I spotted a clique of reporters up ahead. They saw Sampson and me coming. We’re about as hard to miss as the Harlem Globetrotters in Tokyo.
“Detective Cross? Dr. Cross?” the reporters called out, trying to slow us down.
“No comment,” I waved them off. “From either of us. Get the fuck out of the way.”
Inside Vivian Kim’s apartment, Sampson and I passed all the familiar faces—techies, forensics, the DOA gang in their ghoulish element.
“I don’t want to do this anymore,” Sampson said.
“Whole world’s flowing down the piss-tubes. It’s too much, even for me.”
“We burn out,” I mumbled to him, “we burn out together.”
Sampson grabbed my hand and held it. That told me he was as fucked up about this as he got. We went inside the first bedroom on the right side of the hallway. I tried to be still inside. I couldn’t do it.
Vivian Kim’s bedroom was beautifully laid out. Lots of exquisite, black-and-white family photographs and art posters covered most of the wall space. An antique violin was hung on one wall. I didn’t want to look at the reason I was there. Finally, I had to.
Vivian Kim was pinned to the bed with a long hunting knife. It was driven through her stomach. Both her breasts had been removed. Her pubic hair had been shaved. Her eyes had rolled back in her head, as if she had seen something unfathomable during her last moments.
I let my eyes wander around the bedroom. I couldn’t look at Vivian Kim’s mutilated body. I stared at a splash of bright color on the floor. I caught my breath. Nobody had said anything about it on the way up. Nobody had noticed the most important clue. Fortunately, nobody had moved the evidence.
“Look at this here.” I showed Sampson.
Maggie Rose Dunne’s second sneaker was lying on Vivian Kim’s bedroom floor. The killer was leaving what the pathologists call “artistic touches.” He’d left an overt message this time—the signature of signatures. I was shaking as I bent down over the little girl’s sneaker. Here was the most sadistic humor at work. The pink sneaker, in shocking contrast to the bloody crime scene.
Gary Soneji had been in the bedroom. Soneji was the project killer, too. He was The Thing. And he was back in town.
CHAPTER 35
GARY SONEJI was still in Washington, indeed. He was sending out special-delivery messages to his fans. There was a difference now. He was baiting us, too. Sampson and I got a dispensation from The Jefe: we could work on the kidnapping as long as it was linked to the other murder investigations. It definitely was.
“This is our day off, so we must be having fun,” Sampson said to me as we walked the streets of Southeast. It was the thirteenth of January. Bitter cold. Folks had fires blazing in the garbage cans on almost every street corner. One of the brothers had FUC U 2 razor-cut on the back of his head. My sentiments exactly.
“Mayor Monroe doesn’t call anymore. Doesn’t write,” I said to Samson. I watched my breath launch clouds in the freezing air.
“See, there is a silver lining,” he said into the wind. “He’ll come around when we catch The Thing. He’ll be there to take all the bows for us.”
We walked along, goofing on the situation and on each other. Sampson rapped lyrics from pop songs, something he does a lot. That morning, it was “Now That We’ve Found Love.” Heavy D & The Boyz. “Rev me up, rev me up, you’re my little buttercup,” Sampson kept saying, as if the lyrics made sense out of everything.
We were canvassing Vivian Kim’s neighborhood, which was on the edge of Southeast. Canvassing a neighborhood is mind-numbing work, even for the young and uninitiated. “Did you see anyone or anything unusual yesterday?” we asked anybody dumb enough to open their doors for us. “Did you notice any strangers, strange cars, anything that sticks out in your mind? Let us decide whether it’s important.”
As usual, nobody had seen a thing. Nada de nada. Nobody was happy to see us either, especially as we moved into Southeast on our canvass.
To top it off, the temperature was about three degrees with the windchill. It was sleeting. The streets and sidewalks were covered with icy slush. A couple of times we joined the street people warming themselves over their garbage-can fires.
“You motherfuckin’ cops always cold, even in the summer,” one of the young fucks said to us. Both Sampson and I laughed.
We finally trudged back toward our car around six. We were beaten up. We’d blown a long day. Nothing good had come of it. Gary Soneji had disappeared into thin air again. I felt as if I were in a horror movie.
“Want to go out a few extra blocks?” I asked Sampson. I was feeling desperate enough to try the slot machines in Atlantic City. Soneji was playing with us. Maybe he was watching us. Maybe the fucker was invisible.
Sampson shook his head. “No mas, sugar. I want to drink at least a case of brew. Then I just might do some serious drinking.”
He wiped slush off his sunglasses, then put them on again. It’s weird how well I know his every move. He’s been dusting his glasses like that since he was twelve. Through rain or sleet or snow.
“Let’s do the extra blocks,” I said. “For Ms. Vivian. Least we can do.”
“I knew you were going to say that.”