“Did she hire one?”
“I don’t know.”
“When was the last time you saw her and the girls?”
“Tina and Rachel? Fourth of July, before they went off to camp. They’re counselors.”
“Is that where they are now?”
“Until mid-August.”
“When was the last time you saw their mother?”
Taylor licked her lips and looked ready to cry. “This morning,” she said in a soft voice. “Early. Twenty to five? I thought I heard her moving around next door even earlier, when I was eating breakfast. But as I was going out the door for my shift, I saw her coming in from a run, climbing the porch steps drenched in sweat. She looked like she’d been crying.”
“Early run and crying,” I said, estimating the distance to the school at roughly two miles. “Describe what she was wearing, please.”
Taylor said Christopher’s wife had on blue running shorts, a long-sleeved white T-shirt, a reflector vest, and a pack with a hydration pouch.
“Did you talk to her?”
“Just to say hello and ask if she was okay. She said she’d been having trouble sleeping, that she was emotional with the girls away, so she’d gone for a run.”
“What else?”
“She said she’d decided to go somewhere for a few days and think things through.”
“She say where?”
“No.”
“Do you have her cell phone number?”
She nodded and went to her phone. She choked as she read the number to me, then she threw her hand up to her mouth and said, sobbing, “You don’t think she killed him, do you, Dr. Cross? The Elaine Paulson I know is such a sweet, sweet soul.”
CHAPTER 9
AFTER TRYING ELAINE PAULSON’S PHONE unsuccessfully several times, I drove to Kay Willingham’s brick home in Georgetown. She’d bought two old townhomes decades before and merged them into a small mansion. As I parked, I noted that the front door was still deep green and the brass knocker was still polished to a high shine. A riot of flowers spilled from window boxes to the left and right.
It was so familiar.
I remembered a night, years before, when Kay had had too much to drink at a fundraiser and I’d given her a ride home. I was working a brief stint as a private investigator at the time, and I was single then, a widower. The socialite had gotten her high heel stuck in a crack in the brick side-walk; the heel broke, the shoe slipped off and landed in a puddle, and she tripped. I’d caught her before she hit the ground. She’d been gasping and afraid and suddenly there’d been this intense moment of attraction between us that I’ll never forget.
Shaking the memory off, I got out of my car and walked to the broad-shouldered young man in a dark suit and glasses standing at the low iron gate across the short path to the front door. “FBI?” I said.
“Special Agent Aaron Tilden,” he said, nodding. “I recognize you, Dr. Cross. I heard you lecture several times at the academy.”
“I hope I was coherent.”
“Very, sir,” he said, holding out his hand. “It’s an honor to meet you.”
I shook his hand, saying, “The honor’s all mine, Agent Tilden. Has anyone been inside?”
“Not since my partner and I arrived a half an hour ago. Bill’s in the alley. Doors are locked. No one is answering when we knock. Do you have a key?”
“No, uh … we know the location of the spare,” I said, feeling a little flustered. I motioned him aside. “Any media been by?”
“Cameraman from CNN,” Tilden said. “He shot the front of the house and stayed about two minutes.”
“She lived alone,” I said, putting on latex gloves. I reached over the iron railing left of the door to the brick face of the house, counted two bricks in and two down, then pressed on that brick. A small door levered open, revealing a shallow slot and the key.
“That’s neat.”
“Her idea, evidently,” I said and unlocked the door.
“Do you need help, sir?”
“I’m sure I will, Special Agent Tilden,” I said as a hollowness formed in my stomach. “But I’d like to take the first look around alone.”
“Of course,” Tilden said.
The door opened on oiled hinges and shut behind me just as quietly. I had not been in Kay’s two-hundred-year-old Georgian townhome since that night long ago when she’d tripped and I’d caught her and she’d invited me in for a nightcap.
But standing there in the foyer that met the long center hallway of her home, I felt like it could have been yesterday. I could smell her scent. I could hear the echoes of her laughter in the air.
I walked down the hall, passing the various paintings on the walls, and stopped at the entrance to what had been Kay’s grand salon. Then I stepped inside the long rectangular room and took it all in with a sweeping glance.
The floors were two-hundred-year-old plankboard interrupted by tasteful squares of cream-colored carpet. The furniture was early sixties glamour, from the Kennedy era; “pieces of restored Camelot,” Kay had called them. The couches were upholstered in wide stripes of indigo blue and mouse gray. Some of the overstuffed wingback chairs were blue, and others were gray. All so familiar I could not help replaying that night in my mind.
We had met at a fundraiser for victims’ rights. This was years ago, when her husband was the governor of Alabama and they were separated and contemplating divorce. The car service that normally picked Kay up was late; she’d had a few drinks, and I’d offered her a ride home in my car.
I’d be lying if I said there was not a genuine spark between us after I’d caught her when she fell. That sense had continued inside the house.
I accepted a brandy. I couldn’t remember what music she’d put on, but it was perfect. She’d danced away from me, twirling across the floor and the carpet, barefoot, totally free, and laughing.
“God, she was something,” I said to myself and walked over to a built-in shelf in the corner that was crammed with pictures of moments in Kay’s remarkable life.
I found one that she’d shown me that night, a framed snapshot of an eleven-year-old Kay cheek to cheek with an African-American girl, both of them wet from swimming, both of them grinning with love.
“That’s Althea,” Kay had said softly. “Best friend I’ve ever had. Only person I’ve trusted completely in my entire life.”
“Where does she live?”
“Here and there,” she’d said. Her phone rang. She picked it up, listened, and said, “Walter, I’m home before curfew, and yes, I’ve had a few drinks, but I’m going to bed now. Does that work for you?”
She listened again, her brows tightening. “Good night.”
Kay hung up the phone and stood there a long moment as if in a trance. When it broke, she looked at me sadly. “It’s time for me to say good night, Alex.”
Whatever spark there was between us out on the sidewalk had died. I set my untouched brandy on the coffee table, said her house was beautiful, and got ready to leave.
“Could you check around the house? That’s what my driver usually does before I set the alarm and go to bed. Thank you for not letting me fall out there,” she said. “I’d have probably broken something irreparably.”
CHAPTER 10
THE BIG APARTMENT BUILDING ACROSS the street from Harrison Charter High School was being totally renovated, so no one lived there at the moment. It was surrounded by a high chain-link fence to keep people out of the construction site. John Sampson noticed two security cameras mounted on the fence posts and aimed at the street.
He went to the supervisor at the site and asked for copies of the feeds from midnight on the evening before but was told the cameras had been down since the big lightning storm a few days earlier. Frustrated, he walked up the street, looking for more security cameras. His cell phone rang. His wife, Billie.
“Hey, baby,” he said. “How you feeling?”
“Better every day,” she said.
“What we
love to hear. What’s up?”
“I didn’t get a chance to see you this morning and I wanted to tell you I love you before I go get Willow from camp.”
Sampson softened and slowed down. “That’s the best news I’ve heard all day. I love you too, baby.”
“Big case?”
“Big as they come,” Sampson said, quickening his pace. “I’ll tell you what I can when I get home. Make sure you get your rest, hear?”
“I hear you,” she said and clicked off.
Beyond a vacant lot to the north of the apartment building, on the northeast corner of the block, there was a two-story white structure that housed a small bodega and a laundromat at street level. Two cameras were mounted below the second floor and aimed out at the street and school grounds, but because they were painted the same color as the building, Sampson almost didn’t see them.
He went inside the bodega and regretted it the moment he did, finding it packed with scruffy types buying provisions for the media people camped out around the crime scene. Thankfully, none of them seemed to recognize him as they chatted and traded unsubstantiated rumors about the case.
“Kay knew too much,” he heard one kid say. “Mark my words, she knew too much.”
“I dunno,” said another. “Randall rubbed a lot of folks hard. Especially in this neighborhood. Drug dealers and such.”
Sampson listened without judgment. He pressed his hand against his jacket to cover the badge on his hip, picked up a Diet Coke and a bag of kettle potato chips—his secret vices — and got in line to pay for them. Two people were working the registers: a grinning, homely, redheaded guy in his late forties and a girl in her late teens with green hair, tats, and piercings, all of which went well with her miserable mood.
When Sampson reached the front of the line, he got the Goth; her name tag read LUCY. He set the chips and the soda down.
“That makes no sense unless your goal is blimpdom,” she said, managing to sound bored, mildly disgusted, and sarcastic at the same time. She gestured at the chips and soda.
“Excuse me?” Sampson said.
“The combo. The diet soda’s supposed to make you lean, but it actually makes you fat. The chips are supposed to make you fat, and they do it double time.”
Irritated, Sampson opened his jacket to show her his badge and gun. “Do I look fat?” he asked quietly as he leaned forward.
“No,” Lucy said, drawing back. “This about — ”
“It is,” Sampson said, still talking low. “Who’s the owner?”
Lucy pointed her thumb at the other cashier, who was engaged in pleasant chitchat with a woman from the neighborhood. “Mr. Peters.”
Sampson paid for the chips and soda. “Lucy, after I leave, tell Mr. Peters quietly that I am a detective and I would like to speak to him outside.”
Lucy looked indignant. “I’ll be swamped.”
“Better than having me lock the doors and Mr. Peters and you making no money,” Sampson said. “I’ll be outside.”
A few minutes later, Peters came out, looked around, saw Sampson, and beamed. He rushed over, extending his hand. “Ronald Peters, Detective …”
“Sampson,” he said, showing him his credentials. “Metro Homicide.”
Peters’s smile faded, but his gaze stayed steady on Sampson. “I heard. Mostly from the reporters. Is it true? Randall Christopher? And the vice president’s ex-wife?”
Sampson nodded.
“Jesus,” Peters said, shaking his head. “You never know, do you?”
“You knew Christopher?”
“Yup,” he said. “Came in every so often to pick up a few things, make sure I wasn’t having any problems with his students.”
“Did you have problems with his students?”
“Not one,” Peters said, nodding. “That guy ran a tight ship. His kids were always polite. Not even a shoplifting attempt, which is a miracle.”
“That’s saying something.”
“It is, which is a shame,” Peters said, looking toward the high school. “Randall Christopher had it, you know? It? I mean, the way he helped organize the searches for those missing girls, it made you want to be part of it.”
“You helped search?”
“As much as I could,” he said. “Mostly I worked the phones. I’m a busy guy. I own four other small businesses besides the store and the laundromat. What’s going to become of them, the students? The school?”
“Questions I can’t answer, sir,” Sampson said, then gestured up at the security cameras mounted high above the bodega. “We’re going to need the feeds from those.”
“Last night’s?”
“Midnight on, for now,” Sampson said.
Peters nodded. “Megan, my store manager, is out sick, but I think I can get it for you. Can I copy it to a thumb drive? Will that work?”
“If it’s time-stamped.”
“By the second,” Peters said, then he looked over as two more customers entered his store. “Need it now?”
“I’m standing here,” Sampson said.
Five minutes later, the bodega owner came out and handed him a thumb drive. “From midnight up to when you entered the store,” he said.
“When will I see you arrive?” Sampson said.
“Five forty-five,” Peters said. “On the dot. I usually get here before Megan to help out before we open at six fifteen.”
“Appreciate it, sir.”
“Anytime, Detective. Believe it or not, with all the bad press lately, we’re a neighborhood of good people here. Or trying to be.”
CHAPTER 11
THAT EVENING, IN OUR KITCHEN at home on Fifth Street, Bree peered at my phone and a picture of Elaine Paulson that Barbara Taylor had sent me. She’d taken it right before the twins boarded the bus to camp.
In the picture, Randall Christopher’s wife had her arms around her daughters. The three of them were smiling, but their grins looked forced, as if they all had other things on their minds.
Bree said, “Where’s Dad in the pic?”
“Well, exactly,” I said.
“You’ve called her number?”
“Ten times,” I said. “It goes straight to voice mail. I’ve got Rawlins at Quantico watching for any calls from her number or charges on her credit card. We’ll find her. Given what we found in the house? We have to.”
After looking through Kay Willingham’s home, I’d returned with a search warrant for Randall Christopher and Elaine Paulson’s duplex. The place was spotless, with vacuum tracks on the rug and all the trash cans empty; it looked like Christopher’s widow had gone to a great deal of trouble cleaning the place. Upstairs in their bedroom, however, in a nightstand, I’d found something that she’d neglected to clean. I’d taken a picture of the small, open, empty gun vault, and now I showed it to Bree. “Pistol is missing. Recent gun residue inside.”
Bree shook her head. “Mom kills Dad because he’s having an affair.”
“Looks like it.”
After a long silence, she said, “Too bad. I liked Randall Christopher. He was never afraid to dive in and help a good cause.”
“Wasn’t for him, you wouldn’t have had so many people looking for Maya Parker.”
“Or Elizabeth Hernandez.”
Maya Parker and Elizabeth Hernandez were the most recent victims in a series of rapes and murders in Southeast DC that went back fifteen years. The early crimes had gone largely unnoticed by the media because of the long gaps between the attacks and because the victims were all either Hispanic or African-American.
Then, last year, seventeen-year-old Elizabeth Hernandez disappeared. Less than three days later, her body was found dumped in the Potomac. Eight months passed before sixteen-year-old Maya Parker vanished; soon after, her body was discovered floating in the Potomac. The autopsy determined that she had been beaten and savagely raped. That was a little less than four months ago.
It was obvious to law enforcement that the killer was losing control because the gaps betw
een his attacks were growing shorter. As a result, Bree, who was chief of detectives for Metro PD, was under tremendous pressure to catch the fiend. Most of that pressure came from the new commissioner.
“How’s that going?” I asked.
“We could use you and Sampson.”
“I can’t speak for John, and I’m a little overextended at the moment, but I’ll get there.”
Bree smiled. “Thank you. Want to see something interesting?”
“Always,” I said.
She led me out of the kitchen, past Nana Mama, my ninety-something grandmother, who was peering into the oven at a meat thermometer buried in the thigh of a roast chicken.
“Dinner in twenty minutes,” Nana said as we left.
In the front room, Bree opened her briefcase and retrieved a small box marked bond arms. She lifted the lid.
“That is interesting,” I said.
“Isn’t it?” she said, pulling a small, modern, nickel-plated derringer from the box. She handed it to me. “They call it ‘the backup.’ ”
“Appropriate,” I said, bouncing the stout little gun in my palm. “Nice weight. Easy to conceal. Double barrel over and under.”
“And a forty-five-caliber,” she said. “It packs a wallop. And look.”
She showed me a small holster attached to an elastic sleeve through which she slid her left arm. She took the derringer from me, slipped it into the holster, and rotated it so the little gun rode snugly beneath her forearm. “Put a jacket with loose sleeves on and no one would know,” she said. “Or I can put it around my ankle with an accessory, but I kind of like this idea. I don’t have to bend down for it.”
I nodded. “Just reach up your sleeve. Where did you find it?”
“A rep from the company gave us a demonstration today. He asked me to try it for a while. If I like it, I’ll buy it.”
“Sounds like you’re already sold.”
When we returned to the kitchen, Nana Mama tapped a wooden spoon on the side of a saucepan, covered it, and clicked on CNN.
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