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Chapter 70

  THE NEXT DAY WOULD GET FILED under What the Hell Was I Thinking? I showed up at the Sixth District station house, where Jason Stemple was based, and I started asking around about him. I wasn’t sure what I would do if I found him, but I was nervous enough for Kim Stafford that I had to try something, or thought I did.

  I didn’t carry creds or a badge anymore, but lots of DC cops knew who I was, who I am. Apparently not the desk sergeant, though.

  He kept me waiting on the civilian side of the glass longer than I would have liked. That was okay, I guess, no big deal. I stood around, glancing over the Annual Crime Reduction Awards on the wall until he finally informed me that he had checked me out with his captain; then he buzzed me through.

  Another uniformed officer was there waiting for me.

  “Pulaski, take Mister”—the sergeant glanced down at the sign-in sheet—“Cross back to the locker room please. He’s looking for Stemple. I thought he’d be out by now.”

  I followed him down a busy hallway, picking up strands of cop talk along the way. Pulaski pushed open a heavy swinging door into the locker room. The smell was familiar, sweat and various antiseptics.

  “Stemple! You got a visitor.”

  A young guy, late twenties, about my height but heavier, looked over. He was alone at a row of beat-up army-green lockers, and he was just pulling on a Washington Nationals road jersey. Another half-dozen or so off-duty cops were standing around, grousing and laughing about the state of the court system, which definitely was a joke these days.

  I walked over to where Stemple was putting his watch on and still basically ignoring me.

  “Could I talk to you for a minute?” I asked. I was trying to be polite, but it took an effort with this guy who liked to beat up on his girlfriend.

  “About?” Stemple barely looked my way.

  I lowered my voice. “I want to talk to you . . . about Kim Stafford.”

  All at once, the less-than-friendly welcome downgraded to pure animosity. Stemple rocked back on his heels and looked me up and down like I was a street person who’d just broken into his house.

  “What are you doing in here anyway? You a cop?”

  “I used to be a cop, but now I’m a therapist. I work with Kim.”

  Stemple’s eyes beaded and burned. He was getting the picture now, and he didn’t like what he saw. Neither did I, because I was looking at a powerfully built male who beat up on women and sometimes burned them with lit objects.

  “Yeah, well, I just pulled a double, and I’m out of here. You stay away from Kim, if you know what’s good for you. You hear me?”

  Now that we’d met, I had a professional opinion of Stemple: He was a piece of shit. As he walked away, I said, “You’re beating her up, Stemple. You burned her with a cigar.”

  The locker room got still, but I noticed that no one hurried to get in my face on Stemple’s behalf. The others just watched. A couple of them nodded, as though maybe they knew about Stemple and Kim already.

  He slowly turned back to me and puffed himself up. “What are you trying to start with me, asshole? Who the hell are you? She screwing you?”

  “It’s nothing like that. I told you, I just came here to talk. If you know what’s good for you, you should listen.”

  That’s when Stemple threw the first punch. I stepped back, and he missed, but not by much. He was definitely hot-tempered, and strong.

  It was all I needed, though, maybe all I wanted. I feinted to the left, then countered with an uppercut into his gut. Some of the air rushed out of him.

  But then his powerful arms latched around my middle. Stemple drove me hard against a row of lockers. The metal boomed with the impact. Pain radiated through my upper and lower back. I hoped nothing was broken already.

  As soon as I could get my footing again, I bulldozed him back, and he stumbled, losing his grip. He swung again. This time, he connected hard with my jaw.

  I returned the favor—a solid right to the chin—followed with a looping left hook that landed just over his eyebrow. One for me, one for Kim Stafford. Then I hit him with a right to the cheekbone.

  Stemple spun halfway around; then he surprised me and went down to the locker room floor. His right eye was already starting to close.

  My arms pulsed. I was ready for more of this punk, this coward. The fight never should have started, but it had, and I was disappointed when he didn’t get up again.

  “Is that how it is with Kim? She pisses you off, you take a swing?”

  He groaned but didn’t say anything to me.

  I said, “Listen, Stemple. You want me to keep what I know to myself, not go any higher with this? Make sure it doesn’t happen again. Ever. Keep your hands off her. And your cigars. Are we clear?”

  He stayed where he was, and that told me what I needed to know. I was halfway to the door when one of the other cops caught my eye. “Good for you,” he said.

  Chapter 71

  IF NANA HAD BEEN WORKING the Georgetown case, in her own inimitable style, she’d have said it was “simmering” about now. Sampson and I had tossed a bunch of interesting ingredients into the mix, and we’d turned the heat up high. Now it was time for some results.

  I looked at the big man across a table full of crime reports spread out between us. “I’ve never seen so much information lead to so little,” I said grumpily.

  “Now you know what I’ve been dealing with on this,” he said, and squeezed and unsqueezed a rubber stress ball in his fist. I was surprised the thing hadn’t burst into a million pieces by now.

  “This guy is careful, seems smart enough, and he’s cruel. Got a powerful angle too—using his souvenirs to threaten these women. Making it personal. In case you hadn’t figured that out already,” I said. I was just talking it through out loud. Sometimes that helps.

  My thing lately, my habit, was pacing. I’d probably covered about six miles of carpet in the past fourteen hours, all in the same Second District station conference room where we were holed up. My feet hurt some, but that’s how I kept my brain going. That and sour-apple Altoids.

  We’d started that morning by cross-referencing the last four years of Uniform Crime Reports, looking for potentially related cases—reaching for anything that could start to tie this thing together. Given what we now knew about our perp, we had looked at female missing persons, rape cases, and especially murder where mutilation was involved. First for Georgetown and then for the whole DC metro area.

  To keep our mood as light as possible, we’d listened to “Elliot in the Morning” on the radio, but even Elliot and Diane couldn’t brighten our moods that day, good as they are at mood-brightening.

  In order to cover all our bases, we made a second pass, checking unsolved murders in general. The result was a list of potential follow-ups that was just as large as it was unpromising.

  One good thing had happened today. Mena Sunderland had granted us another interview, where she went so far as to give a few descriptive details on her rapist. He was a white man, in his forties, she guessed. And from what we could glean from Mena, he was good-looking, which was difficult for her to admit. “You know,” she’d told us, “the way Kevin Costner is good-looking for an older guy?”

  It was an important part of the profile for us to pin down though. Attractive attackers had an edge that made them even more dangerous. My hope was that with a little time and the promise of a lot of protection, Mena would be willing to keep talking to us. What we had so far wasn’t enough for a useful police sketch. As soon as we had a likeness that didn’t match about twelve thousand other faces on the streets of Georgetown, Sampson and I wanted to go wide with it.

  Sampson tilted his chair back and stretched his long legs. “What do you think about getting some sleep and starting in on the rest of these in the morning? I’m cooked.”

  Just then, Betsey Hall came whizzing in, looking a lot more awake than either of us did. Betsey was a newbie detective, eager, but the kind who knew how to be helpful wit
hout getting underfoot.

  “You only looked at female victims in your cross-refs?” she said. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

  “Why?” Sampson asked.

  “Ever heard of Benny Fontana?”

  Neither of us had.

  “Midlevel mob soldier, underboss, I guess is the term. Was, anyway,” Betsey said. “He was killed two weeks ago. In an apartment in Kalorama Park. Actually, on the night that Lisa Brandt was raped in Georgetown.”

  “And?” Sampson asked. I could hear the same tired impatience in his voice that I felt. “So?”

  “And so, this.”

  Betsey flipped open a file and spread half a dozen black-and-white photographs out on the table. They showed a white man, maybe fifty years old, dead on his back in a living room somewhere. Both of his feet were completely—and freshly—severed at the ankle.

  All of a sudden, I wasn’t so tired anymore. Adrenaline was pumping through my system.

  “Jesus,” Sampson muttered. We were both on our feet now, scanning from one grisly photo to the other, repeating the process a couple of times.

  “The ME’s report says all the cutting on Mr. Fontana was done antemortem,” Betsey added. “Possibly with surgical tools. Maybe a scalpel and saw.” Her expression was hopeful, kind of sweetly naive. “So you think this is the same perp?”

  I answered, “I think I want to know more. Can we get the keys to that apartment?”

  She fished a set out of her pocket, jangling them proudly. “Thought you might ask me that.”

  Chapter 72

  “SHIT, ALEX. MULTIPLE RAPES, multiple murders. Now a mob connection?” Sampson punched the roof of the car. “It can’t all be coincidental. Can’t be! Cannot!”

  “Could definitely be something—if it’s the same guy,” I reminded him. “Let’s see what happens here. Try not to get too far ahead of ourselves.”

  Not that John was off base. Our suspect was looking more and more like a sadistic monster with a very bad, very distinctive habit. It wasn’t that we’d been looking in the wrong place for him, just maybe not in enough places.

  “But if this does pan out,” Sampson went on, “no phone calls to your old pals tonight. All right? I want a little time with this before the Feds come on board.”

  The FBI would already know about the Fontana murder, assuming it was mob related. But the rapes were still DCPD. Local stuff.

  “You don’t know that they’ll necessarily take over the case,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah.” Sampson snapped his fingers and pointed at me. “I forgot. You had your memory wiped when you left the Bureau, like they do it in Men in Black. Well, let me remind you—they’ll take over this case. They love cases like this one. We do all the work; the Feebies take all the credit.”

  I stole a glance at him. “When I was at the Bureau, you ever resent me coming in on a case? Did I do that?”

  “If it happened, don’t worry about it,” he said. “If it was worth talking about then, I would have brought it up. Hell no, you never moved in on one of my cases!”

  I pulled over in front of a tan brick apartment house across from Kalorama Park. It was a nice location; I’m sure the Fontana murder had rocked that building, if not the neighborhood. It was also less than two miles from the location where Lisa Brandt had been attacked not long after Benny Fontana died.

  We spent the next hour inside, using crime-scene photos and the bloodstains still in the carpet to re-create what might have happened. It didn’t give us any concrete connection to the other attacks, but it was a start.

  When we left, we rode southwest into Georgetown, taking the most logical route to Lisa Brandt’s neighborhood. By now, it was around midnight. Neither of us felt like stopping yet, so we did a full tour of the case, riding by each of the known rape sites in chronological order. They weren’t that far apart.

  At 2:30 a.m. we were in a booth at an all-night coffee shop. We had crime files spread out on the table and were reading them over, too revved up to stop, too tired to go home.

  This was my first chance to really get into the Benny Fontana file. I had read the police and ME’s reports several times. Now I was looking over the list of items taken from the apartment. On my fourth or fifth time through, my eyes stopped on one item in particular: a torn-off corner of a white foil-lined envelope. It had been found under the sofa, only a few feet from Fontana’s body. Speaking of feet, or a lack of them.

  I sat up. These are the moments you hope for in an unsolved case.

  “We have to go somewhere.”

  “You’re right. We have to go home,” Sampson said.

  I called to the waitress, who was half-asleep at the counter. “Is there a twenty-four-hour drugstore somewhere around here? It’s important.”

  Sampson was too tired to argue. He followed me out of the coffee shop and around the corner, up a few blocks to a brightly lit Walgreens. A quick scan of the aisles inside and I found what I was looking for.

  “Mena Sunderland said the pictures she saw were Polaroids.” I ripped open a box of film.

  “You have to pay for that first,” a clerk called from the front. I ignored him.

  Sampson was shaking his head. “Alex, what the hell are you doing?”

  “The evidence list from the Fontana murder scene,” I said. “There was a white foil-lined envelope. A piece of one anyway.”

  I pulled the new envelope out of the box, tore off a corner, and held it up. “Just like this.”

  Sampson started to smile.

  “He took pictures of Benny Fontana after he cut him up. It’s the same guy, John.”

  Chapter 73

  I WORKED A LONG, LONG DAY, but the next night, I was grounded.

  Nana had a weekly reading class she was teaching at the First Baptist-run shelter on Fourth Street, and I stayed home with the kids. When I’m with them, there’s nowhere I’d rather be. The problem, sometimes, is just getting me there.

  I played chef for the night. I made my and the kids’ favorite, white-bean soup, along with a chopped Cobb salad, and I’d brought home some nice fresh cheddar bread from the bakery next to my office. The soup tasted almost as good as Nana’s. Sometimes I think she has two versions of every recipe—the one in her head and the one she shares with me, minus some key secret ingredient. It’s her mystique, and I doubt it has changed much in the last half century.

  Then the kids and I had a long-overdue session with the punching bag downstairs. Jannie and Damon took turns pummeling leather, while Ali ran his trucks around and around the basement floor, which he declared was I-95!

  Afterward we migrated upstairs for a swimming lesson with little brother. Yes, swimming. It was Jannie’s concoction, inspired by Ali’s reluctance to get into the bathtub. Never mind that it was even harder to get him out of the bath once he got started. That distinction was lost on him, and he fussed every single time, as if he were allergic to clean. I was skeptical about Jannie’s idea until I saw how it worked.

  “Breathe, Ali!” she coached him from the side. “Let’s see you breathe, puppy.”

  Damon kept his hands under Ali’s belly while Ali lay facedown on top of the water, mostly blowing bubbles and splashing around. It was hilarious, but I didn’t dare laugh, for Jannie’s sake. I sat at a safe—as in dry—distance, watching from the toilet seat.

  “Pick him up for a second,” Jannie said.

  Damon stood the big boy up in the claw-foot tub.

  Ali blinked and sprayed out a mouthful of water, his eyes gleaming from the game.

  “I’m swimming!” he declared.

  “Not yet you’re not,” Jannie said, all business. “But you’re definitely getting there, little bro.”

  She and Damon were practically as soaked as he was, but no one seemed to care. It was a blast. Jannie was kneeling right in a puddle, while Damon stood up and gave me a conspiratorial oldest-child look that said, Aren’t they crazy?

  When the phone rang, they both sprang for the door. “I’ll get
it!” they chorused.

  “I’ll get it,” I said, cutting them off at the pass. “You’re both sopping wet. No swimming until I get back.”

  “Come on, Ali,” I heard as I started out of the bathroom. “Let’s wash your hair.”

  The girl was a genius.

  I trotted down the hall to catch the phone before the machine picked up. “Cross family YMCA,” I said, loud enough for the kids’ benefit.

  Chapter 74

  “IS THIS ALEX CROSS?”

  “Yes?” I said. I didn’t recognize the voice on the line though. Just that it was a woman.

  “It’s Annie Falk.”

  “Annie,” I said, embarrassed now. “Hi, how are you?”

  We were acquaintances, not quite friends. Her son was one or maybe two grades ahead of Damon. Annie was an ER doc at St. Anthony’s.

  “Alex, I’m at the hospital—”

  I suddenly made a connection, and my heart skipped the next beat. “Is Nana there?”

  “It’s not Nana,” she said. “I didn’t know who else to call. Kayla Coles was just admitted to St. Anthony’s. She’s here in the ER.”

  “Kayla?” I said, my voice rising. “What’s going on? Is she okay?”

  “I don’t know, Alex. We don’t know enough yet. It’s not a good situation though.”

  That wasn’t the answer I expected, or the one I wanted to hear.

  “Annie, what happened? Can you tell me that much?”

  “It’s hard to know exactly. What’s certain is that someone attacked Kayla.”

  “Who?” I practically shouted into the phone, feeling horrible, as though I already knew the answer to my own question.

  Damon stepped halfway into the hall and stared at me, his eyes wide and scared. It was a look I’d seen far too many times in our house.

  “All I can tell you is that she was stabbed with a knife. Twice, Alex. She’s alive.”

  Stabbed? My mind screamed the word, but I held it in. I swallowed hard. But she’s alive.