The Ways of the Dead (2 page)

Sully Carter, on
his third Basil Hayden’s (on the rocks, water back), felt the October air blow into the bar through an open window near his booth. He closed his eyes for a second, it felt that good, like a kiss from home.

His white linen shirt, freshly pressed at the beginning of the day, was wrinkled and untucked from his jeans. The sleeves were rolled up at the cuffs and he had not bothered with the razor, it being a Friday. He was sitting in the back corner of Stoney’s, the Ducati racing jacket slung over the seat on the booth, the helmet beneath it. He felt good enough to punch somebody.

He rattled the ice in his glass, sipped, and felt the slight and lovely sting of bourbon on the tip of the tongue. Sneaking another glance at the bar, he caught a glimpse of Dusty, still working, taking orders next to Dmitri, the other bartender, the guy from the Ukraine. She didn’t see him look this time, but she had earlier, so maybe that could count as flirting or foreplay or something.

Lean as a light pole, Sully spoke in a slight rasp, a trace of a Louisiana accent, more centered on the Irish-German sections of Nawlins, but it took an ear. He was taller than most people, but because he tended to lean back on his left leg it wasn’t always apparent. The shrapnel blast he had taken while covering the Bosnian war, the hot metal that had eaten up his right knee, broken three ribs, and sliced open his left cheek—that bitch had tattooed its signature across his face and torso, too.

There were horizontal scars down his cheek, with tiny little welts around both eyes. There was a long, horizontal scar at the top of his forehead, but it was mostly concealed by the shock of black hair that fell slightly over it. He had twin scars that ran down his right side like a short set of railroad tracks, and the skin on his right knee looked like it had been put together by Dalí during a hangover.

The unusual gait, the scars, the posture, the distant manner—it all combined to create a menacing air of someone who cared less about his future than the people around him cared about theirs.

Stoney’s, his favorite dive, sat four blocks from the courthouse, three from the Metropolitan Police Department headquarters, and five from the U.S. Attorney’s Office. It catered to cops and prosecutors and assorted stiffs of the downtown proletarian set. It had worn hardwood floors, a mirror behind the bar that had lost most of its silvering, and an air that the smart set drank somewhere else.

Now he looked back across the booth at his dinner partner, Eva Harris, in Homicide for eight years, fifteen in the Agency.

“So why didn’t the—the jury—I mean, why didn’t they convict him for killing Fat Chucky?” he said.

“Self-defense,” she said.

“Self-defense from what?”

“Self-defense from Fat Chucky. Fat Chucky went six-one and three-twenty. Mr. Hastings testified that Chucky wanted to make him be ‘sexually submissive.’”

“At ten in the morning? On the general compound of D.C. jail?”

“That was the testimony.”

“How did Mr. Hastings defend himself?”

“With a ten-pound barbell from the weight-lifting thing.”

“Beat Chucky to death?”

“Beat him to death.”

“Mr. Hastings,” Sully said, “must not like to be sexually submissive.”

“Submissive, my ass. Chucky owed money. Sly Hastings beat the man’s skull open in front of a hundred and twenty-five witnesses and walked because everybody on the general compound knows better than to testify against him.”

“And how did Sly Hastings come to be in D.C. jail?”

“Weapons charge. This is, what, five, six years ago? He was awaiting trial.”

“And?”

“Beat that, too.”

“I’m detecting a pattern, counselor.”

“Yeah. There is. Mr. Hastings offs people and gets away with it,” Eva said, a little heat now. “He looks like a bookworm. Wears those little round John Lennon glasses, did you know that? Read Jean Toomer during the last trial.
Cane
. Fucker made notes in the margins.”

“You denying the man an interest in the Harlem Renaissance?”

“Your neighborhood don doesn’t usually have literary tastes more sophisticated than
Penthouse Letters
.”

“You sure this is his occupation? Because, what are we talking here—three trials, two hung juries, one acquittal? I don’t want to go wading in on a piece about a Teflon defendant if the dude is, what do I want to say, small time.”

“Then don’t.”

“But you—you think he’s a badass.”

“I don’t
think
anything. I’m
telling
you. Sly Hastings runs things. He runs things because he gets rid of people who get in the way of him running things, and then he skates on it.”

“You got hard feelings on the Fat Chucky thing,” he said.

She put a hand to her short dreadlocks pulled back into a ponytail, touched her wineglass, and then set her hand back on the table. Eva, she would look at you for five seconds before saying anything, and then burst out,
rat-a-tat-tat
. She had grown up in West Virginia, went to Georgetown Law, and had no accent from anywhere unless she wanted to. When she did want to, it leaned more to city than country, Sully thought, her saying things like “he left out the house” and “my decedent.”

Sully ate a French fry. He liked Eva. She was one of the few people in the courthouse he allowed himself to address by first name. He had done so since shortly after he came back, blown up and fucked up, from Bosnia. He looked at her now, sitting back in her booth, that saddle of freckles across the bridge of her nose. She was looking to the front of the bar, as if she recognized a cop coming in. On the plate in front of her was half a grilled cheese she had not touched in fifteen minutes.

He reached across the table, picked it up, took a bite, and there was a buzzing noise. Eva looked down at her right hip, lifted her pager, and said, “It’s not me.”

Sully rolled his eyes, still chewing, and opened his backpack. He pulled out the chunky little cellphone. The screen was illuminated and the unit vibrated. He looked at the numbers that came up on the screen and his eyebrows furrowed. “They give me this thing this summer,” he said. “It’s supposed to be like a perk. What it is? It’s like one of those electronic tether anklets they put on parolees. It’s a way for the bosses to find you.”

He extended a finger and punched the little green handset sign to open the line, then put it to his ear.

“R.J., brother. It’s Friday night. What?”

The low baritone burst into his ear, aural shrapnel that made him tilt his head away from the phone.

“Waitwaitwaitwait. Just wait. Is—is Chris sure? I mean, come
on
. That don’t even make—” Sully looked down at his watch. It was nearly eight. “You want Chris to write it, why are we talking?” He motioned to Eva for a pen, a fetching motion with the fingers of his left hand. She pulled one from her purse and Sully scribbled an address on a cocktail napkin. He said yes and yes and then fuck and clicked it off.

He set the phone down on the table and gave Eva her pen and drained the whiskey. He put his fist against his mouth to stifle a cough. He pulled three twenties from his wallet and dropped them on the table.

“Somebody just killed David Reese’s daughter,” he said, coughing now. “Tossed the body, a dumpster up on Georgia.” He looked at his napkin. “The 3700? Right around the intersection with, what’s that gonna be, New Jersey?”

Eva blinked once but did not otherwise move, the same inscrutable expression he’d seen her use in court, the judge allows an objection, her face, the mouth in a line, she’d just say to the air, to God, to the witness,
So then you just didn’t see anything after the gun went off
 . . .

“I thought Reese lived out to McLean,” she said.

“He does. Maybe the girl—” He looked down at the napkin. “Sarah, it’s Sarah, was just dumped there. If this shit ain’t right and Chris is, what, peeing in his pants and getting R.J. worked up—I mean, you piss off the brass and—”

The cell buzzed again and he looked down. “Goddammit. He’s outside already. Chris. R.J. sent him over here to pick me up. Said he figures my blood alcohol is over the limit for the bike but not to file.”

“Isn’t R.J. your editor?”

“At last report.”

“And he doesn’t care if you’re half lit?”

“Anybody who can’t file drunk,” Sully said, “oughta turn in their fucking press card.”

He grabbed his cycle gear and pushed himself out of the booth, Eva following. Sully pushed through the light crowd, the drinkers at the bar, making for the front door, Eva a step behind. The light seemed to him uneven, the voices too loud, the energy he felt a few moments ago dissipating, switching gears. He did not see Dusty behind the bar, just Dmitri, and then they were outside, the sky giving up the last bit of light. He felt the cool evening air as a tactile sensation, as if a butterfly landed on his forearm and sat there, wings beating.

“What kind of death wish do you have to have,” he asked Eva, giving her a distracted peck on the cheek before walking to Chris Hunter’s car idling at the curb, “to kill the daughter of the chief judge of the federal court at the foot of Capitol Hill?”

Sully flung open
the passenger door of Chris’s beater, a nine-year-old Honda CRX, shoving notebooks and a camera and a stack of newspapers from the seat onto the floorboard. He slung the jacket and the helmet to the back and tumbled into the front seat.

Chris, pudgy faced, fat little fingers on the steering wheel, pulled out hard, jerking Sully backward into the seat and, by force of forward motion, slamming the door shut behind him.

“She’s already dead, bubba,” Sully said, wondering whether the vowels were slurred.

“Dead
line
,” Chris shot back, shifting into third. “Reese is supposed to be the next nominee to the Supreme Court. This is
monster.
”

Sully stifled a snort. The youth, the enthusiasm. He looked down and there were wrappers of fast-food sandwiches and paper cups. He burped. The backseat had three cardboard boxes and a mound of clothes on the floor.

“I see you’ve started your sophomore year,” he said.

“Just moved to a new place,” the younger man said, not taking his eyes off the road but sensing the look-around.

“When was that?”

“June.”

Chris took them up through the few ragged blocks of Chinatown on Seventh, crossed Massachusetts Avenue, and headed north on Georgia. The austere beauty of Federal Washington faded into a charmless strip of storefronts and row houses with window units sagging out of their upstairs windows. Black iron bars covered the street-front doors and plate-glass windows. Men stood or sat by open doorways, beer cans and cigarettes in their hands, the fresh evening drawing them out. Sully let his window down and let the air rush in.

After a while, he said, “It’s October, ace.”

Chris, leaning forward, ignoring the jibe, both hands on the wheel, was going on about the way he’d gotten the call from a beat cop almost an hour earlier. He seemed impressed the officer had thought to call him, an honest-to-god tip on something big. He was talking rapidly and his eyes were darting back and forth. Sully kept his mouth zipped.

A few minutes later, traffic stalled. Sully leaned out the window. Georgia was blocked off up ahead, the revolving lights of the police squad cars and fire trucks marking the edge of the crime scene barricade.

Chris cut the wheel hard to the left to make the turn onto Park Road, three blocks short of their destination. He went up to an alley, turned right, and then pulled into the parking lot of a bank and Giant Liquors, the letters on the sign in banana-yellow neon. He was turning off the ignition when his cell rang.

“Hey, man. I’m here, parking. Where are you? Yeah. The where? I can go with that?” He listened again. “Okay. Yeah, yeah, right. Just as a basis of knowledge. Not attributing to you.”

He hung up after a moment.

“Sorry. My buddy. Gives us official confirmation on one Sarah Emily Reese, DOB February 14, 1984. Parents notified and are here. In the chief’s car at the moment, inside the cordon. FBI is here, so are the U.S. Marshals. Secret Service. D.C. cops. The mayor. It’s a cluster-fuck. The kid was at a dance class or something. My guy says it’s on the west side of Georgia. Apparently Sarah went to get a soda at the store catty-corner across the street. Ran out the back. Found in the dumpster in an alley behind the store. Body’s already been removed.”

Sully wrote it all down.

“Why was she taking classes here and not in some tony studio out in Potomac?”

“The owner, what, Regina something or other, used to be a dancer in Alvin Ailey in New York.”

“Why’d she run out the back?”

“I don’t know.”

“That would seem to be the question we would want to know.”

They got out of the car and walked down to the commercial strip of Georgia, then up the sidewalk, Sully twisting his shoulders to get through the mass of bodies, the crowd stalling and spreading out against the yellow tape.

Three squad cars were blocking off Georgia northbound at the intersection of Otis Place. Sully could see a knot of uniformed officers outside a building on the west side of Georgia, which he presumed to be the dance studio. There was another knot on the far side of the street, in front of Doyle’s Market.

They were on the south side of the scene and the police barricade was keeping the crowd a block away from the store where the girl had been killed. Sully guessed they would also be blocking the north approach from the same distance. If the east and west approaches were also blocked off like that, the perimeter would be four city blocks. He wrote that down in his notebook, too. The wide swath of roped-off real estate told him MPD was clueless and was casting a wide net.

He inhaled deeply, trying to get a read on the scene, trying to figure if Dusty would be pissed about his unannounced departure, trying to shake the whiskey out of his head.

He looked to his right, up the slight incline onto Otis, and could see the Park View Recreation Center at the end of the block. The name Lana Escobar floated into his mind. That was last summer, the last time he’d written about the neighborhood. She was a working girl whose body had been found on the outfield grass of the complex’s baseball field. The police had scarcely bothered to block off the outfield. There had been no gawking crowd. It had been raining and the police tape had sagged to the ground. The mud beneath his feet, the techs lifting her into the body bag, the sound of the rain spattering on the hard plastic, Jesus.

“So how are we doing this?”

It was Chris at his elbow, the kid looping a lanyard with his photo ID badge around his neck. He had his mini-recorder and a small notebook in one hand. He looked like a fat puppy, ready to chase a tennis ball. Chris was beginning to annoy the shit out of him, and when he was annoyed and drunk he tended to be unpleasant. So the people in the Employee Assistance Program had told him. The little fuckers.

“You want to do the street, since you know people up here,” Chris panted, “and I’ll do the cops?”

Sully patted his pockets. He had his ID. Fabulous. And gum. Gum was useful, particularly to take the smell of bourbon off your breath. People had been known to misunderstand. He put the side of the notebook in his mouth and used both hands to tuck his shirttails back in. He pulled the notebook from between his teeth and popped a stick of Juicy Fruit in his mouth.

“You do that, champ,” he said. “I’ll do the vox pop.”

He looked ahead at the mosh pit of reporters clustered at the far side of the street, the television antennas rising like metal saplings. Dave Roberts was over there, setting up for a live feed, the hometown hero. Played high school ball at DeMatha before Maryland and the NFL and was now the local television reporter everyone loved.

“Here’s a thought,” Sully said to Chris. “Don’t ask it up there in that scrum. Just nudge the cops that maybe this is random. Everybody else is going to be playing up the aspect that it’s got something to do with Reese. See if there’s any intel that maybe it’s not.”

Chris looked up at him and shifted his weight from his right foot to his left. He didn’t like the idea, Sully could tell. He was looking for an inside tip on something big—a local gang member, a Colombian drug lord, or maybe one of those anti-government Idaho nut jobs—striking at the federal bench. It would be days and days of 1-A stories, the kind of boost that would shoot him up from the dredges of Metro to the exalted wonders of National.

Chris shrugged. “I’ll ask.” He started to turn into the crowd, then leaned back. “You need a ride back? Should we meet up?”

Sully shook his head. “I’ll get the cycle stuff later.”

Overhead, far above the streetlights, two police helicopters swept back and forth, shining spotlights onto roofs, alleys, backyards. Sully felt the first touch of fall place a finger at the nape of his neck, the warning note of winter about to descend. There was still the bourbon buzz tingling through his bones, and now the electric murmur of
murder
on people’s lips, the morbid milling around, blood on the asphalt, the dark thrill of a Friday night being turned into something big, something mean, something to talk about. The television trucks, the networks and cable news channels, they were pouring into a neighborhood they usually never noticed, beaming a bit of neighborhood D.C. into living rooms in Seattle and Chicago and Tucson.
I was just coming out the store, you know, and then all these police cars come flying up, cops with guns out and shit
 . . .

He checked his watch. Fifty-seven minutes until deadline. A shell burst of adrenaline ran up his spine.

Edging through the gawkers, he could see Dave outside the television van, wrestling a tie around his neck. His cameraman was setting up a shot with the dance studio across the street in the background. Sully could see the “Big Apple” sign across the second floor. The stems of the “A” were shaped like a pair of dancer’s legs; the top of the letter was an inverted, heart-shaped ass.

Sully pushed to the front row behind the police tape, now holding his press badge up as if it were a police department shield, people giving him a little room. He caught Dave’s eye with a wave. The older man, dark skinned, broad shouldered, still looking like he could bust your ass at outside linebacker, waved him inside the tape.

“Gloamin’ of the evenin’,” Sully said, waving a hand at the falling dark, then catching himself. Put the “G” on the goddamned end, this wasn’t back home.

“I was on my way to the movies with the missus,” Dave said.

“She pissed?”

“Twenty-two years of marriage says I’m not getting any when I get home.”

“Tell her I said hello, if she’s speaking to you when you get there. Christ almighty, I think I see everybody but the
East Jesus Gazette
out there. D.C.’s finest coughing up anything?”

Dave saw the rearview mirror on the van, a revelation, a place to check the knot in the tie. “Just got it from a brother over in 4-D. There’s a BOLO for three black guys, teenagers, who were in the store. They’re going for them hard but keeping it low-key. You know, they can’t just say, ‘Niggas killing white girls! Whoo! Hide your women!’ But that’s what’s up. Owner of the market there told the cops there was some sort of scene between them and the girl.”

“Here we go.”

“No no no, I’m not opening up all that shit.”

“You calling the suspects black?”

“On air? Not unless there’s better ID.”

“This business,” Sully said.

There were people on porches, men with arms folded. Horns honking at the stalled traffic. A cluster of people forming along the yellow tape a dozen yards away, forming a circle around someone. He nodded to Dave and moved quickly, forcing his way back into the crowd and pressing to the outer edge of the cluster. In the center was a young woman, thin, long boned, wearing a too-big T-shirt,
BIG APPLE DANCE
across the front in that split-legged logo.

“—so I’s telling Gina the girls had been doing that. Sneaking over there. Something to eat, I don’t know.”

Someone asked something that Sully couldn’t hear.

“Momma calls the cops, they come running and I went upstairs. Then there’s all these sirens and I looked out the window and all them go running to Doyle’s, around to the back. Momma sees that, takes off running. Flat-out
screaming
.”

A lady next to Sully: “Been my baby, Jesus.”

The young woman in the circle started talking to someone next to her and the crowd shifted, losing interest. Sully pushed forward to the woman.

“Ma’am? My name’s Sully Carter. I’m—”

“I know you,” she said evenly, eyes dancing over his scars, starting to walk away. “You came around asking questions after that Spanish girl got killed last summer.”

“Did I talk to you?” he cocked his head, falling in step alongside her, handing her his business card.

She shook her head. “You just stopped in the studio.” She remembered the scars, the limp. Everybody did.

“You knew Lana?”

She had taken the card, that was good, she was looking down at it now, slowing, giving in. “Yeah, no, I don’t know. To talk to. Maybe I saw her around.”

“So you saw Sarah Reese go across the street? About what time?”

She looked at her watch, then up at him, deciding to stand for it for a moment. “After her class let out. A little after seven.”

He pulled out the notebook, started scribbling. “Went over there by herself?”

“Like I said.”

“The girls, the students, they tend to do that after class?”

A nod.

“How much later were the sirens?”

She folded her arms across her chest and grimaced. “The first cops, they didn’t come with any sirens. They may have been what, Secret Service? Who is it the judges call? The cops, the sirens, the ones that went over to Doyle’s? That was right at eight.”

“Marshals,” he said. “Judges are protected by U.S. Marshals. Why do you remember the time so well?”

“’Cause I was closing up. Eight thirty, we’re all done.”

“Anybody from the studio go over there, to Doyle’s, before the cops, to, what, look for her?”

“Probably. Maybe. I don’t know. Once Momma got here. I mean, look—their lessons were over, okay? They’re supposed to wait in the lobby. I saw Sarah go over there and I had another class. We didn’t know she was missing until Momma came in.”

“Had problems with Sarah before?”

“She was alright. Maybe a little scared of the sisters, you know.”

“How did she come to be taking lessons down here?”

“Maybe she heard Gina’d been in Alvin Ailey, I don’t know. Gina gets girls from all over, the serious ones.”

“Did Dad bring her to class, or was it Mom?”

“Mostly Momma, from what I know. But I’ve seen Daddy in there on Saturdays dropping her off. Handsome, like.”

“How many lessons did Sarah take a week?”

“What is this, two million questions?” Arms unfolding. Sully caught it from the corner of his eye. He looked up. You had to have eye contact or they got pissed.

“Sorry. Hey, look—I’m not an ass, I just play one on TV. You’re helping me out here. So. About how many classes?”

“I think it was two. Friday night, Saturday morning, lots of girls do that. Gina’d know for sure.”