She started to cry again as the EMTs took her into the emergency room. “I just want to live in the United States, you know?”
I stood there a moment, feeling her pain. But by the time the doors had shut behind her, I was thinking that with any luck, by late that night we would have sketches of the killer from two different angles, and then the hunt for a mass murderer would really begin.
I was immediately overcome with doubt. Would we have enough time? Who knew whether anyone would recognize the killer?
I sat on a bench outside the ER and phoned Bree. I just needed to hear her voice.
Chapter
63
For nearly two hours Bree had driven all over Southeast DC looking for Ava. She’d been everywhere she and Alex had gone in the past week, including the factory where the homeless guy said he’d seen Ava light Jane Doe on fire.
But there had been no sign of her.
Finally, around nine thirty, Bree pulled into a 7-Eleven parking lot on Eighth Street and rested her forehead on the steering wheel of her car. Maybe Ava is gone, she thought, feeling desperately sad at that idea.
She’d become very close to the girl during Ava’s all-too-brief time in the Cross household, almost as if Ava were the younger sister she’d never had. To think that she might never see Ava again, never know what became of her, well, that was…
She flashed on the poor Bransons and the Lancasters, grasping the depth and dimensions of their parental desperation and fear. Tears welled in Bree’s eyes at the thought that those kids were going to be drowned tomorrow, and for several seconds she gave in to the misery.
But almost immediately she got angry. No, she was not giving up. Not yet. Not on those babies. And not on Ava.
Bree got out, went into the convenience store in search of comfort food. She bought a Coke and a bag of crunchy kettle-fried Zapp’s Cajun-style potato chips, one of her few vices. Back in the car, she tore open the bag and snapped open the soda can. As she drank and crunched her way through the potato chips, she told herself she was going to have to think differently.
If Ava hadn’t left Washington altogether, it made growing sense to Bree that the girl would at least have left Southeast, where drug dealers were hunting her. And Yolanda had said that Ava had been using painkillers like oxy and Percocet.
Once you latched on to those kind of drugs, it was hard to let go, Bree reasoned. Which meant that if Ava was still in the city, she’d be looking for a fix.
Bree had never worked narcotics and neither had Alex, so she wasn’t totally up to speed on where people scored these days. But she had a friend from the academy who’d worked drugs and gangs the past three years. She texted the detective, asking her where dealers worked in the city besides Southeast.
She was finishing the last crunchy Zapp’s chip when her phone buzzed. She picked it up and read the reply. She drained her Coke can and started her car, hearing her phone ring. She clicked Answer and Speaker.
“Hey.” It was Alex. “Where are you?”
“Out for a drive. You?”
“Georgetown Medical Center.”
She felt her stomach knot. “You all right?”
“Just in need of a ride.”
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” Bree said. “I want to check one more place before I put Ava on the back burner.”
“I’ll be sitting outside the emergency room.”
Chapter
64
Forty minutes later we were just north of Adams Morgan in a transitional neighborhood where enclaves of eight-hundred-thousand-dollar townhomes give way to a rougher side of the nation’s capital. From Eighteenth Street we cruised east on Euclid, a narrow road with old redbrick row houses, oak trees, and older cars parked on both sides.
Ahead, near the intersection of Seventeenth, we could see the taillights of cars stopped in the road. This was where Bree’s pal in narcotics had said there was a thriving open-air drug market catering to everyone from US Senate aides in search of a mild thrill to hard-core junkies on a jones for their next fix. And sure enough, as we got closer I could see figures darting up to the windows of the stopped cars.
“Should we stop?” Bree asked as we came within sight of the old Euclid Market, now boarded up and for lease. Five or six young men in hoodies were leaning against the wall, drinking Colt 45, smoking cigarettes, and watching us. Another band of guys stood on the opposite side of the intersection, dealing with the buyers coming in from the north.
“Go on through,” I said, looking straight ahead. “We’re better off talking to them on foot.”