The Ways of the Dead (24 page)

By dawn, the
blaze was billowing out the first-floor windows, glass breaking with the heat, orange flames licking up the front of the house. Firefighters were shouting that the roof was caving in at the back. Fire engines, set up in the rear alley and out front on Princeton, were as much watering down the houses on either side as they were training the hoses on Doyle’s, trying to keep the flames from jumping from one roof to the next, Sully figured. That happened, the entire block would be an inferno.

He was standing on the sidewalk behind the police barricade, showered, in a fresh change of clothes. All the old clothes—shirt, pants, shoes, socks, underwear, everything—were in a dumpster in an alley halfway out to the Beltway.

The David Reese story was on the front page, dominating the early news shows, but it was quickly being engulfed by the fire and its darker revelations, the thick black cloud of smoke going straight up and then spiraling over the golf course, filtering toward downtown and the federal city.

It was visible from the Capitol building as a dark finger on the horizon, a foreboding image, and the networks and cable channels were keeping their cameras trained on it from their rooftop sets near the Capitol. Cameras could take in the host talking with the Capitol dome in the background, and then just pan to the spiraling smoke.

At the scene, uniformed officers were holding the crowd at the barricades, most of them residents who’d been evacuated from adjacent houses. Four television trucks sat at the curb, their antennae sprouting up like tiny metal hairs on the asphalt head of the city. Traffic on Warder was at a standstill, people getting out of their cars, walking up to be able to look around the corner and see the enflamed building. Boys in big, loose T-shirts, riding their bikes in circles, whooping.

A hose sent a huge stream of water toward Doyle’s, the torrent bursting into spray and steam upon contact with the roof, shooting through the windows, the hiss of it meeting flame and ember, cascades of water running off the porch. The yard was drenched, the overflow pouring off the postage-stamp yard, over the low stone wall to the sidewalk, where it splattered and ran into the street.

Sully was steadily dictating to Tony, the man still on from the overnight shift, updating the story on the fly for the paper’s nascent Web site.

“‘The interior of Goodwin’s home appeared to be austere and grim, with some sort of death chamber’—call it a ‘
macabre
,’ Tony, ‘
macabre
,’ death chamber—‘in the basement. A hurried view of the premises this morning, just as the fire was breaking out, showed an upstairs bedroom with almost no furnishings other than a mattress on the floor and a tidily kept office.

“‘The basement was decorated with grisly displays—pictures, mementos, items of clothing—of several dead women, their photographs in both life and death. The packed-dirt floor appeared to be a burial pit, partially obscured by floorboards and carpet. Recently turned earth showed the remains of what appeared to be human skeletal remains.’”

“Jesus.”

“I know, right?”

“How the hell did you get in there?”

“Luck and nerve.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I was over here early and, Christ, there was fire coming out of the front window. Knew it was his place, ran up. Door was open. Went in to look for him.”

“And found this.”

“And found this.”

“Was he in there?”

Sully paused, thinking.

“Not that I saw.”

“And you’re sure? I mean, you are fucking-A sure about the basement? The corpse?”

“I don’t know how many times I can say it.”

“Okay. I’m still going to couch it as it ‘appeared’ to be a body, ‘appeared’ to be this and that down there. Now. They’re beating on me for an update. Gimme something on the scene outside.”

“A couple hundred people, I’d say, top and bottom of the street. Two fire engines out here now. Looks to be just the one house going up. Tall, tall plume of smoke. Very black. Is Photo over here yet? And hey—so what is Chris getting from the cops about Doyle’s location?”

“They think maybe he’s inside.”

“Yeah, well, he’s a crispy critter if so. I’m sweating and I’m at the back of the barricade. I’ll call you in a few when I know something else.”

“Keep that phone in your hand.”

Sully clicked off the cell and sat down, ignoring the damp pavement.

After a while, the flames began to die down, and then some more, and another fire engine came and put a third hose on the blaze, and soon the last of the flames were gone and a huge cloud of smoke was rising, ash filtering out into the air, gobs of roof caving in, the occasional sound of bottles exploding inside.

Warder Avenue was cleared and traffic began to move. Most of the crowd broke up. The street smelled bad, like burnt insulation, like waterlogged carpet.

Sully kept calling in updates, the story blowing up, R.J., Eddie, both calling him, asking him if he was absolutely sure
about what he saw, if he was alright, that this was breaking all over the networks now, citing the paper as the sole source as to the interior of the house.

“Unbelievable,” Eddie said, his voice thin down the line. “Just unbelievable. He just sat there, hiding in plain sight.”

Sully called R.J. and asked him what the Reese camp was saying about the story. R.J. said, “They’re holed up. Not even a denial.”

Midmorning, Sully finally answered John Parker’s calls and told him that what he had seen was in the paper and he didn’t have anything to add. Parker said they would need a formal statement and Sully, as politely as possible, referred him to the paper’s attorneys.

He stood at the top of the 700 block, less than fifty yards from Noel’s apartment, maybe thirty from where Lana Escobar was found, six houses down from Rebekah Bolin’s resting place.

It struck him that, for a navy man, Doyle didn’t like to travel much.

•   •   •

A little after nine that night, and long after dark, paramedics in heavy fire gear finally came out of the house with what looked to be a body beneath a white sheet. It was loaded into an ambulance and it pulled away, lights flashing but no siren.

A few minutes later, a couple of patrol cars came up Warder,
whoop-whoop
ing to clear the traffic, and uniformed officers opened the barricade to let them and a small convoy of black SUVs pull inside. Once they were inside, the yellow tape and the rubber orange traffic cones were put back in place behind them. The mayor materialized out of one of the SUVs, and Sully spotted the chief waddling around in the middle of the block.

By then, there were more reporters than gawkers, dozens of them, from television stations and networks and cable channels, from newspapers, from magazines—everybody who had a bureau in Washington had a crew up here, the serial killer in the nation’s capital. Metro was all over this in force, Chris staking out turf, two or three other young reporters asking and interviewing bystanders and making calls, Sully still out there just to call in the big picture or telling detail or whatever. He was standing off to himself, not in the mood to bullshit with the rest of them, his thoughts running in loops.

By ten twenty, with the eleven p.m. news looming, a police sergeant Sully didn’t recognize told television crews to set up at the top end of the street for a presser, just inside the barricade. This set off a brief and unpleasant scrum. Print reporters howled until they were allowed to cross the barricade, too, standing just behind the cameras. A small forest of microphone stands blossomed on the pavement, floodlights beaming on the small patch of blacktop. A techie stood in front, holding a white rectangle of paper for a white balance, then stood behind the microphones for focusing.

Sully saw Chris interviewing people and then immediately calling it in.

For himself, he’d called in only a couple of bits of color in the past few hours, both from neighbors. One man, who lived three doors down from Doyle, said he’d been in bed with his back window open, said there were gunshots, plural, and then the fire boomed into sudden life. The other, a man in his sixties who lived directly across the street, said he was lying on the couch watching television when he heard a
bap
, one shot, looked over, and noticed that fire was already licking at the drapes inside Doyle’s. Not two shots, he said. He was sure of it.

Sully was sure to call in the conflicting reports to the desk.

At five minutes after eleven, the chief, the mayor, the fire chief, the U.S. Attorney for the District, and a small group of racially diverse suits from Main Justice and the FBI stepped out of SUVs and patrol cars down the street, stood together, waiting for one more, and then approached the reporters together.

The group stopped about five yards from the microphones. The chief walked ahead and took the microphone; the rest formed a supporting line behind him.

“Good evening,” the chief began. “I’m joined this evening by Mayor Barnes; U.S. Attorney Stanton Holmes; Chief Bolden of D.C. Fire; Agent Montgomery of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Marshal Medford of the Judicial Security Division of the Marshals Service; and Paul Cavna, deputy director of the Justice Department.”

The chief paused and looked back and forth across the lights arrayed in front of him, as if he were somberly taking in an audience, though Sully knew, from standing in front of such lights at such short distance himself, that you couldn’t see a damned thing but glare.

“This morning, the city’s fire department responded, at roughly 2:20 a.m., to several 911 calls of a fire in the 600 block of Princeton Place Northwest. This was preceded, by a few minutes, of calls reporting a possible gunshot or gunshots at or near the same location. The house in question was 673, the remains of which are behind me. Officers were unable to enter for several hours because of the blaze.

“The homeowner, Doyle Goodwin, who was, ah, he was a well-known and long-established member of this community, and owner of the market that bears his name just up the street there at Georgia. The remains of Mr. Goodwin were found in the front hallway. His body was very badly burned, let me say, but there was a gunshot wound in his right temple, passing through the skull.”

There was a ripple of noise that ran through the reporters, a vague sigh, the lot of them scribbling while they held out their recorders, or perhaps the exhaled air came from the seventy or so onlookers, the hard-cores, who were stacked behind them.

“Mr. Goodwin . . . Mr. Goodwin lived alone. A pistol, with one shot fired, was near his right hand. Although the investigation is continuing, preliminary reports lean to suicide. There was no note found, but it may have been lost in the fire.

“The fire, Chief Bolden tells me—you’re going to hear more from him in a minute, I’m not the expert—was clearly set. Accelerant found all over the first floor of the house, going up the stairs. It’s our scenario—this is early, I want to emphasize, this may change—that Mr. Goodwin set the fire and then shot himself.”

Here, he looked up. The man hated his job right now, Sully thought, and he didn’t blame him.

“However, that is not all. Found in Mr. Goodwin’s left hand was a necklace, a silver sort of charm necklace bearing the name ‘Noel.’ It has since been identified, by a family relative, as the cherished keepsake of Noel Pittman, whose body—”

—a louder ripple from the onlookers, a stifled cry—

“—buried in the basement of a dilapidated home behind Mr. Goodwin’s store. Mr. Goodwin had been interviewed about that homicide, as well as that of Sarah Reese, but as a possible witness. He showed no signs of distress in those interviews. He was not, ah, a suspect of a material crime.”

He sighed then, and let the final shoe go, played it out and put an end to it all.

“Finally, in the basement, which was only partially burned—very water damaged, but not badly burned—was some sort of—of burial ground, as you may have seen reported. I cannot go into details at this time, but I can say that there were what I would call mementos from several women who have been listed as missing or dying under mysterious circumstances. Our work into that is just beginning, but I can say that we have found at least one set of human remains in the basement, as yet unidentified, and we also found two items belonging to Sarah Emily Reese and an industrial type of serrated knife, which may be the murder—”

Whole shouts now, yells, gasps.

“—murder weapon in that homicide, which, as you know, took place just outside of Mr. Goodwin’s store. The forensics tests will take a couple of days for final verification, but we believe that blood on that knife is likely to be a match to Sarah’s for several reasons, not all of which am I at liberty to go into.”

Silence now, total and astonished silence.

“There had been a confession in that case, as most of you know, and we will sort this out in the coming days, but at—at this moment we would expect the three suspects in that case to be released and most of their serious charges dropped. Obviously, we are just starting an investigation into Mr. Goodwin, and that will be an investigation that takes some time.

“I want to let the others speak to this very sad, very disturbing case, and I want to stress that our information is preliminary, but let me take at least a few questions now.”

The dam burst. Shouts, yells, repeated questions, one clamoring over another, a final one floating in at the end of the others, and thus gaining clarity.

“—was there, right in front of you—how was he able to elude you for this long?”

“Probably because we weren’t looking at him.”

“Why weren’t you looking at him?” The shouted follow-up.

“Probably because one of the primary suspects, Reginald Jackson, confessed.”

“Why would Jackson confess if he didn’t do it?”

“I have no insight as to that.”

Full barking now, the media dogs were loose.

“Was Jackson coerced into that confession? Was that confession videotaped?”

“Why would Goodwin kill Sarah?”

“Will charges be filed against Judge Reese for failing to disclose his ties to Noel? Does that classify as obstruction of justice?”