloodied hardwood floor.
In one corner of the small room, there were vestiges of brief childhoods: a Lotto game, a stuffed blue bear that was threadbare
and looked about as old as the girls themselves, a Barbie doll, a Ouija board.
“Take a good look, Alex. It gets weirder and weirder. Our Weasel is starting to freak out.”