Cross Country (3 page)

T
HE TIGER WAS the tallest and strongest of ten well-muscled black men racing up and down a weathered asphalt basketball court at Carter Park in Petway. He understood that he wasn't a skillful shooter or dribbler, but he rebounded like a pro and defended the basket fiercely, and he hated to lose more than anything. In his world, you lose, you die.

Buckwheat either didn't mind the name, or he'd gotten used to it. He was fast on the basketball court and a steady shooter. He was also a trash-talker, as were most of the young players in DC. The Tiger had picked up the game in London instantly while he was at university, but there wasn't much trash-talking in England.

"You talk a good game, but you're going to lose," the Tiger finally said as he and his opponent ran up the court, shoulder to shoulder. Buckwheat turned off a screen and took a bounce pass in the left corner. He proceeded to bury a long, perfectly arced jump shot even though the Tiger bumped him hard after the release.

"Fuckin' ape," the other man yelled as the two of them ran back the other way.

"You think so?"

"Oh hell, I know so. 'Nother minute, you be the big monkey watchin' on the sideline!"

The Tiger laughed but said nothing more. He scored on a rebound, and then Buckwheat's team raced the ball up the court on a fast break.

Buckwheat caught a pass in full stride and brought it hard to the hoop. He had a step on the Tiger and called out, "Game!" even before he went up for the winning dunk.

He was airborne, graceful and athletic, when the Tiger hit him with all his force and weight. He took the six-foot-three man down, drove him into the metal pole supporting the basket. The man lay sprawled on the asphalt with blood streaming from his face.

"Game" shouted the Tiger and raised both arms high over his head. He loved to play basketball — what great fun it was to beat these loudmouthed African Americans who didn't know anything about the real world.

On the sidelines, his boys cheered as if he were Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant rolled into one. He wasn't any of that, he knew. He didn't want to be like Mike or Kobe. He was much better.

He decided life and death on a daily basis.

He walked off the court, and a man came up to him. This particular man couldn't have been more out of place, since he wore a gray suit and he was white.

"Ghedi Ahmed," said the white devil. "You know who he is?"

The Tiger nodded. "I know who he used to be."

"Make an example of him."

"And his family."

"Of course," said the white devil. "His family too."

I
PUT IN a call for help to my friend Avie Glazer, who headed up the Gang Intervention Project in the Third District. I told Avie why it was important to me.

"Any way you could meet us?" I asked him. "I'll owe you one. Buy you a beer."

"Which makes it how many total? Favors and beers?"

That was his way of saying yes, though. Bree and I met Avie at a shitty little pool hall called Forty-Four. The owner told us that was how old he was when he opened the place. Avie already knew the story but listened politely anyway.

"Seemed like as good a name as any," the owner said. His what-ever attitude struck me as that of a long-term stoner. For sure, he wasn't making his nut on billiards and sodas. His name was Jaime Ramirez, and Avie Glazer had advised me to give him room and a little respect.

"You know anything about the murders in Georgetown last night?" I asked Ramirez after we'd chitchatted some. "Multiple perps?"

"That was some awful shit," he said, leaning on the bottom half of a Dutch door, a brown cigarette held between stubby fingers and tilted at the same angle as his body.

He chinned up at the television in the corner. "Channel Four's all I get in here, Detective."

"How about any new games opening up?" Bree asked. "Players we might not have heard about? Somebody who would wipe a family out?"

"Hard to keep up," Ramirez said and shrugged. That's when Glazer gave him a look. "But yeah, matter of fact, there has been some talk."

His dark eyes flicked almost involuntarily past me and Bree. "Africans," he said to Avie.

"African American?" I asked. "Or—"

"African African." He turned back to Avie. "Yo, Toto, I'm gonna get something for this? Or this a freebie?"

Avie Glazer looked at me first and then at Ramirez. "Let's say I owe you one."

"What kind of African?" I asked.

He shrugged and blew out air. "How'm I supposed to know that? Black-guys-from-Africa kind of African."

"English speaking?"

"Yeah," he said, nodding. "But I never spoke to them. Sounds like they're into a little bit of everything. You know, four-H club? Hits, ho's, heroin, and heists. This ain't your graffiti-and-skip-party kind of gang."

He opened a glass-fronted cooler and took out a can of Coke. "Anyone thirsty? Two dollars."

"I'll take one," Glazer said. He cupped a couple of bills into Ramirez's hand, and they didn't look like singles.

Then Glazer turned to me. "And I will collect from you too. Count on it."

"Africans," Ramirez repeated as we headed toward the door, "from Africa."

T
HIS WAS THE last place I wanted to be in DC, or probably anyplace else.

Ellie's office was up on the second floor of the house in Georgetown. It was as tidy and meticulously organized as I remembered her being back when we thought we might love each other.

A copy of Sidney Poitier's
The Measure of a Man
was open on the arm of an easy chair. I'd liked the autobiography and remembered that Ellie and I had similar tastes in books, music, and politics.

The shades were all drawn to exactly the same height. The desk held an iMac, a phone, an appointment book, and a few family photos in silver frames. The room felt strange compared with the downstairs of the house, which had been ransacked by the killers last night.

I started with Ellie's appointment book and then went on to the desk drawers. I wasn't sure yet what I was looking for, only that I'd had to come back here with a clearer head than I'd had last night.

I booted up Ellie's computer and went into her e-mail — checking the in-box, sent items, and deleted folders, working backward in time. I was trying to get as close as possible to the moment of the murders. Had Ellie known the killers?

The first thing to catch my attention was a note from an editor at Georgetown University Press. It concerned her completion schedule for "the new book."

Ellie had a new book coming out? I knew she was on the history faculty at Georgetown, but I didn't know much more than that. We had seen each other at a few charity events during the past fifteen years or so, but that was about it. She was married, I wasn't for much of that time, and that fact can sometimes cut down contact and communication.

I ran her name through Amazon and Barnes & Noble and found three book titles. Each had something to do with African sociopolitics. The most recent one,
Critical Juncture
, had been published four years ago.

So where was the new book? Was there a partial manuscript I could read?

I swiveled around to look over the floor-to-ceiling bookcases that took up two entire walls of the office. Ellie had hundreds of volumes here, mixed in with a collection of awards and citations.

Kids' artwork and framed photos covered the rest of the space.

Then all of a sudden I was looking at a picture of myself.

I
T WAS AN old snapshot from our college days. I remembered the time as soon as I saw it. Ellie and I were sitting on a blanket on the National Mall. We had just finished finals. I had a summer internship lined up at Sibley Memorial, and I was falling in love for the first time. Ellie told me that she was too. In the photograph, we were smiling and hugging one another, and it looked as if we could be that way forever.

I let myself stare nostalgically at the picture for a few more seconds, then forced myself to move on, to come back to the present mess.

It didn't take long to find three hundred typed pages of a manuscript titled
Deathtrip
. The subtitle on the title page read
Crime as a Way of Life, of Doing Business, in Central Africa
.

A copy of a plane ticket had been inserted in the manuscript. The ticket was round-trip from Washington to Lagos, Nigeria. Ellie had returned from there two weeks ago.

I looked through the index at the back of the manuscript and found a listing for "Violence, African Style," and a subhead, "Family Massacre."

I turned to the relevant manuscript page and read: "There are gang leaders for hire all through Nigeria and especially in Sudan. These brutal men and their groups — often made up of boys as young as ten — have an unlimited appetite for violence and sadism. A favorite target is entire families, since that spreads both news and fear the farthest. Families are massacred in their huts and shacks, and even boiled in oil, a trademark of a few of the worst gang leaders."

I decided to take the partial manuscript with me to get it copied. I wanted to read everything that Ellie had written.

Was this what had gotten her killed — her book?

Next, I stared for a long time at a striking, poignant picture of Ellie, her husband, and their three beautiful children.

All dead now.

Murdered right here in their home. At least they hadn't been boiled in oil.

I took one more look at the photo of the two of us on the National Mall. Young and in love, or whatever it was that we were feeling.

"Ellie, I'll do what I can for you and your family. I promise you that."

I left the house, thinking, What did you find in Africa?

Did somebody follow you back?

E
VERYBODY THERE KNEW there was trouble, but no one knew what kind or how bad it was.

Even so, the very moment Ghedi Ahmed saw the gunmen scrambling out of the van, saw their gray hoodies, their black face masks and jaunty sunglasses, he knew they had come for him. They were just boys — the Tiger's boys.

The first gunshots were aimed into the sky. Just warnings. Men and women screamed, and some scurried back into the mosque.

Others flattened themselves on the sidewalk, shielding their children's bodies as best they could.

His hands held high, Ghedi Ahmed made his decision and moved away from his family. Better to die alone than to take them with me, he was thinking, shaking like a leaf now.

He hadn't gotten far when he heard his wife, Aziza, scream, and he realized what a terrible mistake he'd made. "Ghedi! Ghedi!" He turned as the wild boys carried, then threw, Aziza into the waiting van. And then — his children! They were taking the children, too! All four of them were hustled into the van.

Ghedi reversed direction quickly, and now he was screaming, more loudly than anyone in the crowd, even more than Aziza.

A courageous man from the congregation took a swing at one of the kidnappers. The boy yelled, "Dog!" and shot the man in the face. Then he fired again, where the man lay spread-eagled and already dying on the sidewalk.

Another bullet took down an elderly woman just as Ghedi pushed past her.

The next shot found his leg, and running became falling. Then two of the boys snatched him up off the ground and threw him into the van with his family.

"The children! Not our children!" sobbed Aziza.

"Where are you taking us?" Ghedi screamed at the kidnappers. "Where?"

"To Allah," came the answer from the driver, the Tiger himself.

T
HE MYSTERY WAS deepening and getting worse each day, but much of Washington didn't seem to care, probably because this one happened in Southeast, and only black people were killed.

"A drive in the country, Alex. This is so romantic," Bree said as we plunged forward through the muck. She was good at keeping things upbeat, no matter what the circumstances.

"I'm always thinking of new things for us to do."

"You've outdone yourself this time. Trust me on that."

I finally spotted Sampson talking to the truck's driver as we got out of the car. Behind the two of them and a ribbon of Crime scene tape, I could see yellow sheets covering the six bodies where they had been found.

Two parents and four more kids here. That made four adults and seven children in just the past few days.

Sampson walked over to brief us. "Garbage truck started on the empty streets this morning and made stops all over midtown. Forty-one Dumpsters at eighteen locations, some of them as close as a few blocks from the mosque. That's a shitload of follow-up work for us."

"Any other good news?" I asked him.

"So far, only the bodies have been found. No word on the heads." We hadn't released that so far to the press: All six of the victims had been decapitated.

"I love my job, I love my job," Bree said quietly. "I can't wait to get to work in the morning."

I asked Sampson where the father's body was, and we started there. When I pulled back the sheet, the sight was horrific, but I didn't need an ME to tell me that the cutting was much cleaner this time. There were no extraneous wounds: no bullet holes, no slashes, no punctures. Plus, the lower body had been burned badly.

Senseless murders, but probably not random, I was thinking.

But what did the Ahmed killings have to do with Ellie and her family?

"We've got some similarities and some real differences here," Sampson told us. "Two families taken out suddenly. Multiple perps. But one behind closed doors, the other outside a mosque. Heavy cutting in both cases."

"But different cutting," Bree said. "And if the heads don't turn up—"

"Something tells me they won't," I said.

"Then, maybe we're talking about trophies, keepsakes."

"Or proof of purchase," I said.

They both looked at me. "Maybe this one was business, and the other was personal. Also, CNBC just broke a story that Ghedi Ahmed was the brother of Erasto Ahmed, who's Al Qaeda, operating out of Somalia."

"Al Qaeda?" Bree whispered and looked momentarily stumped. "Al Qaeda, Alex?"

We stood there, silent for a moment, trying to comprehend something as horrible as these murders. I thought of Ellie again. I couldn't stop thinking of her the past few days. Did her trip to Africa have something to do with her murder?

"So, what are we looking at?" Sampson finally spoke again. "Two sides of a war?"

"Could be," I said. "Or maybe two teams."

Or maybe one very smart killer, trying to keep us guessing.