The phone rang moments after I stepped inside the house. Oh no, I thought, not tonight. Nothing good comes from phone calls at two-thirty A.M.
I picked up in the living room and heard Sampson’s voice on the line. “Sugar?” he whispered.
“Leave me alone,” I said. “Try again in the morning. I’m closed for the night.”
“No you’re not, Alex. Not tonight. Get over to Alabama Avenue, about three blocks east of Dupont Park. A man was found there naked and dead, in the gutter. The guy is white, and there’s no I.D. on him.”
First thing in the morning, I would tell Nana and the kids about Christine and me. I had to go. The murder scene was a ten-minute ride across the Anacostia River. Sampson was waiting for me on a street corner. So was the John Doe.
And a lively, mean-spirited crowd. A naked white body dumped in this neighborhood had prompted lots of curiosity, almost like seeing a deer walking down Alabama Avenue.
“Casper the Friendly Ghost been offed.” A heckler contributed his twenty-five cents as Sampson and I stooped down under the yellow plastic crime-scene tape. In the background were rows of dilapidated brick buildings that almost seemed to scream out the names of the lost, the forgotten, the never-had-a-chance.
Stagnant water often pools on the street corners here since the storm drains are hardly ever inspected. I knelt over the twisted, naked body that was partly immersed in the cesspool. There would be no tire marks left at the watery scene. I wondered if the killer had thought of that.
I was making mental notes. No need to write them down; I’d remember everything. The man had manicured fingernails and toenails. No calluses showed on either his hands or his feet. He had no bruises or distinct disfiguring marks, other than the cruel gunshot wound that had blown away the left side of his face.
The body was deeply suntanned, except where he’d worn swim trunks. A thin, pale ring ran around his left index finger, where he’d probably worn a wedding band, which was missing.
And there was no I.D.—just like the Jane Does.
Death was clearly the result of the single, devastating gunshot to the head. Alabama Avenue was the primary scene—where the body was found—but I suspected a secondary homicide scene, where the victim was actually murdered.
“What do you think?” Sampson crouched down close beside me. His knees cracked loudly. “Sonofabitch killer is pissed off about something.”
“Really bizarre that he wound up here in Benning Heights. I don’t know if he’s connected to the Jane Does. But if he is, the killer wanted us to find this one in a hurry. Bodies around here usually get dumped in Fort Dupont Park. He’s getting stranger and stranger. And you’re right, he’s very angry with the world.”
My mind was rapidly filling with crime-scene notes, plus the usual stream of homicide-detective questions. Why leave the body in a street gutter? Why not in an abandoned building? Why in Benning Heights? Was the killer black? That still made the most sense to me, but a very low percentage of pattern killers are black.
The sergeant from the Crime Scene Unit came strolling up to Sampson and me. “What do you want from us, Detective?”
I looked back at the naked white body. “Videotape it, photograph it, sketch it,” I told him.
“A
nd take some of the trash in the gutter and sidewalk?”
“Take everything. Even if it’s soaking wet.”
The sergeant frowned. “Everything? All this wet trash? Why?”
Alabama Avenue is hilly, and I could see the Capitol Building brightly illuminated in the distance. It looked like a faraway celestial body, maybe heaven. It got me thinking about the haves in Washington, and the have-nots.
“Just take everything. It’s how I work,” I said.
Chapter 23
DETECTIVE PATSY HAMPTON arrived at the chilling homicide scene around 2:15. The Jefe’s assistant had called her apartment about an unusual murder in Benning Heights that might relate to the Jane Does. This one was different in some ways, but there were too many similarities for her to ignore.
She watched Alex Cross work the crime scene. She was impressed that he’d come out at this early hour. She was curious about him, had been for a long time. Hampton knew Cross by reputation and had followed a couple of his cases. She had even worked a few weeks on the tragic kidnapping of Maggie Rose Dunne and Michael Goldberg.
So far, she had mixed feelings about Cross. He was personable enough, and more than good-looking. Cross was a tall, strongly put-together man. She felt that he received undeserved special treatment because he was a forensic psychologist. She’d done her homework on Cross.
Hampton understood that she had been assigned to show Cross up, to win, to knock him down a peg. She knew it would be a tough competition, but she also knew that she was the one to do it; she never failed at anything.
She’d already done her own examination of the crime scene. She had stayed on at the scene only because Cross and Sampson had unexpectedly shown up.
She continued to study Cross, watched him walk the homicide scene several times. He was physically imposing, and so was his partner, who had to be at least six-nine. Cross was six-three and weighed maybe two hundred. He appeared younger than his age, which was forty-one. He seemed to be respected by the assisting patrolmen, even by the EMS personnel. He shook a few hands, patted shoulders, occasionally shared a smile with someone working the crime scene.