“It is, which is a shame,” Peters said, looking toward the high school. “Randall Christopher had it, you know? It? I mean, the way he helped organize the searches for those missing girls, it made you want to be part of it.”
“You helped search?”
“As much as I could,” he said. “Mostly I worked the phones. I’m a busy guy. I own four other small businesses besides the store and the laundromat. What’s going to become of them, the students? The school?”
“Questions I can’t answer, sir,” Sampson said, then gestured up at the security cameras mounted high above the bodega. “We’re going to need the feeds from those.”
“Last night’s?”
“Midnight on, for now,” Sampson said.
Peters nodded. “Megan, my store manager, is out sick, but I think I can get it for you. Can I copy it to a thumb drive? Will that work?”
“If it’s time-stamped.”
“By the second,” Peters said, then he looked over as two more customers entered his store. “Need it now?”
“I’m standing here,” Sampson said.
Five minutes later, the bodega owner came out and handed him a thumb drive. “From midnight up to when you entered the store,” he said.
“When will I see you arrive?” Sampson said.
“Five forty-five,” Peters said. “On the dot. I usually get here before Megan to help out before we open at six fifteen.”
“Appreciate it, sir.”
“Anytime, Detective. Believe it or not, with all the bad press lately, we’re a neighborhood of good people here. Or trying to be.”
CHAPTER 11
THAT EVENING, IN OUR KITCHEN at home on Fifth Street, Bree peered at my phone and a picture of Elaine Paulson that Barbara Taylor had sent me. She’d taken it right before the twins boarded the bus to camp.
In the picture, Randall Christopher’s wife had her arms around her daughters. The three of them were smiling, but their grins looked forced, as if they all had other things on their minds.
Bree said, “Where’s Dad in the pic?”
“Well, exactly,” I said.
“You’ve called her number?”
“Ten times,” I said. “It goes straight to voice mail. I’ve got Rawlins at Quantico watching for any calls from her number or charges on her credit card. We’ll find her. Given what we found in the house? We have to.”
After looking through Kay Willingham’s home, I’d returned with a search warrant for Randall Christopher and Elaine Paulson’s duplex. The place was spotless, with vacuum tracks on the rug and all the trash cans empty; it looked like Christopher’s widow had gone to a great deal of trouble cleaning the place. Upstairs in their bedroom, however, in a nightstand, I’d found something that she’d neglected to clean. I’d taken a picture of the small, open, empty gun vault, and now I showed it to Bree. “Pistol is missing. Recent gun residue inside.”
Bree shook her head. “Mom kills Dad because he’s having an affair.”
“Looks like it.”
After a long silence, she said, “Too bad. I liked Randall Christopher. He was never afraid to dive in and help a good cause.”
“Wasn’t for him, you wouldn’t have had so many people looking for Maya Parker.”
“Or Elizabeth Hernandez.”
Maya Parker and Elizabeth Hernandez were the most recent victims in a series of rapes and murders in Southeast DC that went back fifteen years. The early crimes had gone largely unnoticed by the media because of the long gaps between the attacks and because the victims were all either Hispanic or African-American.
Then, last year, seventeen-year-old Elizabeth Hernandez disappeared. Less than three days later, her body was found dumped in the Potomac. Eight months passed before sixteen-year-old Maya Parker vanished; soon after, her body was discovered floating in the Potomac. The autopsy determined that she had been beaten and savagely raped. That was a little less than four months ago.
It was obvious to law enforcement that the killer was losing control because the gaps between his attacks were growing shorter. As a result, Bree, who was chief of detectives for Metro PD, was under tremendous pressure to catch the fiend. Most of that pressure came from the new commissioner.
“How’s that going?” I asked.
“We could use you and Sampson.”
“I can’t speak for John, and I’m a little overextended at the moment, but I’ll get there.”
Bree smiled. “Thank you. Want to see something interesting?”
“Always,” I said.
She led me out of the kitchen, past Nana Mama, my ninety-something grandmother, who was peering into the oven at a meat thermometer buried in the thigh of a roast chicken.
“Dinner in twenty minutes,” Nana said as we left.
In the front room, Bree opened her briefcase and retrieved a small box marked bond arms. She lifted the lid.
“That is interesting,” I said.
“Isn’t it?” she said, pulling a small, modern, nickel-plated derringer from the box. She handed it to me. “They call it ‘the backup.’ ”
“Appropriate,” I said, bouncing the stout little gun in my palm. “Nice weight. Easy to conceal. Double barrel over and under.”
“And a forty-five-caliber,” she said. “It packs a wallop. And look.”
She showed me a small holster attached to an elastic sleeve through which she slid her left arm. She took the derringer from me, slipped it into the holster, and rotated it so the little gun rode snugly beneath her forearm. “Put a jacket with loose sleeves on and no one would know,” she said. “Or I can put it around my ankle with an accessory, but I kind of like this idea. I don’t have to bend down for it.”
I nodded. “Just reach up your sleeve. Where did you find it?”
“A rep from the company gave us a demonstration today. He asked me to try it for a while. If I like it, I’ll buy it.”
“Sounds like you’re already sold.”
When we returned to the kitchen, Nana Mama tapped a wooden spoon on the side of a saucepan, covered it, and clicked on CNN.
“It smells amazing, Nana,” I said.
“I should hope so,” she said, then she moaned sadly and gestured at the screen, shaking her head.
CHAPTER 12
BREE AND I LOOKED AT the TV to see Anderson Cooper doing a standup in front of the yellow tape blocking access to Kay Willingham’s Georgetown mansion. On the screen, over Cooper’s left shoulder, there was a picture of Kay from several years before, beaming and waving.
“Kay Willingham died today at fifty-two, shot to death in her powder-blue Bentley convertible in the middle of a tryst with her latest political protégé and apparent lover, Randall Christopher,” Cooper said.
A montage of video clips and images of Kay with many of the most powerful people in the country began to play. Cooper went on in voice-over. “She inherited her family’s millions and moved from Alabama to the nation’s capital, where for years Kay was Washington’s socialite queen. She was more than just beautiful and rich. She spoke five languages and had several degrees from schools all over the world, but she also possessed that rare ability to relate to almost everyone she met with warmth and genuine interest. She was known as a political mentor and an advocate for social justice — until she became better known as the angry ex-wife of the sitting vice president of the United States.”