“It’s not so hard to hide a pregnancy,” John said, flipping through the file I’d given him. “Especially if nobody’s looking.”
“Exactly. Her neighbors barely knew her, and she dropped out of school five months ago.”
“What about family?” he asked. “Next of kin?”
“Not much. She’s got two grandparents down in Georgia who raised her, and that’s about it. According to them, she fell off the radar a while ago. They haven’t heard from her since Christmas.”
“In other words, this baby could be—”
“Anywhere. Yeah.”
John chugged the last of his Diet Coke and obliterated the can in his huge hand. There’s a reason we call him Man Mountain. “I’m going to need something stronger here,” he said.
“Talk to Youth Division, see if any of this rings a bell,” I told him. “Harry Keith over there will keep his mouth shut, if you need some help. Go district by district if you have to. Check the NCMEC database as often as you can, and talk to their people over in Alexandria. Just don’t say anything about me or this case.”
This was the thing. Elizabeth Reilly’s pregnancy was the only card we were holding close anymore. If our killer had any connection to her baby, I didn’t want him to see us coming, and I was already publicly attached to this very public story. That’s where Sampson came in.
The other possibility was that there might not be a baby to find anymore. We didn’t know if Elizabeth’s pregnancy had been full term; if the baby was delivered stillborn; or God forbid, if it had been killed for some reason I didn’t understand yet.
Right now, all of that was a question mark. But for the baby’s sake, as well as the mother’s, we had to assume that there was still someone out there to save.
CHAPTER
12
FOR THREE DAYS WE GOT NOWHERE. THERE WAS NO SIGNIFICANT MOVEMENT on the Darcy Vickers or Elizabeth Reilly murders, and the phone call I kept hoping to get from Sampson never came. You could just feel these cases going cold.
Then on that Saturday morning, we had a new development. The worst kind. Another body popped up in Georgetown.
I was home when I got the call from Sergeant Huizenga. She wanted me to keep going in the direction I’d been going, and monitor this homicide alongside the other two. The trick would be to see this scene on its own merit first, without comparing it to anything. Sometimes if you go looking for connections, you start to see what you want to see instead of what’s really there.
I took Pennsylvania, and then M Street, all the way to the Key Bridge and parked just below it. Several cruisers were already on-site, and they’d strung an outer perimeter of yellow tape across Water Street, on the south side of the Potomac Boat Club.
A maintenance worker had found the boy’s body that morning, lodged under one of their docks. By now someone had pulled him onto the shore and left him there, on a little spit of dirt and grass just beyond the white-clapboard-and-green-shingled building.
The first sight of him was a shock, even for me. The apparent cause of death was a gunshot to the face, with an ugly, wide-open entry wound that told me he’d been hit at close range. It was hard to know what kind of powder burns or stippling had washed away in the water, but there were still a few dark marks around the remains of his cheekbone. A couple of smashed teeth were exposed where the flesh had been blown away, and it gave him a kind of sideways grimace, almost as if he were still in pain.
That wasn’t all. His jeans were stained dark all around the hips and crotch, presumably from stabbing. There were at least half a dozen ragged perforations in the denim of his pants, clearly centered around the genital area. It was a horrible proposition to think about what had happened to this poor kid. I could only hope for his sake that he’d been shot dead first, and mutilated after. Not much consolation there.
The most depressing part was how young he was. He didn’t look any older than eighteen, and his waterlogged letterman’s jacket was from St. Catherine’s, a private high school in Northwest DC. How he had gotten here, like this, was anyone’s guess.
My one clear hit was that this had been done in anger—possibly at the victim himself, but also maybe out of the killer’s own sense of self-loathing. Mutilation can be a signifier of that, as often as not. Either way, our perpetrator obviously had some kind of demons to exorcise. You don’t need a gun and a blade if your motivation is strictly murder.
In fact, it felt a little to me like this killer was getting out all of his ideas at once—stabbing, shooting, drowning. But why? What need did that satisfy?
After I’d taken in all the details I could, I slipped on some gloves and checked the boy’s pockets. They were all empty, but I did find a name, Smithe, stenciled on the back of his jacket. I called it in right away.
It didn’t take long to get word back, either. A few minutes later, a call from our Command Information Center told me that an eighteen-year-old senior at St. Catherine’s, Cory Smithe, had been reported missing by his parents two days earlier. Six one, blond hair, and a small birthmark on his right wrist. Check, check, and check.
“Have you got an address?” I asked the dispatcher.
“Already sent it to your phone,” she told me.
Because we both knew what I had to do next.
CHAPTER
13