The Ways of the Dead (3 page)

“Okay. Sarah ever come with a boyfriend, anybody like that?”

“Not that I saw.”

“Any pervs hanging out? Strange calls to the studio?”

“I don’t answer the phone, mister.”

“Don’t imagine you do. We got started talking, I didn’t even ask your name.”

“You going to put it in the paper?”

“Only if you say I can. I don’t know your name right now. If you don’t tell me,” and here he looked up again, smiling, trying to muster some charm, “I don’t have any way of doing that.”

“Why you got to put me in there? Police’ll tell you all that.”

“Hard as it is to believe, ma’am, we get accused of making the shit up.”

“I see a little white girl run off to get killed and you want to tell everybody where to find me?”

“How about first name only?”

“Gee, that’ll help.”

“So, okay, look—if you gave me your middle name I wouldn’t know the difference. And nobody would recognize it. And I wouldn’t have to make you an anonymous source.”

“Anonymous. I like anonymous. Make me anonymous.”

“They won’t use it. Which would be bad, because I think you’re telling the truth.”

“Why would I lie?”

“Because everybody does.”

She eyeballed him.

“I been doing this twenty-something years,” he said.

“My middle—okay, it’s Victoria? You can put that in there. Make it ‘Vicky.’ But don’t put I work at the studio. Gina’ll fire my ass, talking to you.”

“Deal, Miss Vicky.” He reached out and tapped the card she was holding. “You remember something else? Call your old friend Sully. You work here most every day?”

“Yeah.”

“I might stop by.”

She nodded, walking away, looking at the card. He waited for her to toss it in the grass, but she didn’t, and he had a little hope.

He looked at his watch. He had forty-fucking-three minutes.

He started walking away, pushing back through the crowd. He turned left on Otis, hustled past the recreation center to Warder Street, then turned left for a block until he got back to Princeton Place. He turned left again, having made the block, and now came down the street behind Doyle’s Market.

Halfway down, a cruiser blocked off the street and yellow tape stretched all the way across both sidewalks. Sully walked down the middle of the street until the yellow tape stopped him. This was a block of old houses, duplexes, at least half a dozen of them boarded up. Most of the streetlights were out. A cop in the cruiser was talking on his radio and stood up out of the car to eyeball him. Sully stopped and held up his press ID and gave the cop a half wave. The cop nodded and went on transmitting, still eyeing him.

He was maybe seventy yards from the intersection, fifty from the alley in back of the store where Sarah’s body had been found. Houses and trees blocked the view, but it was easy to see squad cars, a forensics van, unmarked vehicles. He walked over to a light pole just off the sidewalk and leaned against it, taking the weight off his knee.

He had thirty-one minutes to file.

The child’s killer or killers had left the scene three hours before, maybe two and a half, and had vanished into the breeze. Nobody on the street knew a goddamned thing. Right at this minute, local cops and the feds were crushing perp lists, sex offender files, credible threats to the judge, Sarah Reese’s lists of schoolmates . . . and he had dick. Sweet fuckall. He didn’t have any more time to work a source, to play an angle.

But because of the paper’s reputation, if not his own, the story in tomorrow’s paper would be regarded as a cornerstone document in shaping the narrative of the murder of Sarah Reese in the national imagination. He was going to dictate a large chunk of that narrative while tired, not exactly sober, and knowing little more than any sad son of a bitch on the sidewalk.

He spat. Nothing like starting in last place.

“Sully, my boy.
You are calling in poetry, I know it. But I got to ask you something first.”

Tony Rubin’s cigarette-scarred voice blared down the line, followed by his smoker’s cough and the flurry of keyboard tapping in the background. Tony had the abrupt nature of a man who’d spent the past twenty-one years switching subjects on deadline and the attaboy patter of a Little League third-base coach, coaxing writers past the freezing point on deadline, the fate of the late-night man on the rewrite desk. He’d gotten divorced, for the third time, two years earlier and spent the following four months living in the newsroom, mostly without detection, as he showered in the old pressmen’s locker room and slept in the deserted warrens of the Sunday Magazine. Sully had come across him there one morning, dozing and sweaty, a jacket for a pillow, curled beneath a copy editor’s desk, dreaming of anarchy and knifing his third wife’s boyfriend.

“Yeah?” Sully said. “What?”

“Sunday, the Skins? Four-point line against Carolina. At home. Too much chalk? Talk to me.” The patter, nervous, finishing up a previous feed, stalling him until he was ready for the dictation.

“I’m a Saints man. I don’t really—”

“You’re a gambling man.”

“Only games I know something about. But off the top of my head—look, we beat Carolina and we suck. Skins are scoring like crazy, so at home I’ll say they cover. You see the Giants game? Fifty points, I mean—”

“Got it,” Tony said and then, finally, the flurry of typing stopped. “Okay. I’m clear. Go go go go.”

“You got the BOLO on the three black suspects?”

“Yeah.”

“Not from Chris, though, am I right?”

“Nope.”

“Boy couldn’t find his dick with a flashlight. Okay. I got the BOLO, too, secondhand, coming out of 4-D, but from a hack I trust.”

“Jamie has it from the feds, the FBI.”

“Good.”

Dictation, then: He narrated Victoria’s view of Sarah crossing the street, omitting that her perspective came from the dance studio. In this telling, she was simply a happenstance witness—accurate, not entirely forthcoming, but not exactly misleading. He said she withheld her last name for fear of possible retaliation. He knocked off the rest on the fly:

“‘Prosecutors have said that this fear of retribution is common across high-crime areas of the city, as witnesses are loath to put themselves at risk of further violence. While the Park View neighborhood is not among the most violent, it does have problems with street crime and robberies. At least one woman on Princeton Place, Lana Escobar, has been killed in the past eighteen months. Escobar was strangled to death on the outfield grass of the Park View Recreation Center, less than one hundred yards from where Sarah Reese’s body was found. No arrest was made in that case. It is unclear tonight—’ Tony, make that ‘
was
unclear
last
night—’ Um . . . ‘was unclear whether the incident involving Reese was part of the street violence common to the area or was an unconnected tragedy.’ Wait. Make it ‘
random
street violence or whether she was a targeted victim.’ There we go.”

He then described the scene on the street, the helicopters overhead, the crowd and its resentful energy, the television antennas, the failing light of day, the horns of stalled motorists in the distance.

He looked at his watch. They were past deadline for the suburban.

“What does that alley look like?” Rubin asked.

“It’s seven minutes after ten.”

“I moved an early version. The alley?”

“The center of police activity. I’m calling it narrow, wide enough for one car at a time. I remember walking through there once or twice before, when I was doing the Escobar thing. It’s pretty nondescript. Alley, dumpsters, needles, condoms, beer cans. It’s the back of all the stores that face Georgia.”

“How far is it off the street?”

“I haven’t stepped it off, but sixty, maybe seventy feet? Doyle’s is a little weird—it has four or five parking spaces in front of it between it and Georgia, this little parking lot.”

“Are the dumpsters right behind the market’s door?”

“Unknown. But they couldn’t be far. The alley bends, okay? It doesn’t go straight across. It bends backward, away from Georgia to accommodate an office building, the one with the restaurant, the Hunger Stopper, on the first floor, and then it comes out onto Otis. Shit. Look up whether that’s Otis Place or Street. The dumpsters couldn’t be in the turn, so, yeah, the dumpster is within twenty or thirty feet of the back door of the market.”

“She was found in the alley between Princeton Place and Otis Place? That’s accurate?”

“Yes. I mean, no—yeah, Otis. I don’t know if it’s street or terrace or whatever.”

“I’m looking at a street map. Princeton Place, Otis Place. Princeton runs east and west. It’s only two and half blocks long.”

“What, it picks up at the golf course and dead-ends into Georgia? The other side of the golf course, that’s whatsit, Catholic University? So yeah, it wouldn’t pick up again over there.”

“Alley is pavement? Not brick?”

“Ah, affirmative.”

“And you’re sure about that location for the alley? It’s not shown on my street map.”

“I’m looking at it.”

“What’s the population back there right now?”

“In the alley? I’m counting two squad cars, three unmarkeds, and a tech van. The van is just outside the alley. What’s Chris telling you about the investigation?”

“Cops are mostly shutting him down. A statement coming at ten thirty from the chief, then the mayor. They’re going to do a stand-up in front of the store.”

“Suspects?”

“Well, the BOLO, if you want to count that. Cops are calling them persons of interest, asking witnesses to come forward. Particularly any who may have been in Doyle’s.”

“How many hacks feeding you?”

“I got Jamie on the FBI and Main Justice. The obit desk, which has the bio stuff on Reese. Got a feed from National. Something about judges being targets of crimes, and another about him being the presumptive next nominee to the Supremes. Research is putting together a list of his recent decisions. Metro has the kid going to the Hazelwood School. That’s like twenty grand a year, you know. Looks like we’re getting a picture of young Miss Sarah from the yearbook. Metro also has somebody out there in the neighborhood, trying for friends and family. We’ll add in the police and the feds when they go on at ten thirty. And there’s you and Chris. How many was that?”

“Like about twenty people who don’t know fuckall.”

“Well, it’s what we do best.”

Sully clicked off the cell and dropped it in his pocket. The rotating lights of the police and emergency vehicles bounced off the houses, scattered through the leaves of the trees overhead. The breeze came back up. The last of the bourbon pulsed at his temples. He tapped his pen against his notebook and his foot against the pavement. Something about the neighborhood was bouncing just beyond the reach of his memory.

The press conference was going to be in front of the dance studio, well inside the perimeter—Chris would cover that—and somewhere offscreen there would be the parental misery of David and Tori Reese, a wound that would never heal. He could give a fuck about Reese himself, Washington parasite that he was, but he felt a twinge in his chest for Tori, the well of sorrow she was falling into, a blackness he knew well enough.

“Keening,” he said out loud to nobody.

And Sarah. He would rather not think about the child’s last minutes, but that was the job. He looked at the moths circling above and found himself wondering why a girl—white, rich—would run into an alley in a neighborhood like this. Had somebody lured her back there, and if so, with what? She had crossed the street for a soda from the store—fine, he could believe that. But why did she leave from the back entrance? A drug buy? Weed?

Drugs, that was the smart money. Sarah, what, goes out back to buy some weed—maybe that was the point of the whole foray from the dance studio—and pulls out too much cash? Maybe that’s what the three black guys in the store were doing, a little dealing. Hey, white girl, you want some quality endo? Y’all come on out back. She goes, pulls out her money, dude grabs it, she bucks, gets the knife, and that’s the end. Or, maybe: She pays and they try to get a little what-what with the transaction. She bucks, the knife, the same.

Maybe a rapist who had spotted her before—she would have been in the same place, same time each week—and finally made a play? He blew out his lips. Possible, but less likely.

Then there was the Big Idea story that his colleagues would love most: Daddy was the target, she was the message. This struck him as the most likely to be bullshit, but if it was true, the killing would almost certainly be a professional hit, designed to be quick, clean, and most likely done efficiently with a firearm. Or maybe the killer liked the knife because, if he was sure of his physical control of the situation, it offered the benefits of silence and no left-behind ballistics.

Of course none of this really mattered—the initial BOLO would fix the narrative on television, radio, newspapers, the national consciousness. Three young black guys, one dead white girl. This was how shit got started.

He looked up and saw three people walk out of the alley. The low yellow light was not good but he recognized the police chief’s short, rotund outline. The other figure, a tall, broad-shouldered dude in a suit, he didn’t know. He guessed FBI. They both turned and went away from him, toward the lights on Georgia Avenue.

The third figure, who started walking his way, was a woman. She passed under a streetlight, crossed the street, passed the cop in the cruiser, and pulled out her car keys. Sully smiled.

“Counselor,” he called out.

Eva turned, startled, but did not relax her shoulders when she recognized him. She crossed the street, walking to where he sat.

“Thought you guys dug out information. Not come to a crime scene and sit.”

“Odd for you to be out on a scene, isn’t it?” he said.

“No,” she said, a little too quickly. “We don’t always wait to get suspects to file indictments.”

“A grand jury original?”

“’s what they call it.”

“This’ll be your case.”

“It might, but you can’t print that. It’s not settled.” She turned and looked toward the alley. “They got more people down there than the state fair. FBI, Marshals, ATF. Surprised I didn’t run into LAPD.”

“Who are the guys in the store just before she died?”

“Listening to the BOLOs, are we? Three young men we want to talk to. We don’t have names, so don’t ask. There’ll be a bulletin in a few with a general description.”

“Are they suspects?”

“I believe the term is ‘persons of interest.’”

“So are they suspects?”

“If you were one of them, and half the local and federal police agencies in the nation’s capital were hunting your ass, what would you feel like?”

“Thought so. Where’s the girl? Sarah?”

“She
was
in a dumpster back there. She
is
at the morgue. I imagine they’ll be reflecting the scalp in a bit. You know what that is? Reflecting the scalp?”

“I’ve heard.”

“I’ve seen. It’s something that shouldn’t happen to fifteen-year-olds at dance class.”

“What happened to her in the alley?”

“Can’t say.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Either. Both. Pick.”

“Cause of death? Proximate cause of death? We got word this was a stabbing.”

“You’re looking for attribution or confirmation?”

“Either. Both. Pick.”

“No attribution to me or my office. But I will confirm, as a law enforcement official familiar with the investigation, the stabbing.”

“Multiple? Or a one-shot thing that hit an artery?”

“Usually when you cut someone’s throat you get the artery.”

“Multiple wounds or just the one?”

“Only one apparent.”

“Sex crime?”

“Sully. The parents. I’m not saying. Forensics will bear that out anyway, one way or the other.”

“Is there any evidence it’s targeted? Her being Reese’s kid?”

“Will neither confirm nor deny.”

“So what was her condition in the dumpster?”

“Wrapped in a big black trash bag, like the ones contractors use. But it’s not clear if she was wrapped in that by whoever killed her or by the uniform who found her.”

“I didn’t hear that right.”

“The cop who found her. Canvassing the alley—her mother was screaming and everybody knew who she was—officer looks in, sees a body, facedown. Jumps in and rolls her over to, I don’t know, try to save her. Then he sees the cut. She’d bled out onto this black trash bag that was under her. He pulled that back over her body, now that she was faceup, until other units got here.”

“That wasn’t good.”

“Hey, no shit. Now we don’t know if she was wrapped up before she got thrown in or if it was already there and she gets thrown in on top of it.”

“Ah.”

“And when I say thrown in, let me be clear. This is a tall, big, heavy dumpster, about five feet high. She was down inside there on top of a couple of feet of garbage.”

“Blood on the pavement outside the dumpster? Side of it?”

“Some.”

“A puddle, a lake, a drop?”

“More than the last, less than the middle.”

“Eva, for Christ’s sake.”

“It’s not clear if she was dragged there or killed on the spot if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Blood nearby?”

Sully saw her look down at him. The light was muted, from overhead. He could see the beginning of crow’s feet, the full lips, the strong, high cheekbones. It struck him, her age, and by extension, his.

“Scene is still being worked,” she said, finally.

“Alright.”

“You look like you’re half asleep,” she said.

“You look fried.”

“If I’m not, I’m going to be.” She nodded good night in parting, turned, and walked to her Jeep Cherokee. She pulled out and was gone.

Sully called Tony, affirming the manhunt for the three black men in the store and giving the details of the throat slashing. He was careful with the description of the blood’s amount and location, to make it less likely he’d get burned if Eva’s initial description was less than exact. He decided to omit the bit about the black garbage bag; it was just too complicated to get into.