The Ways of the Dead Read online

  “The blender of ‘Who’s killing all these women?’”

  “You’re pouting. You didn’t get the call this morning. It doesn’t suit you.”

  “The three suspects on the Reese thing, R.J.? They’re not going to stand. We don’t want to follow this too hard. We’ll get burned.”

  “Your own story is bullshit?”

  “Three men were arrested in a dramatic raid and the police say they killed Sarah Reese. That’s what I reported, and that’s not bullshit. The arrests aren’t going to stand. Also no bullshit.”

  “And who says that?”

  Sully tried to let his shoulders loosen. He had a knot in the middle of his upper back. His bowels felt cramped. The office, the office—who the fuck ever came up with the idea of working in an office?

  “Okay. Okay. Part of that, what I know? I can’t tell you because it’s a confidential source and—”

  “Whose name and position is?”

  “Can’t say.”

  “You can’t hide sources from your editors, you know that. Confidentiality means we don’t put it in the paper—”

  “I don’t need the primer—”

  “—and that eventually, you might go to jail rather than reveal it to a judge or to the public. But editors know the reporter’s source if need be. And I’m saying there’s a need.”

  “Then we’ll just have to discount that part of it, because there is no way I’m giving up the source on this.”

  R.J. blinked and looked at him, wrinkling his nose, making the bifocals twitch. He did not otherwise move. “You do remember your suspension. You went with a confidential source about Judge Foy—”

  “My source was David Reese.”

  “He says not. Edward agreed with him.”

  A deep breath.

  “Okay, think about this, R.J. Give it the smell test. These three guys? They’re shooting hoops on Friday evening, early, drinking beer, talking shit, a couple of blocks off Georgia. They go to the store, they bump into some white chick—and what, they drag her in an alley and slit her throat?”

  “The police say they found the girl’s wallet on them.”

  “That’s what the ‘item’ was?”

  “Chris got it from a detective this morning while he was at the Noel Pittman thing. It’ll be mentioned in the hearing this afternoon.”

  “Okay. Okay. So she drops it in the store, they pick it up. Maybe they stole it. That I can believe. I can’t believe they somehow got her in the alley and killed her just boom boom like that.”

  It seemed as if all the air was going out of R.J. The man looked as if somebody had pulled a little plastic plug out of his chest and now he was a deflating balloon. He looked like he was wondering what Sully would blow on a Breathalyzer right about now.

  “Do you have an aversion to the smart money, Sullivan? You have a clear path to the number one story in the paper, if not the nation, and you’re begging to take a back-road detour. This is called self-negation in psychiatric circles.”

  They had made it to Sully’s desk and he plunked down in his chair, glad to have the weight off his knee. He motioned R.J. to pull up another. He needed this man for an ally, R.J. well placed to play the Ivy League mind-fuck games that the paper required—hustles that, Sully damn well knew, he lacked the formal education, tact, and patience to tolerate. R.J., on the other hand, after a turbulent and moneyed youth in Boston, and after being drummed out of the U.S. Army during Vietnam (sodomy, insubordination), had blossomed into a high-brow journalist and intellectual of the type that Washington society, and New York publishing, adored. Four-time Pulitzer finalist, two wins. He and his partner, the artist Elwood Douglas, were big in the D.C. arts and museum circles. Their house was filled with art, mainly with Elwood’s canvas works, but also, on the mantel, sat one of Capote’s hand-decorated snakebite kits, this a sign of R.J.’s whimsy, his easy wealth, and his sincere, if slightly patronizing, ideas about Southern art and madness.

  Behind R.J., the homicide map loomed on the cubicle wall.

  “Okay. So look—just look at the map, R.J. It’s behind you. No—lean up—yes. There. The pin dots are homicides. Black pins, black male murder victims. White pins, white men. Yellow pins, Asian. Orange, Hispanic.”

  “This is quite racist, you know.”

  “Pink pins, women victims of any race.”

  “Have you had a talk with HR on sensitivity training?”

  Sully knew, without counting, that there were two hundred and six pins of all colors so far this year. One hundred and seventy-one pins were black. Eleven were orange. Four were white. One was yellow.

  “There are only nineteen pink pins, R.J. See how they’re spread out, but mostly east of the Anacostia?”

  “All of them are mostly east of the Anacostia.”

  “Yeah. Well. Watch this.” He reached into the top sliding drawer of his desk and pulled out three pink pins. He rolled the chair over to the cubicle wall. He found the intersection of Georgia and Princeton Place, then traced a finger slightly to the right to get to the rec center. He pushed all three pins in—marking the deaths of Sarah, Noel, and Lana. Then he pushed his chair back, rolling until he stopped alongside R.J.’s chair.

  The map documented, in ways that economists and social scientists spent oceans of time and expense duplicating, the diamond-shaped city’s fault lines between race and class. To the west of the green expanse of Rock Creek Park, there were only three pins, two white and one black. To the right of the park, to the east and south, there were more than 190, almost all of them black.

  Right in the middle, apart from any other pins, were the three pins Sully had just inserted. They formed a tiny pink cluster, a raised welt.

  “Twenty, twenty-one, and twenty-two,” Sully said. “Right on top of one another. That includes the only white child of either gender, the only Latina woman, and one of about fifteen black women. All within two hundred yards of one another, all within eighteen months.”

  R.J. shook his head.

  “Before we start debating statistical analysis, which neither of us can spell, the Reese murder is, at least officially, explained and off the map. Now. You’ve got a prostitute killed up the block and a body dumped in a basement. That’s not what—”

  “Give me three days, R.J.,” Sully said quietly, leaning forward so the man could hear him. “Give me three days and let me see what I get.”

  “To what end? Look, we’ve got Jamie and two others on the National doing the federal investigation, and Keith handling the issues on the bench. But this story on the suspects! It’s the one that’s going to drive our coverage! It’s yours! And you want a three-day holiday to jerk off on a piece about misbegotten girls of the night? You can’t possibly try to tie all that to Sarah Reese. There’s no connective tissue.”

  “Like I said—we’re not doing the death of Sarah Reese. We’re doing the dead and missing women of Princeton Place. If nothing else, I’ll write a bio of Pittman and Escobar, you know, young lives lost in a rough neighborhood.”

  “That sounds like what you did the other day.”

  “That was the block. These are the victims. Come on, R.J. A cluster of killings like that? Tell me it’s chance.”

  R.J. let out another sigh and stood up. He hitched his pants up slightly and his fingers found his slim golden belt buckle and fussed with it until it was perfectly in between the first and last loops of his slacks and directly beneath the point of his tie. He crossed his left arm across his chest and propped his right elbow against his left hand, holding the arm upright so that the fingers on his right hand could stroke his chin.

  “Jesus. Okay. We’ll play it your way for now. I’ll keep Chris on the Reese investigation. Keith will handle the courts; Jamie, the feds. You go out there in the demimonde, you go dig and claw around in the world of prostitutes, johns, and the party world where good-l
ooking young women get buried in the basements of abandoned buildings, and you come back and tell us all about it. You’ll start right now, giving Chris fill for the story tomorrow on the discovery of Pittman’s body. We’ll bump it from fifteen inches to twenty-five.”

  “You got it.”

  R.J. leaned forward and whispered, mocking the way Sully had spoken to him.

  “Got a minute, hero boy?”

  “Just that.”

  “Everybody knows you’re drinking again. You haven’t noticed Edward tippy-toeing around this story? Asking you a bunch of dick-holding questions? It’s not the old days when holding one’s liquor was a job description. Now look me in the eye and tell me I don’t have to worry.”

  “You don’t got to worry.”

  The old man stood. He rapped Sully on the shoulder, more of a punch than a pat, his face scowling behind the white beard. The skin was flushed, reddish. “When this is done, you’ll take your ass back to rehab.”

  A spin on the heel and he was gone. Sully looked after him, settling the papers on his desk. He looked up at the homicide map and then back across the newsroom. He took a long pull on his soda, in a Styrofoam cup, the plastic lid keeping in the sweet and lovely scent of his afternoon bourbon and Coke.

  fifteen

  By midafternoon, Sully was slumped back in his chair, feet up on his desk, going through the clips that had been written about the disappearance of Noel Pittman.

  Noel had gone to school in the city, Coolidge High, enrolled at Howard part-time, made decent but not spectacular grades, and was known on the black party circuit that thrived on the eastern side of the city—as opposed to the polo-playing Georgetown trust fund set who’d reliably turn up in the glossy society mags, beaming at the camera. Nobody from Noel’s set got invited to those parties.

  And almost no one, including his own paper, had written about Noel at all. About the only notice of her disappearance was from Howard’s campus paper, the Hilltop, in which a student staffer wrote a short piece about her disappearance in March of the previous year. They described her as a Jamaican immigrant.

  There was a picture of her, smiling, hair up, dangling earrings, light brown skin and dark brown eyes. She was laughing in the photograph, a warmth that seemed to bubble up out of her. Sully reached out and, without realizing it, touched the photograph.

  She was last seen leaving her weekend gig as a featured dancer at Halo, the high-end club on New York Avenue, at about two a.m. after arriving to work four hours earlier. It put her disappearance two hours into April 25. She had never been seen again. She drove her car out of the club’s parking lot and into the void. Her apartment on Princeton Place was a house that had been divided into two units—the basement to itself, the top floors another—and she had lived on the top floors. The basement apartment had been empty at the time of her disappearance.

  There was nothing in the clips about a Playboy shoot, and a database search of court records with her name did not turn up any hits. He’d been out to Halo once or twice, enough to know that “featured dancers” were the girls who danced on elevated platforms above the dance floor on the penthouse level. The dancers wore G-strings, heels, and a miniscule lingerie top.

  He tapped the keyboard to move into the paper’s copyediting system to read Chris’s story. It was being laid out to run on the lower right-hand corner of the Metro front. It was the basic “missing woman found dead” story. It noted the proximity of the Sarah Reese case as a coincidence that police were checking for any possible connection. The police chief was quoted as saying it was unlikely but could not be ruled out immediately. The photograph of her being printed was the same as the one on the flier. That reminded him to try the number on the flier again. He picked up the phone, dialed, and after five rings got the same voice mail message.

  To get a live voice in the story, he called the home phone of a professor of criminal justice at Georgetown. The professor confirmed what was obvious—three women being killed, if Noel was killed, within two hundred yards of one another was extremely unusual and pushed at the boundaries of circumstance. That went into the file he was writing up for Chris.

  “We’re nervous,” said David Belham, the Ward 1 city councilman, whose district included the area, Sully getting him at his home. “Whether these are connected or not, it’s too many. It feels wrong.”

  John Parker, when he finally picked up, had nothing to add on the investigation, but did say that he had Noel Pittman’s pictures. Sully arranged to meet him at eleven the next morning.

  Looking up at the clock, deadline was on him. He typed quickly now, information from the clips, filler stats, things he knew without having to think.

  The series of unsolved deaths in such a concentrated area makes criminologists wary of a coincidental explanation . . .

  After a few more paragraphs like this, he hit the send button and bounced an internal instant message to Chris, letting him know the file was available. He thought about it for a minute, then got up and walked over to Chris’s desk, the newsroom mostly empty. The place always smelled vaguely of—of—what was it? Takeout Chinese?

  He leaned over the cubicle. Chubface did not look up and did not remove his hands from the keyboard. “You got it,” Sully said.

  “Un-hunh. Thanks.” Not even looking up.

  Bitchy, bitchy, bitchy.

  Back at his desk, the whiskey was gone in two long slurps on the straw. He looked around and then took the ice-laden cup to another reporter’s desk and dropped it in the trash can.

  The cycle boots were under the desk, and he reached down and pulled them out, thinking about a burger at Stoney’s, wondering if Eva would pick up the phone if he called her, Dusty up in Baltimore at her weekday bar. There was a cough and a soft “Hey, man.”

  Chris again, hands on the chest-high divider of Sully’s cubicle, leaning forward on it, a piece of paper in one hand.

  “Yeah?” Sully said. “You filed? What happened with the guys in court?”

  “No surprises. No guilty plea, held until trial. Keith did it.”

  He extended his fingers, pushing a slip of paper at Sully. “This woman left two messages on the Metro main answering machine yesterday, asking for you. Said she was returning your call. The news aide delivered it to me today, I guess because I was working the story.”

  Sully took the slip of paper, which had a 301 area code, Maryland. The name was Lorena Bradford. The name was a blank.

  “She say what it was about?”

  “Yeah. She said you called her Saturday, before the body was found. She’s Noel Pittman’s sister.”

  • • •

  John Parker was already sitting at a four-top, coffee in front of him, when Sully walked in the next morning, nursing a modest hangover. He got a Coke and sat down.

  “You checked your messages?” John asked.

  “At the office? Should I?”

  “That story you and the fat kid did today? Whole neighborhood is jumping. We got forty, forty-five calls asking if there’s a serial killer on the loose.”

  “I didn’t say anything about a serial killer.”

  “You didn’t spell the words. But ‘unsolved deaths’? ‘Concentrated area’? Don’t pussyfoot. You know how the game goes. So does Belham. He’s setting up a community meeting tonight, calling in the chief, everybody.”

  “Well. I didn’t think he’d do that. But you don’t buy the cluster?”

  John shrugged. “No. Not for homicide. Know what you get when you get a lot of crackheads in a small area? Lot of deaths of people too young to die. I see how you get there for a newspaper story, but coincidence doesn’t make much of a homicide investigation.” He slid a manila envelope across the tabletop, the pictures of Noel Pittman. “Adult audiences only,” he said. “Someone sent them to you in the mail.”

  Sully peeked inside, thumbing through the eight-by-
tens without pulling any of the explicit pictures into public view. “Wow.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So what was the story on these?” He got out a notebook.

  “Based on the file I looked at, which didn’t have all that much, it was straight missing persons. This was last April. A family member starts pushing us on it, so a couple of uniforms looked around. Like I told you, decedent lived on the top end of the 700 block of Princeton. Ten, twelve houses up from where she was found.”

  “What’d the place look like?”

  “Not tossed, if that’s what you mean. I don’t have anything other than that. Report says the guys went through it. Nothing unusual about the calls on the voice mail, stuff on the computer. Her car never turned up. So it was pretty flat until this photographer guy calls us. He got wind we were making calls, thought we were snooping him. Runs a studio up there in Petworth.”

  “She was a client?”

  “Man said Pittman told him that she wanted the stills to send to lingerie magazines, upscale men’s magazines, like that, a portfolio. She came in for shoots in his studio, the results of which you’re looking at. First day just her, second day the girl-on-girl stuff. This about two months before she went missing.”

  “What about the shooter? You scope him out?”

  “Yeah, look, he’s a sleazeball, you ask me, but we didn’t find anything we could hit him for. Makes a lot of money on what they tell me is boudoir photography.”

  “Housewives in the buff?”

  “Something like it. Girlfriends, whatever. He shoots a lot of advertising, fashion, like that. He checked out.”

  “So who’s girl number two?” Sully asked, peering into the envelope.