Cross Country (2 page)

O
NE OF THE printing techs moved to help me, but I got myself up quickly. I wondered if maybe I was in shock about Ellie. "No harm. I'm fine. What's the name here again?" I asked the tech.

Eleanor Cox. That was right; I remembered now. I stared down at Ellie, my heart racing out of control, tears starting at the corners of my eyes. She had been Ellie Randall when I met her, a smart, attractive history major looking for anti-apartheid signatures from Georgetown University students. Definitely not someone whose story would end like this.

"Need anything?" Fescoe was back and he was hovering.

"Just… get me a garbage bag or something," I told him. "Please. Thank you."

I peeled off my windbreaker and tried to wipe myself with it, then stuck the coat in the bag Fescoe brought me. I needed to keep moving and to get out of this room, at least for now.

I headed toward the stairs and found Bree just coming down.

"Alex? Jesus, what happened to you?" she asked.

I knew if I started to explain, I wouldn't be able to finish. "We'll talk about it later, okay?" I said. "What's going on upstairs?"

She looked at me strangely but didn't push it. "More of the same. Bad stuff. Third floor, Alex. Two more kids. I think they were trying to hide from the killers, but it didn't work."

A photo flash ghosted the stairwell as we climbed. Everything seemed hallucinogenic and unreal to me. I was outside the scene, watching myself stumble through it. Ellie had been murdered. I tried again but couldn't process the thought.

"No blood on the stairs, or in the hall," I noticed, trying to focus on evidence, trying to do the job. It was freezing cold, with a hatch door open overhead. November third, and the forecast was for single-digit temperatures overnight. Even the weather had gone a little crazy.

"Alex?"

Bree was waiting up ahead, standing at the doorway to a room on the third floor. She didn't move as I approached. "You sure you're okay to be here?" she asked, speaking low so the others wouldn't hear.

I nodded and peered into the room.

Behind Bree, the two little girls' bodies were crisscrossed on an oval rag rug. A white canopy bed was broken into pieces, collapsed in on itself as if someone had jumped too hard on it.

"I'll be fine," I said. "I need to see what happened here. I need to begin to understand what it all means. Like who the hell was jumping on that bed?"

B
UT I DIDN'T even begin to understand the horrible murders of five family members. Not that night, anyway. I was as baffled as everybody else about the possible motivation of the killers.

It was a little after three thirty in the morning when Bree and I finally got back home to Fifth Street. In the stillness of my house, I could hear Ali's little-boy snores wafting down from upstairs. Reassuring and comforting sounds, to be sure.

Nana Mama had left the hood light on over the stove, and she'd Saran Wrapped a plate of the last four hermit cookies from dessert. We took them upstairs, along with glasses and a half-full bottle of wine.

Two hours later I was still awake and still messed up in the head. Bree finally sat up and turned on the light. She found me sitting on the edge of the bed. I could feel the warmth of her body against my back, her breast on my neck.

"You sleep at all?" she asked.

That wasn't really what she wanted to know.

"I knew the mother, Bree. We went to Georgetown together. This couldn't have happened to her. Shouldn't have, anyway."

She breathed in sharply at my revelation. "I'm so sorry, Alex. Why didn't you say so?"

I shrugged, then sighed. "I'm not even sure if I can talk about it now," I said.

She hugged me. "It's okay. No need to talk. Unless you want to, Alex. I'm here."

"We were best friends, Bree. We were a couple for a year. I know it was a long time ago, but…" I trailed off. But what? But — it hadn't just been kid stuff, either. "I loved her for a while, Bree. I'm blown away right now."

"You want to get off the case?"

"No." I'd already asked myself the same question, and the answer had come just as quickly.

"I can get Sampson or somebody else from Violent Crimes to cover. We'll keep you up to the second—"

"Bree, I can't let go of this one."

"This one?" She ran a hand softly up and down my arm. "As compared to… what, Alex?"

I took a deep breath. I knew where Bree was going with this. "It's not about Maria, if that's what you mean." My wife, Maria, had been gunned down when our kids were small.

I'd managed to close the case only recently. There had been years of torture and guilt before that. But Maria had been my wife, the love of my life at the time. Ellie was something else. I wasn't confusing the two. I didn't think so anyway.

"Okay," she said, stroking my back, soothing me. "Tell me what I can do."

I folded us both under the covers. "Just lie here with me," I said. "That's all I need for now."

"You got it."

And soon, wrapped in Bree's arms, I went off to sleep — for a whole two hours.

"I
SPY, WITH my little eye, a pink newspaper," said Bree.

To my family's surprise and delight, I hadn't left for work at some obscene hour the morning after I found Ellie and her family dead in their home. Today, I wanted to walk the kids to school. Actually, I wanted to do it most every day, but sometimes I couldn't, and sometimes I didn't. But today I needed lots of fresh air in my life. And smiles. And Ali's giggles.

Jannie was in her last year at Sojourner Truth, all ready for high school, while Ali was just starting out in the school world. It seemed very circle-of-life to me that morning, with Ellie's family gone in a blink, and my own kids coming up strong.

I put on my best cheerful dad face and tried to set aside the gruesome images of last night. "Who's next?"

"I've got one," Jannie said. She turned a canary-eating grin on Bree and me. "I spy, with my little eye, a POSSLQ."

"What's a possel-cue?" Ali wanted to know. He was already looking around, moving his head like a bobblehead doll's, trying to spot it, whatever it was.

Jannie practically sang out the answer. "P, O, S, S, L, Q. Person of the opposite sex, sharing living quarters." She whispered the word sex in our direction, presumably to safeguard her little brother's innocence. No matter, I could feel myself blushing slightly.

Bree tagged Jannie's shoulder. "Where exactly did you pick that one up?"

"Cherise J. She says her mom says you two are, you know, living in sin."

I exchanged a look with Bree over the top of Jannie's head. I guessed this was bound to come up in some way or another sooner or later. Bree and I had been together for more than a year now, and she spent a good amount of time at the house on Fifth Street. Part of the reason was that the kids loved having her around. Part was that I did.

"I think maybe you and Cherise J. need to find something else to talk about," I told her. "You think?"

"Oh, it's okay, Daddy. I told Cherise her mom needs to get over herself. I mean, even Nana Mama's down with it, and her picture's in the dictionary under 'old-fashioned,' right?"

"You wouldn't have any idea what's in a dictionary," I said.

But Bree and I had stopped trying to be politically correct with Jannie, and we just let ourselves laugh. Jannie had that "crossroads" thing going on these days; she was right at the intersection of girl and woman.

"What's so funny?" Ali asked. "Somebody tell me. What is it?"

I scooped him up off the sidewalk and onto my shoulders for the last half block of our walk to school. "I'll tell you in about five years."

"I know anyway," he said. "You and Bree love each other. Everybody knows. No big deal. It's a good thing."

"Yes it is," I said and kissed his cheek.

We dropped him at the school's east entrance, where the rest of his class of minicuties were lining up outside. Jannie called to him through the fence. "See you later, alligator! Love you."

"In a while, crocodile! Love you back."

With their older brother, Damon, off at prep school in Massachusetts, these two had grown closer than ever lately. On weekend nights, Ali often slept on an air mattress at the foot of his sister's bed, in what he called his "nest."

We left Jannie at the opposite side of the school building, where all the older kids were streaming in. She gave us both hugs good-bye, and I held on a little longer than usual. "I love you, sweetie. There's nothing more special to me than you and your brothers."

Jannie couldn't help but look around to make sure no one had heard. "Me too, Daddy," she said. Then, almost in the same breath, "Cherise! Wait up!"

As soon as Jannie was gone, Bree took my arm in hers. "So what was that?" she said. ' "Everybody knows you and Bree love each other'?"

I shrugged and smiled. "What do I know? That's the big rumor going around, anyway."

I gave her a kiss.

And because that worked out so well, I gave her another.

B
Y NINE A.M. I was all kissed out and getting ready to enter a most unpleasant multiple-homicide briefing at the Daly Building. It was being held in the large conference room right across from my office. Handy, anyway. Every available D-1 and D-2, and a contingent from Second District, which covered most of Georgetown, would be there.

The ME's Office had sent over a representative in the person of Dr. Paula Cook, a bright investigator who had the personality of tapioca pudding. The corners of Dr. Cook's mouth actually twitched when we shook hands. I think it was an attempted smile, so I smiled back. "Thanks for coming, Paula. We need you on this one."

"Worst I've seen," she said, "in fourteen years. All those kids, the parents. Turns my stomach. Senseless."

We had picked up a stack of crime scene photos on the way in, and now Paula and I pinned some of them up in the situation room. I made sure they were all 11 x 14s. I wanted everyone to feel some of what had happened last night in Georgetown, the way I still did.

"This might be an isolated incident," I stood in front and told the assembled group a few minutes later. "But I'm not going to assume it is. The more we understand, the more prepared we'll be if this happens again. It might not be an isolated incident." I figured some of the more jaded homicide detectives wouldn't agree; they'd be thinking I'd worked one too many serial cases. I didn't much care what they thought at that point.

For the first fifteen minutes or so, I ran through the primary facts of the case for those who hadn't been there the night before. Then I turned it over to Paula. She bounced up and talked us through the photos on the wall.

"The cutting styles indicate a variety of weapons, strength, and ability," she said, using a red laser pointer to highlight the slashes, punctures, and severing that had been done to the Cox family.

"At least one blade had a serrated edge. One was unusually large — possibly a machete. The amputations, wherever they occurred, were never done cleanly. Rather, they were the result of repetitive trauma."

A detective named Monk Jeffries asked a pretty good question from the front row. "You think they were practicing? Had never done this before?"

"I couldn't say," Paula told him. "Wouldn't surprise me."

"Yeah," I put in. "It's like they were practicing, Monk." I had my own opinion about the murders. "There's something very young about this crime scene."

"As in inexperienced?" Jeffries asked.

"No. Just young. I'm talking about the cutting, the broken bed, the vandalism in general. Also the fact that this was probably done by a group of five or more. That's a big group of intruders. When I intersect all those factors, I get a few possibilities: gang, cult, OC. In that order."

"Gang?" another D-1 asked from the back. "You ever see gang violence like this massacre?"

"I've never seen violence like this, period," I said.

"I've got twenty bucks on OC. Any takers?" It was Lou Copeland, a competent but thoroughly obnoxious D-1 with Major Case Squad. A few of his cronies laughed.

Not me. I threw my clipboard across the room. It struck the wall and fell onto the tile. That wasn't like me, so it made an impression.

The room was quiet. I walked over to pick up my notes. I saw Bree and Sampson exchange a look I didn't like. They weren't sure that I could handle this.

Bree took it from there, and she started handing out assignments. We needed people recanvassing the Cambridge Place neighborhood, riding the lab for fast turnaround, and calling in any chits we had on the street for information about last night.

"We need your best work on this one," Bree told the group. "And we want some answers by the end of the day."

"What about—?"

"Dismissed!"

Everyone looked around. It was Sampson who'd spoken.

"You all have any more questions, you can reach Stone or Cross on their cells. Meanwhile, we've got a buttload of fieldwork to do. This is a major case. So get started! Let's hit it, and hit it hard."