The Ways of the Dead Read online

  “Do we have it from the police, formally, that he didn’t tell them?” Edward asked.

  “A statement from the chief is coming,” Sully said. “They’ve been stiffing me on it all day. I gave them until eight or said I would go with the chief had no comment, but police sources have confirmed it.”

  “Then let’s soften that to ‘apparently’ didn’t tell the police, until we get the confirmation or the nonstatement. And make that lede two sentences.”

  He kept reading, eyes not lifting from the screen. “And I want you to show Lewis your documentation and your notes. With all due respect, I’m also going to ask him to call Lorena Bradford to verify the phone information.”

  “Sure.”

  A few minutes and quiet remarks to the copyediting staff later, he half spun in his chair away from the computer and looked at the assembled. “It’s solid. Hard to believe but equally hard to dispute. Let’s keep going through it.”

  The mini conference broke up.

  Sully went back to his desk, a printout of the story in hand, and found, lying on his keyboard, a package that a news aide had left. It was a large envelope from Lorena—the complete chronology she’d worked up. Pushing it aside for now, he got a red pen and went through the story, testing every assertion of fact against his notes, putting a red check over each when he verified it. The room was quiet, and he worked without interruption. Lewis waddled by, terse, hurried, and Sully looked up. He was surprised to see that more than an hour had passed.

  “The old lady across the street? Show me the notes. And the sister’s number.”

  Sully gave him the numbers for both, Lewis nodding, writing the numbers on his legal pad, and left.

  The newsroom population was thinning out, it was down to the late-night metro editor and copy editors and layout artists. He leaned back in his chair, stretching, nerves jumping. Either his career or David Reese’s was going to be over in twenty-four hours. There wasn’t much way around it.

  To the right of his keyboard, underneath a flurry of papers he’d gone through in fact-checking, was Lorena’s manila folder. Yawning, he tore it open and pulled the thick chronology out. “Just in time!” was written in a sticky note attached to the front page in Lorena’s swirling hand. She’d dropped it off downstairs earlier, her note said.

  When he pulled it out, a smaller sheaf of papers fell out onto the floor. They were held together with a paper clip, and he bent over to pick them up.

  “??? Stores???” was written in Lorena’s hand on the sticky note on top of them. “Didn’t go through—I don’t know what these are/where they’re from.”

  He removed the clip and they fluttered out onto the table. None of the receipts had any identifying information, hence Lenora’s shorthand. Most appeared to be from an old-fashioned cash register, narrow slips of paper with a serrated edge at top and bottom. The receipts listed prices, with a date and time at the bottom, but no store name or what the purchased items were. There were something like two dozen of them, the amounts small, $.99, $2.25, $1.39, $4.58, and the like.

  Dealing them out across the table like playing cards, killing time while waiting for editing questions, he started making piles by date.

  It was clear after the first ten or eleven receipts that they were all from April 1998, the month Noel disappeared. There were a couple dated the third, one on the seventh, the eighteenth, the fourth, the twenty-second—he was putting them in a line, left to right . . . and then he stopped. The receipt dropped to the desk like a flaring match.

  The date on the receipt was April 25. The day she was last seen.

  There were three items on it—$2.49, $3.39, $3.39—but it was the time that glared out at him, radiating.

  The time was 4:47 p.m.

  Speckles of sweat burst out on his back, the palms of his hand.

  Noel hadn’t died the night she came home from Halo, and she didn’t die shortly after her phone call to Reese that morning.

  No, no, she was still alive and shopping that afternoon. Not only that, but she’d come back to her apartment after buying whatever it was in a calm enough state of mind to put her daily receipts in the record-keeping coffee can.

  How late did that make it? Five thirty? Six? Eight?

  Frantically, he finished assembling the other receipts by date—the twelfth, the seventeenth, the third, the twenty-first, the second—but none came after the twenty-fifth. He counted them all again—twenty-two purchases for small things in twenty-five days, apparently from the same store.

  As soon as the thought flickered, the tumblers of his mind, the ones that had been rolling, clicking, never settling down, finally stopped, a combination that clicked.

  Pushing back and sideways in his chair, he reached in his back pocket for his wallet and yanked it open. He pulled out a tumble of paperwork, dollar bills, a couple of twenties. Here they were, the tab for Halo . . . gas for the motorcycle . . . drinks with Eva at Stoney’s.

  And then there was a simple till receipt, for $0.99 and $1.29. Total of $2.46 with tax. He placed it against the final receipts from Noel’s. It was an exact match.

  Sully sat back against his chair, dazed.

  “Peanuts,” he said flatly. “Peanuts and a Coke.”

  thirty-eight

  The bike roared out of the garage and he redlined it at the first light, revving, popping the clutch, and wham, he was hitting sixty, moving the needle to seventy, blowing through traffic, his mind moving faster than the bike.

  David Reese wasn’t the last one to see Noel. He’d lied. He hadn’t volunteered information. He’d covered his ass. But he wasn’t the last one to see her, and he wasn’t the only one covering his tracks.

  Noel had been to one place over and over again that last month. Sully was certain she’d been to it several times a week for the entire time she’d lived in the neighborhood, someplace she was known as a regular: Doyle’s.

  It all came screaming at him now. Doyle had said he barely recognized her when Sully had shown him the pictures of the three girls—yet he knew her well enough to recognize her on her front porch with Reese. What if his rage that day hadn’t been fury at being slighted by Reese, but jealousy of the man? What if half of the “D’s” in the diary were for Doyle, not David, and Noel, silly, giggling, had written in the double meaning to amuse herself? What if he was the boyfriend with the money for the photographer?

  No, sweet Jesus, no.

  And then it came to him so clearly he nearly dropped the bike: When he’d shown Doyle the pictures of Lana, Noel, and Michelle? What had he said? “They’re the three dead girls.”

  Lana and Noel were dead, yes, but Michelle was missing. Nobody said she was dead.

  He slowed the bike with the thought, on a straight shot of Georgia now, the commercial low-rise storefronts and the prewar four-story apartment buildings populated by fortysomething immigrant men driving taxis and their dour women and their children loud as shit on the playgrounds.

  His breath came back to him, slowly, one inhalation at a time. By the time he pulled into the neighborhood, the mixed wave of euphoria and revelation was wearing off, and self-doubt and paranoia were settling in.

  Doyle had said they were three dead girls? So what? Two of the three women were dead. Doyle might have lopped Michelle in with the rest out of laziness, or by a simple mistake. It wasn’t some irrefutable Freudian slip.

  And the receipts? So what?

  It was important to know Noel was alive later in the day, absolutely. But maybe Doyle didn’t have any idea she’d come in the store that day. Maybe he happened not to work that weekend. Maybe he had, and the encounter was so routine that its very familiarity blinded him as to the date of its actual occurrence. And even if he had recalled her coming in that day? Maybe he’d decided to keep his mouth shut for the same reason a lot of witnesses in this town did—to stay out of it, to avoid the pos
sible retribution from suspects. Hadn’t he already said that business in the store was half off?

  The bottom line was, how could he know? The presses were going to roll in an hour and, suddenly, he had no fucking idea.

  Goddammit.

  There was only one thing to do, and he’d known it as soon as he saw the matched receipts. He’d started out of the paper’s garage at a hundred miles an hour, and where had the bike taken him? He was already turning onto Rock Creek Church, the blinker on without a conscious thought, the bike slowing in front of Sly’s dilapidated house.

  You wanted to know what was happening in Park View? You dealt with the devil and you paid the price.

  • • •

  Sly listened to his spiel, to his hunches, then pushed back on his bar stool, balancing it on the rear two legs.

  “So you thinking we ought to go sweat this photographer, Eric.”

  “At least two of the dead women posed nude. We know he photographed one of them.”

  “Carter. Eric? Known him since back in the day. Got to be the gayest motherfucker this side of Luther.”

  “Amber said he had a hard-on during the shoot with Noel.”

  “Eric probably gets a hard-on buying groceries. Back in third grade? He had a hard-on then, too.”

  “So I don’t hear any brilliant ideas from you.”

  “You been yapping.” Sly set the stool back down on all four legs. “So, if you’re done? I been taking this sort of hard, you see what I’m saying here, the judge tipping in my backyard.” Only dim lights along the kitchen wall were illuminated, the stereo was off, Donnell was asleep by the couch, and Sly’s voice seemed to rise from the shadows.

  “So me and Lionel, we been pushing. Beating the pavement. Making it known we want to hear from people, that we better hear from people. And so this female who’s been in the lockup for a few weeks comes to see me. She’s what your paper would call a working girl, right, walking Georgia between Princeton Place and the Show Bar? She comes by to tell me she saw this ‘Missing’ poster about that girl Michelle, and then she saw the thing you wrote in the paper, about them girls missing or dead or whatever, and she said it gave her this fucked-up feeling, because she saw Michelle a few weeks ago in the back room at Doyle’s.”

  “Michelle was in Doyle’s? When?”

  “Wait, now. This female, she’s all the time going into Doyle’s to buy a little something so they let her go pee while she’s working. She says when Doyle is there, he’s eyeing her up, telling her she can get shit for free for a little favor in the back.”

  “Did she?”

  “Nah. Pussy ain’t for bartering. Hers, anyway. But here it is. She’s back there squatting one night and she hears grunting, unh unh unh. She walks out the toilet real quiet, the office door ain’t all the way closed. She peeps, sees Michelle, titties out, shirt open, kneeling in front of the desk in Doyle’s office. She just tipped on out, didn’t think nothing about it, just thought Doyle musta been making his offer to a lot of females and Michelle took him up on it.”

  “Michelle was turning tricks?”

  “Girl was a crackhead. Crackheads’ll suck an exhaust pipe for ten dollars and a hit. So girlfriend here, she leaves out of Doyle’s, gets picked up the next night for, what do you call it, soliciting, and doesn’t know anything else until she gets out a couple days ago.”

  “So what day was this she sees Michelle?”

  “About six weeks back.”

  “She sure?”

  “She was in the lockup for forty-something days before the charges got dropped. She remembers it was the night before she got picked up.”

  “And she reads the newspapers, does she?”

  “There ain’t a lot to do in lockup.”

  Sully leaned against the counter and thought for a minute.

  “So, okay, Doyle lied about Noel. And he’s getting blow jobs or whatever from Michelle. Which means what to us exactly? I mean, I got a story running tomorrow, and it’s the judge’s ass or mine.”

  Donnell’s eyes flicked open, looking up at Sly, then Sully, as if startled to see them there, then laid his massive head back on the carpet and yawned, long pink tongue flicking out over his teeth. Sully could no longer make out Sly’s face in the darkness, just glints of the sides of his glasses and his small, narrow nose, surprisingly delicately boned.

  “I told you me and Lionel, we been pushing this hard. Turns out Doyle is a regular pussy hound. Man runs a tab up at the Show Bar, after he shuts his store down. And you know as well as me that Les, the owner? He’s working girls up in there. Les, he tells me that Doyle likes sisters, black and brown, don’t matter, long as they got some pigmentation. Gets blown off in the men’s once or twice a week, maybe more on the side.”

  “All the women who are missing or dead—they’re all hookers or got a drug problem or they live right there on Princeton,” Sully said. “You thinking Noel was turning high-end tricks? That the judge was paying for it, and maybe Doyle, too? That, what, Doyle is the one out there killing women?”

  “You got a better idea?”

  “Why Sarah, then? She’s not anything like the others.”

  “She got in the way. She saw something. He decided to branch out.”

  “But she wasn’t sexually assaulted.”

  “Maybe he couldn’t get it up, killed her when he got pissed off. I’m not a sick fuck. I don’t know. I don’t have to know the why. I just have to know the if.”

  “So what is it you propose to do?”

  “I don’t propose nothing. I’m saying what we’re going to do, brother—we’re going to find out. Lionel, he’s down there at the Show Bar keeping an eye on Doyle.”

  “You don’t mean we’re going to go press him at the club.”

  “No no no. You don’t think right. We’re going to check out his house while he’s up there getting his johnson polished.”

  “What? Right now?”

  “You got something better to do? Somebody’s shooting at you. Probably Doyle, you ask me. Then you come in here and tell me your comfy-ass job is on the line. I’m saying police are pressing people to talk about them three. It’s making my people nervous, and it ain’t in my best interest when my neighbors are nervous. So, brother. I’m taking care of my business. You? You in or out? I mean, I’m not the one going to get fired tomorrow if I’m wrong.”

  thirty-nine

  Sly went to the back room and came back two minutes later with a large envelope. He opened the flap and held it down at an angle, shaking it. A series of pictures, all eight-by-tens, slid out. It was a series of pictures of houses just up the street. He fanned them out across the counter.

  “Now. This here is Doyle’s place. All these old row houses on this street? They pretty much the same layout, same front porch, same front room, dining room, kitchen, basement, and bath and bedrooms upstairs. Look here. Window units. Cheap-ass ain’t even put in central air.”

  Sully was going to point out that the top two floors of Sly’s house looked like a crack squat, but decided against it.

  “You been staking him out?” Sully asked.

  “I said I’m taking care of business. Now look. These here are the backyards of the houses on that block. See if you can pick his out.”

  Sully looked at the pictures Sly had spread out—five, taken from different vantage points of the rear alley. The yards were all tiny, rectangular, sectioned off by stretches of sagging chain-link fences, overgrown grass and flowerpots and concrete parking spots in the yards. The paint on the rear brick walls on every house was peeling or chipped or faded. Some of the houses had drives that sloped sharply downhill from the alley to their basements. There was a recent-model blue BMW in one, a silver Honda just beyond, and a Caddy, sagging at the ass end, in another.

  There was no need to guess.

  In the middle of the block, t
here was one house with a yard sealed off from view by a solid wooden fence at least six feet high.

  “So you still think the man ain’t done nothing?”

  “It’s a fucking fence, Sly.”

  “Y’all got problems with your belief system. Why would he have a fence up like that, he ain’t up to something?”

  “He likes to sun himself naked. He wants the shade. Tired of kids jumping the fence and stealing his barbeque.”

  Sly rolled his eyes and went to the back room again.

  When he came back, he was dressed in a black tracksuit. In each hand, he held a ziplock bag, stuffed thick, and he tossed one underhanded to Sully. Inside was a black watch cap, gloves, plastic booties. Sly set two pencil-thin flashlights on the counter and told him not to pick his up until his gloves were on. He told him to leave the cycle jacket and tossed him a long-sleeve black T-shirt, a turtleneck, and told him to burn everything when they were done.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Sully said. Sly just looked at him, and Sully, in spite of himself, put the gear on. A few minutes later, Sly’s phone buzzed. He looked down at it and said, “Lionel’s out front. Let’s go.”

  He opened the basement door, Sully out in front, and then locked it behind them. He took Sully by the arm as he walked past. “You ain’t gonna pussy out now, are you?”

  Sully responded by taking the steps two at a time to get to street level and there was a Honda Odyssey idling at the curb, the side door sliding open. Lionel was at the wheel.

  Sully stepped inside, then Sly.

  They pulled out slowly, and Sully could not help himself.

  “When did you start pushing a minivan, Dad?”

  A full block passed before Sly spoke.

  “Nothing is so stupid as driving your own car to do your dirt. We borrowing this from a driveway in Bethesda. The Camaro, see, one of my associates is tooling around Southeast, outside a few clubs, going to a drive-through McDonald’s.”