The Ways of the Dead (9 page)

Dusty stirred. The
black silk band Sully had used as a blindfold was pulled down around her neck. He slipped out of bed, looking at the clock—Christ, what was with the early goddamned phone calls?—and picked up the cell before it could buzz again. He didn’t recognize the number. He walked out in the hallway and down the steps, grabbing a pair of basketball shorts as he went.

“This better be spectacular,” he said into the phone.

“Good morning to you, sunshine, and yes, it is.”

“John? Lieutenant Parker? Is that you? What number is this?”

“Borrowed a line. Look. You need to get your skinny ass up to Princeton Place. And hey, nice to see you on the front page. I didn’t think you actually worked there anymore.”

“Princeton Place? Can’t a man have company over every now and then without this shit?”

“It’s a free country for white people, Sully. Stay in bed and bonk like a bunny rabbit, you want. I’d get my ass to Princeton Place, but that’s just me.”

“What am I going to see there?”

“Me, brother.”

The line disconnected.

He swore, standing there shirtless, thinking about it. Then he went back upstairs and found jeans and a shirt. He tiptoed to the bed, leaned over, and kissed Dusty between her shoulder blades. He left his mouth there. The taste of her skin was like peaches, that soft little down brushing against his lips.

“Got to go. Something about this Reese thing.”

“Umm-hmm.”

“Can you stay?”

“Nnnhh. Work in Baltimore tonight.” She was half asleep.

“I’ll call.”

“Mmmm.”

He walked out to the bike, parked on the street, and turned to look at the upstairs window, the smell of her still on him. It was open, the curtain twisting, flitting over the frame, and Dusty asleep a few feet away, unseen in the shadows.

•   •   •

The yellow police tape that had been blocking off the street during the Sarah Reese investigation was back, but this time one light pole farther up the block. Another squad car was parked diagonally across the street, in almost exactly the same spot as before. There were other squad cars down the street. Sully approached an unmarked car with the door open. A hand emerged from the window, waving him closer.

He limped down the middle of the street, ducking under the yellow tape.

“You showed,” John Parker said, sunglasses propped on his shaved head. He was wearing a light brown suit, a dark brown tie over a starched white shirt, sitting in the front seat.

“You promised spectacular.”

“I did. And I’ll deliver. Right after you tell me how you learned about that little takedown yesterday.” He got out of the car, his suit coat falling just so, the broad tie knotted perfectly at the neck. Sully always meant to ask him how he got the knot like that.

“Come on, man.”

“Was it from us?”

“What, you worried I’m dating someone else?”

“Fun is fun and leaks are leaks, Sully, but that was in a different category. I’m trying to get control of this group, the squad. You know how bad we are right now? And that leak, brother, was high level.”

“You know I can’t say.”

“Was it from us?”

Sully paused, let out a breath for the theater of it. “No.”

“Alright,” John nodding, eyeing him, seeing if he believed it. “Alright, then. I’ll settle for it. I find out different, I’m not going to be amused, at you or your snitch. But you watch your ass, you hear? This is big-boy shit.”

“Noted. Hey. You got any guys working out of a blue Olds? Beefy white boys, plainclothes?”

“Not out of our shop. Somebody bothering you?”

“Not yet.”

“Also,” John said, touching his fingertips to his temples, bringing them back down, “before I forget. The beach house. Already booked for Christmas and New Year’s.”

“Super Bowl?”

“I can check. Mrs. Parker handles all that. Summer is still mostly open.”

“Never liked the beach in the summer. Winter is terrific. It’s deserted.” He nodded and lifted his chin to point farther down the street at the squad cars. Officers and lab techs were walking out of the house at the end of the block. “So what’s the attraction?”

John let out a sigh. “Noel Pittman. What’s left of her, anyhow.”

Sully coughed, the late night, the whiskey. It wasn’t what he was expecting.

“The girl from Howard?”

“Found her late yesterday, ID’d her this morning through the dentals. She was in the basement. It’s packed dirt with a wood floorboard over it, like big plywood panels with carpet over them? She was in this tight little space down there, covered up with a lot of trash and junk.”

“You guys had a cadaver dog in there?”

John blew out his lips in a raspberry, leaning on the car door. Twenty-three years on the force, started on the street, it was all white guys running Homicide, the big cases, and now here he was, the lieutenant, trying to get the homicide unit off its dysfunctional ass, kicking the shit with a reporter on a Monday morning, the rotting body his problem now.

“Fat fucking chance. Uniform just out the academy is doing a recanvass, seeing if somebody remembers something they forgot the other night about Sarah Reese. Him and a partner. Mr. Gung Ho goes to the abandoned house, 788, knocks, and, instead of saying it’s just empty, does a walk-through. Goes down to the basement. Sees a pile of old chairs, some lumber, stacked up odd in the middle of the floor. Pokes around, sees bones.”

“Goddamn.”

“Goddamn.”

“That was impressive.”

“I may make him chief of detectives.”

“Any connection to Sarah Reese?”

“Just the geography, apparently. Pittman lived right up there. That house, 742, at the end of the block.”

“So who owns this place?”

“The bank. Foreclosed on two years ago, some guy out of Delaware buying houses, trying to flip them.”

“What about—?” He was going to ask about Lana Escobar getting it on the baseball field, but skipped it. “What about—where—I mean, Pittman’s body’s been there the whole time?”

“I’d suppose but I don’t know.”

“Didn’t, ah, didn’t you guys search the hood after she went missing?”

“Some, it turns out, but not much. She was last seen pulling out of the club, not back here. We never found her car. And look, hey—this was a missing persons case, okay, not homicide. We have a hard enough time with our own.”

“Wouldn’t there have been a smell, though?”

“You may have noticed the crack squats on this block? The ones everybody’s scattered from this morning?”

“I have.”

“They all sorta smell.”

“Jesus H.”

“Yeah. You ever see the pictures of Pittman?”

“Nah. I mean, yeah, the one on the flier.”

“No, I mean
the
pictures. Girl was a model. Naughty model. Posed nude. They got around the department when she went missing. She’d done a test shoot, I think it was for
Playboy
. Girl-on-girl stuff.”

“I’m just a polite boy from a small town on the big river, John.”

“You won’t be after you see these.”

“Could you assist in a viewing of same?”

“Probably.”

Sully thought for a minute, the beer truck guy, Rodney Wilson, the bitterness, the black and brown girls, no word in the papers.

“I’m gonna write about this one, I think, Lieutenant Parker. You show me the naughty pictures? It’ll count as research.” He looked over the hood of the car, down toward the row house on the left side of the street, with squad cars out front and two officers standing on the front porch. “Anybody down there to talk to?”

John half turned in his seat, then turned back to Sully. “Just the techs scraping the place. Chief came and went. Mayor, too, since there was a TV camera.”

“This broke this morning?”

“While you were at your love-in. Saw your colleague up here earlier. Who was it, that fat one?”

“Chris. I’m surprised the desk didn’t—” And he thought of his call with Melissa the night before. She’d just paid him back. Well well well. This was getting better by the goddamned hour.

Twenty-five minutes later,
he was walking into the newsroom, past the rows of cubicles, moving at a clip. His backpack was slung over a shoulder, and he’d stopped at the cafeteria downstairs for a soda, needing the caffeine. R.J. must have seen him getting off the elevator because here he was, already out of his chair, a tall, meaty blur moving toward him, heading him off before he got close to Melissa’s desk. R.J. shook a fist, bluff and hearty, booming out congratulations on the arrest story from last night.

“No one else was even
there
,” he said. “Not even television. They’re crediting your story on the networks with the narrative of how it went down. Brand X didn’t have
anything.
”

He guffawed, but Sully could see it in his eyes, the searching, seeing if he knew about the Noel Pittman discovery, testing the waters to see how angry he was, to see if he had the breath of bourbon on him.

Sully played it low-key. “So, hey, I was out at Princeton Place just now? Turns out I was the last one to the Noel Pittman party. Hear Chris was out there two hours back.”

R.J. peered at him over his bifocals, the bow tie at his neck, the beefy frame, the still-black hair oiled, the close-cropped beard. He had Norman Mailer bluster when he wanted, or he could sit and cross his legs, the dapper newspaperman, professorial, discussing not his first Pulitzer, but the second, still keeping himself between Sully and Melissa, who was somewhere back there in Metro.

“Pittman is a sideshow. A stale story for Chris, something to keep the youngster busy. This—this, now, is your chance to take over the Reese story. You see it now? The play here? The suspects are going to have their initial appearance in court this afternoon. We can have you there, overseeing, and moving on to takeouts on—”

“The C-10 is a presentation,” Sully said. “There’s no bail in the District. It’s just flight risk and danger to the community. They’re not going anywhere. Keith covers the courts. Give it to him.”

“Yes, but we’re going to need to know everything about these men, teenagers, whatever, so yes, Keith can handle the hearing. But we need you out in the neighborhood, the old pro, going for the families, the relatives, the neighbors.”

“Lemme guess. I’d dig up a fucked-up home life, discipline problems in school, a mom who says her baby just wouldn’t do this, and a father who—”

“Did you have a point in mind, Sullivan?”

“Yes. I did. I do. We’re going to advance this story through the
killings
on Princeton Place, not the kill
ing
. That’s what I was trying to say yesterday, and Melissa and Eddie didn’t want to hear it. Three women have been killed within 150 yards of one another, none of the cases solved. The Reese kid is just the latest. It’s—”

“Wait wait wait. Sarah Reese, Noel Pittman. Who’s the third?”

“Lana Escobar. Prostitute. Got killed up at the baseball field at the top of the block, last summer. Lana, Noel, Sarah. Three.”

“A prostitute? Well, Christ, Sullivan, take off your tutu and come back from the ball. I just don’t think so. They just got the bad guys on the Reese killing, or did I misread your story on the front page? Now, this morning, we got the body of some young woman, perhaps more fond of cocaine than a fixed address, discovered in a basement a few doors down the block. No arrests on that one, probably never will be. And a street hooker. You put this in what blender to get a story?”

“The blender of ‘Who’s killing all these women?’”

“You’re pouting. You didn’t get the call this morning. It doesn’t suit you.”

“The three suspects on the Reese thing, R.J.? They’re not going to stand. We don’t want to follow this too hard. We’ll get burned.”

“Your own story is bullshit?”

“Three men were arrested in a dramatic raid and the police say they killed Sarah Reese. That’s what I reported, and that’s not bullshit. The arrests aren’t going to stand. Also no bullshit.”

“And who says that?”

Sully tried to let his shoulders loosen. He had a knot in the middle of his upper back. His bowels felt cramped. The office, the office—who the fuck ever came up with the idea of working in an office?

“Okay. Okay. Part of that, what I know? I can’t tell you because it’s a confidential source and—”

“Whose name and position is?”

“Can’t say.”

“You can’t hide sources from your editors, you know that. Confidentiality means we don’t put it in the paper—”

“I don’t need the primer—”

“—and that eventually, you might go to jail rather than reveal it to a judge or to the public. But editors know the reporter’s source if need be. And I’m saying there’s a need.”

“Then we’ll just have to discount that part of it, because there is no way I’m giving up the source on this.”

R.J. blinked and looked at him, wrinkling his nose, making the bifocals twitch. He did not otherwise move. “You do remember your suspension. You went with a confidential source about Judge Foy—”

“My source was David Reese.”

“He says not. Edward agreed with him.”

A deep breath.

“Okay, think about this, R.J. Give it the smell test. These three guys? They’re shooting hoops on Friday evening, early, drinking beer, talking shit, a couple of blocks off Georgia. They go to the store, they bump into some white chick—and what, they drag her in an alley and slit her throat?”

“The police say they found the girl’s wallet on them.”

“That’s what the ‘item’ was?”

“Chris got it from a detective this morning while he was at the Noel Pittman thing. It’ll be mentioned in the hearing this afternoon.”

“Okay. Okay. So she drops it in the store, they pick it up. Maybe they stole it. That I can believe. I can’t believe they somehow got her in the alley and killed her just
boom boom
like that.”

It seemed as if all the air was going out of R.J. The man looked as if somebody had pulled a little plastic plug out of his chest and now he was a deflating balloon. He looked like he was wondering what Sully would blow on a Breathalyzer right about now.

“Do you have an aversion to the smart money, Sullivan? You have a clear path to the number one story in the paper, if not the nation, and you’re begging to take a back-road detour. This is called self-negation in psychiatric circles.”

They had made it to Sully’s desk and he plunked down in his chair, glad to have the weight off his knee. He motioned R.J. to pull up another. He needed this man for an ally, R.J. well placed to play the Ivy League mind-fuck games that the paper required—hustles that, Sully damn well knew, he lacked the formal education, tact, and patience to tolerate. R.J., on the other hand, after a turbulent and moneyed youth in Boston, and after being drummed out of the U.S. Army during Vietnam (sodomy, insubordination), had blossomed into a high-brow journalist and intellectual of the type that Washington society, and New York publishing, adored. Four-time Pulitzer finalist, two wins. He and his partner, the artist Elwood Douglas, were big in the D.C. arts and museum circles. Their house was filled with art, mainly with Elwood’s canvas works, but also, on the mantel, sat one of Capote’s hand-decorated snakebite kits, this a sign of R.J.’s whimsy, his easy wealth, and his sincere, if slightly patronizing, ideas about Southern art and madness.

Behind R.J., the homicide map loomed on the cubicle wall.

“Okay. So look—just look at the map, R.J. It’s behind you. No—lean up—yes. There. The pin dots are homicides. Black pins, black male murder victims. White pins, white men. Yellow pins, Asian. Orange, Hispanic.”

“This is quite racist, you know.”

“Pink pins, women victims of any race.”

“Have you had a talk with HR on sensitivity training?”

Sully knew, without counting, that there were two hundred and six pins of all colors so far this year. One hundred and seventy-one pins were black. Eleven were orange. Four were white. One was yellow.

“There are only nineteen pink pins, R.J. See how they’re spread out, but mostly east of the Anacostia?”

“All of them are mostly east of the Anacostia.”

“Yeah. Well. Watch this.” He reached into the top sliding drawer of his desk and pulled out three pink pins. He rolled the chair over to the cubicle wall. He found the intersection of Georgia and Princeton Place, then traced a finger slightly to the right to get to the rec center. He pushed all three pins in—marking the deaths of Sarah, Noel, and Lana. Then he pushed his chair back, rolling until he stopped alongside R.J.’s chair.

The map documented, in ways that economists and social scientists spent oceans of time and expense duplicating, the diamond-shaped city’s fault lines between race and class. To the west of the green expanse of Rock Creek Park, there were only three pins, two white and one black. To the right of the park, to the east and south, there were more than 190, almost all of them black.

Right in the middle, apart from any other pins, were the three pins Sully had just inserted. They formed a tiny pink cluster, a raised welt.

“Twenty, twenty-one, and twenty-two,” Sully said. “Right on top of one another. That includes the only white child of either gender, the only Latina woman, and one of about fifteen black women. All within two hundred yards of one another, all within eighteen months.”

R.J. shook his head.

“Before we start debating statistical analysis, which neither of us can spell, the Reese murder is, at least officially, explained and off the map. Now. You’ve got a prostitute killed up the block and a body dumped in a basement. That’s not what—”

“Give me three days, R.J.,” Sully said quietly, leaning forward so the man could hear him. “Give me three days and let me see what I get.”

“To what end? Look, we’ve got Jamie and two others on the National doing the federal investigation, and Keith handling the issues on the bench. But this story on the suspects! It’s the one that’s going to drive our coverage! It’s yours! And you want a three-day holiday to jerk off on a piece about misbegotten girls of the night? You can’t possibly try to tie all that to Sarah Reese. There’s no connective tissue.”

“Like I said—we’re not doing the death of Sarah Reese. We’re doing the dead and missing women of Princeton Place. If nothing else, I’ll write a bio of Pittman and Escobar, you know, young lives lost in a rough neighborhood.”

“That sounds like what you did the other day.”

“That was the
block.
These are the
victims
. Come on, R.J. A cluster of killings like that? Tell me it’s chance.”

R.J. let out another sigh and stood up. He hitched his pants up slightly and his fingers found his slim golden belt buckle and fussed with it until it was perfectly in between the first and last loops of his slacks and directly beneath the point of his tie. He crossed his left arm across his chest and propped his right elbow against his left hand, holding the arm upright so that the fingers on his right hand could stroke his chin.

“Jesus. Okay. We’ll play it your way for now. I’ll keep Chris on the Reese investigation. Keith will handle the courts; Jamie, the feds. You go out there in the demimonde, you go dig and claw around in the world of prostitutes, johns, and the party world where good-looking young women get buried in the basements of abandoned buildings, and you come back and tell us all about it. You’ll start right now, giving Chris fill for the story tomorrow on the discovery of Pittman’s body. We’ll bump it from fifteen inches to twenty-five.”

“You got it.”

R.J. leaned forward and whispered, mocking the way Sully had spoken to him.

“Got a minute, hero boy?”

“Just that.”

“Everybody knows you’re drinking again. You haven’t noticed Edward tippy-toeing around this story? Asking you a bunch of dick-holding questions? It’s not the old days when holding one’s liquor was a job description. Now look me in the eye and tell me I don’t have to worry.”

“You don’t got to worry.”

The old man stood. He rapped Sully on the shoulder, more of a punch than a pat, his face scowling behind the white beard. The skin was flushed, reddish. “When this is done, you’ll take your ass back to rehab.”

A spin on the heel and he was gone. Sully looked after him, settling the papers on his desk. He looked up at the homicide map and then back across the newsroom. He took a long pull on his soda, in a Styrofoam cup, the plastic lid keeping in the sweet and lovely scent of his afternoon bourbon and Coke.