24
IT WAS the worst of times; it was the worst of times. On Wednesday morning, just two days after Shanelle Green’s murder, a second murdered child was found in Garfield Park, not far from the Sojourner Truth School. This time the victim was a seven-year-old boy. The crime was similar. The child’s face had been crushed, possibly with a metal club or pipe.
I could walk from my house on Fifth Street to the horrifying murder scene. I did just that, but I dragged my feet. It was the fourth of December and children were already thinking of Christmas. This shouldn’t have been happening. Not ever, but especially not then.
I felt bad for another reason, besides the murder of another innocent child. Unless someone was copycatting the first murder, and that seemed highly unlikely to me, the killer couldn’t have been Emmanuel Perez, couldn’t have been Chop-It-Off-Chucky. Sampson and I had made a mistake. We had run down the wrong child molester. We were partly responsible for his death.
The wind swirled and howled across the small park as I entered across from the bodega. It was a miserable morning, terribly cold and darkly overcast. Two ambulances and a half-dozen police cruisers were parked on the grounds inside the rim of the park. There were at least a hundred people from the neighborhood at the crime scene. It was eerie, ghastly, completely unreal. Police and ambulance sirens screamed in the background, a terrifying dirge for the dead. I shivered miserably, and it wasn’t only from the cold.
The horrifying crime scene reminded me of a bad time a few years back when we had found a little boy’s body the day before Christmas. The image was everlasting in my mind. The boy’s name was Michael Goldberg, but everybody had called him Shrimpie. He was only nine years old. The murderer’s name was Gary Soneji, and he had escaped from prison after I caught him. He had escaped, and he had disappeared off the face of the earth. I’d come to think of Soneji as my Dr. Moriarty, evil incarnate, if there was such a thing, and I had begun to believe that there was.
I couldn’t help thinking and wondering about Soneji. Gary Soneji had a perfect reason to commit murders near my home. He had vowed to pay me back for his time spent in prison: every day, every hour, every minute. Payback time, Dr. Cross.
As I ducked under the crisscrossing yellow crime-scene tapes, a woman in a white rain poncho yelled out to me, “You’re supposed to be a policeman, right? So why the hell won’t you do something! Do something about this maniac killing our children! Oh yeah, and have a happy, goddamn holiday!”
What could I possibly say to the angry woman? That real police work wasn’t like N.Y.P.D. Blue on television? We had no leads on the two child killings so far. We had no Chop-It-Off-Chucky to blame anymore. There was no getting around a simple fact: Sampson and I had made a mistake. A bad hombre was dead, but probably for the wrong reason.
The news coverage continued to be very limited, but I recognized a few reporters at the tragic scene: Inez Gomez from El Diario and Fern Galperin from CNN. They seemed to cover everything in Washington, occasionally even murders in Southeast.
“Does this have anything to do with the child murder last week, Detective? Did you get the real murderer? Is this a serial killer of little kids?” Inez Gomez shot off a clipped barrage of questions at me. She was very good at her job, smart and tough and fair most of the time.
I said nothing to any of the reporters, not even to Gomez. I didn’t even look their way. There was an ache at the center of my chest that wouldn’t go away.
Is this a serial killer of little kids? I don’t know, Inez, I think it might be. I pray that it isn’t. Was Emmanuel Perez innocent? I don’t believe so, Inez, I pray that he wasn’t.
Could Gary Soneji be the killer of these two children? I hope not. I pray that isn’t the case, Inez.
Lots of prayers this cold, dismal morning.
It was too harsh for early December, too much snow. Somebody on the radio said they’ve been shoveling so much in D.C., it felt like an election year.
I pushed my way through the crowd to the dead child lying like a broken doll on an expanse of frost-covered grass. The police photographer was taking pictures of the small boy. He had a short haircut like Damon’s, what Damon called a “baldie.”
Of course, I knew it wasn’t Damon, but the effect was incredibly powerful. It was as if I had been punched in the stomach, hard. The sight took all the breath out of my chest and stomach, and left me wheezing. Cruelty isn’t softened by tears. I had learned that lesson many times by then.
I knelt down low over the murdered boy. He looked as if he were sleeping, but having a terrible nightmare. Someone had closed his eyes, and I wondered if it could have been the killer. I didn’t think so. More likely it was the work of some Good Samaritan or possibly a good-hearted, but very careless, policeman. The little boy had on worn, loose gray sweats that had holes in the knees and tattered Nike sneakers. The right side of his face had been virtually destroyed by the killer blow, just like Shanelle’s. The face was crushed, but also pocked with jagged holes and tears. Bright red blood was pooled under his head.
The maniac likes to decimate beautiful things. It gave me an idea. Is the killer disfigured in some way himself? Physically? Emotionally? Maybe both.
Why does he hate small children so much? Why is he killing them near the Sojourner Truth School?
I opened the little boy’s eyes. The child stared up at me. I don’t know why I did it. I just needed to look.
&nbs
p; CHAPTER
25
“DR. CROSS… Dr. Cross… I know this boy,” said a shaky voice. “He’s in our lower school. His name is Vernon Wheatley.”
I looked up and saw Mrs. Johnson, the principal at Damon’s school. She held back a sob; she grabbed the sob back hard.
She’s even tougher than you are, Daddy. That’s what Damon had said to me. Maybe he was right about that. The school principal wouldn’t cry, wouldn’t allow herself to.
The medical examiner was standing next to Mrs. Johnson. I knew her, too. She was a white woman, Janine Prestegard. Looked to be about the same age as Mrs. Johnson. Mid-thirties, give or take a few years. They had been talking, consulting, probably consoling each other.
What was there about the Sojourner Truth School? Why this school? Why Damon’s school? Shanelle Green and now Vernon Wheatley. What did the principal know, if anything? Did the school principal believe she could help solve these terrifying murders? She had known both victims.