Pop Goes the Weasel (4 page)

“She was dumped in a row house, Eighteenth and Garnesville. Jerome Thurman is out there with her. Says she’s probably been
there since the weekend. Some needle pusher found the body. No clothes or I.D., Alex,” Sampson said.

I looked over at him. “So how did they know it was Nina?”

“Uniform guy on the scene recognized her. Knew her from the hospital. Everybody knew Nina.”

I shut my eyes, but I saw Nina Childs’s face and I opened them again. She had been the eleven-to-seven charge nurse in the
E.R. unit at St. Anthony’s Hospital, where once I’d run like a tornado, with a dying little boy in my arms. Sampson and I
had worked with Nina more times than I could remember. Sampson had also dated Nina for over a year, but then they’d broken
it off. She’d married a neighborhood man who worked for the city. They had two kids, two little babies, and Nina had seemed
so happy the last time I saw her.

I couldn’t believe she was lying dead in a tenement cellar on the wrong side of the Anacostia. She had been abandoned, like
one of the Jane Does.

NINA CHILDS’S BODY had been found in a battered row house in one of the city’s most impoverished, destroyed, and dismaying
neighborhoods. There was only one patrol car on the scene, and a single rusted and dented EMS van; homicides in Southeast
don’t attract much attention. A dog was barking somewhere, and it was the only sound on the desolate street.

Sampson and I had to walk past an open-air drug mart on the corner of Eighteenth Street. Mostly young males, but a few children
and two women were also gathered there defiantly. The drug marts are everywhere in this part of Southeast. The neighborhood
youth activity is the crack trade.

“Daily body pickup, Officers?” said one of the young men. He was wearing black trousers with black suspenders, no shirt, socks,
or shoes. He had a prison-yard physique and tattoos everywhere.

“Come to take out the trash?” an older man cackled from behind an unruly patch of salt-and-pepper beard. “Take that muhfuckin’
barkin’-all-night dog while you here. Make yourselves useful,” he added.

Sampson and I ignored them and continued walking across Eighteenth, then into the boarded-up, three-storied row house straight
ahead. A black and white boxer leaned out of a third-floor window, like a lifetime resident, and wouldn’t stop barking. Otherwise
the building appeared deserted.

The front door had been jimmied a hundred times, so it just swung open for us. The building smelled of fire, garbage, water
damage. There was a gaping hole in the ceiling from a burst steam pipe. It was so wrong for Nina to have ended up in this
sad, abominable place.

For over a year I had been unofficially investigating unsolved murders in Southeast, many of them Jane Does. My count was
well over a hundred, but no one else in the department was willing to agree to that number, or anything close to it. Several
of the murdered women were drug abusers or prostitutes. But not Nina.

We carefully descended a circular stairwell that had a shaky, well-worn wooden railing that neither of us would touch. I could
see flashlights shining up ahead, and I already had my Maglite turned on.

Nina was deep in the basement of the abandoned building. At least somebody had bothered to tape off the perimeter to protect
the crime scene.

I saw Nina’s body—and I had to look away.

It wasn’t just that she was dead; it was how she’d been killed. I tried to put my mind and eyes somewhere else until I regained
some composure.

Jerome Thurman was there with the EMS team. So was a single patrol officer, probably the one who had identified Nina. No M.E.
was present. It wasn’t unusual for a medical examiner not to show up for homicides in Southeast.

There were dead flowers on the floor near the body. I focused on the flowers, still not able to look at Nina again. It didn’t
fit with the other Jane Does, but the killer didn’t have a strict pattern. That was one of the problems I was having. It might
mean that his fantasy was still evolving—and that he hadn’t finished making up his gruesome story yet.

I noted shreds of foil and cellophane wrappers lying everywhere on the floor. Rats are attracted to shiny things and often
bring them back to their nests. Thick cobwebs weaved from one end of the basement to the other.

I had to look at Nina again. I needed to look closely.

“I’m Detective Alex Cross. Let me take a look at her, please,” I finally said to the EMS team, a man and a woman in their
twenties. “I’ll just be a couple of minutes, then I’ll get out of your way.”

“The other detectives already released the body,” the male EMS worker said. He was rail-thin, with long dirty-blond hair.
He didn’t bother to look up at me. “Let us finish our job and get the hell out of this cesspool. Whole area is highly infectious
—smells like shit.”

“Just back away,” Sampson barked. “Get up, before I pull your skinny ass up.”

The EMS techie cursed, but he stood and backed away from Nina’s body. I moved in close, tried to concentrate and be professional,
tried to remember specific details I had gathered about the previous Jane Does in Southeast. I was looking for some connection.
I wondered if a single predator could possibly be killing so many people. If that was the case, then this would be one of
the most savage killing sprees ever.

I took a deep breath and then I knelt over Nina. The rats had been at her, I could see, but the killer had done much worse
damage.

It looked to me as if Nina had been beaten to death, with punches and possibly kicks. She might have been struck a hundred
times or more. I had rarely seen anyone given this much punishment. Why did it have to happen? She was only thirty-one years
old, a mother of two, kind, talented, dedicated to her work at St. Anthony’s.

There was a sudden noise, like a rifleshot, in the building. It reverberated right through the basement walls. The EMS workers
jumped.

The rest of us laughed nervously. I knew exactly what the sound was.

“Just rattraps,” I said to the EMS team. “Get used to it.”

I WAS AT THE HOMICIDE SCENE for a little over two hours, much longer than I wanted to be there, and I hated every second.
I couldn’t fix a set pattern for the Jane Doe killings, and Nina Childs’s murder didn’t help. Why had he struck her so many
times and so savagely? What were the flowers doing there? Could this be the work of the same killer?

The way I usually operate at a crime scene is to let the homicide investigation take on an almost aerial view. Everything
emanates from the body.

Sampson and I walked the entire crime scene, from the basement to each floor and on up to the roof. Then we walked the neighborhood.
Nobody had seen anything unusual, which didn’t surprise either of us.

Now came the really bad part. Sampson and I drove from the woeful tenement to Nina’s apartment in the Brookland section of
Washington, east of Catholic University. I knew I was being sucked in again, but there was nothing I could do about it.

It was a sweltering-hot day, and the sun hammered Washington without mercy. We were both silent and withdrawn during the ride.
What we had to do was the worst thing about our job—telling a family about the death of a loved one. I didn’t know how I
could do it this time.

Nina’s building was a well-kept brownbrick apartment house on Monroe Street. Miniature yellow roses were blooming out front
in bright-green window boxes. It didn’t look as if anything bad should happen to someone who lived here. Everything about
the place was so bright and hopeful, just as Nina had been.

I was becoming more and more disturbed and upset about the brutal and obscene murder, and about the fact that it probably
wouldn’t get a decent investigation from the department, at least not officially. Nana Mama would chalk it up to her conspiracy
theories about the white overlords and their “criminal disinterest” in the people of Southeast. She had often told me that
she felt morally superior to white people, that she would never, ever treat them the way they treated the black people of
Washington.

“Nina’s sister, Marie, takes care of the kids,” Sampson said as we rode down Monroe. “She’s a nice girl. Had a drug problem
one time, beat it. Nina helped her. The whole family is close-knit. A lot like yours. This is going to be real bad, Alex.”

I turned to him. Not surprisingly, he was taking Nina’s death even harder than I was. It’s unusual for him to show his emotions,
though. “I can do it, John. You stay here in the car. I’ll go up and talk to the family.”

Sampson shook his head and sighed loudly. “Doesn’t work that way, sugar.”

He snugged the Nissan up to the curb, and we both climbed out. He didn’t stop me from coming along to the apartment, so I
knew he wanted me there with him. He was right. This was going to be bad.

The Childs apartment took up the first and second floors. The front door was slightly ornate, aluminum. Nina’s husband was
already at the door. He had on the proletariat uniform of the D.C. Housing Authority, where he worked: mud-stained work boots,
blue trousers, a shirt marked
DCHA
. One of the babies snuggled in his arms, a beautiful girl who looked at me and smiled and cooed.

“Could we come inside for a moment?” Sampson asked.

“It’s Nina,” the husband said, and started to break down right there in the doorway.

“I’m sorry, William,” I spoke softly. “You’re right. She’s gone. She was found this morning.”

William Childs started to sob loudly. He was a powerful-looking workingman, but that didn’t matter. He held his bewildered
little girl to his chest and tried to control the crying, but he couldn’t.

“Oh, God, no. Oh, Nina, Nina baby. How could somebody kill her? How could anybody do that? Oh, Nina, Nina, Nina.”

A young, pretty woman came up behind him. She had to be Nina’s sister, Marie. She took the baby from her sister’s husband,
and the little girl began to scream, as if she knew what had happened. I had seen so many families, so many good people, who
had lost loved ones on these merciless streets. I knew it would never completely stop, but I felt it ought to get better.
It never did.

The sister motioned for us to come inside, and I noticed a hall table on which there were two pocketbooks, as if Nina were
still about. The apartment was comfortable looking and neat, with light bamboo and white-cushioned furniture. The whir of
a window air conditioner was constant. A Llardo porcelain figure of a nurse stood on an end table.

I was still sorting through details of the homicide scene, trying to connect the murder to the other Jane Does. We learned
that Nina had attended a health-care charity dinner on Saturday night. William had been working overtime. The family called
the police late Saturday night. Two detectives had shown up, but no one had been able to find Nina until now.

Then I was holding the baby while Nina’s sister took the chill off a bottle of formula. It was such a sad and poignant moment,
knowing this poor little girl would never see her mother again, never know how truly special her mother had been. It reminded
me of my own kids and their mother, and of Christine, who was afraid I would die during some murder investigation like this
one.

The older little girl came up to me while I was holding her baby sister. She was two or three at the most. “I got a new hairstyle,”
she said proudly and did a half-turn to show me.

“You did? It’s beautiful. Who did those braids for you?”

“My mommy,” said the girl.

It was an hour later when Sampson and I finally left the house. We drove away in silence and despair, the same way we’d come.
After a couple of blocks, Sampson pulled over in front of a ramshackle neighborhood bodega covered with beer and soda posters.

He gave a deep sigh, put his hands to his face, and then cried. I’d never ever seen John like this before, not in all the
years we’d been friends, not even when we were just boys. I reached out and laid a hand on his shoulder, and he didn’t move
away. Then he told me something he hadn’t shared before.

“I loved her, Alex, but I let her get away. I never told her how I felt. We have to get this son of a bitch.”

I SENSED I WAS AT THE START of another homicide mess. I didn’t want it, but I couldn’t stop the horror. I had to try to do
something about the Jane Does. I couldn’t just stand by and do nothing.

Although I was assigned to the Seventh District as a senior detective, my job as liaison with the FBI gave me some extra status
and also the freedom to occasionally work without too much supervision or interference. My mind was running free, and I’d
already made some associations between Nina’s murder and at least some of the unsolved killings. First, there had been no
identification on the victims at each crime scene. Second, the bodies had frequently been dumped in buildings where they might
not be found quickly. Third, not a single witness had seen anyone who might be a suspect. The most we ever got was that there
had been traffic, or people out on the street, where one of the bodies had been found. That told me that the killer knew how
to blend in, and that he possibly was a black man.

Around six that night, I finally headed home. This was supposed to be my day off. I had things to do there, and I was trying
to balance the demands of Job and homelife as best I could. I put on a happy face and headed inside the house.

Damon, Jannie, and Nana were singing “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ de Boat” in the kitchen. The show tune was music to my ears
and other essential parts of my anatomy. The kids looked happy as could be. There is a lot to be said for the innocence of
childhood.

I heard Nana say, “How about ‘I Can Tell the World’?” Then the three of them launched into one of the most beautiful spirituals
I know. Damon’s voice seemed particularly strong to me. I hadn’t really noticed that before.

“I feel like I just walked into a story by Louisa May Alcott,” I said, laughing for the first time that long day.