Neely Tucker - The Ways of the Dead

“Twenty, twenty-one, and twenty-two,” Sully said. “Right on top of one another. That includes the only white child of either gender, the only Latina woman, and one of about fifteen black women. All within two hundred yards of one another, all within eighteen months.”

R.J. shook his head.

“Before we start debating statistical analysis, which neither of us can spell, the Reese murder is, at least officially, explained and off the map. Now. You’ve got a prostitute killed up the block and a body dumped in a basement. That’s not what-”

“Give me three days, R.J.,” Sully said quietly, leaning forward so the man could hear him. “Give me three days and let me see what I get.”

“To what end? Look, we’ve got Jamie and two others on the National doing the federal investigation, and Keith handling the issues on the bench. But this story on the suspects! It’s the one that’s going to drive our coverage! It’s yours! And you want a three-day holiday to jerk off on a piece about misbegotten girls of the night? You can’t possibly try to tie all that to Sarah Reese. There’s no connective tissue.”

“Like I said-we’re not doing the death of Sarah Reese. We’re doing the dead and missing women of Princeton Place. If nothing else, I’ll write a bio of Pittman and Escobar, you know, young lives lost in a rough neighborhood.”

“That sounds like what you did the other day.”

“That was the block. These are the victims . Come on, R.J. A cluster of killings like that? Tell me it’s chance.”

R.J. let out another sigh and stood up. He hitched his pants up slightly and his fingers found his slim golden belt buckle and fussed with it until it was perfectly in between the first and last loops of his slacks and directly beneath the point of his tie. He crossed his left arm across his chest and propped his right elbow against his left hand, holding the arm upright so that the fingers on his right hand could stroke his chin.

“Jesus. Okay. We’ll play it your way for now. I’ll keep Chris on the Reese investigation. Keith will handle the courts; Jamie, the feds. You go out there in the demimonde, you go dig and claw around in the world of prostitutes, johns, and the party world where good-looking young women get buried in the basements of abandoned buildings, and you come back and tell us all about it. You’ll start right now, giving Chris fill for the story tomorrow on the discovery of Pittman’s body. We’ll bump it from fifteen inches to twenty-five.”

“You got it.”

R.J. leaned forward and whispered, mocking the way Sully had spoken to him.

“Got a minute, hero boy?”

“Just that.”

“Everybody knows you’re drinking again. You haven’t noticed Edward tippy-toeing around this story? Asking you a bunch of dick-holding questions? It’s not the old days when holding one’s liquor was a job description. Now look me in the eye and tell me I don’t have to worry.”

“You don’t got to worry.”

The old man stood. He rapped Sully on the shoulder, more of a punch than a pat, his face scowling behind the white beard. The skin was flushed, reddish. “When this is done, you’ll take your ass back to rehab.”

A spin on the heel and he was gone. Sully looked after him, settling the papers on his desk. He looked up at the homicide map and then back across the newsroom. He took a long pull on his soda, in a Styrofoam cup, the plastic lid keeping in the sweet and lovely scent of his afternoon bourbon and Coke.

By midafternoon, Sully was slumped back in his chair, feet up on his desk, going through the clips that had been written about the disappearance of Noel Pittman.

Noel had gone to school in the city, Coolidge High, enrolled at Howard part-time, made decent but not spectacular grades, and was known on the black party circuit that thrived on the eastern side of the city-as opposed to the polo-playing Georgetown trust fund set who’d reliably turn up in the glossy society mags, beaming at the camera. Nobody from Noel’s set got invited to those parties.

And almost no one, including his own paper, had written about Noel at all. About the only notice of her disappearance was from Howard’s campus paper, the Hilltop , in which a student staffer wrote a short piece about her disappearance in March of the previous year. They described her as a Jamaican immigrant.

There was a picture of her, smiling, hair up, dangling earrings, light brown skin and dark brown eyes. She was laughing in the photograph, a warmth that seemed to bubble up out of her. Sully reached out and, without realizing it, touched the photograph.

She was last seen leaving her weekend gig as a featured dancer at Halo, the high-end club on New York Avenue, at about two a.m. after arriving to work four hours earlier. It put her disappearance two hours into April 25. She had never been seen again. She drove her car out of the club’s parking lot and into the void. Her apartment on Princeton Place was a house that had been divided into two units-the basement to itself, the top floors another-and she had lived on the top floors. The basement apartment had been empty at the time of her disappearance.

There was nothing in the clips about a Playboy shoot, and a database search of court records with her name did not turn up any hits. He’d been out to Halo once or twice, enough to know that “featured dancers” were the girls who danced on elevated platforms above the dance floor on the penthouse level. The dancers wore G-strings, heels, and a miniscule lingerie top.

He tapped the keyboard to move into the paper’s copyediting system to read Chris’s story. It was being laid out to run on the lower right-hand corner of the Metro front. It was the basic “missing woman found dead” story. It noted the proximity of the Sarah Reese case as a coincidence that police were checking for any possible connection. The police chief was quoted as saying it was unlikely but could not be ruled out immediately. The photograph of her being printed was the same as the one on the flier. That reminded him to try the number on the flier again. He picked up the phone, dialed, and after five rings got the same voice mail message.

To get a live voice in the story, he called the home phone of a professor of criminal justice at Georgetown. The professor confirmed what was obvious-three women being killed, if Noel was killed, within two hundred yards of one another was extremely unusual and pushed at the boundaries of circumstance. That went into the file he was writing up for Chris.

“We’re nervous,” said David Belham, the Ward 1 city councilman, whose district included the area, Sully getting him at his home. “Whether these are connected or not, it’s too many. It feels wrong.”

John Parker, when he finally picked up, had nothing to add on the investigation, but did say that he had Noel Pittman’s pictures. Sully arranged to meet him at eleven the next morning.

Looking up at the clock, deadline was on him. He typed quickly now, information from the clips, filler stats, things he knew without having to think.

The series of unsolved deaths in such a concentrated area makes criminologists wary of a coincidental explanation…

After a few more paragraphs like this, he hit the send button and bounced an internal instant message to Chris, letting him know the file was available. He thought about it for a minute, then got up and walked over to Chris’s desk, the newsroom mostly empty. The place always smelled vaguely of-of-what was it? Takeout Chinese?

He leaned over the cubicle. Chubface did not look up and did not remove his hands from the keyboard. “You got it,” Sully said.

“Un-hunh. Thanks.” Not even looking up.