Pop Goes the Weasel (Alex Cross 5)

“Come to take out the trash?” an older man cackled from behind an unruly patch of salt-and-pepper beard. “Take that muhfuckin’ barkin’-all-night dog while you here. Make yourselves useful,” he added.

Sampson and I ignored them and continued walking across Eighteenth, then into the boarded-up, three-storied row house straight ahead. A black and white boxer leaned out of a third-floor window, like a lifetime resident, and wouldn’t stop barking. Otherwise the building appeared deserted.

The front door had been jimmied a hundred times, so it just swung open for us. The building smelled of fire, garbage, water damage. There was a gaping hole in the ceiling from a burst steam pipe. It was so wrong for Nina to have ended up in this sad, abominable place.

For over a year I had been unofficially investigating unsolved murders in Southeast, many of them Jane Does. My count was well over a hundred, but no one else in the department was willing to agree to that number, or anything close to it. Several of the murdered women were drug abusers or prostitutes. But not Nina.

We carefully descended a circular stairwell that had a shaky, well-worn wooden railing that neither of us would touch. I could see flashlights shining up ahead, and I already had my Maglite turned on.

Nina was deep in the basement of the abandoned building. At least somebody had bothered to tape off the perimeter to protect the crime scene.

I saw Nina’s body—and I had to look away.

It wasn’t just that she was dead; it was how she’d been killed. I tried to put my mind and eyes somewhere else until I regained some composure.

Jerome Thurman was there with the EMS team. So was a single patrol officer, probably the one who had identified Nina. No M.E. was present. It wasn’t unusual for a medical examiner not to show up for homicides in Southeast.

There were dead flowers on the floor near the body. I focused on the flowers, still not able to look at Nina again. It didn’t fit with the other Jane Does, but the killer didn’t have a strict pattern. That was one of the problems I was having. It might mean that his fantasy was still evolving—and that he hadn’t finished making up his gruesome story yet.

I noted shreds of foil and cellophane wrappers lying everywhere on the floor. Rats are attracted to shiny things and often bring them back to their nests. Thick cobwebs weaved from one end of the basement to the other.

I had to look at Nina again. I needed to look closely.

“I’m Detective Alex Cross. Let me take a look at her, please,” I finally said to the EMS team, a man and a woman in their twenties. “I’ll just be a couple of minutes, then I’ll get out of your way.”

“The other detectives already released the body,” the male EMS worker said. He was rail-thin, with long dirty-blond hair. He didn’t bother to look up at me. “Let us finish our job and get the hell out of this cesspool. Whole area is highly infectious —smells like shit.”

“Just back away,” Sampson barked. “Get up, before I pull your skinny ass up.”

The EMS techie cursed, but he stood and backed away from Nina’s body. I moved in close, tried to concentrate and be professional, tried to remember specific details I had gathered about the previous Jane Does in Southeast. I was looking for some connection. I wondered if a single predator could possibly be killing so many people. If that was the case, then this would be one of the most savage killing sprees ever.

I took a deep breath and then I knelt over Nina. The rats had been at her, I could see, but the killer had done much worse damage.

It looked to me as if Nina had been beaten to death, with punches and possibly kicks. She might have been struck a hundred times or more. I had rarely seen anyone given this muc

h punishment. Why did it have to happen? She was only thirty-one years old, a mother of two, kind, talented, dedicated to her work at St. Anthony’s.

There was a sudden noise, like a rifleshot, in the building. It reverberated right through the basement walls. The EMS workers jumped.

The rest of us laughed nervously. I knew exactly what the sound was.

“Just rattraps,” I said to the EMS team. “Get used to it.”

Chapter 10

I WAS AT THE HOMICIDE SCENE for a little over two hours, much longer than I wanted to be there, and I hated every second. I couldn’t fix a set pattern for the Jane Doe killings, and Nina Childs’s murder didn’t help. Why had he struck her so many times and so savagely? What were the flowers doing there? Could this be the work of the same killer?

The way I usually operate at a crime scene is to let the homicide investigation take on an almost aerial view. Everything emanates from the body.

Sampson and I walked the entire crime scene, from the basement to each floor and on up to the roof. Then we walked the neighborhood. Nobody had seen anything unusual, which didn’t surprise either of us.

Now came the really bad part. Sampson and I drove from the woeful tenement to Nina’s apartment in the Brookland section of Washington, east of Catholic University. I knew I was being sucked in again, but there was nothing I could do about it.

It was a sweltering-hot day, and the sun hammered Washington without mercy. We were both silent and withdrawn during the ride. What we had to do was the worst thing about our job—telling a family about the death of a loved one. I didn’t know how I could do it this time.

Nina’s building was a well-kept brownbrick apartment house on Monroe Street. Miniature yellow roses were blooming out front in bright-green window boxes. It didn’t look as if anything bad should happen to someone who lived here. Everything about the place was so bright and hopeful, just as Nina had been.

I was becoming more and more disturbed and upset about the brutal and obscene murder, and about the fact that it probably wouldn’t get a decent investigation from the department, at least not officially. Nana Mama would chalk it up to her conspiracy theories about the white overlords and their “criminal disinterest” in the people of Southeast. She had often told me that she felt morally superior to white people, that she would never, ever treat them the way they treated the black people of Washington.