“My ass is a major organ, Priscilla Mae,” he grumbled.
“No, it’s not,” she said. She looked at the nurse and the doctor. “Right?”
“Right,” the nurse said.
The doctor nodded. “A set of gluteal muscles does not constitute an organ.”
“I may never take a dump sitting down again,” Peggliazo whined.
Priscilla Mae rolled her eyes. “My daddy says you should be grateful that bullet didn’t go right through your ass and into your gut.”
She seemed to notice us just as Peggliazo said, “Your daddy can kiss my — ”
“That’s enough, Phil,” she said sharply. “We’ve got visitors with badges. I told you Vanessa Dennison would come through.”
A bear of a man with a blocky head, a full mane of silver hair, and two days’ growth of beard, Peggliazo propped himself up on his elbows on the massage table and twisted around to peer at us.
“About time someone showed up. You catch him yet?”
“No, sir,” Sampson said. “We just wanted to ask you some questions.”
“I’m gonna spend my life facedown with a blowtorch coring out both cheeks,” he said. “That should answer most of your questions.”
“Phil!” his wife said, then looked at us. “I’m so sorry. He’s not himself. They’ve got him on drugs.”
“Not enough drugs!” he shouted before settling back onto the massage table, face in the ring. “You want to ask me questions, you come around here and lie on the floor so I can see you.”
“They’re detectives, for Christ’s sake. They’re not lying on the floor. All last night you kept saying, ‘How come no one’s come to get my statement? Call Vanessa.’ I did. So here they are.”
“And here I am, Priscilla!” he roared. “Unable to sit up for their questions!”
I said, “It’s okay, Mrs. Peggliazo, we can lie on our backs to talk to him.”
“See there?” Peggliazo said as we walked to the head of the massage table and started to get down on the floor. “These people are willing to cooperate.”
“Who’s not cooperating?” his wife asked.
“Mirror, mirror on the wall,” he said.
“I’m glad you got shot,” she said. “But I can’t believe the bullet missed your head. I mean, it had to have been up your ass like it always is.” She stormed out.
Peggliazo was chuckling when Sampson and I rolled over on our backs and looked up at the wounded lobbyist’s face.
“That was a good one,” he said. “Can’t believe he missed my head, she says! She’s good. Tough but good. Like Kate, you know, in Taming of the Shrew.”
“I’m not touching that one,” I said. “Tell us what happened.”
“I’m seeing you upside down.”
“It’s either that or the side,” Sampson said.
He grimaced, then said, “I’m telling you, neither of you has ever had a pain in the ass like this pain in the ass. Unless you’ve been shot there?”
“No, sir,” I said. “I haven’t had that pleasure. Tell us what happened.”
The lobbyist said he’d been saying goodbye to his guests outside Argento, an upscale Italian restaurant off Prospect Street, when he was hit.
“Never heard the shot, but I went down like boom,” he said. “Felt like fire and then both of my legs were funny-boned, you know?”
“Any idea who’d want to shoot you?”
“Other than cigarette- and Dorito-haters, I can’t think of anyone offhand.”
Sampson said, “So you’ve gotten threats before?”
He chuckled again. “With predictable regularity. They’ve threatened to put enough nicotine in me to stop my heart while stuffing me with enough preservatives and food additives to damage my brain.”
“But no specific threats about shooting you?”
“Creative haters. What can I say?”
Before we could answer, he winced again, said, “Doc? How much more time?”
“Fifty minutes.”
“Aw, c’mon. I’m having a lava eruption back there.”
I started getting up and motioned for Sampson to do the same.
“Hey,” Peggliazo said. “Where you going?”
“To try to find whoever shot you in the ass,” Sampson said.
CHAPTER 20
TRAFFIC WAS SNARLED DOWNTOWN AND I made it back with just ten minutes to spare before my noon appointment. In addition to my law enforcement consulting, I tried to maintain a small client base in my private psychotherapy practice because the work gave me much fulfillment.
That day, however, I felt harried and on the verge of being overwhelmed by the three hot cases on my plate. But I was, if anything, a professional, and even though the client I was about to see was connected to one of the cases, I needed to shift into a completely different way of thinking. I pulled out Analisa Hernandez’s file and almost immediately felt my mindset change from detective to healer.
A knock came at the basement door about five minutes later. I left my office, opened the door, and found a Hispanic woman in her forties who had been seeing me on and off for a while now smiling at me.
“Dr. Cross!” she cried as she hurried in. “I miss you!”
I grinned. I never knew what I was going to get when Analisa showed up for counseling. One day she could be bubbly like this and the next distraught, so I was happy when she walked into my office with a big smile on her face after she’d spent six months working in Guatemala.
When I shut the door to my office, she sat down on the edge of her chair, smiling eagerly, and said, “So how are you?”
“In demand,” I said.
“I hear this, yes,” she said. “Tell me about Maya Parker.”
“You heard?”
“Even in Guatemala there is internet,” she said, her smile fading. “It’s him, yes, the same one who killed my Elizabeth?”
I nodded. “We think so.”
“Where did she go to school, Maya?”
“Bragg,” I said.
“And Elizabeth was at Anacostia. But all of them from Southeast.”
“All eight.”
She looked away from me, her hand going to her lips, and her right knee began to jiggle nervously, signs I’d seen before when her mood was becoming darker. “Did he make a mistake this time?”
“If he has, we haven’t found it yet.”
She shook her head, then pounded her fist gently on her thigh. “How can this be? I ask myself. How can he be so much like the ghost?”
“We believe he prepares extensively,” I said.
“Prepares,” she said and tears began to dribble down her cheeks. “What makes this kind of monster, Dr. Cross?” We’d had this discussion several times, but I indulged her. “Probably a lot of things,” I said. “One damaging incident after another, probably as a young child and in puberty, possibly involving abuse by a female about Elizabeth’s age. That abuse festered in his brain until the brain was literally changed. The chemicals, the wiring, it’s different for these kinds of men.”