The Ways of the Dead

by Neely Tucker

  But the main feature of his space was the hand-sketched homicide map of the city, his pride and possibly his joy. It was a poster-sized grid, thirty-six inches wide and fifty inches tall, marked off by the seven police districts with a few major roads indicated, and it was his oracle of Washington. It was his manner of understanding the living, by studying the ways of the dead, a habit so natural to him after years of covering war and conflict that it was no longer a conscious thought. If you wanted to understand any animal, he would tell college classes when they asked him to give talks, then you have to understand the behavior that made them unique, and what made human beings unique among animals were the prefrontal cortex, the opposing thumb, the well-developed voice box, and the propensity to torture and kill other members of their species. When students sometimes objected to this as morbid, or sought to invoke deities and religious perspectives, he would say that he had yet to see evidence of deity, but any textbook offered three thousand years or so of recorded history to back up his thoughts on humanity.

  “Even if you believe the Bible is literally true,” he would say, “when the population of the planet was four, Cain killed Abel, reducing it to three. Homicide is not an aberration. It is the norm. It is part of who we are.”

  On his map, each killing of the current year was marked with a pushpin, a tiny cross, and a number. The pins were color coded to the race of the victim. The crosses denoted case status: black for closed, red for open. The tiny numbers taped to the pins denoted the chronological order of the killings in each year. These numbers correlated to a database Sully kept that had the victim’s name, date of the crime, suspects (if any), relatives’ names (if any), and the name of the lead detective. Each killing then had a manila folder of its own, complete with photographs of the crime scene, the victim, the killer, and so on.

  A half dozen years earlier, at the height of the crack cocaine epidemic, there would have been more than four hundred crosses each year. There were about two hundred so far this year, nearly all of them clustered in the city’s poorest quadrants: east of the Anacostia, then a spine up through the neighborhoods of eastern Capitol Hill, Trinidad, and on into Brookland. The most violent housing projects—Benning Terrace, Barry Farms, Potomac Gardens, Sursum Corda—were a thick red smear of crosses.

  Rock Creek Park, its eastern edge reaching as far as Sixteenth Street, split the city, both in geography and homicide. Nearly all the slayings were to the east and south. West of the park—west of the park’s jogging trails and rising hills and tumbling streams—the city got wealthy and mostly white, and the few red murder crosses there appeared as droplets of blood.

  He was looking for a pin and a red cross for Sarah.

  “Sullivan, God, I’m glad to see you,” a voice called out, startling him. Melissa Baird, the Metro editor, was smiling, closing on him like a fast hawk on a slow rabbit. “R.J. tells me you’ve got a beautiful piece on this neighborhood, just really beautiful.”

  She was wearing her shoulder-length brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, and her pressed jeans and an open-collared shirt—her idea of a casual Saturday—had an air that all but screamed Master’s in Fucking Journalism from Columbia, born on third base in Westchester. Social climber, vertical blur at a paper that idolized the Ivy League and East Coast wankerdom. He swiveled in the chair, eyes darting to a clock posted on a beam behind her. It was nearly five. Front-page meeting starting in fifteen.

  “Thank God you’ve got something so eloquent,” she was saying. “Nothing happened on the investigation, other than they’re still looking for those three guys in the store.” She came into his cubicle and made a slight hop to sit on the edge of the desk, her newsroom trademark. Legs crossed at the ankles, back straight, hands on the desk beside her.

  “Hunter’s sources on cops zipped up tight,” she continued. Sully itched, wondering how long this would go on. Pert. She was just so damn pert. “The feds aren’t even returning calls. Reese family is sequestered at home in McLean. We’ll put the investigation story on the front page—we’ve got to, right?—but we’re looking pretty thin. Your piece is saving us. The art’s already in. Have you seen it? Early-morning mist in an alley, looking across Georgia at the store where the girl was murdered, a couple of storefronts, a guy in ragged pants and shirt walking across the street, stepping in a puddle. R.J. saw it and said it was just the kind of atmosphere you’ve got.”

  “R.J. is a kind man.”

  “He said something about Charles Bukowski poetry.”

  Sully recognized the drill, and he recognized Melissa’s skill at it. She was pumping him up while letting him know the pressure she, and by extension he, was under. And, he recognized, without telling him what to write, she was telling him exactly what to write.

  “Well, a piece like this,” he said, thinking of something to bullshit her with, “I think we just tell people what it feels like on the block down there. We tell them what the beer delivery guy is talking about while he’s loading up a dolly and what song is thumping out of a car stopped at the light. We tell them what the bathroom in the strip club just down the street smells like. We tell them about the elementary school, swing sets in the rain and needles in the playground grass from the Friday night junkies, and that the people who live here, the people in left-behind America, they, they’re the people least interested in the murder story that, you know, is horrifying the rest of the nation’s capital.”

  Melissa, beaming, smiling, leaning back on the desk, holding up her hands. “Perfect! That’s just golden. Never mind a lead for the five o’clock, but go ahead and write in a public basket so we can peek in, okay? Helps the headline guys. Move a final by seven?”

  Sully nodded, sure sure, yeah.

  Melissa popped her hands together and got off the desk, starting to back away, pep talk done. “That bit about the people there being the least interested in the murder that’s fascinating the rest of the city? Perfect. But you can make it the rest of the country. Slow weekend. This thing is all over the networks, the cable channels. The Beeb just did eight minutes.”

  She nodded, as if that were information he really needed right now, turned and walked away, everything but a spring in her step. He put his pen in his mouth and typed in a slug for the story—PRINCETONPLACE—and not twenty seconds later felt the bulbs of sweat start pushing through the pores in the small of his back, under his arms, on his palms. Why couldn’t you drink in the newsroom anymore? What was wrong with that?

  • • •

  Someone dumped the body of Sarah Emily Reese into a garbage dumpster less than 200 feet from the intersection of Georgia Avenue Northwest and Princeton Place NW in this scruffy corner of the District on Friday evening, a crime that has fascinated, if not horrified, the nation. But there were no memorials of teddy bears, flowers and hand-scrawled posters at the scene yesterday, the typical signs of neighborhood mourning in this part of the city.

  Instead, neighbors and residents here may be the people in America least interested in the brutal slaying of the child of a prominent D.C. jurist in their midst. Neighborhood bars kept their televisions tuned to sports stations yesterday, not the blanket coverage of the killing carried by cable news channels. Pedestrians sidestepped the yellow police tape around Doyle’s Market and ducked into the Hunger Stopper restaurant for breakfasts of waffles and fried chicken. Speculation wasn’t on the menu. The Show Bar, a strip club two blocks from the murder scene, did a brisk afternoon trade in the regular bump and grind . . .

  Sully had this in the system and heard Melissa hoot from across the room. “Sullivan Carter! ‘Speculation was not on the menu.’ You’re killing me here!”

  “Un-hunh,” he called back, without looking up.

  The dwindling clock, the fact that half a dozen editors were looking at his copy as he was writing, that the copy desk was already composing a headline, that any mistake in spelling or a mistyped digit in an address or a failure of memor
y about facts would result in a credibility-dinging correction and sour faces from the brass . . .

  He stopped to look up a few clips of old crime stories and did a database search for Lana and Noel. That led to a few perfunctory grafs of background about the Honorable Judge Reese and the probability of his future with the Supreme Court. Then onto Regina Blocker’s dance studio, the neighborhood demographics, what the traffic was like in that segment of Georgia on a Friday night. The keyboard strokes came in bursts:

  The Park View neighborhood has fast-food chicken places and two liquor stores and a couple of corner stores and a Chinese carryout and a used-car lot. The people who live on Princeton Place and adjacent streets tend to be bus drivers and nurses and Metro mechanics and check-out clerks and employees in the city’s parks and recreation department and secretaries in other city agencies. Some people still own. Most rent. Violence, drug deals and prostitution are not unusual.

  Lana Escobar, 25, was found dead in outfield grass at the Park View Recreation Center’s baseball field last July 14. She had been strangled. Her slaying remains unsolved, but police say Escobar was involved in prostitution and believe the killing was related to that trade.

  Another young woman, Noel Pittman, a part-time student at Howard University, disappeared April 24 of last year. A call to the telephone number listed on a flier asking for help finding her was not returned yesterday . . .

  Sully looked at the clock: 7:15. A kicker and he was home. Flipping through his notes, he remembered he hadn’t said anything else about the strip club, after mentioning it in the lede. If he came back to it now at the end, it would appear as if he’d intended that all along.

  Les Samuels, who runs the strip club, said residents and neighbors were not indifferent to the Reese slaying. He was in his office in the back of the club yesterday afternoon, filling out paperwork for the array of city and law enforcement agencies that license his establishment.

  “What people don’t want,” he said, “is trouble they ain’t already got. People got plenty of trouble all by themselves. A rich white girl gets killed up the street? That’s a fresh lot of trouble. That’s something you want to stay about a million miles away from.”

  “Sullivan!”

  He hit the send button. “Yours!”

  The bathroom, a place to walk to. Water ran from the tap in a cold torrent, and lowering his face to the sink, he cupped his hands to catch it, splashing it over his face. A damp hand through the hair and he looked up to the mirror. The scars were there, like bones melted by fire, by electricity. He thought of his house and its silences, awaiting him like an entombing crypt, and he did not want to go there, did not want to be left alone with his thoughts.

  Back at the desk, he read through his notes for fact-checking, checked the names to be sure, and then Melissa was waving, beckoning him. She had made a few tightening and clarification changes. She called the story up in layout, so they could see the front page and how it was displayed.

  There was no one else nearby, but she lowered her voice anyway, part of that bullshit hey-I’m-doing-you-a-favor air of familiarity she liked to convey. “Fabulous work today, Sullivan. It saved us. Now. Look. Really need you at the Reese house tomorrow. They’re making some sort of statement at one.”

  He blinked. She needed to whisper to hand him a lame-ass assignment like that?

  “Chris—let’s let him get that,” he said. “Lemme push the investigative side, something related to the manhunt but not precisely on it.”

  She looked away from the screen and at him, not pleased with the push-back. “Thanks, but cops are Chris’s beat. Jamie is working the feds. I need a real pro out there with the family. This statement, or whatever it is, isn’t going to be much, but I know you can do something with it. We’ll box it on the front.”

  “A statement? You’re serious?” He was whispering back, as if they were trading stock tips. “You’re sending me out to McLean to take dictation? Send a shooter and an intern.”

  “No,” she said firmly, holding his gaze now. “I need a scene setter. It’s a Sunday. Nothing else is going to develop on a Sunday. I need you to do just what you did today: Write the story onto the front page. The family statement, you know, pathos, the eternal grief of parents of murdered children.”

  “Reese and I have a certain history—”

  “Which nobody cares about,” she said. “You two are both professionals. Surely a tiff several years ago will not affect either of you when it comes to the murder of his child.”

  “A tiff?” It burst out of him, loud and hot, before he could stifle it. “He tried to get me fucking fired. He leaked me intel and then tried to say it—”

  “So you always said,” she shot back.

  “Screw you,” he said, standing up. “Just fuck that—”

  “Sullivan,” Edward Winters cut in, looking like he was pulling the leash on a poorly trained dog. Starched striped shirt, tie, hair swept back in a perfect coif, he seemed to materalize at the right of the copyediting desk, prim lips pursed. Sully walked over, this little summoning to the principal’s office. Copy editors, leaning back in their chairs, trying to glance over without looking like they were glancing over.

  “What’s it about?” Edward’s voice a harsh whisper, the blue eyes hard, that whole Princeton and Martha’s Vineyard thing. In his sixties, lifetime of privilege. Twits like this running things, nothing you could do.

  “Reese. The Judge Foy thing. You remember. You suspended me a week.”

  “What’s that got to do with this?”

  “Melissa wants me to babysit his presser tomorrow in his front yard.”

  “So do it.”

  “It’s wasting my time,” and here was where he should play his ace. “I’m working something, Eddie. The three suspects? They’re not connected. It’s a wrong turn.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “From a source. It’s developing. I need—”

  “No, what you need? You need to realize you’re not still working in a war zone. You cover that presser at one. This is the next Supreme Court justice we’re talking about. We need to own this story, and you—you need to get over your beef with Reese. You fucked up. There were repercussions. End of story.”

  Sully held his gaze for a beat, then two.

  “Sure thing, boss.”

  He went back over to Melissa, who was running with it now. She was leaning forward, elbows on the desk, eyebrows pulling down and together.

  “Let’s get this straight,” she said. “I am. Your boss. I. Am. Your. Boss’s. Boss. You pop off like that to me again? I’ll slap a memo to HR. You’ll be covering high school soccer until you quit. That bit Eddie just told you about the war being over, that’s exactly—”

  “What war are we talking about? I remember about six. Depending on your definition of open conflict.”

  “Then all of them, Sullivan. You’re back home. Look at a map. The rules are different here.”

  He kept his face flat, but felt the fury boiling from his throat into his head, the humiliation. Times like this, since the shell, maybe before, his mental wires crossed. The doctors, they had talked to him about the rage and how to contain it, and all that was washed away in a flood.

  “Just you try busting me,” he said, leaning closer to her, whispering back, smiling, pure malice now. “Go the fuck ahead. Walk into your boss’s office, good old Eddie back there, and explain assigning your best reporter to babysit a presser ’cause you thought it brilliant to have a twenty-seven-year-old newbie on the cop beat get bitchslapped by the New York Times.”

  She broke her gaze and leaned back, to defuse at least the appearance of a scene. “Okay, Sully. Look, it’s late. Everybody’s tired. Let’s just cool off and—”

  “You’ll get your presser,” he cut in, his voice ragged. “And in the next twenty-four to forty-eight? You’ll be eating t
his. Be a sweetheart when you do.”

  He managed to make his feet turn and walk, the walls seemed to vibrate, and the thundering in his ears was so loud that he had to blink it back.

  When he got to the hallway and reached for the elevator button, his thumb was trembling.

  nine

  When he blew in the door, Dusty had called, and that was just fucking great. He listened to the voice mail—Call me, it’s been too long, what’s the deal?—and decided to ignore it. The blackness, the bile—she wouldn’t understand and he couldn’t explain. He poured Basil’s over ice, skipped the splash, and opened the Dutch door to the backyard, sitting on the steps.

  He blinked and looked at the cherry tree, trying to slow his breathing the way the doctors had taught him: Focus, focus on something small. The tree, the tree. It would be shedding leaves in a matter of weeks. The chill in the air would stay. The ghosts in his head would leave. Winter would descend. He listened to the traffic passing on Constitution and his chest slowed. He held out his hand. The tremors were almost gone.

  He went back inside, got the bottle and went upstairs. The shelf in the closet held the box, the kind of storage box law firms used to use for case files. He took it to the bed, unwrapped the silk drawstrings, turned it upside down, shaking it out onto the top of the sheets.

  Pictures, old passports, documents in foreign languages, wrinkled currencies in faint shades of blue. Nadia’s scarf. He climbed on the bed, propping the bourbon against a pillow. There were several sets of pictures from Bosnia, bound together with a green rubber band, and he sorted through them until he found the packet he was looking for. He pulled the rubber band off and the pictures spilled out. They were taken at the school and they were poorly lit and Nadia wasn’t the subject of most of them because he did not know her then.

  The story had been about an elementary school that was functioning in the basement of an apartment building during that first winter of the war, populated by children of parents who’d stayed behind by choice or necessity now that the routes into and out of Sarajevo were blocked. The siege had a surreal quality to it. The drudgery of the war, the intermittent shelling, the bread lines, the snipers, gasoline at a hundred dollars per gallon, twenty-five dollars for a bar of chocolate, had not yet settled in.