Pop Goes the Weasel (Alex Cross 5)

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.”

Chapter 28

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.

Chapter 29

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.