He sighed heavily. Waited a moment, then began again. They didn’t need to know everything he was seeing and feeling right now.
“The senator is handcuffed to his bedposts. Look like police cuffs to me. His body is nude and not a pretty sight. Penis and scrotum appear to have been gouged out of the body. There’s a lot of blood all over the bed, a humongous stain. Big stain on the rug, too, where it soaked through.”
He forced his face even closer to the senator’s silver-haired chest. He didn’t like it, being this close to a dead man—or any man, for that matter. Probably real silver. He smelled of a woman’s perfume. The tall man, the investigator, was almost certain of it. “The D.C. police are going to be guessing jealous lover. Some kind of crime of high passion,” he said. “Wait—there’s something else here. Okay. Hold on. I’ve got to check this out.”
He didn’t know how he’d missed it at first, but he sure as hell saw the note now. It was right next to the cordless telephone on the bed stand. Impossible to miss, right? But he’d missed it. He picked it up in his gloved hand.
The note was typewritten on thick, expensive bond. He read it quickly. Then he read it again, just to be sure… that the note was for real.
Ah Dannyboy, we kne
w ya all too well
One useless, thieving, rich bastard down
So many more to go.
Jack and Jill came to The Hill
To hose down all the slime
Most imperiled
Was poor Fitzpatrick
Right schmuck, wrong place, wrong time.
Truly,
Jack and Jill
He read the note over the hand phone. He took one more look around, then left the senator’s apartment as it was: in a state of bedlam and horror and death. When he was safely down on Q Street, he called in the homicide to the Washington police.
He made the call anonymously. No one could know that he’d been inside the senator’s apartment, or especially, how it came to happen, and who he was. If anybody found out, all hell would really break loose—as if it hadn’t started already.
Everything was unreal, and it promised to get much worse. Jack and Jill had promised it.
One useless, thieving, rich bastard down
So many more to go.
CHAPTER
5
AT EVERY HUMAN TRAGEDY like this one, there is always someone who points. A man stood outside the crime scene tape and pointed at the murdered child and also at me. I was remembering Jannie’s prophetic words to me earlier that morning: It’s something bad, isn’t it, Daddy?
Yes, it was. The baddest of the bad. The murder scene at the Sojourner Truth School was heartbreaking to me, and, I was sure, to everyone else. The schoolyard was the saddest, most desolate place in the world.
The chatter of portable radios violated the air and made it hard to breathe. I could still smell the little girl’s blood. It was thick in my nostrils and my throat, but mostly inside my head.
Shanelle Green’s parents were weeping nearby, but so were other people from the neighborhood, even complete strangers to the little girl. In most cities, in most civilized countries, a child murdered so young would be a catastrophe, but not in Washington, where hundreds of children die violent deaths every single year.
“I want as large a street canvass as we can manage on this one,” I told Rakeem Powell. “Sampson and I will be part of the canvass ourselves.”
“I hear you. We’re on it in a big way. Sleep is overrated, anyway.”
“Let’s go, John. We’ve got to move on this now,” I finally said to Sampson.