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  “Little boy tried to kill himself. Sweet little boy, like Damon. Eleven years old.”

  “Want me to run over to their crack crib? Shoot the boy’s parents?” Sampson asked. His eyes were obisdian-hard.

  “We’ll do it later,” I said.

  I was probably in the mood. The positive news was that the parents of Marcus Daniels lived together; the bad part was that they kept the boy and his four sisters in the crack house they ran near the Langley Terrace projects. The ages of the children ranged from five to twelve, and all the kids worked in the business. They were “runners.”

  “What are you doing here?” I asked him for the second time. “You didn’t just happen to show up here at St. A’s. What’s up?”

  Sampson tapped out a cigarette from a pack of Camels. He used only one hand. Very cool. He lit up. Doctors and nurses were everywhere.

  I snatched the cigarette away and crushed it under my black Converse sneaker sole, near the hole in the big toe.

  “Feel better now?” Sampson eyed me. Then he gave me a broad grin showing his large white teeth. The skit was over. Sampson had worked his magic on me, and it was magic, including the cigarette trick. I was feeling better. Skits work. Actually, I felt as if I’d just been hugged by about a half-dozen close relatives and both my kids. Sampson is my best friend for a reason. He can push my buttons better than anybody.

  “Here comes the angel of mercy,” he said, pointing down the long, chaotic corridor.

  Annie Waters was walking toward us with her hands thrust deeply into the pockets of her hospital coat. She had a tight look on her face, but she always does.

  “I’m real sorry, Alex. The boy didn’t make it. I think he was nearly gone when you got him here. Probably living on all that hope you carry bottled up inside you.”

  Powerful images and visceral sensations of carrying Marcus along Fifth and L streets flashed before me. I imagined the hospital death sheet covering Marcus. It’s such a small sheet that they use for children.

  “The boy was my patient. He adopted me this spring.” I told the two of them what had me so wild and crazed and suddenly depressed.

  “Can I get you something, Alex?” said Annie Waters. She had a concerned look on her face.

  I shook my head. I had to talk, had to get this out right now.

  “Marcus found out I gave help at St. A’s, talked to people sometimes. He started coming by the trailer afternoons. Once I passed his tests, he talked about his life at the crack house. Everybody he knew in his life was a junkie. Junkie came by my house today… Rita Washington. Not Marcus’s mother, not his father. The boy tried to slit his own throat, slit his wrists. Just eleven years old.”

  My eyes were wet. A little boy dies, somebody should cry. The psychologist for an eleven-year-old suicide victim ought to mourn. I thought so, anyway.

  Sampson finally stood up and put his long arm gently on my shoulder. He was six feet nine again. “Let’s head on home, Alex,” he said. “C’mon, my man. Time to go.”

  I went in and looked at Marcus for the last time.

  I held his lifeless little hand and thought about the talks the two of us had, the ineffable sadness always in his brown eyes. I remembered a wise, beautiful African proverb: “It takes a whole village to raise a good child.”

  Finally, Sampson came and took me away from the boy, took me home.

  Where it got much worse.

  Chapter 5

  I DIDN’T like what I saw at home. A lot of cars were crowded helter-skelter around my house. It’s a white shingle A-frame; it looks like anybody’s house. Most of the cars appeared familiar; they were cars of friends and family members.

  Sampson pulled in behind a dented ten-year-old Toyota that belonged to the wife of my late brother Aaron. Cilla Cross was good friend. She was tough and smart. I had ended up liking her more than my brother. What was Cilla doing here?

  “What the hell is going on at the house?” I asked Sampson again. I was starting to get a little concerned.

  “Invite me in for a cold beer,” he said as he pulled the key from the ignition. “Least you can do.”

  Sampson was already up and out of the car. He moves like a slick winter wind when he wants to. “Let’s go inside, Alex.”

  I had the car door open, but I was still sitting inside. “I live here. I’ll go in when I feel like it.” I didn’t feel like it suddenly. A sheen of cold sweat was on the back of my neck. Detective paranoia? Maybe, maybe not.

  “Don’t be difficult,” Sampson called back over his shoulder, “for once in your life.”

  A long icy shiver ran through my body. I took a deep breath. The thought of the human monster I had recently helped put away still gave me nightmares. I deeply feared he would escape one day. The mass killer and kidnapper had already been to Fifth Street once.

  What in hell was going on inside my house?

  Sampson didn’t knock on the front door, or ring the bell, which dangled on red-and-blue wires. He just waltzed inside as if he lived there. Same as it’s always been. Mi casa es su casa. I followed him into my own house.

  My boy, Damon, streaked into Sampson’s outstretched arms, and John scooped up my son as if he were made of air. Jannie came skating toward me, calling me “Big Daddy” as she ran. She was already in her slipper-sock pajamas, smelling of fresh talcum after her bath. My little lady.

  Something was wrong in her big brown eyes. The look on her face froze me.

  “What is it, my honeybunch?” I asked as I nuzzled against Jannie’s smooth, warm cheek. The two of us nuzzle a lot. “What’s wrong? Tell your Daddy all your troubles and woes.”

  In the living room I could see three of my aunts, my two sisters-in-law, my one living brother, Charles. My aunts had been crying; their faces were all puffy and red. So had my sister-in-law Cilla, and she isn’t one to get weepy without a good reason.

  The room had the unnatural, claustrophobic look of a wake. Somebody has died, I thought. Somebody we all love has died. But everybody I love seemed to be there, present and accounted for.

  Nana Mama, my grandmother, was serving coffee, iced tea, and also cold chicken pieces, which no one seemed to be eating. Nana lives on Fifth Street with me and the kids. In her own mind, she’s raising the three of us.

  Nana had shrunk to around five feet by her eightieth year. She is still the most impressive person I know in our nation’s capital, and I know most of them—the Reagans, the Bush people, and now the Clintons.

  My grandmother was dry-eyed as she did her serving. I have rarely seen her cry, though she is a tremendously warm and caring person. She just doesn’t cry anymore. She says she doesn’t have that much of life left, and she won’t waste it on tears.

  I finally walked into the living room and asked the question that was beating against the inside of my head. “It’s nice to see everyone—Charles, Cilla, Aunt Tia—but would someone please tell me what’s going on here?”

  They all stared at me.

  I still had Jannie cradled in my arms. Sampson had Damon tucked like a hairy football under his massive right arm.

  Nana spoke for the assembled group. Her almost inaudible words sent the sharpest pain right through me.

  “It’s Naomi,” she said quietly. “Scootchie is missing, Alex.” Then Nana Mama started to weep for the first time in years.

  Chapter 6

  CASANOVA SCREAMED, and the loud sound coming from deep inside his throat turned into a raspy howl.

  He was crashing through the deep woods, thinking about the girl he had abandoned back there. The horror of what he had done. Again.

  Part of him wanted to go back for the girl—save her—an act of mercy.

  He was experiencing spasms of guilt now, and he began to run faster and faster. His thick neck and chest were covered with perspiration. He felt weak, and his legs were rubbery and undependable.

  He was fully conscious of what he had done. He just couldn‘t stop himself.

  Anyway, it was better this
way. She had seen his face. It was stupid of him to think she would ever be able to understand him. He had seen the fear and loathing in her eyes.

  If only she’d listened when he’d tried to talk to her. After all, he was different from other mass killers—he could feel everything he did. He could feel love… and suffer loss… and…

  He angrily swept away the death mask. It was all her fault. He would have to change personas now. He needed to stop being Casanova.

  He needed to be himself. His pitiful other self.

  Chapter 7

  IT’S NAOMI. Scootchie is missing, Alex.

  We held the most intense Cross family emergency conference in our kitchen, where they’ve always been held. Nana made more coffee, and also herbal tea for herself. I put the kids to bed first. Then I cracked open a bottle of Black Jack and poured stiff drinks of whiskey all around.

  I learned that my twenty-two-year-old niece had been missing in North Carolina for four days. The police down there had waited that long to contact our family in Washington. As a policeman, I found that hard to understand. Two days was pretty standard in missing-person cases. Four days made no sense.

  Naomi Cross was a law student at Duke University. She’d made Law Review and was near the top of her class. She was the pride of everyone in our family, including myself. We had a nickname for her that went back to when she was three or four years old. Scootchie. She always used to “scootch” up close to everybody when she was little. She loved to “scootch,” and hug, and be hugged. After my brother Aaron died, I helped Cilla to raise her. It wasn’t hard—she was always sweet and funny, cooperative, and so very smart.

  Scootchie was missing. In North Carolina. Four days now.

  “I talked to a detective named Ruskin,” Sampson told the group in the kitchen. He was trying not to act like a street cop, but he couldn’t help it. He was on the case now. Flat-faced and serious. The Sampson stare.

  “Detective Ruskin sounded knowledgeable about Naomi’s disappearance. Seemed like a straight-ahead cop on the phone. Something strange, though. Told me that a law-school friend of Naomi’s reported her missing. Her name’s Mary Ellen Klouk.”

  I had met Naomi’s friend. She was a future lawyer, from Garden City, Long Island. Naomi had brought Mary Ellen home to Washington a couple of times. We’d gone to hear Handel’s Messiah together one Christmas at the Kennedy Center.

  Sampson took off his dark glasses, and kept them off, which is rare for him. Naomi was his favorite, and he was as shook up as the rest of us. She called Sampson “His Grimness,” and “Darth One,” and he loved it when she teased him.

  “Why didn’t this Detective Ruskin call us before now? Why didn’t those university people call me?” my sister-in-law asked. Cilla is forty-one. She has allowed herself to grow to ample proportions. I doubted that she was five feet four, but she had to be close to two hundred pounds. She’d told me that she didn’t want to be attractive to men anymore.

  “Don’t know the answer to that yet,” Sampson told Cilla and the rest of us. “They told Mary Ellen Klouk not to call us.”

  “What exactly did Detective Ruskin have to say about the delay?” I asked Sampson.

  “Detective said there were extenuating circumstances. He wouldn’t elaborate for me, persuasive as I can be.”

  “You tell him we could have the conversation in person?”

  Sampson nodded slowly. “Uh-huh. He said the result would be the same. I told him I doubted that. He said okay. Man seemed to have no fears.”

  “Black man?” Nana asked. She is a racist, and proud of it. She says she’s too old to be socially or politically correct. She doesn’t so much dislike white people as distrust them.

  “No, but I don’t think that’s the problem, Nana. Something else is going on.” Sampson looked across the kitchen table at me. “I don’t think he could talk.”

  “FBI?” I asked. It was the obvious guess when things get overly secretive. The FBI understands better than Bell Atlantic, the Washington Post, and the New York Times that information is power.

  “That could be the problem. Ruskin wouldn’t admit it on the phone.”

  “I better talk to him,” I said. “In person would probably be best, don’t you think?”

  “I think that would be good, Alex.” Cilla spoke up from her end of the table.

  “Maybe I’ll tag along,” Sampson said, grinning like the predatory wolf that he is.

  There were sage nods and at least one hallelujah in the overcrowded kitchen. Cilla came around the table and hugged me tight. My sister-in-law was shaking like a big, spreading tree in a storm.

  Sampson and I were going South. We were going to bring back Scootchie.

  Chapter 8

  I HAD to tell Damon and Jannie about their “Auntie Scootch,” which is what the kids have always called her. My kids sensed something bad had happened. They knew it, just as they somehow know my most secret and vulnerable places. They had refused to go to sleep until I came and talked to them.

  “Where’s Auntie Scootch at? What happened to her?” Damon demanded as soon as I entered the kids’ bedroom. He had heard enough to understand that Naomi was in some kind of terrible trouble.

  I have a need always to tell the kids the truth, if it’s possible. I’m committed to truth-telling between us. But every once in a while, it is so hard to do,

  “We haven’t heard from Aunt Naomi in a few days,” I began. “That’s why everybody is worried tonight, and why they came over to our house,” I said.

  I went on. “Daddy’s on the case now. I’m going to do my best to find Aunt Naomi in the next couple of days. You know that your daddy usually solves problems. Am I right?”

  Damon nodded to the truth in that, and seemed reassured by what I had told them, but mostly by my serious tone. He came into my arms and gave me a kiss, which he hasn’t been doing as much lately. Jannie gave me the softest kiss, too. I held them both in my arms. My sweet babies.

  “Daddy’s on the case now,” Jannie whispered. That warmed my spirits some. As Billie Holiday put it, “God bless the child who’s got his own.”

  By eleven the kids were sleeping peacefully, and the house was beginning to clear. My elderly aunts had already gone home to their quirky old-lady nests, and Sampson was getting ready to leave.

  He usually lets himself in and out, but this time, Nana Mama walked Sampson to the door, which is a rarity. I went with them. Safety in numbers.

  “Thank you for going down South with Alex tomorrow,” Nana said to Sampson in confidential tones. I wondered who she thought might be listening, trying to overhear her intimacies. “You see now, John Sampson, you can be civilized and somewhat useful when you want to be. Didn’t I always tell you that?” She pointed a curled, knobby finger at his massive chin. “Didn’t I?”

  Sampson grinned down at her. He revels in his physical superiority even to a woman who is eighty. “I let Alex go by himself, I’d only have to come later, Nana. Rescue him and Naomi,” he said.

  Nana and Sampson cackled like a pair of cartoon crows on an old familiar fencepost. It was good to hear them laugh. Then she somehow managed to wrap her arms around Sampson and me. She stood there—like some little old lady holding on to her two favorite redwood trees. I could feel her fragile body tremble. Nana Mama hadn’t hugged the two of us like that in twenty years. I knew that she loved Naomi as if she were her own child, and she was very afraid for her.

  It can’t be Naomi. Nothing bad could happen to her, not to Naomi. The words kept drifting through my head. But something had happened to her, and now I would have to start thinking and acting like a policeman. Like a homicide detective. In the South.

  “Have faith and pursue the unknown end.” Oliver Wendell Holmes said that. I have faith. I pursue the unknown. That’s my job description.

  Chapter 9

  SEVEN O’CLOCK in the evening was a busy time in late April on the stunningly beautiful campus of Duke University. The physical impressiveness of the
students was visible everywhere at the self-proclaimed “Harvard of the South.” The magnolia trees, especially along Chapel Drive, were plentiful and in full bloom. The well-kept and striking orderliness of the grounds made it one of the most visually satisfying campuses in the United States.

  Casanova found the fragrant air intoxicating as he strolled between tall graystone gates and onto the university’s West Campus. It was a few minutes past seven. He had come for one reason only—to hunt. The entire process was exhilarating and irresistible. Impossible to stop once he had begun. This was foreplay. Lovely in every way.

  I’m like a killer shark, with a human brain, and even a heart, Casanova thought, as he walked. I am a predator without peer, a thinking predator.

  He believed that men loved the hunt—lived for it, in fact—though most wouldn’t admit it. A man’s eyes never stopped searching for beautiful, sensual women, or for sexy men and boys, for that matter. All the more at a prime location like the Duke campus, or the campuses at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, or North Carolina State University at Raleigh, or many others he’d visited throughout the Southeast.

  Just look at them! The slightly uppity Duke coeds were among the very finest and most “contemporary” American women. Even in dirty cutoffs, or ridiculous holey 501s, or baggy hobo’s pants, they were something to see, to watch, occasionally to photograph, to fantasize about endlessly.

  Nothing could be finer, Casanova thought, whistling a bar of the beamish old tune about a life of leisure in the Carolinas.

  He casually sipped an icy Coca-Cola as he watched the students at play. He was playing a game of skill himself—several complicated games at once, actually. The games had become his life. The fact that he had a “respectable” job, another life, no longer mattered.

  He checked each passing woman who even looked like a faint possibility for his collection. He studied shapely young coeds, older women professors, and female visitors in the Duke Blue Devils T-shirts that seemed de rigueur for outsiders.