My two kids, Damon and Janelle, were sitting on the trusty, if slightly rickety, piano bench beside me. Janelle had her small arm wrapped across my back as far as it would stretch, which was about one-third of the way.
She had a bag of Gummi Bears in her free hand. As always, she shared with her friends. I was slow-sucking a red Gummi.
She and Damon were whistling along with my piano playing, though for Jannie, whistling is more like spitting to a certain preestablished rhythm. A battered copy of Green Eggs and Ham sat on top of the piano, vibrating to the beat.
Both Jannie and Damon knew I was having some trouble in my life lately, for the past few months, anyway. They were trying to cheer me up. We were playing and whistling the blues, soul, and a little fusion, but we were also laughing and carrying on, as children like us will.
I loved these times with my kids more than I loved all the rest of my life put together, and I had been spending more and more time with them. The Kodak pictures of children always remind me that my babies will be seven and five years old only one time. I didn’t plan to miss any of it.
We were interrupted by the sound of heavy footsteps running up the wooden stairs of our back porch. Then the doorbell rang: one, two, three tinny rings. Whoever was out there was in a big hurry.
“Ding-dong the witch is dead.” Damon offered his inspirational thought for the moment. He was wearing wrap-around shades, his impression of a cool dude. He was a cool little dude, actually.
“No, the witch isn’t,” countered Jannie. I’d recently noticed that she had become a staunch defender of her gender.
“It might not be news about the witch,” I said, with just the right timing and delivery. The kids laughed. They get most of my jokes, which is a frightening thought.
Someone began to pound insistently against the door frame, and my name was shouted in a plaintive and alarming way. Goddammit, leave us be. We don’t need anything plaintive or alarming in our lives right now.
“Dr. Cross, please come! Please! Dr. Cross,” the loud shouts continued. I didn’t recognize the woman’s voice, but privacy doesn’t seem to count when your first name is Doctor.
I held the kids down, my hands fastened onto the tops of their small heads. “I’m Dr. Cross, not you two. Just keep on humming and hold my place. I’ll be right back.”
“I’ll be back!” said Damon in his best Terminator voice. I smiled at his joke. He is a second-grade wiseguy already.
I hurried to the back door, grabbing my service revolver on the way. This can be a bad neighborhood even for a cop, which I am. I peered out through the foggy and grimy windowpanes to see who was on our porch steps.
I recognized the young woman. She lived in the Langley projects. Rita Washington was a twenty-three-year-old pipe-head who prowled our streets like a gray ghost. Rita was smart, nice enough, but impressionable and weak. She had taken a very bad turn in her life, lost her looks, and now was probably doomed.
I opened the door and felt a cold, wet gust of wind slap against my face. There was a lot of blood on Rita’s hands and wrists and on the front of her green fake-leather carcoat.
“Rita, what in hell happened to you?” I asked. I guessed that she’d been gut-shot or stabbed over some drugs.
“Please, please come with me.” Rita Washington started to cough and sob at the same time. “It little Marcus Daniels,” she said, and cried even louder. “He been stabbed! It be real bad! He call your name. He ask for you, Dr. Cross.”
“You stay there, kids! I’ll be right back!” I shouted over Rita Washington’s hysterical cries. “Nana, please watch the kids!” I yelled even louder. “Nana, I have to go out!” I grabbed my coat and followed Rita Washington into the cold, teeming rain.
I tried not to step on the bright red blood dripping like wet paint all over our porch steps.
Chapter 2
I RAN as fast as I could down Fifth Street. I could feel my heart going whump, whump, whump, and I was sweating profusely in spite of the nasty, steady, cold spring rain. Blood was pounding furiously in my head. Every muscle and tendon in my body was straining, and my stomach clenched real hard.
I held eleven-year-old Marcus Daniels in my arms, clutched tightly against my chest. The little boy was bleeding badly. Rita Washington had found Marcus on the oily, darkened stairway leading to the basement in his building and had taken me to his crumpled body.
I ran like the wind, crying inside, holding it back as I’ve been taught to do on The Job and most everywhere else.
People who don’t normally stare at much in Southeast were staring at me as I rumbled forward like a ten-axle semi on the loose in the inner city.
I outpaced gypsy cabs, shouting at everybody to get out of my way. I passed ghost store after ghost store boarded up with dark, rotting plywood that was scrawled with graffiti.
I ran over broken glass and rubble, Irish Rose bottles, and occasional dismal patches of weeds and loose dirt. This was our neighborhood; our share in The Dream; our capital.
I remembered a saying I’d heard about D.C.: “Stoop down and you’ll get stepped on, stand tall and you’ll be shot at.”
As I ran, poor Marcus was throwing off blood like a soaking-wet puppy dog shedding water. My neck and arms were on fire, and my muscles continued to strain.
“Hold on, baby,” I said to the little boy. “Hold on, baby,” I prayed.
Halfway there, Marcus cried out in a tiny voice, “Doctor Alex, man.”
That was all he said to me. I knew why. I knew a lot about little Marcus.
I raced up the steep, freshly paved asphalt drive of St. Anthony’s Hospital. “St. Tony’s Spaghetti House” as it’s sometimes called in the projects. An EMS ambulance rolled past me, heading toward L Street.
The driver wore a Chicago Bulls cap pulled sideways, its brim pointing strangely in my direction. Loud rap music blared from the van, and it must have been deafening inside. The driver and medic didn’t stop, didn’t seem to consider stopping. Life in Southeast goes like that sometimes. You can’t stop for every murder or mugging that you come across on your daily rounds.
I knew my way to St. Anthony’s emergency room. I’d been there too many times. I shouldered open the familiar swing glass door. It was stenciled EMERGENCY, but the letters were peeling away and there were nail scratches on the glass.
“We’re here, Marcus. We’re at the hospital,” I whispered to the little boy, but he didn’t hear me. He was unconscious now.
“I need some help here! People, I need help with this boy!” I shouted.
The Pizza Hut delivery man would have gotten more attention. A bored-looking security guard glanced my way and gave me his practiced, flat-faced stare. A shabby stretcher clattered loudly down the halls of medicine.
I saw nurses I knew. Annie Bell Waters and Tanya Heywood, in particular.
“Bring him right here.” Annie Waters quickly cleared a way once she sized up the situation. She didn’t ask me any questions as she pushed other hospital workers and the walking wounded out of our path.
We sailed past the reception desk, with SIGN IN HERE in English, Spanish, and Korean. I smelled hospital antiseptic on everything.
“Tried to cut his throat with a gravity knife. I think he nicked the carotid artery,” I said as we rushed down a crowded, puke-green corridor that was thick with faded signs: X-RAY, TRAUMA, CASHIER.
We finally located a room about the size of a clothes closet. The young-looking doctor who rushed in told me to leave.
“The boy’s eleven years old,” I said. “I’m staying right here. Both his wrists are cut. It’s a suicide attempt. Hold on, baby,” I whispered to Marcus. “Just hold on, baby.”
Chapter 3
CLICK! CASANOVA popped the trunk latch of his car and peered into the wide, shiny-wet eyes staring out at him. What a pity. What a waste, he thought as he looked down at her.
“Peekaboo,” he said. “I see you.” He had fallen out of love with the twenty-two-year-old college stude
nt tied up in the trunk. He was also angry at her. She had disobeyed the rules. She’d ruined the fantasy du jour.
“You look like absolute hell,” he said. “Relatively speaking, of course.”
The young woman was gagged with wet cloths and couldn’t answer back, but she glared at him. Her dark-brown eyes showed fear and pain, but he could still see the stubbornness and spunk there.
He took out his black carrying bag first, then he roughly lifted her one hundred twelve pounds out of the car. He made no effort to be gentle at this point.
“You’re welcome,” he said as he put her down. “Forgotten our manners, have we?” Her legs were shaky and she almost fell, but Casanova held her up easily with one hand.
She had on dark green Wake Forest University running shorts, a white tank top, and brand-new Nike cross-training shoes. She was a typical spoiled college brat, he knew, but achingly beautiful. Her slender ankles were bound with a leather thong that stretched about two and a half feet. Her hands were tied behind her back, also with a leather thong.
“You can just walk ahead of me. Go straight unless I tell you otherwise. Now walk,” he ordered. “Move those long, lovely gams. Hut, hut, hut.”
They started through the dense woods that got even thicker as they moved slowly along. Thicker and darker. Creepier and creepier. He swung his black bag as if he were a child carrying a lunch box. He loved the dark woods. Always had.
Casanova was tall and athletic, well built, and good-looking. He knew that he could have many women, but not the way he wanted them. Not like this.
“I asked you to listen, didn’t I? You wouldn’t listen.” He spoke in a soft, detached voice. “I told you the house rules. But you wanted to be a wiseass. So be a wiseass. Reap the rewards.”
As the young woman struggled ahead she became increasingly afraid, close to panic. The woods were even denser now, and the low-hanging branches clawed at her bare arms, leaving long scratches. She knew her captor’s name: Casanova. He fancied himself a great lover, and in fact he could maintain an erection longer than any man she had ever known. He had always seemed rational and in control of himself, but she knew he had to be crazy. He certainly could act sane on occasion, though. Once you accepted a single premise of his, something he had said to her several times: “Man was born to hunt… women.”
He had given her the rules of his house. He had clearly warned her to behave. She just hadn’t listened. She’d been willful and stupid and had made a huge, tactical mistake.
She tried not to think of what he was going to do to her out here in these bewildering Twilight Zone-type woods. It would surely give her a heart attack. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing her break down and cry.
If only he would ungag her. Her mouth was dry, and she was thirsty beyond belief. Perhaps she could actually talk her way out of this—of whatever it was that he had planned.
She stopped walking and turned to face him. It was draw-a-line-in-the-sand time.
“You want to stop here? That’s fine with me. I’m not going to let you talk, though. No last words, dear heart. No reprieve from the governor. You blew it big time. If we stop here, you may not like it. If you want to walk some more, that’s fine, too. I just love these woods, don’t you?”
She had to talk to him, get through to him somehow. Ask him why. Maybe appeal to his intelligence. She tried to say his name, but only muffled sounds made it through the damp gag.
He was self-assured and even calmer than usual. He walked with a cocky swagger. “I don’t understand a word you’re saying. Anyway, it wouldn’t change a thing even if I did.”
He had on one of the weird masks that he always wore. This one was actually called a death mask, he’d told her, and it was used to reconstruct faces, usually at hospitals and morgues.
The skin color of the death mask was almost perfect and the detail was frighteningly realistic. The face he’d chosen was young and handsome, an all-American type. She wondered what he really looked like. Who in hell was he? Why did he wear masks?
She would escape somehow, she told herself. Then she would get him locked up for a thousand years. No death penalty—let him suffer.
“If that’s your choice, fine,” he said, and he suddenly kicked her feet out from under her. She fell down hard on her back. “You die right here.”
He slid a needle out of the well-worn black medical bag he’d brought with him. He brandished it like a tiny sword. Let her see it.
“This needle is called a Tubex,” he said. “It’s pre-loaded with thiopental sodium, which is a barbiturate. Does barbiturate-sounding things.” He squeezed out a thin squirt of the brown liquid. It looked like iced tea, and it was not something she wanted injected into her veins.
“What does it do? What are you doing to me?” she screamed into the tight gag. “Please take this gag out of my mouth.”
She was covered with sweat, and her breathing was labored. Her whole body felt stiff, anesthetized and numb. Why was he giving her a barbiturate?
“If I do this wrong, you’ll die right now,” he told her. “So don’t move.”
She shook her head affirmatively. She was trying so hard to let him know that she could be good; she could be so very good. Please don’t kill me, she silently pleaded. Don’t do this.
He pricked a vein in the crook of her elbow, and she could feel the painful pinch there.
“I don’t want to leave any unsightly bruises,” he whispered. “It won’t take long. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, you, are, so, beautiful, zero. All finished.”
She was crying now. She couldn’t help it. The tears were streaming down her cheeks. He was crazy. She squeezed her eyes shut, couldn’t look at him anymore. Please, God, don’t let me die like this, she prayed. Not all alone out here.
The drug acted quickly, almost immediately. She felt warm all over, warm and sleepy. She went limp.
He took off her tank top and began to fondle her breasts, like a juggler with several balls. There was nothing she could do to stop him.
He arranged her legs as if she were his art, his human sculpture, stretching the leather thong as far as it would go. He felt down between her legs. The sudden thrust made her open her eyes, and she stared up at the horrible mask. His eyes stared back at her. They were blank and emotionless, yet strangely penetrating.
He entered her, and she felt a jolt like a very powerful electric shock running through her body. He was very hard, fully aroused already. He was probing inside her as she was dying from the barbiturate. He was watching her die. That’s what this was all about.
Her body wriggled, bolted, shook. As weak as she was, she tried to scream. No, please, please, please. Don’t do this to me.
Mercifully, blackness came over her.
She didn’t know how long she’d been unconscious. Didn’t care. She woke up and she was still alive.
She started to cry, and the muffled sounds coming through the gag were agonizing. Tears ran down her cheeks. She realized how much she wanted to live.
She noticed that she’d been moved. Her arms were behind her and tied around a tree. Her legs were crossed and bound, and she was still tightly gagged. He had taken off her clothes. She didn’t see her clothes anywhere.
He was still there!
“I don’t really care if you scream,” he said. “There’s absolutely nobody to hear you out here.” His eyes gleamed out of the lifelike mask. “I just don’t want you to scare away the hungry birds and animals.” He glanced briefly at her truly beautiful body. “Too bad you disobeyed me, broke the rules,” he said.
He took off the mask and let her see his face for the first time. He fixed the image of her face in his mind. Then he bent down and kissed her on the lips.
Kiss the girls.
Finally, he walked away.
Chapter 4
MOST OF my rage had been spent on the furious footrace to St. Anthony’s with Marcus Daniels cradled in my arms. The adrenaline rush was gone now, but I felt an u
nnatural weariness.
The emergency-room waiting area was noise and frustrated confusion. Babies crying, parents wailing out their grief, the PA incessantly paging doctors. A bleeding man kept muttering, “Ho shit, ho shit.”
I could still see the beautiful, sad eyes of Marcus Daniels. I could still hear his soft voice.
At a little past six-thirty that night, my partner in crime arrived unexpectedly at the hospital. Something about that struck me as wrong, but I let it pass for now.
John Sampson and I have been best friends since we were both ten years old and running these same streets in D.C. Southeast. Somehow, we survived without having our throats slashed. I dirfted into abnormal psychology, and eventually got a doctorate at Johns Hopkins. Sampson went into the army. In some strange and mysterious manner, we both ended up working together on the D.C. police force.
I was sitting on a sheetless gurney parked outside the Trauma Room. Next to me was the “crash cart” they had used for Marcus. Rubber tourniquets hung like streamers from the black handles of the cart.
“How’s the boy?” Sampson asked. He knew about Marcus already. Somehow, he always knew. The rain was running down his black poncho in little streams, but he didn’t seem to care.
I sadly shook my head. I was still feeling wasted. “Don’t know yet. They won’t tell me anything. Doctor wanted to know if I was next of kin. They took him to Trauma. He cut himself real bad. So what brings you to happy hour?”
Sampson shrugged his way out of his poncho, and flopped down beside me on the straining gurney. Under the poncho, he had on one of his typical street-detective outfits: silver-and-red Nike sweatsuit, matching high-topped sneakers, thin gold bracelets, signet rings. His street look was intact.
“Where’s your gold tooth?” I managed a smile. “You need a gold tooth to complete your fly ensemble. At least a gold star on one tooth. Maybe some corn braids?”
Sampson snorted out a laugh. “I heard. I came,” he said offhandedly about his appearance at St. Anthony’s. “You okay? You look like the last of the big, bad bull elephants.”
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