The Ways of the Dead (10 page)

By midafternoon, Sully
was slumped back in his chair, feet up on his desk, going through the clips that had been written about the disappearance of Noel Pittman.

Noel had gone to school in the city, Coolidge High, enrolled at Howard part-time, made decent but not spectacular grades, and was known on the black party circuit that thrived on the eastern side of the city—as opposed to the polo-playing Georgetown trust fund set who’d reliably turn up in the glossy society mags, beaming at the camera. Nobody from Noel’s set got invited to those parties.

And almost no one, including his own paper, had written about Noel at all. About the only notice of her disappearance was from Howard’s campus paper, the
Hilltop
, in which a student staffer wrote a short piece about her disappearance in March of the previous year. They described her as a Jamaican immigrant.

There was a picture of her, smiling, hair up, dangling earrings, light brown skin and dark brown eyes. She was laughing in the photograph, a warmth that seemed to bubble up out of her. Sully reached out and, without realizing it, touched the photograph.

She was last seen leaving her weekend gig as a featured dancer at Halo, the high-end club on New York Avenue, at about two a.m. after arriving to work four hours earlier. It put her disappearance two hours into April 25. She had never been seen again. She drove her car out of the club’s parking lot and into the void. Her apartment on Princeton Place was a house that had been divided into two units—the basement to itself, the top floors another—and she had lived on the top floors. The basement apartment had been empty at the time of her disappearance.

There was nothing in the clips about a
Playboy
shoot, and a database search of court records with her name did not turn up any hits. He’d been out to Halo once or twice, enough to know that “featured dancers” were the girls who danced on elevated platforms above the dance floor on the penthouse level. The dancers wore G-strings, heels, and a miniscule lingerie top.

He tapped the keyboard to move into the paper’s copyediting system to read Chris’s story. It was being laid out to run on the lower right-hand corner of the Metro front. It was the basic “missing woman found dead” story. It noted the proximity of the Sarah Reese case as a coincidence that police were checking for any possible connection. The police chief was quoted as saying it was unlikely but could not be ruled out immediately. The photograph of her being printed was the same as the one on the flier. That reminded him to try the number on the flier again. He picked up the phone, dialed, and after five rings got the same voice mail message.

To get a live voice in the story, he called the home phone of a professor of criminal justice at Georgetown. The professor confirmed what was obvious—three women being killed,
if
Noel was killed, within two hundred yards of one another was extremely unusual and pushed at the boundaries of circumstance. That went into the file he was writing up for Chris.

“We’re nervous,” said David Belham, the Ward 1 city councilman, whose district included the area, Sully getting him at his home. “Whether these are connected or not, it’s too many. It feels wrong.”

John Parker, when he finally picked up, had nothing to add on the investigation, but did say that he had Noel Pittman’s pictures. Sully arranged to meet him at eleven the next morning.

Looking up at the clock, deadline was on him. He typed quickly now, information from the clips, filler stats, things he knew without having to think.

The series of unsolved deaths in such a concentrated area makes criminologists wary of a coincidental explanation . . .

After a few more paragraphs like this, he hit the send button and bounced an internal instant message to Chris, letting him know the file was available. He thought about it for a minute, then got up and walked over to Chris’s desk, the newsroom mostly empty. The place always smelled vaguely of—of—what was it? Takeout Chinese?

He leaned over the cubicle. Chubface did not look up and did not remove his hands from the keyboard. “You got it,” Sully said.

“Un-hunh. Thanks.” Not even looking up.

Bitchy, bitchy, bitchy.

Back at his desk, the whiskey was gone in two long slurps on the straw. He looked around and then took the ice-laden cup to another reporter’s desk and dropped it in the trash can.

The cycle boots were under the desk, and he reached down and pulled them out, thinking about a burger at Stoney’s, wondering if Eva would pick up the phone if he called her, Dusty up in Baltimore at her weekday bar. There was a cough and a soft “Hey, man.”

Chris again, hands on the chest-high divider of Sully’s cubicle, leaning forward on it, a piece of paper in one hand.

“Yeah?” Sully said. “You filed? What happened with the guys in court?”

“No surprises. No guilty plea, held until trial. Keith did it.”

He extended his fingers, pushing a slip of paper at Sully. “This woman left two messages on the Metro main answering machine yesterday, asking for you. Said she was returning your call. The news aide delivered it to me today, I guess because I was working the story.”

Sully took the slip of paper, which had a 301 area code, Maryland. The name was Lorena Bradford. The name was a blank.

“She say what it was about?”

“Yeah. She said you called her Saturday, before the body was found. She’s Noel Pittman’s sister.”

•   •   •

John Parker was already sitting at a four-top, coffee in front of him, when Sully walked in the next morning, nursing a modest hangover. He got a Coke and sat down.

“You checked your messages?” John asked.

“At the office? Should I?”

“That story you and the fat kid did today? Whole neighborhood is jumping. We got forty, forty-five calls asking if there’s a serial killer on the loose.”

“I didn’t say anything about a serial killer.”

“You didn’t spell the words. But ‘unsolved deaths’? ‘Concentrated area’? Don’t pussyfoot. You know how the game goes. So does Belham. He’s setting up a community meeting tonight, calling in the chief, everybody.”

“Well. I didn’t think he’d do that. But you don’t buy the cluster?”

John shrugged. “No. Not for homicide. Know what you get when you get a lot of crackheads in a small area? Lot of deaths of people too young to die. I see how you get there for a newspaper story, but coincidence doesn’t make much of a homicide investigation.” He slid a manila envelope across the tabletop, the pictures of Noel Pittman. “Adult audiences only,” he said. “Someone sent them to you in the mail.”

Sully peeked inside, thumbing through the eight-by-tens without pulling any of the explicit pictures into public view. “Wow.”

“Yeah.”

“So what was the story on these?” He got out a notebook.

“Based on the file I looked at, which didn’t have all that much, it was straight missing persons. This was last April. A family member starts pushing us on it, so a couple of uniforms looked around. Like I told you, decedent lived on the top end of the 700 block of Princeton. Ten, twelve houses up from where she was found.”

“What’d the place look like?”

“Not tossed, if that’s what you mean. I don’t have anything other than that. Report says the guys went through it. Nothing unusual about the calls on the voice mail, stuff on the computer. Her car never turned up. So it was pretty flat until this photographer guy calls us. He got wind we were making calls, thought we were snooping him. Runs a studio up there in Petworth.”

“She was a client?”

“Man said Pittman told him that she wanted the stills to send to lingerie magazines, upscale men’s magazines, like that, a portfolio. She came in for shoots in his studio, the results of which you’re looking at. First day just her, second day the girl-on-girl stuff. This about two months before she went missing.”

“What about the shooter? You scope him out?”

“Yeah, look, he’s a sleazeball, you ask me, but we didn’t find anything we could hit him for. Makes a lot of money on what they tell me is boudoir photography.”

“Housewives in the buff?”

“Something like it. Girlfriends, whatever. He shoots a lot of advertising, fashion, like that. He checked out.”

“So who’s girl number two?” Sully asked, peering into the envelope.

“Our mystery guest. Photog didn’t have a record of her name. So that was about it. File says a uniform went out to Halo. You been?”

“Once or twice. She was one of the platform girls out there.”

“So we looked at that. Report says the uniform talked to bouncers, bartenders, the guys in the kitchen. Got nothing. Well. She was scoring a little coke out there, but nothing to make any to-do over. We kept an eye on one or two of the bouncers for a while. No crazy ex-boyfriends or ex-girlfriends or whoever. She also worked part-time, a lingerie-like shop, over to Union Station. And college at Howard. Marketing major.”

“What about her car?”

“Older black Acura, two-door. From what we were told, ripped front seat, a dent in the right fender. Put out tracers. No hits.”

“Get much on her background, finances, all that?”

“Nah. Jamaican, came here when she was eight or nine. Not much family around, just a sister. She was the one pushing us to do more.”

“She did coke; she owe anybody money?”

“Not so far as I could tell from looking at the report. Look, you got to remember, this was never a criminal investigation. Missing persons only. You know how many of those come in? Pisses family members off, they want us to do more, but there’s only so much we can do if there’s nothing suggesting foul play. She owed a couple grand on the car, maybe about that on a credit card. I’m saying I don’t think the coke was a habit.”

Sully pulled out a few of the photographs.

They were black-and-white glossies. These were not hammy boudoir shots; this was art photography. He was impressed. Placing them on his lap between his chest and the table, where he could see them without anyone else doing so, he went through them slowly. There were perhaps two dozen.

Noel Pittman had honey-brown skin, shoulder-length straightened black hair, lips that formed a natural pout, full breasts, nice hips, and long legs. She seemed, in her regard for the camera, to have a sense of style, of presence. The photographs, her tousled hair, her eyes glittering. He wondered what her voice had been like. The nude photographs—lying across the bed on her stomach, looking back at the camera over her shoulder, wearing a necklace and a thong, leaning against a shower wall.

“Suspects?”

“We just got the body, partner. But no, none. At least we know now she’s not doing three-ways for a billionaire in Buenos Aires.”

“Who’s got lead on it?”

“Jensen. Good luck. We don’t call him Dick for nothing. He’s liaison to the Reese investigation, as due diligence, but this—look, this is cold-case material. We’ll look at the coroner’s report and if something comes up it’ll be followed.”

“Spot me Jensen’s cell?”

“You didn’t get it from me.” Parker consulted his phone and scribbled a series of numbers on a napkin.

“Who’s the lead on Sarah?”

“Bill, Billy Hairston. But look, I’m not kidding—not even a phone call to him, you hear? Man is overwhelmed. Can’t take a crap without the bureau guys going in the stall with him.”

Sully stood up. “Thanks for the glossies.”

“Perks up the day, doesn’t it?”

Sully walked outside, called Richard Jensen’s number, got the answering machine, and left a message. He rated his odds for a call back as zero. Jensen was two years from retirement but mentally had a foot out the door. He wasn’t going to do anything to jeopardize his pension, being quoted by some hack at a newspaper.

The Office of
the Chief Medical Examiner of the District of Columbia sat in a gray concrete lump at the back end of Capitol Hill. It was adjacent to the jail, at the bottom of a small hill that backed down to the Anacostia. The grass lots were filled with knee-high weeds.

Sully parked in front of the morgue, Building 27, and sat astride the bike while he called into his office voice mail. Thirty-two new messages. John hadn’t been kidding. He clicked it off without listening to them. He didn’t need the hate that people called in to vent, and, actually, if anybody ever bothered to ask him, he would be happy to tell them he had never given a flying fuck what readers thought. He wasn’t running a goddamn wine bar. It was better when he was on one continent, sending stories back to his newspaper on a different one. That was swell.

A few steps took him to the front glass doors, their surfaces reflecting his image, wobbling in a funhouse effect. Once inside, the faint, cloying smell of formaldehyde and chemical compounds permeated his nose, his clothes, his skin, and his mind suddenly flashed a picture of Noel, the brain matter, the sticky sheet . . .

The receptionist looked up at him with a flat stare.

“Hey, now,” he said, reaching out to the counter to steady himself, the image fading now. “Is the man himself in?”

She said, “Haven’t seen you around here since you got rid of the last man himself.”

“I think it was the city council that did that.”

“After that thing you wrote. Jason’s back there, you want to talk to him. You still riding that motorcycle?”

Sully looked down. He had the helmet in his right hand. “Every day,” he said.

“Be seeing you in here soon enough,” she said. Then she spoke into the phone. “Dr. Reitman? Your reporter friend is down here.” There was a pause. “The one with the motorcycle.”

Jason appeared a few moments later, loose limbed, lanky, goofy grin, pushing open a steel door and holding it open for Sully to enter.

“Let me guess. Sarah Reese,” he said.

“Noel Pittman,” Sully said, limping down the hallway. Jason fell in step, his white lab coat over a dress shirt and tie, walking heel to toe, rising off the toe on each step.

“Pittman? You get demoted? Nobody’s talking about Pittman. Everybody is all over the Reese thing.”

“I’ll let them run with it. Let me guess, though: no signs of sexual trauma on young Miss Reese?”

Jason looked straight ahead, still walking, tapping his clipboard on his hip, that rolling gait. “The office has no comment on any pending case, particularly not any case currently the subject of an intense media circus. So I couldn’t possibly comment on your completely unfounded but totally correct assertion.”

“Didn’t think so. Nasty, though, the throat slitting.”

“In the mood for news on that?”

“Could be.”

“Like before? I trusted you before and you were straight up. I don’t know any of these other guys, and I’m not about to go sticking my neck out. But it’s weird, dude, really weird.”

“Not for attribution,” Sully said. “Possibly to a ‘law enforcement official with knowledge of the matter.’”

Jason considered. “There’ve been so many suits through here that will probably stand up. But I’d rather you get someone else to confirm it.”

“Alright already.”

They had reached Jason’s narrow office and turned in. Jason plunked in his chair, swiveling side to side.

“The throat slitting?” he said. “It was postmortem.”

Sully frowned. “Somebody slit her throat
after
they killed her? What was the cause of death?”

“Asphyxiation. Somebody suffocated her. Looks like they shoved something in her mouth—there are fiber matches to something like a tennis ball—and then put their hand or a pillow over her face. The hyoid was broken, too.”

“So they suffocated her and then cut her throat?”

Jason nodded. “Very little bleeding, at least for that kind of cut. Usually you’d have buckets, spray, splatter, the works.”

“Why would they do that?”

“You’re asking me? A thrill. They liked the sight. Wanted to send a message. She died too soon. Anything.”

“But she wasn’t raped?”

“Not for publication or attribution, no. No bruising, no tearing. Panties in place. She did appear to be experienced in this area, though. She wasn’t a virgin . . . but you didn’t come to hear about that.”

Sully paused. “Actually I didn’t. I came to see if you could not comment on Noel Pittman.”

“I could not comment very well on Miss Pittman, as I did the autopsy, such as it was, yesterday.”

“That quick?”

“I actually had some time. Old cases are more interesting, besides. Autopsies of twenty-three-year-old men with an extra hole in their heads are not, what do I want to say, professionally challenging.”

“So what can you not say?”

“Alas, Yorick, I did not know her well. Decomposition is an unpleasant fact of afterlife. Insects and rodents and bugs, you know, all God’s creatures have to eat. Some of the skin had—you’d call it mummified, but there was very little flesh left.”

“Could you get a cause of death?”

“Not from the cut. She didn’t have any broken bones. Nobody shot her in the head, I can tell you that.”

“OD’d?”

“Toxicology not possible.”

“Strangled? Throat cut?”

“What, you’re thinking she and Sarah went out the same way? Yeah, well, no—no way to tell. Flesh from that area was all gone. You really want to picture a skeleton in some rotted clothes.”

“What were the clothes?”

“Appeared to be jeans, a belt—there was a metal buckle—maybe some sort of jacket or coat.”

“Was she killed there? In that basement?”

“Ask MPD. Nothing I saw on her suggested anything one way or another. And back up just a second, while I’m not saying anything. Based on the material we have, you can’t say someone killed her.”

Sully blinked. “You’re saying being stuffed in a hole in a basement isn’t a sign of a violent and unnatural end?”

“It’s a sign of a violent and unnatural
burial
. But we’re about what happens to people
before
they die. For all you or I know, she overdosed and her coke buddies wanted to keep using the house, so they arranged for a private burial. That violates city code, I’m sure, and probably some sort of misdemeanor about death notification, but that would be about it.”

“This sounds like bullshit, Jason. You guys are always pulling this. Dead body turns up and an ‘undetermined’ cause of death. The torso found in the dumpster by the waterfront, what, last year? You guys called it ‘undetermined.’ A torso in a dumpster, and nobody says ‘homicide.’ It keeps the murder rate down. I’m not blaming you, I mean, I know the politics of—”

“Nope. That was the old administration. Peter pulled that stuff all the time, in addition to the embezzling you wrote about. He was a real piece of work. I’m happy to label it homicide if there’s evidence. On this one, you can say the autopsy was inconclusive as to a cause of death, but that we described it as suspicious.”

“You think that’s what happened?”

“What happened?”

“OD’d and a friend panicked.”

“Are you writing about this? Or we just girl-talking?”

“Wanting to write about it. Bosses are less than thrilled. You’re still off the record, if that’s what you’re asking. I’m just looking for direction.”

Jason made a face.

“You look constipated, Jason. Look. I’m interested in your irresponsible speculation. It’s better than mine.”

Jason leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. He swiveled back and forth for a moment.

“I don’t. I don’t think she overdosed. If you’re interested in unfounded speculation, I think it’s highly likely someone raped her and killed her and hid the body. She was young, gorgeous, known to take liberties with portraying herself as a sex object, and was apparently known to do drugs. So you take anyone with that background and stuff them in a hole in the basement of an abandoned house in a crappy neighborhood, my first instinct is that she ran into Ted fucking Bundy. But I don’t know that, and there’s nothing in the autopsy to point to it as a forensic standard of proof.”

“What if you’d examined the body the day after she was buried?”

“Fibers, signs of bruises, cuts, bleeding—all that would have been available. Whoever buried her, or stuffed her beneath that trash pile or whatever, did a good job. Well, I should say buried her the first time. She’s being reburied today.”

Sully sat up. The funeral—pathos, symbols, a lead anecdote to the story. This he needed, what with the heat R.J. was putting on him. He needed something he didn’t have, which was family, which was emotion. You want emotion, you go to a funeral.

“Today? The funeral’s
today
?”

“Funeral home claimed the body as soon as we were finished. And I don’t think this is so much a funeral as a burial.”

“They—they just found her yesterday morning,” Sully said.

Jason shrugged. “Jews, we bury them quick. She’s not a member of the tribe, but maybe there was a family rush.”

Family. Her sister would be there, the one who’d put out the flyer, who had called him.

“Got the name of the funeral home, Jason? For a carrion-feeding media vulture?”