The latest message listed gory details about the murder of a black child, “details only the D.C. police would know,” the subscriber wrote.
“Jesus, Maryann, what a nasty, weird creep,” the Prodigy supervisor said over Maryann Magio's shoulder. “Are all the messages like this one?”
“Pretty much, Joanie. He's toned down his language some, but the violence is really graphic stuff. Vampire creepy Been that way since I clipped his wings.”
The latest message from Washington continued to scroll before their eyes. The description seemed to be of an actual murder of a small black child in Garfield Park. The killer claimed to have used a sawed-off baseball bat reinforced with electrical tape. He claimed to have struck the child twenty-three times, and to have counted every single blow.
“Stop this awful, freakish crap now. Pull the damn plug on him!” the supervisor quickly made her decision.
Then the supervisor made an even more important decision.
She decided the Washington Police Department had to be alerted about the suspicious subscriber. Neither she nor Maryann Maggio knew whether the child murders were real, but they sure sounded that way.
At one-thirty in the morning, the Prodigy supervisor reached a detective at the 1st District in D.C. The supervisor made a note of the detective's rank and also his name in her own log: Detective John Sampson.
I HAD GOTTEN TO BED at a little past one. Nana came and woke me at quarter to five. I heard her slippers scuffing across the bare wood of the bedroom floor. Then she spoke in a low whisper just above my ear. Made me feel as if I were six years old again.
“Alex? Alex? You awake?”
“Mm, hmm. You bet. I am now.”
“Your friend's down in the kitchen. Eating bacon and tomatoes out of my skillet like there's no tomorrow, and he would know, wouldn't he? He still eats it faster than I can cook it.”
I held in a soft, painful moan. My eyes blinked twice and felt badly puffed and swollen each time they opened. My throat was scratchy and sore.
“Sampson's here?” I finally managed to say.
“Yes, and he says he might have a lead on the Truth School killer. Isn't that a good way to start your day?”
She was taunting me. Same as always. It wasn't even five o'clock in the morning and Nana had her rusty shiv in me already.
“I'm up,” I whispered. “I don't look like it, but I'm up.”
Less than twenty minutes later, Sampson and I pulled up in front of a brick townhouse on Seward Square. He admitted that he needed me at the scene. Rakeem Powell and a white detective named Chester Mullins, who wore an ancient porkpie hat, were standing outside their own cars, waiting for us. They looked extremely tense and uncomfortable.
The street was on the moderately upscale side of Seward Square Park, less than a mile and a half from the Sojourner Truth School. This was probably Mullins's home beat.
“It's the white-on-white Colonial motherlode on the corner,” Rakeem said, pointing to a big house about a block away “Man, I like working in these high-rent neighborhoods. You'all smell the roses?”
“That's window-cleaning solution,” I said.
“There goes my career with FTD,” Rakeem Powell laughed, and so did his partner Chester.
“Might not be the Partridge Family living in that nice house up yonder,” Sampson cautioned the two detectives. “Beautiful surroundings, peaceful street and all, maybe a homicidal maniac shitheel waiting for us inside, though. You copy?”
Sampson turned to me. 'What are you thinking about, Sugar?
You having your usual nasty thoughts on this? Feeling the gris-gris?'
Sampson had told me what he knew on the short ride over to Seward Square. A subscriber to the Prodigy interactive service, an Army man, Colonel Frank Moore, had been sending messages about the child killings over the service. He appeared to know details about the murders that only the police and the real killer knew. He sounded like our freak.
'I don't like what I'm hearing from you so far, Mister John.
The killings suggest he's in a rage state, and yet he's fairly careful.
Now he's reaching out for help? He's virtually leading us to his doorstep? I don't know if I get that. And I don't like it too much, either. That's what I'm feeling so far, partner.'
“I was thinking the same thing.” Sampson nodded and kept staring at the house in question. “At any rate, we're here. Might as well check out what the colonel wanted us to see.”
“Not mutilated bodies,” Rakeem Powell said and frowned deeply “Not at five on a Monday morning. Not more little kids stashed somewhere in that big house.”
“Alex and I will take the back door in,” Sampson said to Rakeem. “You and Popeye Doyle here can cover the front. Watch the garage. If this is the killer's house, you might expect a surprise or two. Everybody wide-awake? Wakee-wakee!”
Rakeem and the white man in the hat nodded. “Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed,” Rakeem said with fake enthusiasm.
“We have you covered, Detectives.” Chester Mullins finally said something.
