Heading toward the kitchen, meaning to search the drawers and the pocketbooks for key rings, I noticed the closed doors in the hallway. The one nearest to me was a utility closet. The one nearest to the entry was locked.
Irritated, I looked up and saw the barest hint of brass sticking over the lip of the door sash. I smiled and reached up for the key. It fit the lock. It probably fit the locks on the French doors as well, but I opened the door nearest to the entry and found a steep staircase that dropped into darkness.
The air coming up from the basement was musty, a welcome break from the smell of Pine-Sol. The building was old, built back when people were smaller, and I had to duck while climbing down the stairs. And when I reached the dirty basement floor I still had to stoop to protect my head.
Slicing the flashlight beam around, I spotted eight pieces of new luggage lined up along the wall closer to me, stacks of old boxes, and garden tools covered in dust and cobwebs over by the furnace and oil tank. To the left of the furnace my flashlight found the other side of the steel door to the backyard.
I went toward it. When I passed the furnace I was digging in my pocket for the key, and my light was focused on the door. Finally getting the key out, I unlocked the door and pushed it open, getting a much better look at the broken beer bottles and the liquid in the curved shards and drying on the cement pad.
It was blood.
Not huge swaths of it like upstairs. More like spurts flaring in many directions, almost as if someone had run across the glass barefoot and …
I shined the flashlight down at the door’s threshold, seeing smeared blood there. Taking a step back, I spotted what I’d missed in my hurry to unlock the door: bloody footprints in the dust, leading—
Silk rustled against the floor before she screamed in what sounded like a Russian accent: “I kill you, motherfucker!”
I cocked the light up, catching a big, crazed woman in a black lace nightgown coming at me with a pitchfork.
CHAPTER 62
Maybe it was the fact that recently a homeless man had sprung from the darkness to hit me in the stomach with a baseball bat.
I don’t know.
But seeing the sharp tines of that pitchfork arc toward my face caused me to throw myself to the side and away from her. One tine caught my ear and cut me.
I hit the cement floor hard but rolled and clawed for the pistol in the shoulder holster beneath my jacket. I kept rolling, heard the steel tines ping off the cement right behind my back, and turned over once more, flashlight in one hand, service pistol in the other.
She had lifted the pitchfork high with both hands, ready to take another downward stab at me. But the light was blinding her.
“Police!” I shouted at her. “Drop your weapon or I’ll shoot!”
She looked deranged, said something in what sounded like Russian.
“Drop it!”
The young woman let go of the pitchfork. It clanged to the floor and she stood there trembling in shock and disbelief before she collapsed into a sobbing heap. That was when I saw her bare feet, all sliced up and draining blood.
It took a while for her to settle down and for paramedics to tend to her feet. In the ambulance on the way to Georgetown University Medical Center she gave me her initial statement in broken English.
Her name was Irina Popovitch. Twenty-four, she had been in the United States thirteen months on a work visa obtained through an agency in St. Petersburg, where she’d been assured she would find employment as a fashion model. They’d even paid her airfare.
Instead of glory on the fashion runways, she’d arrived to find that she had become the property of Russian organized crime figures who ran a string of high-class private brothels up and down the Eastern Seaboard: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Atlanta, Tampa, and Miami.
Popovitch had been to every one of them. The Russians evidently believed in moving the girls around in order to keep the clients, who paid upwards of two thousand dollars a visit, coming back for more. She’d been with this team of four women about a month. They stayed in a guarded apartment in Falls Church and commuted to work every day under the watchful eye of Dimitri, the well-dressed dead guy in the main room.
Around six forty-five that evening, twenty minutes after the arrival of the man we’d found dead in the first bedroom, Popovitch had welcomed Martin, her third client of the day, a man she’d seen once about a week before. She said Martin had asked Dimitri for her specifically.
Martin liked to take off his clothes first and have her tease him in her lingerie before they got down to business. That was what she was doing, teasing, when she heard the apartment buzzer. She was still teasing Martin when the music in the outer room was turned up very, very loud.
“That does not to make sense for me,” Popovitch said, beginning to cry again. “Dimitri, he hate loud music and he hate hip-hop music. He say men with money enough for us are too old to like that shitty rap.”
Streaks of mascara ran down her cheeks like spiderwebs. I got a wipe and cleaned her face, said, “So, you heard the music and you went to look?”
Popovitch nodded, sniffling. “After a minute, yes, because, well, my client he says he cannot do things he wants to with such music playing so loud. I go to bedroom door, and I don’t know why, something says open just little bit.”
Her face grew taut and her gaze fixed.
“You saw him?” I said. “The killer?”
She bobbed her head, crying again. “He wears business suit and hat like Indiana Jones. He carries two guns with these things to make no sound.”
“Suppressors.”
She took a deep, wavering breath. “He disappears into Marina’s bedroom, and then I see down the hall my friend Lenka lying there in her blood.”
Popovitch said she spun around and hissed to her naked client, “Run! He kills everyone!” She heard a scream from the other bedroom and ran for the window. She got her head and shoulders out the window, realized she was going to fall headfirst onto brick, and hesitated. Martin pushed her out from behind. She fell and hit her head.
Stunned, she nevertheless heard the music grow louder, understood that the door of her bedroom had opened. She heard her client say, “No, please!”
Then she got up, trying to find another place to hide. She said Dimitri kept a key to the basement door in a fake rock and she figured if she could get in there she was safe.
“I no know the glass is there,” she said. “I run onto it, feel it cut, and want to yell, but I say nothing. I hear something back up at window, so I get down, cut myself more, but try to find key.”
“Lucky you did,” I said. “Why didn’t you come upstairs once you heard the music stop?”
“I hear walking on floors, I hear voices,” she said. “I no know who this is, where he is, so I stay put.”
The ambulance stopped and then backed up to the emergency room entrance at Georgetown University Medical Center.
“How well did you see him?” I asked.
She thought about that. “He will know of me?”
“If you mean can we protect you, yes,” I said firmly. “This is not Russia. Did you see him?”
Popovitch hesitated but then replied reluctantly, “Yes. Good in light from bathroom. But only from the side as he goes into Marina’s bedroom.”
The EMTs opened the rear doors to slide out her gurney. There was a female police officer waiting behind them.
“You come with me, Detective?” Irina asked in a pleading tone.
“The officer will stay with you,” I assured her. “They’ll fix your cuts, and I’m going to send an artist around to see you.”
“I see this on television. They draw what I see, yes?”
“Exactly,” I replied, and patted her on the shoulder. “You’re a brave woman, Irina, and we’re going to help you.”
She started to cry again as the EMTs took her into the emergency room. “I just want to live in the United States, you know?”
I sto
od there a moment, feeling her pain. But by the time the doors had shut behind her, I was thinking that with any luck, by late that night we would have sketches of the killer from two different angles, and then the hunt for a mass murderer would really begin.
I was immediately overcome with doubt. Would we have enough time? Who knew whether anyone would recognize the killer?
I sat on a bench outside the ER and phoned Bree. I just needed to hear her voice.
CHAPTER 63
For nearly two hours Bree had driven all over Southeast DC looking for Ava. She’d been everywhere she and Alex had gone in the past week, including the factory where the homeless guy said he’d seen Ava light Jane Doe on fire.
But there had been no sign of her.
Finally, around nine thirty, Bree pulled into a 7-Eleven parking lot on Eighth Street and rested her forehead on the steering wheel of her car. Maybe Ava is gone, she thought, feeling desperately sad at that idea.
She’d become very close to the girl during Ava’s all-too-brief time in the Cross household, almost as if Ava were the younger sister she’d never had. To think that she might never see Ava again, never know what became of her, well, that was …
She flashed on the poor Bransons and the Lancasters, grasping the depth and dimensions of their parental desperation and fear. Tears welled in Bree’s eyes at the thought that those kids were going to be drowned tomorrow, and for several seconds she gave in to the misery.
But almost immediately she got angry. No, she was not giving up. Not yet. Not on those babies. And not on Ava.
Bree got out, went into the convenience store in search of comfort food. She bought a Coke and a bag of crunchy kettle-fried Zapp’s Cajun-style potato chips, one of her few vices. Back in the car, she tore open the bag and snapped open the soda can. As she drank and crunched her way through the potato chips, she told herself she was going to have to think differently.
If Ava hadn’t left Washington altogether, it made growing sense to Bree that the girl would at least have left Southeast, where drug dealers were hunting her. And Yolanda had said that Ava had been using painkillers like oxy and Percocet.
Once you latched on to those kind of drugs, it was hard to let go, Bree reasoned. Which meant that if Ava was still in the city, she’d be looking for a fix.
Bree had never worked narcotics and neither had Alex, so she wasn’t totally up to speed on where people scored these days. But she had a friend from the academy who’d worked drugs and gangs the past three years. She texted the detective, asking her where dealers worked in the city besides Southeast.
She was finishing the last crunchy Zapp’s chip when her phone buzzed. She picked it up and read the reply. She drained her Coke can and started her car, hearing her phone ring. She clicked Answer and Speaker.
“Hey.” It was Alex. “Where are you?”
“Out for a drive. You?”
“Georgetown Medical Center.”
She felt her stomach knot. “You all right?”
“Just in need of a ride.”
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” Bree said. “I want to check one more place before I put Ava on the back burner.”
“I’ll be sitting outside the emergency room.”
CHAPTER 64
Forty minutes later we were just north of Adams Morgan in a transitional neighborhood where enclaves of eight-hundred-thousand-dollar townhomes give way to a rougher side of the nation’s capital. From Eighteenth Street we cruised east on Euclid, a narrow road with old redbrick row houses, oak trees, and older cars parked on both sides.
Ahead, near the intersection of Seventeenth, we could see the taillights of cars stopped in the road. This was where Bree’s pal in narcotics had said there was a thriving open-air drug market catering to everyone from US Senate aides in search of a mild thrill to hard-core junkies on a jones for their next fix. And sure enough, as we got closer I could see figures darting up to the windows of the stopped cars.
“Should we stop?” Bree asked as we came within sight of the old Euclid Market, now boarded up and for lease. Five or six young men in hoodies were leaning against the wall, drinking Colt 45, smoking cigarettes, and watching us. Another band of guys stood on the opposite side of the intersection, dealing with the buyers coming in from the north.
“Go on through,” I said, looking straight ahead. “We’re better off talking to them on foot.”
Bree nodded and we drove across Seventeenth, down the block past Mozart Place, and found a spot to park near the Children’s Health Center. It was a quarter to twelve when we walked back toward the intersection, carrying that snapshot of Ava, months old now. Part of me wondered whether this was a wild-goose—
“There she is, Alex!” Bree cried, and pointed south on Seventeenth, to the west side of the street.
Ava was walking toward the dealers along the wall of the empty store. She must have heard Bree’s voice, because she went on instant alert, scanned the area, and spotted me starting to trot in her direction.
She turned on a dime and exploded back the way she’d come.
“Ava!” I yelled, and took off after her.
“We just want to talk!” Bree shouted as she flanked Ava on the east sidewalk.
Ava sped up. She obviously knew this part of the city, because when she cleared the back of the Euclid Market, she darted west, jumping a low fence made of planks and dropping into an overgrown lot that had become a dump of sorts.
By the time I reached the lot, Ava had scrambled across two mattresses and was well up a mound of dirt and old construction debris. The abandoned lot sat at the corner of an alley that led back toward Eighteenth. That was where I thought she was heading. That was where Bree thought she was going, too, because I spotted my wife angling at the alleyway.
“Ava!” I shouted, trying to stop her.
But there was no stopping her, and she didn’t go for the alley. Like a spooked squirrel, she sprang onto a chain-link fence at the rear of the lot, climbed it, then grabbed the top of a wooden fence beyond. She hauled herself over both fences into darkness.
I scrambled up to the first fence and looked over the second. Ava was across the backyard of one row house and climbing into the next.
“We want to help you!” I yelled.
But she never slowed. We had lost her all over again.
“At least she’s here in DC,” I said as we trudged back to the car. “As long as she stays, we’ll find her again.”
Bree, however, was quiet and somber the entire way home.
“She doesn’t trust us anymore,” she said as we climbed up onto the porch.
“I know,” I said. “And I don’t know why.”
“Guilt?” Bree said, putting her key in the lock and opening the door into the front hallway.
It was past midnight and the house was dark. By my count we had about eighteen hours until Cam Nguyen and the babies would be killed.
I pulled out my phone to see if the police artists had e-mailed or texted me. They had not.
“Beer?” Bree asked.
“I don’t think I could sleep without one,” I said, turning on the light in the dining room.
She fished two beers out of the little fridge we were relying on during the remodel, opened one, and handed it to me.
The house phone rang. It surprised us not only because of the late hour but also because it seemed the only people who used the number anymore were telemarketers. I checked caller ID, didn’t recognize the number, and answered harshly, “Kind of late to be selling something, isn’t it?”
“It’s me.”
“Ava?” I said, punching on the speakerphone. “Where are you?”
“We’ll come right away,” Bree said anxiously.
“Please,” Ava said, choking with tears. “Don’t try to find me anymore. Please just forget me.”
“Ava.”
“It’s the only thing you can do for me now,” she said, and hung up.
CHAPTER 65
Ha
unted by thoughts of Ava as a wanted felon, haunted by the looming execution of Cam Nguyen and the babies, we barely slept. Bree finally dozed off around dawn. But I was wide-awake when our bedroom door creaked slowly open around a quarter to seven.
“Dad …” Ali began in a soft voice.
There was no use arguing because I wasn’t going to sleep as it was. I got up, holding my finger to my lips. Out in the hall I whispered, “Let me take a shower and I’ll walk you to school.”
He grinned at me and I saw that he’d lost another front tooth. I gestured at my own. “When did that happen?”
“Last night,” he said. “Nana Mama said it happened too late for the tooth fairy to come.”
“I heard she had strict rules,” I replied. “The tooth fairy, I mean.”
My youngest son nodded as if that were the most logical thing in the world and then went down the stairs toward the racket my grandmother was making as she whipped up breakfast.
Fifteen minutes later, after a quick shower, a shave, and a change of clothes, I turned the bathroom over to Bree and left our room. I stood on the landing at the top of the staircase, looking into Ali’s room and watching him pull on a sweatshirt. All I could think about was Joss Branson and Evan Lancaster and whether some insane couple was going to drown them today and strangle a prostitute for no reason that I could figure.
“C’mon, little man, I’ve gotta move,” I said.
“I’m moving!” Ali cried as he pushed his feet into his sneakers.
I shifted my attention to the staircase at the end of the hall that climbs to my attic office and frowned. Sawdust? I almost went over to see, but then Ali bounded out of his room, saying, “I’m ready!”
He threw his arms around my legs, smiled up at me, revealing his missing front teeth again, and said, “We gotta move!”
“That’s right,” I said, and hugged him to me.
We went out the front door with cries of “See you after school!” to Nana Mama. The builders were just arriving for the day, and I had a brief conversation with Billy DuPris, our contractor, who informed me that the plywood walls were going up around the addition today and the roof tomorrow.
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