'That figures.' I shook my head. You find any ID anywhere around here?'
'No ID. We looked around in the bushes. Nothing but the body,' said the younger one. 'And the body's seen better days.' He was perspiring badly and looked a little sick.
I put on latex gloves and bent down over the corpse. She did appear to be in her mid to late teens. The girl's throat had been slit from ear to ear. Her face was badly slashed. So were the soles of her feet, which seemed odd. She'd been stabbed a dozen or more times in her chest and stomach. I pushed open her legs.
I saw something, and it made me sick. A metal handle was barely visible between her legs. I was almost sure it was a knife and that it had been driven all the way into her vagina.
Sampson crouched and looked at me. 'What are you thinking, Alex? Another one?'
I shook my head, shrugged my shoulders. 'Maybe, but she's an addict, John. Tracks on her arms and legs. Probably behind her knees, under her arms. Our boy doesn't usually go after addicts. He practices safe sex. The murder's brutal, though. That fits the style. You see the knife?'
Sampson nodded. He didn't miss much. 'Clothes,' he said, 'where the hell did they go? We need to find the clothes.'
'Somebody in the neighborhood probably stripped them off her already,' said the young uniform. There was a lot of disturbance around the body. Several footprints in the dirt. 'That's how it goes around here. Nobody seems to care.'
'We're here,' I said to him. 'We care. We're here for all the Jane Does.'
Alex Cross 5 - Pop Goes the Weasel
CHAPTER Three
Geoffrey Shafer was so happy he almost couldn't hide it from his family. He had to keep from laughing out loud as he kissed his wife, Lucy, on the cheek. He caught a whiff of her Chanel No. 5 perfume, then tasted the brittle dryness of her lips as he kissed her again.
They were standing around like statues in the elegant galley hall of the large Georgian house in Kalorama. The children had been summoned to say goodbye to him.
His wife, the former Lucy Rhys-Cousins, was ash blonde, her sparkling green eyes even brighter than the Bulgari and Spark jewelry that she always wore. Slender, still a beauty of sorts at thirty-seven, Lucy had been at Newnham College, Cambridge, for two years before they were married. She still read useless poetry and literary novels, but spent most of her free time at equally pointless lunches, shopping with her expatriate girl friends, going to polo matches, or sailing. Occasionally, Shafer sailed with her. He'd been a very good sailor once upon a time.
Lucy had been considered a prize catch, and he supposed that she still would be, for some men. Well, they could have her skinny, bony body and all the passionless sex they could stomach.
Shafer hoisted up four-year-old twins Tricia and Erica, one in each arm. Two mirror images of their mother. He'd have sold the twins for the price of a postage stamp. He hugged the girls and laughed like the good papa he always pretended to be.
Finally, he formally shook twelve-year-old Robert's hand. The debate being waged in the house was over whether Robert should be sent back to England to boarding school, perhaps to Winchester, where his grandfather had gone. Shafer gave his son a crisp military salute. Once upon a time, Colonel Geoffrey Shafer had been a soldier. Only Robert seemed to remember that part of his life now.
'I'm only going away to London for a few days, and this is work, not a holiday. I'm not planning to spend my nights at the Athenaeum or anything like that.' he told his family. He was smiling jovially, the way they expected him to be.
Try to have some fun while you're away, Dad. Have some laughs. God knows, you deserve it' Robert said, talking in the lower-octave man-to-man's voice that he seemed to be adopting lately.
'Bye, Daddy! Bye, Daddy.' the twins chorused shrilly, making Shafer want to throw them against the walls.
'Bye, Erica-san. Bye, Tricia-san.'
'Remember, Ore's Nest,' Robert said with sudden urgency. 'Dragon and The Duelist.' Ore's Nest was a store for role-playing books and gaming equipment. It was in Earlham Street, just off Cambridge Circus in London. Dragon and The Duelist were currently the two hot-shit British magazines on role-playing games.
Unfortunately for Robert, Shafer wasn't actually going to London. He had a much better plan for the weekend. He was going to play his own fantasy game right here in Washington.
Alex Cross 5 - Pop Goes the Weasel
CHAPTER Four
He sped due east, rather than toward Washington's Dulles airport, feeling as if a tremendously burden-some weight had been lifted. God, he hated his perfect English family, and even more, their claustrophobic life here in America.
Shafer's own family back in England had been 'perfect' as well. He had two older brothers and they were both excellent students, model youths. His father had been a military attache and the family had traveled around the globe until he was twelve, when they returned to England and settled in Guildford, about half an hour outside London. Once there, Shafer began to expand on the schoolboy mischief he'd practiced since he was eight. The center of Guildford contained several historic buildings and he set out to gleefully deface all of them. He began with
