“Every fuckin’ time,” Gomez says, rolling up his window.
“Take a look at this.” Nevins pushes the computer screen on the dashboard to face Gomez, who looks up from his phone to review the report when—
The radio crackles to life: “Dispatch for two-one-two-two-one, reports of fire, address is five hundred Wildwood Drive, armed suspect reported, district fire department are on their way.”
Nevins throws his backpack in the backseat and adjusts his glasses.
“Go, go, go,” Gomez says, watching as a fire truck and ambulance speed past them in the opposite direction. Before Gomez can buckle his seat belt and Nevins can turn on the engine, two more fire trucks follow with a second ambulance, speeding faster.
“Woo!” Gomez yells. “We got a big one. Let’s go, let’s go!”
Nevins turns on the siren before skidding across all lanes, chasing the ambulance in front of him. They turn on Massachusetts Avenue; as they cut around the ambulance, they see a young white girl riding her bike along the sidewalk, a backpack slung over her shoulder: Bunny Bartholomew.
A glass streetlamp explodes; shards of glass shatter over the windshield as Nevins approaches the flames engulfing a nine-thousand-square-foot colonial mansion. Black smoke billows through weeping willows warping around Wildwood Drive, naked limbs blowing toward Rock Creek Park. A place no longer safe for children to play, no longer safe for tourist horse-and-buggy rides or walking dogs.
The ambulance and fire trucks are blocks behind them. Most nights it’s a game for the officers, to race their fellow servicemen and -women, but not tonight.
Nevins gets out of the car, covering his mouth with his forearm. “Jesus! Gomez!” he yells above the approaching sound of screaming sirens, the deep sound of the fire truck horn penetrating his gut. He takes out his gun. Gomez darts toward the back of the house, leaving the car door open, coughing, squinting up at the violent flames bursting through crown molding above expensive windowpanes, charred drywall falling into the dead boxwoods below. The fire is coming from the second level.
“I hear screaming! Someone is screaming! Gomez!!!”
Nevins, coughing and swallowing, grabs the radio attached to his chest as he moves closer to the front door. “Two-one-two-two-one, for dispatch this is Officer Nevins, we need backup, I repeat, we need backup!”
Gomez sprints to meet him. Nevins stands with his ear to the door, trying to pinpoint exactly where the screaming is coming from.
“Do you hear that?” he asks Gomez, a moment of silence between them and the crackling fire when suddenly the front door blows open, knocking Nevins and Gomez to the ground.
Gomez sits on the curb breathing into an oxygen mask while Nevins is taken into an ambulance with severe burns on the side of his face. A body is dragged out of the mansion by a lone fireman as a dozen others attempt to tame the fire; the body is a woman.
“She’s breathing! She’s breathing!”
Blood smears the sidewalk as a stretcher is rushed to her side. The firefighter snips the woman’s top, maneuvering around what look to be stab wounds amidst the burns. In order to preserve the evidence, he carefully places the remnants of her clothing on top of a plastic bag.
Seconds later, another firefighter wobbles empty-handed out of the mansion, red-faced, covered in soot, smelling of acid and unknown chemicals. He falls to his knees and vomits.
The fire chief walks over to him. The fireman is hyperventilating in between gasps: “Sir, I have a daughter, I cannot tell you what I’ve just seen.” He hawks up saliva and spits into the ground. He repeats, over and over, “I have a daughter, I have a daughter, I have a daughter.…”
It is written in the papers that David and Genevieve Banks, Audrey, and the housekeeper were brutally tortured before the house was set on fire. The bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Banks were found chained together, charred and limp, gags in their mouths, shadows of their lives dancing across the wall in front of them. Audrey had been beaten with an autographed Ted Williams baseball bat. Mr. Banks’s vintage samurai sword from a work trip to Japan was used to slice her up, then what remained was left to burn.
It had been the housekeeper who managed to call 911 after being beaten and burned and left for dead; the lone woman, still breathing, still trying to do her job, and eventually dragged out of the house by one of the firemen. She’d died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. There were no survivors.
But what was more disturbing than the murders themselves was the fact that not one neighbor stepped outside to see if everyone—anyone—was okay. Not one. They didn’t notice when the midnight flames tore through the roof. The gut-thumping sirens driving by merely woke them from a bad dream, or caused the switching of sides of a pillow until they fell back into a peculiar slumber. It was only the next morning, when the news crews showed up—and the FBI—that the Washingtonians emerged, standing protected behind their hedges and fences, mouths agape, hugging their spoiled children.
No one in Washington wants to be part of a scandal. The consequences are fatal, socially and economically. Survival in this town requires playing chess, and playing it well. Every move calculated. Never being vulnerable, or someone will inevitably prey upon your weakness and turn it into shame. One wrong move could have you ostracized from all social events, removing any chance for leverage and power moves.
Take the Dobkin family, for example. Mr. Dobkin, a financier, threw a million-dollar wedding for his daughter, and instead of hiring a local wedding planner, chose a celebrity wedding planner. The goal is Town & Country or a New York Times wedding announcement, not the Daily Mail. Turned out said celebrity planner sued for nonpayment, splashing the tabloids with epithets like greedy, cheap, and fraudulent. It was a
