The Ways of the Dead (14 page)

Just after nine
the next morning, Sully edged the Ducati around stalled traffic on C Street, wedging it into a space between cars illegally parked in the designated “Motorcycles Only” spots.

He walked past five or six cars and there was the hot dog cart at the curb in front of the Department of Motor Vehicles. A half smoke with mustard and ketchup, lord yes, he ate it sitting on the steps, washing it down with some sort of crappy iced tea they sold in a glass bottle. He’d reached Doyle on the phone earlier, making plans to meet him at the store later in the day. The man had offered no clue as to what had been on his mind the night before, or why he couldn’t say what he had to say over the phone. This was annoying but it wasn’t like he was being Jensen, blaming him for homicides that cops couldn’t solve. Sully burped softly into his fist. Half smokes.

Just the other side of the two lanes was the U.S. District Courthouse, the federal seat of power, where the United States sued and was sued, where David Reese was the highest-ranking judge. It sat at the foot of Capitol Hill. Pennsylvania Avenue ran in front of it, America’s Main Street, and in the course of a dozen blocks to the west encompassed the Department of Justice, FBI headquarters, the U.S. Treasury, and the White House.

C Street, all of two blocks long, ran just behind the court, the ass end of it, and offered nothing but a portal into the shithole of Washington. The DMV squatted on one end, the great time-waster of urban bureaucracy, and upstairs, in the headquarters of the MPD, were the cops who plowed into the city’s drug deals, stolen cars, burglaries, phone scams, homicides, rapes, and beat downs, usually to little effect.

Next door, across a small park, was Superior Court, where the vast majority of defendants were no-papered the morning after their arrest, down in C-10, the same arraignment room that the Reese suspects had passed through. You could smell the depression in the room amid the piss and the plumbing and the burnt toast from the cafeteria down the hall. A tunnel ran between the court and MPD, used to shuttle defendants between the two without bringing them into daylight. If the defendants actually got charged, their plea bargains and their trials were heard in the brown-paneled courtrooms upstairs, where no one but a few family members and victims’ relatives were ever likely to show up.

Sully threw his foil wrapper and the bottle into a curbside trash can and walked in the DMV entrance, taking the back entrance into police headquarters, so that any beat reporters around the front entrance would not see him enter the place. He turned left and then right and walked around the long corridor, passing through security and heading for the Youth and Preventive Services division on the third floor, the dead end of missing persons cases.

The counter, a long marble divide that ran the length of the room, was not staffed. He stood there long enough to be noticed and a thickset woman in uniform pushed up from her desk in the back of the room and came to the counter and asked him what it was he thought that he wanted.

“Looking for Rudy Jeffries,” he said. “Could you tell him Sully Carter is here?”

“Why does Sully Carter want to see Rudy Jeffries?”

“Because I’d like to ask him about a missing woman. Actually, maybe two.”

She put both elbows on the counter and arched an eyebrow, bored or giving every appearance of it. “Relatives?”

“No.”

“Dependents?”

“Nope.”

“Then why do you need to talk to Sergeant Jeffries about them?”

Sully shifted his weight. “Because I’m a reporter working on a story about them, and I think Sergeant Jeffries might be able to help. He knows me.”

“I’m thrilled he does. You didn’t check in with Sergeant Malone, in the media relations department, did you? ’Cause he didn’t call up saying you were coming.”

“I know Sergeant Malone, and no, I didn’t, because I’m not looking to quote Rudy. I’m just—”

“Since you know so many people, you should know the protocol. Sergeant Malone is on the second floor. But then, hey, you know him. So you know where to find it.”

She was turning her back to him when Sully rapped on the counter and leaned forward. “Nobody’s trying to get around any departmental regs, okay, Officer? I got a simple question for Rudy about how something works. It’s no big fucking deal.”

He dropped the expletive for effect, figuring it would backfire or blast the door open a crack. It didn’t really matter if it was the former, since she was shutting him down already. Malone, he’d relay the request to Rudy, yes, but in his own sweet time, and Sully would lose half the day. She was the troll at the bridge, and trolls
ran
the bridges, and trolls were a pain in the ass, but you couldn’t get around them.

She sauntered back between the desks, and then into the corridor of offices. A minute later, Rudy came into view, beckoned impatiently, and disappeared back down the hall. Sully lifted the divider in the counter, smiled sweetly at the officer, who ignored him, and walked down the narrow corridor. The door was open. Rudy had his bulk crammed behind his desk. He was on the phone and motioned for Sully to sit down.

“’Cause I told him to be there,” he said into the phone. “I’m not interested in stories, Leon. I don’t care if it’s an excuse or a reason. I don’t care if his dick fell off. Tell him to pick it up and meet me at the time and place appointed.”

He hung up but kept looking at the phone, keeping his hand on top of it, as if it were going to run off if it got the chance.

“Kid is seventeen about to be eighteen and he’s got a dope problem, right, and he’s run off from home and now his momma’s looking for him, getting us involved?” he said, still looking at the phone. “Kid gets a lawyer. Didn’t
hire
him, see, just talking to him, right, on the phone, getting
advice
, and the kid doesn’t want to go home, and he’s saying, See, if I stay gone for another month then I’ll be eighteen, and the lawyer’s saying, Hhhmm, and I’m trying to get the kid’s ass outta wherever he’s staying before he gets picked up for something else, something that’s going to send his punk ass to lockup.”

“Why’s the lawyer care?”

“Leon. Leon King, one of your pale-faced brethren on a mission to save us from ourselves. Kid’s telling him life’s shit at home, momma’s a crackhead, blah blah.”

“Is she?”

Rudy rolled his neck, popping his vertebrae as he did so and finally looked up at Sully. “Merlie? I really don’t fucking think so. We graduated Roosevelt the same time. She works at Macy’s, the makeup counter. Sings alto at Metropolitan AME. So no, dipshit is
not
being raised by a crack momma.
Her
problem is she loves the little chump, which is a losing proposition, you ask me, but she called me up and got in my ear about it.” He leaned forward, meaty forearms on the edge of the desk, already looking somewhere between tired and worn down. “Which is not why you’re here.”

“Thought I’d come by and flirt with my girlfriend. What’s her name out there?”

“Sherice? Nah, Sherice don’t care for your kind.”

“Which ‘my kind’ we talking about?”

“Reporters. But now that I think about it, she probably don’t care for white people too much, neither.”

“Pity.”

“Well.”

“Noel Pittman.”

“Yes.”

“You ever see the pictures?”

“They are legend, brother.”

“You guys chasing it as a homicide?”

“Go ask Homicide.”

“It started off as a missing persons.”

“Out there in 4-D, yeah.”

“The homicide case did. But I’m talking about when it was just a missing persons thing. Don’t y’all track missing adults, citywide, out of this office?”

“Used to. But in that reorg the chief loves so much? He moved all the missing persons cases out to each ward last year, when he transferred Homicide out of central command.”

“Ah, shit.”

“Yeah, baby. The way it is now? The seven wards, they’re supposed to report their numbers into us but work the cases themselves. The adult cases, that is. The kids, citywide? We still do that here.”

“This sounds sort of fucked up.”

“It sort of is.”

“So even though Pittman started out as a missing person—an adult—you guys didn’t do anything with it down here out of headquarters.”

“Goodness, but you’re a bright boy.”

“The name Lana Escobar ring a bell?”

Rudy paused. “Last year. I was still in Vice. She turned up dead, up there at Park View.”

“So she was, as they say, known to the vice squad?”

“You’d have to call over there for the Rolodex. If she got booked, there’d be a record. It wasn’t a big enough name for me to know about, I can tell you that. I just remember, you did a little squib on it. Again, all this is when Chief started moving shit around. I was leaving Vice. People were leaving downtown, Homicide and Major Crimes and all that, out to the wards.”

“Her family says they filed a missing persons report.”

“Bully for them.”

“I mean, they said that when they reported her missing, that’s when they found out she was a Jane Doe down at the morgue.”

“I am grieving for them still.”

“It bother you that Noel Pittman, once a missing person, turns up in a basement in the 700 of Princeton Place, and Lana Escobar, once a missing person, turns up on the outfield grass at Park View Rec Center, which is also in the 700 of Princeton Place? And that they went missing within about six months of one another?”

Rudy leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. The fluorescent light overhead gleamed on his shaved dome. He looked up at the ceiling. “This is your story the other day.”

“Dick Jensen didn’t like it.”

“Dick’s not all bad. A hard-ass and old-school, but there’s worse. Played golf with him once. He didn’t cheat.”

“So you think the story was bullshit, too?”

“Well, look, you put it like you just did, the missing females? Yeah, it sounds off. But you know how many missing persons cases we get? Forty-one hundred last year. We’re at three thousand and change this year. That’s about ten a day, all year long, including weekends, holidays, and your religious observances. I think the homicide number last year was 260. This year, so far it’s 190? Something like that. So in a city that’s all of sixty-nine square miles, filled with thousands of reports of missing people, and where you get a homicide about every thirty, thirty-five hours, you’re asking is it odd that you get a combination on the same block?”

He unclasped his hands from the back of his head, pulled his gaze down from the ceiling, and leaned forward in his chair, his forearms back on the edge of the desk. “So I’d say probably not. I’d say maybe. You think it’s to the right of that.”

“How would I check into other girls, women missing up in that area?”

“Under eighteen, right here, but we can’t tell you shit because they’re underage. Adults, you got to go out to 4-D. But I got to tell you, don’t be looking at the files out there like they’re Scripture.”

“Because?”

“Well, one, I refer to my earlier statement, senator. It’s kind of fucked up. Two, adults have the right to disappear. It’s not a crime not to keep a fixed address, and it’s not against the law to move someplace your momma and them can’t find you. And I’m saying ninety-eight, ninety-nine percent of missing adults are the homeless, vagrants, the mentally ill, your hard-core methies and crackheads. They turn back up in a week or two in McPherson Square, Freedom Plaza, or living beneath an overpass in Brooklyn, or five years later in a homeless shelter in Minneapolis, or they turn up as a toe in the morgue. Not more than a handful are quote-unquote actual missing cases—kidnappings, girls who leave for work and never come home.

“Meanwhile, look at this here. You’re a uniform out there in your district, pulling double shifts, busting your ass? Family calls, brother’s missing, they’re hysterical or they’re pissed or they just feel on obligation. They know he’s fucked up but they call it in because it’s family and what else you gonna do? You catch the case, and this isn’t—you ever see the NCIC form? It’s like thirty fucking pages. Dental records, tattoos, list of surgeries. You wouldn’t believe. So you sit with them, fill out the form, but it’s not even a perp card, right? The guy didn’t do anything. You lose ninety minutes of the only life you’ll ever lead and you send it to us downtown.

“Now, five days later, the asshole turns up living beneath a tarp on Farragut Square. You find out he’s had a crack problem since high school and the family knew it but didn’t tell you because they knew if we knew then we wouldn’t look. They’d be right but it’s bullshit. So you’re pissed the family hustled you, but you got to stop what you’re doing, go erase him from your system, then call us and say, Hey, erase him, then we’ve got to have somebody actually erase him instead of just thinking about it, and if you forget or we forget then the numbers get off, and you can multiply that process by about a million. That’s the files you’re looking at.”

“So you’re saying the Old Testament is more reliable?”

“Don’t get me started on the Bible. Merlie is, what do I want to say, a special friend.”

You had to
be kidding. People tell you things like this, this is the way it is, and you still just couldn’t believe.

From a file drawer, the clerk at 4-D had pulled out page after printed page of official police notifications of the missing, the sheets spilling out onto the floor at one point, a sheaf of them. God.

On each sheet, a picture of the individual was centered below
MISSING
in bold, black type. Their name, their age, and last known location was listed at the bottom, along with an MPD phone number. There were more than a hundred, could have been two. They were in no particular order, and the database was not much more than a computerized mess. Some of the cases were closed out, with marks for “Reunited” or “Dead.”

Some listed the precise date they went missing; others just read “Summer 1998.” Some went back to the late 1980s. One—he took this one—had been filed the week before. Others listed an address for the missing, not the place where they were last seen. It had the surreal look and feel of a fever dream, postcards from a nightmare of America gone wrong.

He stopped at the bulletin board in the front lobby on the way out, another bastion of “Missing” posters, most of these handmade. There were pictures of smiling young women, plump-faced middle-aged men. Nearly all the faces were black, most of the rest Latino, and there were two or three white faces, old, grizzled men who did not look coherent. There were a couple of handbills that he recognized from the files he’d just gone through in the back. He went back to the copies he’d made and turned down an ear of the paper on those, to mark it as someone whose family appeared to be seriously involved.

Jogging across the street to the McDonald’s, he got a Coke and some French fries, went to a booth, pulled out a flask, topped off the Coke with a lace of bourbon from his flask, and settled in.

Six or seven cases immediately appeared to be possibilities. Linda Blackwell, Kellie Meikle, Rebekah Bolin, Andrea Thompson—good god, all these in the past three years, all listing a home address within four or five blocks of Princeton Place? Was
anybody
paying attention?

He pulled out his cell and started dialing. Blackwell, Meikle, both had answering machines. On Bolin, a woman answered, listened to his spiel, and said abruptly that her daughter was dead.

“Ma’am? I’m terribly sorry to hear that. I—I am. But it would be helpful to me if you could tell me where she was found. I don’t see her on a list of homicides.”

“They found ’Bekah beneath a house on Princeton Place, the 600 block,” she said.

Sully, who had been scribbling notes, stopped.

“Beneath a house?”

“The floorboards. The—what do they call it, the crawl space? It was abandoned.”

“When was this?”

“January, this year. When they found her. She’d been there awhile.”

He looked at the poster.

“It says here—the poster—that she was last seen in June the year before, like seven months prior.”

“That’s right.”

“Was it unusual for you not to see her for that long?”

“I told you she’s dead.”

“Yes’m, I hear you. I’m sorry. But—it sounds like—maybe—it says here she was twenty-three, that maybe she was out a lot.”

“’Bekah had been in the wind since she was seventeen.”

“But—why—why didn’t they call it a homicide? I don’t mean to pry, it’s just—”

“’Bekah had been on the streets since she dropped out. She weighed ninety-three pounds. She had been arrested I don’t know how many times for drugs. She’d come home and I’d have to put her out, send her to her father’s. She’d steal everything.”

“There was a community meeting at the rec center last night, and the police, they didn’t even mention her name as—as a case that might be—”

“They said her death was of ‘undetermined causes.’”

“But she was found beneath the floorboards of an abandoned house.”

“They said to me, they said, Look, she’s been doing crack forever, got busted recently for heroin, likely she got a hot dose, you know, and it likely gave her a heart attack—”

“Likely?”

“—and she died from that. Yeah, likely. What else? I loved my baby. But I ain’t going to sugarcoat what she was.”

He waited, trying to think of something kind, something patient, to say. Nothing came to mind. The lady knew what she knew.

“Okay, like I said, I’m writing about Princeton Place, and some of the things going on up there. Can I get a picture of Rebekah to—?”

“You can use the one on the flier.”

“Thank you. May I ask your name? I never—”

“Pearl. Pearl Bolin.”

“And, just making sure I heard right, you were her mother?”

“I still am.”

He hung up, the whiskey forgotten, his mind tumbling the numbers to a combination lock. Something was off here, something—this many women and he wasn’t even looking hard yet . . . Where was it, where was it? There it was. Williams. The handbill from the police station, Michelle Williams, the dad from the night before.

He dialed the number on the flier and held his breath, looking at the picture on the handbill, a smiling young woman, plump, pretty.

The phone picked up. The baritone he’d heard last night.

“Hello? Mr. Williams? Sir, my name is Sully Carter, I’m a newspaper reporter, and I’m working on a story about missing persons in the District? Right around Princeton Place, in fact? I was trying to reach the family of Michelle Williams. Someone mentioned her name at a community meeting last night, and I was just following up to see if—”

“This is Michelle’s father. That was me. Why you calling? Has she been found?”

“No, not that I know of. I’m a reporter. I’m working on a story about missing young women. Michelle appears to be one of those. That’s why I was calling.”

Silence. It went on.

He looked at the phone and said into it, “To find out some more about her. I saw the flier at the police station, saw the report, and heard just a part of your question last night. It looks like she’s been gone about a week.”

The phone rustled. “Four. It’s been four
weeks
. They finally just now put out the flier, they got the date wrong to boot. What else is it you need to know, reporter man?” The tone wasn’t hostile. It was resigned, and Sully sensed an opening.

“Well, actually, a lot, Mr. Williams. The basics—the last time you saw her, places you might think she could have gone—but also something about who she is, what she likes to do, what her plans are.”

“
Were.
What her plans
were
. If my baby’s been gone four weeks without talking to me, she’s dead. But I’m asking, what’s it to you?”

Sully let out a breath. “It’s . . . it’s partly my job, Mr. Williams. I’m not calling you in my spare time because I have an odd interest in missing young women. I’m at work. I’ve been doing this twenty years and I’m serious about it. There are a couple of other girls who are missing from around this neighborhood and—I’m not going to lie to you—they’ve turned up as homicide victims, or drug cases. I’m writing about them, and that research led me to Michelle’s name. I’d like to come see you, find out some more about your daughter, and, if it’s okay with you, put her picture in the paper.”

There was another raft of silence.

“Where are you,” the baritone said, “right now?”

“The McDonald’s on Georgia, just up from the intersection with Missouri.”

“You know where Warder is?”

“I do.”

“I’m at 3535. I got to be at work at four. You can come now, you hurry.”

•   •   •

The block was mostly row houses and the Williams place was like the rest: two stories with a basement, an awning over a concrete porch (his was painted gunship gray), four steps down to a grassy yard, a brick walkway to the street. A rusting chain-link fence lined the sidewalk. Two green city-issued trash cans sat just inside the fence, their plastic shells mottled and stained. Sully turned to look up the street toward Princeton Place as he opened the gate to walk into the yard. He could make out the stone edifice of Park View Elementary two blocks down. On the far side of that, in the baseball field at Park View Rec Center, was where Lana Escobar had been killed in the outfield grass. Noel Pittman had lived in the first building behind the center field fence. Rebekah Bolin, she’d been found on the east side of the Warder intersection. Michelle Williams could have walked by all of them in less than five minutes.

When he knocked, the bolt drew on the interior door, and it swung inward to reveal a tall, broad-shouldered man, a paunch beginning to strain the front of the T-shirt that was on under his unbuttoned Amtrak uniform.

“Sully Carter,” he said, opening the screen door and extending a hand.

“Curtis Williams,” he said, gripping Sully’s hand, backing up a step to let him inside. It was a narrow fit; Williams was a big man.

The hallway was dark, as was the front room off to the right. It was quiet save for the tick of a ceiling fan in the living room, its rotation slightly off, clicking on each circuit.

“The kitchen,” Williams said, gesturing down the hall. Sully went into the room, the yellow tile, dim light overhead. There was a small rectangular wooden table pushed against the wall and two chairs. Sully pulled one out and sat down, putting a card of his on the table as he did.

“I got maybe twenty minutes before I got to go,” Williams said.

“Yes, sir, listen—thanks for the time,” Sully said, looking him in the eye. He had maybe sixty seconds to gain his trust. People made their minds up fast, almost on instinct. It was about a feel, a perception, and that was based on physical observations and a sense of comfort. It was about sincerity and it couldn’t be taught or faked.

“You work at the Amtrak station, Mr. Williams, or you make the runs?”

“The runs, mostly. I do the ticketing, keep the books en route. Sometimes the café car when they don’t have anyone else.”

“You don’t sound like the new guy.”

Williams raised his eyebrows. “Twenty-three years,” sounding out each syllable. His voice was deep, but he spoke so softly Sully had to lean forward to catch it. He took the card Sully extended and looked at it while Sully went back over the story he was writing. Thirty or forty seconds into the explanation, Williams reached over into a stack of papers on the table, and pulled out a picture of Michelle. It was a school photograph. She had her hair pulled back, a bright smile, a deep blue T-shirt, and dangling earrings. Thin eyebrows, indicating they were plucked and managed. She was a little on the heavy side. She was twenty-four, her father said.

Sully smiled, looking at it.

“You got kids?” Williams asked.

Sully shook his head no. “It wasn’t good when I grew up. I got a sister who I haven’t seen in six, seven years. She lives out in Phoenix. Kids appear to be something my family doesn’t do well.”

Williams nodded. “I hear you. My wife took off when Michelle was three. It was just me and her. I got people, but they’re down in North Carolina. She’d go stay with my mother in the summers. I stopped taking overnights on the train for a long time back when the wife left, just up to New York and back, the same day. Michelle and I did okay. She went to school down there at Cardozo.”

Sully wrote this in his notebook and nodded. “What’s her birthday?”

“August 22, 1975.”

“Could you tell me about the day she disappeared?”

The man pulled out a chair, far enough from the table that his legs did not fit under it. He sprawled as much as sat. When he went from standing to sitting, his body posture went from dominant to defensive.

“Not really,” he said. “I was out on an overnight to New York. I had started back on those a few years ago. Last train up, first one back the next morning.” His voice had the same resigned effect that it had over the phone. “Now, see, I didn’t think it was unusual when she wasn’t home when I got back after my run. She liked to stay with one of her friends over the weekend. She was grown. And, ah, she had problems with the drugs, Mr. Carter. She’d be out to all hours. She’d get one job, lose it, and go back to getting high. So it wasn’t all that out of place for her to be gone a few days.”

“She’d been to rehab?”

“Several times. We’d fought about it. She’d been raised right. And then—I don’t know. High school, started running with the lowlifes. This neighborhood, I been here since I got out of the service, and that was just before Michelle was born. Older folks been here longer. And it just seems that a lot of our kids, they’re good, but they just wound up without any . . . any ambition.”

Sully leaned back in his chair, pulling up his pen from the notebook for a moment. “It’s hard, with kids.”

“It was a joy. For a long time. When she was four, I always said I wanted her to stay that age forever.”

“What was that date, when you came back from that overnight?”

“September third. A Friday.”

“Was she working anywhere when she went missing?”

“No. She’d worked at the Hunger Stopper up there on Georgia for a hot minute, worked at some place in Dupont Circle, then the drugstore over on Sixteenth. That was all in about two years. She got fired from each one. I don’t think anybody wanted to hire her after that.”

“So you got back that Saturday, what happened?”

“I got back about one in the afternoon. She wasn’t around, and like I say, that wasn’t unusual. She didn’t come home that night, and that wasn’t unusual, either. I tried her pager Sunday afternoon.”

“She didn’t call back?”

Williams shook his head and let one of his massive hands flutter off the table, a surprisingly delicate gesture. “Never again. I was home then—they let me take a paid week off to look for her, not even making me take vacation—but there was nothing. It was like she walked off the edge of the earth. I went down to the police station Tuesday, I think it was. They looked up her record—she’d been arrested once, for drugs—and I told them she had that problem. They said she hadn’t been picked up, but to try the homeless shelters and then try them back.”

Sully looked down at the flier he’d taken off the wall at the police station. “Hunh. This wasn’t posted until October 3, a few days ago. It lists September 13 as the date last seen.”