CHAPTER 2
I AM OFFICIALLY a Deputy Chief of Detectives, Which, in the words of Shakespeare and Mr. Faulkner, is a lot of sound and fury, signifying nada. The title should make me the number-six or -seven person in the Washington Police Department. It doesn't. People wait for my appearance at crime scenes in D.C., though.
A trio of D.C. Metro blue-and-whites were parked helter-skelter in front of 41-15 Benning Road. A crime lab van with blackened windows had arrived. So had an EMS ambulance. MORTUARY was cheerfully stenciled on the door.
There were a couple of fire engines at the murder house. The neighborhood's ambulance-chasers, mostly eye-fucking males, were hanging around. Older women with winter coats thrown over their pajamas and night gowns, and pink and blue curlers in their hair, were up on their porches shivering in the cold.
The row house was dilapidated clapboard, painted a gaudy Caribbean blue. An old Chevette with a broken, taped-up side window looked as if it had been abandoned in the driveway.
“Fuck this. Let's go back to bed,” Sampson said. “I just remembered what this is going to be like. I hate this job lately.”
“I love my work, love Homicide,” I said with a sneer. “See that? There's the M. E. already in his plastic suit. And there are the crime-lab boys. And who's this coming our way now?” A white sergeant in a puffy blue-black parka with a fur collar came waddling up to Sampson and me as we approached the house. Both his hands were jammed in his pockets for warmth.
“Sampson? Uh, Detective Cross?” The sergeant cracked his lower jaw the way some people do when they're trying to clear their ears in airplanes. He knew exactly who we were. He knew we were cops. He was busting our chops.
“Wuz up, man?” Sampson doesn't like his,chops being busted very much.
“Senior Detective Sampson,” I answered the sergeant. “I'm Deputy Chief Cross.”
The sergeant was a jelly-roll-belly Irish type, probably left over from the Civil War. His face looked like a wedding cake left out in the rain. He didn't seem to be buying my tweed jacket ensemble.
“ Everybody's freezin' their toches off,” he wheezed. “That's wuz up.”
“You could probably lose a little of them toches,” Sampson advised him. 'Might give Jenny Craig a call.
“Fuck you,” said the sergeant. It was nice to meet the white Eddie Murphy. “Master of the riposte.” Sampson grinned at me. “You hear what he said? Fuck you?”
Sampson and I are both physical. We work out at the gym attached to St. Anthony's-St. A's. Together, we weigh about five hundred pounds. We can intimidate, if we want to. Sometimes it's necessary in our line of work.
I'm only six three. John is six nine and growing. He always wears Wayfarer sunglasses. Sometimes he wears a raggy Kangol hat, or a yellow bandanna. Some people call him “John-John” because he's so big he could be two Johns.
We walked past the sergeant toward the murder house. Our elite task force team is supposed to be above this kind of confrontation. Sometimes we are.
A couple of uniforms had already been inside the house. A nervous neighbor had called the precinct around four-thirty. She thought she'd spotted a prowler. The, woman had been up with the night-jitters. It comes with the neighborhood.
The two uniformed patrolmen found three bodies inside. When they called it in, they were instructed to wait for the Special Investigator Team. It's made up of eight black officers supposedly slated for better things in the department.
The outside door to the kitchen was ajar. I pushed it all the way open. The doors of every house have a unique sound when they open and close. This one whined like an old man.
It was pitch-black in the house. Eerie. The wind was sucked through the open door, and I could hear something rattling inside.
“We didn't turn on the lights, Sir,” one of the uniforms said from behind me. “You're Dr. Cross, right?”
I nodded. “Was the kitchen door open when you came?” I turned to the patrolman. He was white, babyfaced, growing a little mustache to compensate for it. He was probably twenty-three or twenty-four, real frightened that morning. I couldn't blame him.
'Uh. No. No sign of forced entry. It was unlocked, sir.
The patrolman was very nervous. “It's a real bad mess in there, sir. It's a family.” One of the patrolmen switched on a powerful milled- aluminum flashlight and we all peered inside the kitchen.
There was a cheap Formica breakfast table with matching lime green vinyl chairs. A black Bart Simpson clock was on one wall. It was the kind you see in the front windows of all the People's drugstores. The smells of Lysol and burnt grease melded into something strange to the nose, though not entirely unpleasant. There were a lot worse smells in homicide cases.
Sampson and I hesitated, taking it all in the way the murderer might have just a few hours earlier.
“He was right here,” I said. “He came in through the kitchen. He was here, where we're standing. ”
“Don't talk like that, Alex,” Sampson said. “Sound like Jeane Dixon. Creep me out.”
No matter how many times you do this kind of thing, it never gets easier. You don't want to have to go inside.
You don't want to see any more horrible nightmares in your lifetime.
“They're upstairs,” the cop with the mustache said. He filled us in on who the victims were. A family named Sanders. Two women and a small boy.
His partner, a short, well-built black man, hadn't said a word yet. His name was Butchie Dykes. He was a
