Just four blocks from our house on Fifth Street.
“I’m awake now, whether I like it or not, and I don’t like it. Tell me about it,” I said to Sampson as I watched the glittering red and blue lights of police cars and EMS trucks come into focus up ahead.
Four blocks from our house.
A lot of blue-and-whites were clustered at the end of a tunnel of leafless oak trees and red-brick project buildings. The disturbance appeared to be at my son Damon’s school. (Jannie’s school is a dozen blocks in the opposite direction.) My body tensed all over. There was a roaring, wintry shitstorm inside my head.
“It’s a little girl, Alex,” Sampson said in an unusually soft voice for him. “Six years old. She was last seen at the Sojourner Truth School this afternoon.”
It was Damon’s school. We both sighed. Sampson is almost as close to Damon and Jannie as I am. They feel the same way about him.
A lot of people were already gathered outside the Federal-style two-story building that was the Sojourner Truth Elementary School. Half the neighborhood seemed to be up at four in the morning. I saw angry and shocked faces everywhere in the crowd. Some folks were in bathrobes, others wrapped in blankets. Their frosty breath poured out like car exhaust all over the schoolyard. The Washington Post had reported that more than five hundred children under the age of fourteen had died in D.C. during the past year alone. But the people here knew that. They didn’t have to read it in the newspaper.
A little six-year-old girl. Murdered at or near Damon’s school, the Truth School. I couldn’t have imagined a worse nightmare to wake up to.
“Sorry about this, Sugar,” Sampson said as we climbed out of his car. “I figured you had to see this, though, to be here yourself.”
CHAPTER
3
MY HEART was hammering and felt as if it were suddenly too big for my chest. My wife, Maria, had been shot down and killed not far from this place. Memories of the neighborhood, memories of a lifetime. I’ll always love you, Maria.
I saw a dented and rusting truck from the morgue in the schoolyard, and it was an unbelievably disturbing sight for me and everybody else. Rap music with a lot of bass was playing from somewhere on the edge of the bright police lights.
Sampson and I pushed and angled our way through the frightened and uneasy crowd. Some wiseass muttered, “What’s up, Chief?” and risked finding out. There was yellow crime-scene tape everywhere on the school grounds.
At six three, I’m not as large as Man Mountain, but we are both big men. We make quite the pair when we arrive at a crime scene: Sampson with his huge shaved skull and black leather car coat; me usually in a gray warm-up jacket from Georgetown. Shoulder holster under the coat. Dressed for the game that I play, a game called sudden death.
“Dr. Cross is here,” I heard a few low rumbles in the crowd. My name uttered in vain. I tried to ignore the voices as best I could. Block them out of my consciousness. Officially I was a deputy chief of detectives, but I was mostly working as a street detective these days. It was the way I wanted it for now. The way it had to be. This was definitely an “interesting” time for me. I had seen enough homicide and violence for one lifetime. I was considering going into private practice as a shrink again. I was considering a lot of things.
Sampson lightly touched my shoulder. He sensed this was bad for me. He saw it was maybe too close to the bone. “You okay, Alex?”
“I’m fine,” I lied for the second time that morning.
“Sure you are, Sugar. You’re always fine, even when you’re not. You’re the dragonslayer, right?” Sampson said and shook his head.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a young woman wearing a black sweatshirt with I’LL ALWAYS LOVE YOU, TYSHEIKA in white let
ters. Another dead child. Tysheika. People in the neighborhood sometimes wore the dark shirts to funerals of murdered kids. My grandmother, Nana Mama, had quite a collection of them.
Something else caught my eye. A woman standing back from the crowd, under the spectral branches of a withering elm. She didn’t seem to quite fit with the rest of the neighborhood group. She was tall and nice-looking. She wore a belted raincoat over jeans, and flat shoes. Behind her, I could see a blue sedan. A Mercedes.
She’s the one. That’s her. She’s the one for you. The crazy thought just came out of nowhere. Filled my head with sudden, inappropriate joy.
I made a mental note to find out who she was.
I stopped to talk with a young, intense homicide detective wearing a red Kangol hat with a brown sport jacket and brown knitted tie. I was beginning to take control.
“Bad way to start the day, Alex,” Rakeem Powell said as I came up to him. “Or to end one, in my case.”
I nodded at Rakeem. “Can’t imagine a worse way.” I felt sick in the well of my stomach. “What do you know about this so far, Rakeem? Anything juicy for us to go on? I need to hear it all.”
The detective glanced at his small black notepad. He flipped a few pages. “Little girl’s name is Shanelle Green. Popular girl. A sweetheart, from what I hear so far. She was in the first grade here at the Truth School. Lives two blocks from school in the Northfield Village projects. Parents both work. They let her walk home by herself. Not too goddamn smart, but what can you do, you know? They came home tonight, Shanelle wasn’t there. They reported her missing around eight. That’s the parents over there.”
I glanced around. They were just a couple of kids themselves. Looked completely devastated and heartbroken. I knew they would never be the same after this horrifying night. Nobody could be.
“Either of them suspects?” I had to ask.