The death was a terrible shock to everyone who had worked with him, and a couple of Odenkirk’s coworkers broke down while talking to me about his murder.
I wasn’t looking forward to interviewing Mrs. Odenkirk, but I drove out 295 and 210 to Forest Heights late on Friday afternoon. Chris Odenkirk was home with her mother, and also her husband’s parents, who had flown in from Briarcliff Manor in Westchester County, New York. They told me the same story as the people at the Library of Congress. No one in the family knew of anyone who might want to harm Frank. He was a loving father, a supportive husband, a thoughtful son and son-in-law.
At the Odenkirk home, I learned that the deceased had been wearing a green seersucker suit when he left home, that his business meeting in New York had run over, and that he had been nearly two hours late getting to La Guardia Airport. He generally took a cab home from the airport in Washington because so many flights arrived late.
Even before I went to the house in Forest Heights, I had two detectives sent out to the airport. They showed around pictures of Odenkirk, interviewed airline personnel, shopworkers, porters, taxi dispatchers, and cabdrivers.
Around six I went over to the medical examiner’s office to hear the results of the autopsy. All the photos and sketches from the crime scene were laid out. The autopsy had run about two and a half hours. Every cavity of Frank Odenkirk’s body had been swabbed and scraped, and his brain had been removed.
I talked to the medical examiner while she finished up with Odenkirk at about six-thirty. Her name was Angelina Torres, and I’d known her for years. The two of us had started in our jobs at about the same time. Angelina was a tick under five feet and probably weighed around ninety pounds soaking wet.
“Long day, Alex?” she asked. “You look used and abused.”
“Long one for you, too, Angelina. You look good, though. Short, but good.”
She nodded, grinned, then stretched her small slight arms up over her head. She let out a low groan that approximated the way I felt, too.
“Any surprises for me?” I asked, after allowing her to stretch in peace and moan her little heart out.
I hadn’t expected anything, but she had some news. “One surprise,” Angelina said. “He was sodomized after he died. Someone had sex with him, Alex. Our killer seems to swing both ways.”
Chapter 28
ON THE DRIVE HOME that evening, I needed a break from the murder case. I thought about Christine, and that was much better, easier on the frontal lobe. I even switched off my beeper. I didn’t want any distractions for ten or fifteen minutes.
Even though she hadn’t talked about it recently, she still felt my job was too dangerous. The trouble was, she was absolutely right. I sometimes worried about leaving Damon and Jannie alone in the world, and now Christine as well. As I drove along the familiar streets of Southeast near Fifth, I considered whether I could actually leave police work. I’d been thinking about going into private practice and working as a psychologist, but I hadn’t done anything to make it happen. It probably meant that I didn’t really want to do it.
Nana was sitting on the front porch when I arrived home at around seven-thirty. She looked peeved, an expression of hers that I know all too well. She can still make me feel like I’m nine or ten years old and she’s the one with all the answers.
“Where are the kids?” I called out as soon as I opened the car door and climbed out. A fractured Batman and Robin kite was still up in a tree in the yard, and I was annoyed at myself for not getting it down a couple of weeks ago.
“I shackled them to the sink, and they’re doing the dishes,” Nana said.
“Sorry about missing dinner,” I told her.
“Tell that to your children,” Nana said, frowning up a storm. She’s about as subtle as a hurricane. “You better tell them right now. Your friend Sampson called a little earlier. So did your compatriot Jerome Thurman. There’s been more murders, Alex. I used the plural noun, just in case you didn’t notice. Sampson is waiting for you at the so-called crime scene. Two bodies over in Shaw, near Howard University, of all places. Two more young black girls are dead. It won’t stop, will it? It never stops in Southeast.”
No, it never does.
Chapter 29
THE HOMICIDE SCENE was an old crumbling brownstone in a bad section of S Street in Shaw. A lot of college kids and also some young professionals live in the up-and-down, mostly middle-class neighborhood. Lately, prostitution has become a problem there. According to Sampson, the two dead girls were both prostitutes who occasionally worked in the neighborhood but mostly turned tricks over in Petworth.
A single squad car and an EMS truck were parked at the homicide scene. A uniformed patrolman was posted on the front stoop, and he seemed intent on keeping intruders out. He was young, baby-faced, with smooth, butterscotch skin. I didn’t know him, so I flashed my detective’s shield.
“Detective Cross.” He grunted. I sensed that he’d heard of me.
“What do we have so far?” I asked before I went inside to trudge up four steep flights. “What do you hear, Officer?”
“Two girls dead upstairs. Both pros, apparently. One of them lived in the building. Murders were called in anonymously. Maybe a neighbor, maybe the pimp. They’re sixteen, seventeen, maybe younger. Too bad. They didn’t deserve this.”
I nodded, took a deep breath, and then quickly climbed up the steep, winding, creaking stairs to the fourth floor. Prostitutes make for difficult police investigations, and I wondered if the Weasel knew that. On average, a hooker out of Petworth might turn a dozen or more tricks a night, and that’s a lot of forensic evidence just on her body.
The door to apartment 4A was wide open, and I could see inside. It was an efficiency, with one large room, kitchenette, bath. A fluffy white area rug lay between two daybeds. A lava lamp was undulating green blobs next to several dildos.
Sampson was crouched on the far side of one daybed. He looked like an NBA power forward searching the floor for a missing contact lens.
I walked into a small, untidy room that smelled of incense, peach-blossom fragrance, greasy food. A bright red and yellow McDonald’s container of fries was open on the couch.
Dirty clothes covered the chairs: bike shorts, short-shorts, Karl Kani urban clothes. At least a dozen bottles of nail polish and remover, a couple of nail files, and cotton balls lay on the floor. There was a heavy, cloying smell of fruity perfume in the room.
I went around the bed to look at the victims. Two very young women, both naked from the waist down. The Weasel had been here —I could feel it.
The girls were lying one on top of the other, looking like lovers. They looked as if they were having sex on the floor.
One girl wore a blue tank top, the other black lingerie. They both still wore “slides,” stacked bath sandals that are popular nowadays. Most of the Jane Does had been left naked, but unlike many of the others, these two would be fairly easy for us to identify.
“No actual I.D. on either girl,” Sampson said, without looking up from his work.
“One of them rents the apartment, though,” I told him.
He nodded. “Probably pays cash. She’s in a cash business.”
Sampson was wearing latex rubber gloves, and was bent down close to the two women.
“The killer wore gloves,” Sampson said, still without looking up at me. “Don’t seem to be fingerprints anywhere. That’s what the techie says. First look-through. They both were shot, Alex. Single shot to the forehead.”
I was still looking around the room, collecting information, letting the details of the murder scene flow over me. I noticed an array of hair products: Soft Sheen, Care Free Curl, styling gel, several wigs. On top of one of the wigs was a green army garrison cap with stripes, commonly called a cunt cap among military personnel because it’s said to be effective for picking up women, especially in the South. There was also a pager.
The girls were young and pretty. They had skinny little legs, small, bony
feet, silver toe rings that looked like they’d come from the same shop. Their discarded clothes amounted to insignificant little bundles on the bloodied hardwood floor.
In one corner of the small room, there were vestiges of brief childhoods: a Lotto game, a stuffed blue bear that was threadbare and looked about as old as the girls themselves, a Barbie doll, a Ouija board.
“Take a good look, Alex. It gets weirder and weirder. Our Weasel is starting to freak out.”
I sighed and bent down to see what Sampson had discovered. The smaller, and perhaps the younger, of the two girls was lying on top. The girl underneath was on her back. Her glazed brown eyes stared straight up at a broken light fixture in the ceiling, as if she had seen something terrible up there.
The girl on top had been positioned with her face—actually, her mouth—tilted down into the other girl’s crotch.
“Killer played real cute games with them after they were dead,” Sampson said. “Move the one on top a little. Lift her head, Alex. You see it?”
I saw it. A completely new m.o. for the Jane Does, at least the ones I knew about. The phrase “stuck on each other” ran through my mind. I wondered if that was the killer’s “message.” The girl on top was connected to the one underneath—by her tongue.
Sampson sighed and said, “I think her tongue is stapled inside the other girl. I’m pretty sure that’s it, Alex. The Weasel stapled them together.”
I looked at the two girls and shook my head. “I don’t think so. A staple, even a surgical one, would come apart on the tongue’s surface…. Krazy Glue adhesive would work, though.”
Chapter 30
THE KILLER was working faster, so I had to do the same. The two dead girls didn’t remain Jane Does for very long. I had their names before the ten-o’clock news that night. I ignored the explicit orders of the chief of detectives and continued to work on the investigation.
Early the next morning, Sampson and I met at Stamford, the high school that Tori Glover and Marion Cardinal had attended. The murdered girls were seventeen and fourteen years old.
The memory of the homicide scene had left me with a queasy, sick feeling that wouldn’t go away. I kept thinking, Christine is right. Get out of this, do something else. It’s time.
The principal at Stamford was a small, frail-looking, red-haired woman named Robin Schwartz. Her resource officer, Nathan Kemp, had gotten together some students who knew the victims, and had set aside a couple of classrooms for Sampson, Jerome Thurman, and me to use for interviews. Jerome would work in one room, Sampson and I in the other.
Summer school was still in session, and Stamford was busy as a mall on a Saturday. We passed the cafeteria on the way to the classrooms, and it was packed, even at ten-thirty. No empty seats anywhere. The room reeked of French fries, the same greasy smell that had been in the girl’s apartment.
A few kids were making noise, but they were mostly well behaved. The music of Wu Tang and Jodeci leaked from earphones. The school seemed to be well run and orderly. Between classes a few boys and girls embraced tenderly, with loosely locked pinkies and the gentlest brushes of cheeks.
“These were not bad girls,” Nathan Kemp told us as we walked. “I think you’ll hear that from the other students. Tori dropped out last semester, but her homelife was the main reason. Marion was an honor student at Stamford. I’m telling you, guys, these were not bad girls.”
Sampson, Thurman, and I spent the rest of the afternoon with the kids. We learned that Tori and Marion were popular, all right. They were loyal to their friends, funny, usually fun to be around. Marion was described as “blazing,” which meant she was great. Tori was “buggin’ sometimes,” which meant she could be a little crazy. Most of the kids hadn’t known that the girls were tricking in Petworth, but Tori Glover was said to always have money.
One particular interview would stick in my mind for a while. Evita Cardinal was a senior at Stamford, and also a cousin of Marion’s. She wore white athletic pants and a purple stretchy top. Her black-rimmed, yellow-tinted sunglasses were propped on top of her head.
She started to cry her eyes out as soon as she sat down across the desk from me.
“I’m real sorry about Marion,” I said, and I was. “We just want to catch whoever did this terrible thing. Detective Sampson and I both live nearby in Southeast. My kids go to the Sojourner Truth School.”
The girl looked at me. Her eyes were red-rimmed and wary. “You won’t catch nobody,” she finally said. It was the prevailing attitude in the neighborhood, and it happened to be mostly true. Sampson and I weren’t even supposed to be here. I had told my secretary I was out working the murder of Frank Odenkirk. A few other detectives were covering for us.
“How long have Tori and Marion been working in Petworth? Do you know any other girls from school who work over there?”
Evita shook her head. “Tori was the one working the street in Petworth. Not Marion. My cousin was a good person. They both were. Marion was my little doggie,” Evita said, and the tears came flowing again.
“Marion was there with Tori.” I told her what I knew to be the truth. “We talked to people who saw her on Princeton Place that night.”
The cousin glared at me. “You don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, Mister Detective. You’re wrong. You ain’t got the straight.”
“I’m listening to you, Evita. That’s why I’m here.”
“Marion wasn’t there to sell her body or like that. She was just afraid for Tori. She went to protect Tori. She never did nothin’ bad for money, and I know that for a fact.”
The girl started to sob again. “My cousin was a good person, my best girlfriend. She was tryin’ to just protect Tori and she got herself killed for it. The police won’t do nothin’. You never come back here again after today. Never happen. You don’t care about us. We’re nothin’ to nobody,” Evita Cardinal said, and that seemed to say it all.
Chapter 31
WE’RE NOTHIN’ TO NOBODY. It was a horrifying and absolutely true statement, and it was at the deepest roots of the Jane Doe investigation, the search for the Weasel. It pretty well summed up George Pittman’s cynical philosophy about the inner city. It was also the reason I was feeling tired and numb to the bone by six-thirty that night. I believed that the Jane Doe murders were escalating.
On the other hand, I hadn’t seen nearly enough of my own kids for the last few days, so I decided I’d better head home. On the way, I thought about Christine and calmed down immediately. Since the time I was a young boy, I’ve been having a recurring daydream. I’m standing alone on a cold, barren planet. It’s scary, but more than anything, it’s lonely and unsettling. Then a woman comes up to me. We begin to hold hands, to embrace, and then everything is all right. That woman was Christine, and I had no idea how she had gotten out of my dreams and into the real world.
Nana, Damon, and Jannie were just leaving the house when I pulled up into the driveway. What’s this? I wondered.
Wherever they were going, everybody was dolled up and looking especially nice. Nana and Jannie wore their best dresses, and Damon had on a blue suit, white shirt, and tie. Damon almost never wears what he calls his “monkey” or “funeral” suit.
“Where’s everybody going?” I said as I climbed out of the old Porsche. “What’s going on? You all aren’t moving out on me?”
“It’s nothing,” Damon said, strangely evasive, eyes darting all over the front yard.
“Damon’s in the Washington Boys Choir at school!” Jannie proudly blurted out. “He didn’t want you to know until he made it for sure. Well, he made it. Damon’s a chorister now.”
Her brother swatted her on the arm. Not hard, but enough to show he wasn’t pleased with Jannie for telling his secret.
“Hey!” Jannie said, and put up her dukes like the little semipro boxer that she is becoming under my watchful eye.
“Hey, hey!” I said, and moved in like a big-time referee, like that guy Mills Lane who does the big pro fights. “N
o prizefighting outside the ring. You know the rules of the fight game. Now what’s this about a choir?”
“Damon tried out for the Boys Choir, and he was selected,” Nana said, and beamed gloriously as she looked over at Damon. “He did it all by himself.”
“You sing, too?” I said, and beamed at him as well. “My, my, my.”
“He could be in Boyz Two Men, Daddy. Boyz Two Boyz, maybe. He’s smoo-ooth and silky. His voice is pure.”
“Is that so, Sister Soul?” I said to my baby girl.
“Zatso,” Jannie continued to prattle as she patted Damon on the back. I could tell she was incredibly proud of him. She was his biggest fan, even if he didn’t realize it yet. Someday he would.
Damon couldn’t hold back a big smile, then he shrugged it off. “No big thing. I sing all right.”
“Thousands of other boys tried out,” Jannie said. “It is a big thing, biggest in your small life, brother.”
“Hundreds,” Damon corrected her. “Only hundreds of kids tried out. I guess I just got lucky.”
“Hundreds of thousands!” Jannie gushed, and scooted away before he swatted her like the little gnat she can be sometimes. “And you were born lucky.”
“Can I come to the practice?” I asked. “I’ll be good. I’ll be quiet. I won’t embarrass anybody too much.”
“If you can spare the time.” Nana threw a neat jab. She sure doesn’t need any boxing lessons from me. “Your busy work schedule and all. If you can spare the time, come along with us.”
“Sure, Dad,” said Damon, finally.
So I came along.
Chapter 32
Pop Goes the Weasel Page 8
