Pop Goes the Weasel (2 page)

Ironically, the boys were all trying to look and act tougher than they actually were. I heard one boy say, “You weren’t in
my life before, why should I listen to you now?” But the fathers were trying to show a softer side.

Sampson and I hadn’t made the run to Lorton before. It was our first time, but I was already sure I’d do it again. There was
so much raw emotion and hope in the room, so much potential for something good and decent. Even if some of it would never
be realized, it showed that an effort was being made, and something positive could come from it.

What struck me most was the bond that still existed between some of the fathers and their young sons. I thought about my own
boy, Damon, and how lucky we were. The thing about most of the prisoners in Lorton was that they knew what they had done was
wrong; they just didn’t know how to stop doing it.

For most of the hour and a half, I just walked around and listened. I was occasionally needed as a psychologist, and I did
the best I could on short notice. At one little group, I heard a father say, “Please tell your mother I love her and I miss
her like crazy.” Then both the prisoner and his son broke into tears and hugged each other fiercely.

Sampson came up to me after we’d been in the prison for an hour or so. He was grinning broadly. His smile, when it comes,
is a killer. “Man, I love this. Do-gooder shit is the best.”

“Yeah, I’m hooked myself. I’ll drive the big orange bus again.”

“Think it’ll help? Fathers and sons meeting like this?” he asked me.

I looked around the room. “I think today, right now, this is a success for these men and their sons. That’s good enough.”

Sampson nodded. “The old one-day-at-a-time approach. Works for me, too. I am
flying
, Alex.”

So was I, so was I. I’m a sucker for this kind of stuff.

As I drove the young boys home that afternoon, I could see by their faces that they’d had positive experiences with their
fathers. The boys weren’t nearly as noisy and rambunctious on the way back to D.C. They weren’t trying to be so tough. They
were just acting like kids.

Almost every one of the boys thanked Sampson and me as he got off the big orange bus. It wasn’t necessary. It sure was a lot
better than chasing after homicidal maniacs.

The last boy we dropped off was the eight-year-old from Benning Terrace. He hugged both John and me, and then he started to
cry. “I miss my dad,” he said before running home.

THAT NIGHT, Sampson and I were on duty in Southeast. We’re senior homicide detectives, and I’m also liaison between the FBI
and the D.C. police. We got a call at about half past midnight telling us to go to the area of Washington called Shaw. There’d
been a bad homicide.

A lone Metro squad car was at the murder scene, and the neighborhood psychos had turned out in pretty fair numbers.

It looked like a bizarre block party in the middle of hell. Fires were blazing nearby, throwing off sparks in two trash barrels,
which made no sense, given the sweltering heat of the night.

The victim was a young woman, probably between fourteen and her late teens, according to the radio report.

She wasn’t hard to find. Her nude, mutilated body had been discarded in a clump of briar bushes in a small park less than
ten yards off a paved pathway.

As Sampson and I approached the body, a boy shouted at us from the other side of the crime tape: “Yo, yo, she just some street
whore!”

I stopped and looked at him. He reminded me of the boys we’d just transported to Lorton Prison. “Dime-a-dozen bitch. Ain’t
worth your time, or mine,
Dee-fectives
,” he went on with his disturbing rap.

I walked up to the young wisecracker. “How do you know that? You seen her around?”

The boy backed off. But then he grinned, showing off a gold star on one of his front teeth. “She ain’t got no clothes on,
an’ she layin’ on her back. Somebody stick her good. Sure sound like a whore to me.”

Sampson eyed the youth, who looked to be around fourteen but might have been even younger. “You know who she is?”

“Hell
no!
” The boy pretended to be insulted. “Don’t know no whores, man.”

The boy finally swaggered off, looking back at us once or twice and shaking his head. Sampson and I walked on and joined two
uniformed cops standing by the body. They were obviously waiting for reinforcements. Apparently, we were it.

“You call Emergency Services?” I asked the uniforms.

“Thirty-five minutes ago and counting,” said the older-looking of the two. He was probably in his late twenties, sporting
an attempted mustache and trying to look as if he were experienced at scenes like this one.

“That figures.” I shook my head. “You find any I.D. anywhere around here?”

“No I.D. We looked around in the bushes. Nothing but the body,” said the younger one. “And the body’s seen better days.” He
was perspiring badly and looked a little sick.

I put on latex gloves and bent down over the corpse. She did appear to be in her mid- to late teens. The girl’s throat had
been slit from ear to ear. Her face was badly slashed. So were the soles of her feet, which seemed odd. She’d been stabbed
a dozen or more times in her chest and stomach. I pushed open her legs.

I saw something that made me sick. A metal handle was barely visible between her legs. I was almost sure it was a knife and
that it had been driven all the way into her vagina.

Sampson crouched and looked at me. “What are you thinking, Alex? Another one?”

I shook my head, shrugged my shoulders. “Maybe, but she’s an addict, John. Tracks on her arms and legs. Probably behind her
knees, under her arms. Our boy doesn’t usually go after addicts. He practices safe sex. The murder’s brutal, though. That
fits the style. You see the metal handle?”

Sampson nodded. He didn’t miss much. “Clothes,” he said. “Where the hell did they go to? We need to find the clothes.”

“Somebody in the neighborhood probably stripped them off her already,” said the young uniform. There was a lot of disturbance
around the body. Several footprints in the dirt. “That’s how it goes around here. Nobody seems to care.”

“We’re here,” I said to him. “
We
care. We’re here for all the Jane Does.”

GEOFFREY SHAFER was so happy he almost couldn’t hide it from his family. He had to keep from laughing out loud as he kissed
his wife, Lucy, on the cheek. He caught a whiff of her Chanel No. 5 perfume, then tasted the brittle dryness of her lips as
he kissed her again.

They were standing around like statues in the elegant galley hall of the large Georgian house in Kalorama. The children had
been summoned to say good-bye to him.

His wife, the former Lucy Rhys-Cousins, was ash-blond, her sparkling green eyes even brighter than the Bulgari and Spark jewelry
that she always wore. Slender, still a beauty of sorts at thirty-seven, Lucy had attended Newnham College at Cambridge for
two years before they were married. She read useless poetry and literary novels, and spent most of her free time at equally
pointless lunches, shopping with her expatriate girlfriends, going to polo matches, or sailing. Occasionally, Shafer sailed
with her. He’d been a very good sailor once upon a time.

Lucy had been considered a prize catch, and he supposed that she still would be, for some men. Well, they could have her skinny,
bony ass and all the passionless sex they could stomach.

Shafer hoisted up four-year-old twins Tricia and Erica, one in each arm. Two mirror images of their mother. He’d have sold
the twins for the price of a postage stamp. He hugged the girls and laughed like the good papa he always pretended to be.

Then he formally shook twelve-year-old Robert’s hand. The debate being waged in the house was over whether Robert should be
sent back to England for boarding school, perhaps to Winchester, where his grandfather had gone. Shafer gave his son a crisp
military salute. Once upon a time, Colonel Geoffrey Shafer had been a soldier. Only Robert seemed to remember that part of
his father’s life now.

“I’m only going away to London for a few days, and this is
work
, not a holiday. I’m not planning to spend my nights at the Athenaeum or anything like that,” he told his family. He was smiling
jovially, the way they expected him to be.

“Try to have some fun while you’re away, Dad. Have some laughs. God knows, you deserve it,” Robert said, talking in the lower-octave
man-to-man’s voice that he seemed to be adopting lately.

“Bye, Daddy! Bye, Daddy,” the twins chorused shrilly, making Shafer want to throw them against the walls.

“Bye, Erica-san. Bye, Tricia-san.”

“Remember Orc’s Nest,” Robert said with sudden urgency. “
Dragon
and
The Duelist.
” Orc’s Nest was a store that sold role-playing books and gaming equipment. It was located on Earlham, just off Cambridge
Circus in London.
Dragon
and
The Duelist
were currently the two hot-shit British magazines covering role-playing games.

Unfortunately for Robert, Shafer wasn’t actually going to London. He had a much better plan for the weekend. He was going
to play his fantasy game right here in Washington.

HE SPED DUE EAST, rather than toward Washington’s Dulles Airport, feeling as if a tremendously burdensome weight had been
lifted. God, he hated his perfect English family, and even more, their claustrophobic life here in America.

Shafer’s own family back in England had been “perfect” as well. He had two older brothers, and they’d both been excellent
students, model youths. His father had been a military attaché, and the family had traveled around the globe until he was
twelve, when they’d returned to England and settled in Guildford, about half an hour outside London. Once there, Shafer began
to expand on the schoolboy mischief he’d practiced since he was eight. The center of Guildford contained several historic
buildings, and he set out to gleefully deface all of them. He began with the Abbot’s Hospital, where his grandmother was dying.
He painted obscenities on the walls. Then he moved on to Guildford Castle, Guildhall, the Royal Grammar School, and Guildford
Cathedral. He scrawled more obscene words, and splashed large penises in bright colors. He had no idea why he took such joy
in ruining beautiful things, but he did. He loved it—and he especially loved not getting caught.

Shafer was eventually sent to school at Rugly, where the pranks continued. Then he attended St. John’s College, where he concentrated
on philosophy, Japanese, and shagging as many good-looking women as he possibly could. All his friends were mystified when
he went into the army at twenty-one. His language skills were excellent, and he was posted to Asia, which was where the mischief
rose to a new level and where he began to play the
game of games
.

He stopped at a 7-Eleven in Washington Heights for coffee—three coffees, actually. Black, with four sugars in each. He drank
most of one of the cups on his way to the counter.

The Indian cashier gave him a cheeky, suspicious look, and he laughed in the bearded wanker’s face.

“Do you really think I’d steal a bloody seventy-five-cent cup of coffee? You pathetic jerkoff. You pitiful wog.”

He threw his money on the counter and left before he killed the clerk with his bare hands, which he could do easily enough.

From the 7-Eleven he drove into the Northeast part of Washington, a middle-class section called Eckington. He began to recognize
the streets when he was west of Gallaudet University. Most of the structures were two-storied apartments with vinyl siding,
either redbrick or a hideous Easter-egg blue that always made him wince.

He stopped in front of one of the redbrick garden apartments on Uhland Terrace, near Second Street. This one had an attached
garage. A previous tenant had adorned the brick facade with two white concrete cats.

“Hello, pussies,” Shafer said. He felt relieved to be here. He was “cycling up”—that is, getting high, manic. He loved this
feeling, couldn’t get enough of it. It was time to play the game.

A RUSTED and taped-up purple and blue taxi was parked inside the two-car garage. Shafer had been using it for about four months.
The taxi gave him anonymity, made him almost invisible anywhere he chose to go in D.C. He called it his “Nightmare Machine.”

He wedged the Jaguar beside the taxicab, then he jogged upstairs. Once inside the apartment, he switched on the air-conditioning.
He drank another sugar-laced coffee.

Then he took his pills, like a good boy. Thorazine and Librium. Benadryl, Xanax, Vicodin. He’d been using the drugs in various
combinations for years. It was mostly a trial-and-error process, but he’d learned his lessons well.
Feeling better, Geoffrey? Yes, much better, thank you
.

He tried to read today’s
Washington Post
, then an old copy of
Private Eye
magazine, and finally a catalog from DeMask, a rubber and leather fetish wholesaler in Amsterdam, the world’s largest. He
did two hundred push-ups, then a few hundred sit-ups, impatiently waiting for darkness to fall over Washington.

At quarter to ten, Shafer began to get ready for a big night on the town. He went into the small, barren bathroom, which smelled
of cheap cleanser. He stood before the mirror.

He liked what he saw. Very much so. Thick and wavy blond hair that he would never lose. A charismatic, electric smile. Startling
blue eyes that had a cinematic quality. Excellent physical shape for a man of forty-four.

He went to work, starting with brown contact lenses. He’d done this so many times, he could almost do it blindfolded. It was
a part of his tradecraft. He applied blackface to his face, neck, hands, wrists; thick padding to make his neck seem broader
than it was; a dark watch cap to cover every last strand of hair.

He stared hard at himself—and saw a rather convincing-looking black man, especially if the light wasn’t too strong. Not
bad, not bad at all. It was a good disguise for a night on the town,
especially
if the town was Washington.