Pop Goes the Weasel (Alex Cross 5)

I had to be busy, but I knew I’d lost my ability to concentrate, something that had always come so naturally to me. I came across a pair of shocking murders in Maryland that bothered me for some unspecified reason. I didn’t follow up on them. I should have.

I wasn’t myself; I was lost. I still spent endless hours thinking about Christine, remembering everything about our time together, seeing her face wherever I went.

Sampson tried to push me. He did push me. He and I made the rounds of the streets of Southeast. We put the word out that we were looking for a purple and blue cab, possibly a gypsy. We canvassed door to door in the Shaw neighborhood where Tori Glover and Marion Cardinal had been found. Often we were still going at ten or eleven at night.

I didn’t care. I couldn’t sleep anyway.

Sampson cared. He was my friend.

“You’re supposed to be working the Odenkirk case, right? I’m not supposed to be working at all. The Jefe would be livid. I kind of like that,” Sampson said as we trudged along S Street late one evening. Sampson had lived in this neighborhood for years. He knew all the local hangarounds.

“Jamal, you know anything I should know?” he called out to a goateed youth sitting in shadows on a graystone stoop.

“Don’t know nothin’. Just relaxin’ my mind. Catchin’ a cool night breeze. How ’bout yourself?”

Sampson turned back to me. “Damn crack runners working these streets everywhere you look nowadays. Real good place to commit a murder and never get caught. You talk to the police in Bermuda lately?”

I nodded, and my eyes stared at a fixed point up ahead. “Patrick Busby said the story of Christine’s disappearance is off the front pages. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. It’s probably bad.”

Sampson agreed. “Takes the pressure off them. You going back down there?”

“Not right away. But yeah, I have to go back. I have to find out what happened.”

He looked me in the eye. “Are you here with me right now? Are you here, sugar?”

“Yeah, I’m here. Most of the time. I’m functioning okay.” I pointed up at a nearby redbrick building. “That place would have a view of the front entryway into the girl’s building. Any of those windows. Let’s get back to work.”

Sampson nodded. “I’m here as long as you want to be.”

There was something about pounding the streets that appealed to me that night. We talked to everyone in the building that we could find at home, about half the apartments. Nobody had seen a purple and blue cab on the street; nobody had seen Tori or Marion, either. Or so they said.

“You see any connections anywhere?” I asked as we came down the steep stairs of a fourth-floor walk-up. “What do you see? What the hell am I missing?”

“Not a thing, Alex. Nothing to miss. Weasel didn’t leave a clue. Never does.”

We got back down to the entrance and met up with an elderly man carrying three clear-plastic bags of groceries from the Stop & Shop.

“We’re homicide detectives,” I said to him. “Two young girls were murdered across the street.”

The man nodded. “Tori and Marion. I know ’em. You want to know ’bout that fella watchin’ the buildin’? He was sittin’ there most the night. Inside a slick, fancy black car,” he said. “Mercedes, I think. You think maybe he’s the killer?”

Chapter 55

“I BEEN AWAY AWHILE, y’see. Visitin’ wit’ my two old-bat sisters in North Carolina for a week of good memories, home-cooked food,” the elderly man said as we went up to the fourth floor. “That was why I was missed during the earlier time through here by your detectives.”

This was old-school police work, I was thinking as I climbed stairs—the kind of work too many detectives try to avoid. The man’s name was DeWitt Luke, and he was retired from Bell Atlantic, the huge phone company that services most of the Northeast. He was the fifty-third interview I’d had so far in Shaw.

“Saw him sittin’ there around one in the mornin’. Didn’t think much of it at first. Probably waitin’ for somebody. Seemed to be mindin’ his own business. He was still there at two, though. Sittin’ in his car. Seemed kinda strange to me.” He paused for a long moment as if trying to remember.

“Then what happened?” I prompted the man.

“Fell asleep. But I got up to pee around three-thirty. He was still in that shiny black car. So I watched him closer this time. He was watchin’ the other side of the street. Like some kind of damn spy or somethin’. Couldn’t tell what he was lookin’ at, but he was studyin’ somethin’ real hard over there. I thought he might be the police. ’Cept his car was too nice.”

“You got that right,” Sampson said, and barked out a laugh. “No Mercedes in my garage.”

“I pulled up a card-table chair behind the darkened window in my apartment. Made sure there were no lights on, so he couldn’t see me. By now he’d caught my attention some. Remember the old movie Rear Window? I tried to figure out why he might be down there sittin’, waitin’. Jealous lover, jealous husband, maybe some kinda night stalker. But he wasn’t botherin’ anybody far as I could see.”

I spoke again. “You never got a better look than that? Man sitting in the car?”