Pop Goes the Weasel (5 page)

“I take that as a
high
compliment,” Nana said. She was somewhere between her late seventies and early eighties now, but not telling—and also not
showing—her age.

“Who’s Louise Maise Alcott?” Jannie said, and made a lemon-sucking face. She is a healthy little skeptic, though almost never
a cynic. In that way, she takes after both her father and her grandmother.

“Look it up tonight, little one. Fifty cents in your pocket for the correct answer,” I told her.

“You’re on.” Jannie grinned. “You can pay me right now if you like.”

“Me, too?” Damon asked.

“Of course. You can look up Jane Austen,” I said to him. “Now what’s with the heavenly harmonizing? I like it very much, by
the way. I just want to know what the special occasion is.”

“We’re just singing while we prepare dinner,” Nana said, and stuck up her nose and twinkled her eyes. “You play jazz and the
blues on the piano, don’t you? We harmonize like angels sometimes. No special reason necessary. Good for the soul, and the
soul food, I suppose. Can’t hurt.”

“Well, don’t stop singing on my account,” I said, but they had already stopped. Too bad. Something was going on; I’d figured
out that much. A musical mystery to be solved in my own house.

“We still on for boxing after dinner?” I asked cautiously. I was feeling a little vulnerable because I didn’t want them to
turn me down for the boxing lesson that has become a ritual.

“Of course,” Damon said, and frowned like I must be out of my mind to even ask such a question.

“Of course. Pshaw. Why wouldn’t we be?” Jannie said, and brushed off my silly question with a wave of her hand. “How’s Ms.
Johnson?” she asked then. “You two talk today?”

“I still want to know what the singing was all about?” I answered Jannie with a question of my own.

“You have valuable information. Well, so do I. Tit for tat,” she said. “How do you like that?”

A little later, I decided to call Christine at home. Lately it had seemed more like the way it had been between us before
I got involved with the Mr. Smith case. We talked for a while, and then I asked her to go out on Friday.

“Of course. I’d like that, Alex. What should I wear?” she asked.

I hesitated. “Well, I always like what you choose—but wear something special.”

She didn’t ask why.

AFTER ONE of Nana’s roast-chicken dinners with baked sweet potatoes and homemade bread, I took the kids downstairs for their
weekly boxing lesson. Following the Tuesday night fight with the kids, I glanced at my watch and saw that it was already a
little past nine.

The doorbell rang a moment later. I set down a terrific book called
The Color of Water
and pushed myself up from my chair in the family room.

“I’ll get it. It’s probably for me,” I called out.

“Maybe it’s Christine. You never know,” Jannie teased, then darted away into the kitchen. Both of the kids adored Christine,
in spite of the fact that she was the principal at their school.

I knew exactly who was out on the porch. I had been expecting four homicide detectives from the First District—Jerome Thurman,
Rakeem Powell, Shawn Moore, and Sampson.

Three of the detectives were standing out on the porch. Rosie the cat and I let them inside. Sampson arrived about five minutes
later, and we all gathered in the backyard. What we were doing at the house wasn’t illegal, but it wouldn’t make us a lot
of friends in high places in the police department.

We sat on lawn chairs, and I set out beer and low-fat pretzels that two-hundred-seventy-pound Jerome scoffed at. “Beer and
low-fat pretzels. Give me a
break
, Alex. You lost your mind? Hey, you having an affair with my wife? You must have got this bad idea from Claudette.”

“I bought these especially for you, big man. I’m trying to give your heart a break,” I told him, and the others guffawed loudly.
We all pick on Jerome.

The five of us had been getting together informally for a couple of weeks. We were beginning to work on the Jane Does, as
we called them. Homicide had no official investigation going on; it wasn’t trying to link the murders to a serial killer.
I’d tried to start one and been turned down by Chief Pittman. He claimed that I hadn’t discovered a pattern linking any of
the murders, and besides that, he didn’t have any extra detectives for duty in Southeast.

“I suppose you’ve all heard about Nina Childs by now?” Sampson asked the other detectives. All of them had known Nina, and
of course Jerome had been at the murder scene with us.

“The good die young.” Rakeem Powell frowned severely and shook his head. Rakeem is smart and tough and could go all the way
in the department. “Least they do in Southeast.” His eyes went cold and hard.

I told them what I knew, especially that Nina had been found with no I.D. I mentioned everything else I had noticed at the
tenement crime scene. I also took the occasion to talk some more about the rash of unsolved murders in Southeast. I went over
the devastating stats I had compiled, mostly in my free time.

“Statistic like that in Georgetown or the Capitol district, people in this city be enraged. Going ballistic. Be
Washington Post
headlines every day. The president himself be involved. Money no object. National tragedy!” Jerome Thurman railed on and
waved his arms around like signal flags.

“Well, we are here to do something about it,” I said in a calmer voice. “Money
is
no object with us. Neither is time. Let me tell you what I feel about this killer,” I continued. “I think I know a few things
about him.”

“How’d you come up with the profile?” Shawn Moore asked. “How can you stand thinking about these kinky bastards as much as
you do?”

I shrugged. “It’s what I do best. I’ve analyzed all the Jane Does,” I said. “It took me weeks working on my own. Just me and
the kinky bastard.”

“Plus, he studies rodent droppings,” said Sampson. “I saw him bagging the little turds. That’s his real secret.”

I grinned and told them what I had so far. “I think one male is responsible for at least some of the killings. Maybe as many
as a dozen murders. I don’t think he’s a brilliant killer, like Gary Soneji or Mr. Smith, but he’s clever enough not to be
caught. He’s organized, reasonably careful. I don’t think we’ll find he has any prior record. He probably has a decent job.
Maybe even a family. My FBI friends at Quantico agree with that.

“He’s almost definitely caught up in an escalating fantasy cycle. I think he’s into his fantasies big-time. Maybe he’s in
the process of becoming someone or something new. He might be forming a new personality for himself. He isn’t finished with
the killing, not by any means.

“I’ll make some educated guesses. He hates his old self, though the people closest to him probably don’t realize it. He might
be ready to abandon his family, job, any friends he has. At one time he probably had very strong feelings and beliefs about
something—law and order, religion, the government—but not anymore. He kills in different ways; there’s no set formula.
He knows a lot about killing people. He’s used different kinds of weapons. He may have traveled overseas. Or maybe he’s spent
time in Asia. I think it’s very possible he’s a black man. He’s killed several times in Southeast—no one’s noticed him.”

“Fuck me,” Jerome Thurman said to that. “Any
good
news, Alex?”

“One thing, and this is a long shot. But it feels right to me. I think he might be suicidal. It fits the profile I’m working
on. He’s living dangerously, taking a lot of chances. He might just blow himself up.”

“Pop goes the weasel,” Sampson said.

That was how we came to name the killer: the Weasel.

GEOFFREY SHAFER looked forward to playing the Four Horsemen every Thursday night from nine until about one in the morning.

The fantasy game was everything to him. There were three other master players around the world. The players were the Rider
on the White Horse, Conqueror; the Rider on the Red Horse, War; the Rider on the Black Horse, Famine; and himself, the Rider
on the Pale Horse, Death.

Lucy and the children knew they were forbidden to disturb him for any reason once he locked himself into the library on the
second floor. On one wall was his collection of ceremonial daggers, nearly all of them purchased in Hong Kong and Bangkok.
Also on the wall was the rowing oar from the year his college team had won the “Bumps.” Shafer nearly always won the games
he played.

He had been using the Internet to communicate with the other players for years, long before the rest of the world caught on.
Conqueror played from the town of Dorking, in Surrey, outside London; Famine traveled back and forth between Bangkok, Sydney,
Melbourne, and Manila; and War usually played out of Jamaica, where he had a large estate on the sea. They had been playing
Horsemen for seven years.

Rather than becoming repetitive, the fantasy game had expanded itself. It had grown every year, becoming something new and
even more challenging. The object was to create the most delicious and unusual fantasy or adventure. Violence was almost always
part of the game, but not necessarily murder. Shafer had been the first to claim that his stories weren’t fantasies at all,
that he lived them in the real world. Now the others would do so as well from time to time. Whether they really lived their
fantasies, Shafer couldn’t tell. The object was to create the evening’s most startling fantasy, to get a rise out of the other
players.

At nine o’clock his time, Shafer was on his laptop. So were the others. It was rare for one of them to miss a session, but
if he did, he left lengthy messages and sometimes drawings or even photographs of supposed lovers or victims. Films were occasionally
used, and the other players then had to decide whether the scenes were stage-acted or cinema verité.

Shafer couldn’t imagine missing a chapter of the game himself. Death was by far the most interesting character, the most powerful
and original. He had missed important social and embassy affairs just to be available for Thursday nights. He had played when
he had pneumonia, and once when he’d had a painful double-hernia operation the day before.

The Four Horsemen was unique in so many ways, but most important was the fact that there was no single gamemaster to outline
and control the action of the game. Each of the players had complete autonomy to write and visualize his own story, as long
as he played by the roll of the dice and remained inside the parameters of the character.

In effect, in Horsemen there were four gamemasters. There was no other fantasy game like it. It was as gruesome and shocking
as the participants’ imaginations and their skills at presentation brought them.

Conqueror, Famine, and War had all signed on.

Shafer began to type.

SOMETHING WAS UP, and I didn’t think I’d like it very much. I arrived at the Seventh District Police Station just before seven-thirty
the following morning. I’d been summoned by the powers-that-be to the station, and it was a tough deal. I’d worked until two
in the morning trying to get a lead on Nina Childs’s murder.

I had a feeling that the day was starting out wrong. I was tense and more uptight than I usually let myself become. I didn’t
like this early-morning command appearance one bit.

I shook my head, frowned, tried to roll the kinks out of my neck. Finally, I gritted my teeth tightly before opening the mahogany
door. Chief of Detectives George Pittman was lying in wait in his office, which in fact consists of three connecting offices,
including a conference room.

The Jefe, as he’s called by his many “admirers,” had on a boxy gray business suit, an overstarched white shirt, and a silver
necktie. His gray-and-white-streaked hair was slicked back. He looked like a banker, and in some ways he is one. As he never
tires of saying, he is working with a fixed budget and is always mindful of manpower costs, overtime costs, caseload costs.
Apparently, he is an efficient manager, which is why the police commissioner overlooks the fact that he’s a bully, bigot,
racist, and careerist.

Up on his wall were three large, important-looking pushpin maps. The first showed two consecutive months of rapes, homicides,
and assaults in Washington. The second map did the same for residential and commercial burglaries. The third map showed auto
thefts. The maps and the
Post
said that crime was down in D.C., but not where I live.

“Do you know why you’re here, why I wanted to see you?” Pittman asked point-blank. No socializing or small talk from The Jefe,
no niceties. “Of course you do, Dr. Cross. You’re a psychologist. You’re supposed to know how the human mind works. I keep
forgetting that.”

Be cool, be careful, I told myself. I did the thing Chief Pittman least expected: I smiled, then said softly, “No, I really
don’t
know. I got a call from your assistant. So I’m here.”

Pittman smiled back, as if I’d made a pretty good joke. Then he suddenly raised his voice, and his face and neck turned bright
red; his nostrils flared, exposing the bristly hairs in his nose.

One of his hands was clenched into a tight fist, while the other was stretched open. His fingers were as rigid as the pencils
sticking up from the leather cup on his desk.