“We just want to talk,” Sampson said, holding up his hands. “If Dee’s a straight arrow, I can’t imagine she has anything to say that requires a lawyer.”
After a beat, she nodded. “But I’m listening in. Come in. You’ll have to excuse the minor mess, but I only just got home from work.”
After shutting the front door behind us, she called for Dee up a flight of stairs and got no answer. She asked us to wait in the kitchen and went up the stairs to get her.
We walked down the hall and into the kitchen, where the morning’s breakfast bowls were still in the sink. Two of them. Mother and daughter.
Dee came in a few moments later, a younger version of her mother, wearing shorts and a T-shirt. She walked with an awkward gait, her arms loose and swingy; her mother followed behind her. Dee looked at us uncertainly. “Mama said you want to talk about Maya?”
“That’s right,” I said and introduced myself and Sampson. “How did you two know each other? Through school? Bragg High?”
Dee shook her head. “I go to Stone Ridge.”
Her mother said, “It’s a Catholic school in Potomac.”
“We know it,” Sampson said. “So where’s the connection?”
“I knew Maya before, in middle school,” Dee said. “We stayed friends even though she went to Bragg and Mom made me go to Stone Ridge.”
“C’mon, Dee, do we have to go there?” her mother said.
Her daughter sighed. “No.” She looked at us. “It’s not that bad except for the zero social life. You know, the things normal kids do?”
Gina Nathaniel rolled her eyes. “It’s not like I keep her in a cage, Detectives. I let you go to the Bragg spring formal with Maya and her friends, didn’t I?”
Dee shrugged and nodded glumly. “That was the last time I saw Maya alive.”
“When was that?”
“March twenty-seventh? It was a Friday.”
“They had a limo that I helped pay for,” Mrs. Nathaniel said.
Dee described the evening as fun except for the limo driver, who she said was creepy. There was a roll-up window between him and the kids. They asked him to keep it up, but he kept cracking it to look at the girls and make comments.
“Especially to Maya,” Dee said.
Sampson did not react, but he wagged his pinkie finger, a signal we used during interviews when someone tells us something we did not know before.
“Do you know the name of that limo service?” I asked.
“No,” Dee said. “But the driver’s name was Charley. We joked about him, called him Creepy Chuck.”
“You didn’t tell me that,” her mother said. “But I think I have a card from the limo service somewhere.”
She went to a drawer and began rummaging around. She returned with a card for Capital City Limo, which I took a photograph of. Sampson took the business card and left the room.
I asked Dee, “And that was the last time you saw Maya? In the limo?”
“When they dropped her off here,” her mother said. “Right?”
Dee nodded, tears welling in her eyes. “Maya didn’t deserve it. She was one of the good ones, you know?”
“Your mother said you were part of the search for her,” Sampson said.
“Everyone was part of it after Randall Christopher got involved.”
Her mother shook her head. “It’s a damn shame a fine man gets shot to death like that. We knew him. I mean, he was the one who assigned us our search areas and we reported back to him.”
“We didn’t find a thing,” Dee said, growing angry. “That’s why I wished me and Maya had done that TFT course. If she had been trained, that guy would be dead, and she’d be alive.” Dee explained that Maya had told her she wanted to take a self-defense course called Target-Focused Training taught by a former hand-to-hand combat instructor for the Navy SEALs.
“They teach you targets on the body that can incapacitate someone,” Dee said. “Like their eyes or kneecaps or groin or the side of the neck, and you learn to see them and to hit them. Lots of girls and women have used it successfully.”
Mrs. Nathaniel said, “It also cost more than two thousand dollars.”
Dee gritted her teeth. “That’s exactly what Maya’s mother said, Mom.”
CHAPTER 15
OUTSIDE THE NATHANIELS’ HOUSE, AS Sampson and I were walking to the car, I said, “Home?”
Sampson shook his head. “Good as that sounds, I called Capital City when I left the room. Turns out Creepy Chuck’s name is Charles Kendrick, and Mr. Kendrick has a sheet. Ex-con. And he’s done with his shift in twenty minutes.”
We sped back through the city and were at Capital City’s location off New York Avenue in Northeast DC with five minutes to spare. The night manager said, “What’s Charley done? We took a chance on him and I need to know.”
“Nothing that we know of,” I said. “We just want to have a chat with him about one of his rides.”
A limo came into the garage and parked. “That’s Charley,” the manager said. “Have at him.”
We walked toward the limo as Charley Kendrick, a long, lanky white guy with a hawkish nose, flecks of gray at his temples, and an ill-fitting dark suit, got out. He saw us immediately, studied us, and his expression toughened.
“Whoever you are, I know for a fact you have no reason to be here,” he said.
We held up our identifications. I said, “We want to talk about Maya Parker.”
Kendrick looked puzzled. “Who?”
“The girl murdered and dumped in the Potomac about four months ago,” Sampson said. “She was one of your rides the week before.”
“Hey, hey,” he said, holding up both palms. “I have no idea who you are talking about. I don’t read newspapers. I don’t listen to the news. My counselor told me to lose all media and social media contact for a year, said it would be better for my head. It’s the truth. Call her.”
I held out my phone and showed him a photograph Dee Nathaniel had given us from the night of the formal with all the girls dressed up in the limo. I blew up Maya’s face. “Recognize her now? Her friend said you took the picture.”
Kendrick got out reading glasses, studied it, and smiled. “I remember her now. The whole bunch of them. Little hellions!” Then he sobered. “You said she’s dead?”
“She is,” Sampson said. “And her friend said you were being creepy the night you drove them all to the dance. Lowering the window to spy on them, especially Maya.”
“More likely I was making sure they weren’t blowing dope or anything harder back there,” Kendrick said. “Company policy.”
“What did you do time for, Charley?”
He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and said, “Embezzlement from a nursing home. I have no history whatsoever of violent crime and I’m hardly the sort to obsess over a teenage girl.”
“So what sort are you?” I said.
“The gay and cross-dressing sort,” Kendrick said, raising his eyebrows and pursing his lips. “Honestly, I was simply admiring Maya’s dress and hairdo that night. Nothing more. When did she disappear?”