“That’s window-cleaning solution,” I said.
“There goes my career with FTD,” Rakeem Powell laughed, and so did his partner Chester.
“Might not be the Partridge Family living in that nice house up yonder,” Sampson cautioned the two detectives. “Beautiful surroundings, peaceful street and all, maybe a homicidal maniac shitheel waiting for us inside, though. You copy?”
Sampson turned to me. “What are you thinking about, Sugar? You having your usual nasty thoughts on this? Feeling the gris-gris?”
Sampson had told me what he knew on the short ride over to Seward Square. A subscriber to the Prodigy interactive service, an Army man, Colonel Frank Moore, had been sending messages about the child killings over the service. He appeared to know details about the murders that only the police and the real killer knew. He sounded like our freak.
“I don’t like what I’m hearing from you so far, Mister John. The killings suggest he’s in a rage state, and yet he’s fairly careful. Now he’s reaching out for help? He’s virtually leading us to his doorstep? I don’t know if I get that. And I don’t like it too much, either. That’s what I’m feeling so far, partner.”
“I was thinking the same thing.” Sampson nodded and kept staring at the house in question. “At any rate, we’re here. Might as well check out what the colonel wanted us to see.”
“Not mutilated bodies,” Rakeem Powell said and frowned deeply. “Not at five on a Monday morning. Not more little kids stashed somewhere in that big house.”
“Alex and I will take the back door in,” Sampson said to Rakeem. “You and Popeye Doyle here can cover the front. Watch the garage. If this is the killer’s house, you might expect a surprise or two. Everybody wide-awake? Wakee-wakee!”
Rakeem and the white man in the hat nodded. “Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed,” Rakeem said with fake enthusiasm.
“We h
ave you covered, Detectives.” Chester Mullins finally said something.
Sampson nodded calmly. “Let’s do it, then. Not daylight yet, maybe he’s still in his coffin.”
Five-twenty A.M. and my adrenaline was pumping wildly. I had already met all the human monsters I cared to meet in my lifetime. I didn’t need any more on-the-job experience in this particular area.
“Am I here to watch your ass?” I asked as Man Mountain and I moved toward the big house perched on the corner.
“You got it, Sugar. I need you on this. You got the magic touch with these psycho-killers,” Sampson said without looking back at me.
“Thanks. I think,” I muttered. There was a real loud noise roaring in my head, as if I’d just taken nitrous oxide at the dentist’s. I really didn’t want to meet another psychopath; I didn’t want to meet Colonel Franklin Moore.
We cut across a spongy lawn leading to a long, deep porch with an ivy trellis.
I could see a man and woman standing in the kitchen. Two people were already up inside.
“Must be Frank and Mrs. Frank,” Sampson muttered.
The man was eating something as he leaned over the kitchen counter. I could make out a box of strawberry Pop-Tarts pastry, a carton of skim milk, and the morning’s Washington Post.
“Very Partridge Family,” I whispered to John. “I really don’t like this at all. He’s leading us all the way, right to the door.”
“Homicidal maniac,” he said through brilliantly white, gritted teeth. “Don’t let the pop-m-ups fool you. Only psychos eat that shit.”
“Not easily fooled,” I said to Sampson.
“So I hear. Let’s do it then, Sugar. Time to be unsung heroes again.”
We both crunched down below the level of the kitchen windows—no easy task. We couldn’t see the man and woman from there, and they couldn’t see us.
Sampson grasped the doorknob and slowly turned it.
CHAPTER
65
THE BACK DOOR into the Moore house was unlocked, and Sampson pushed it right in. The two of us exploded into the homey kitchen with its smells of freshly toasted Pop-Tarts and coffee. We were in the Capitol Hill section of Washington. The house and kitchen looked it. So did the Moores. Neither Sampson nor I was fooled by the trappings of normalcy, though. We’d seen it before, in the homes of other psychos.