“C’mon,” Bree said.
“It’s true,” she said. “Don’t believe it? Look up the rise in the rate of sexually transmitted diseases among octogenarians.”
“I’d rather not,” I said.
“Sky-high,” Nana Mama said. “Especially in those assisted-living facilities.”
My son Ali came into the room. “What’s sky-high?”
My grandmother frowned. “A subject not for young men.”
“I’m ten,” he said indignantly.
“Nana Mama was talking about the number of people who make it to ninety these days,” Bree said.
“Oh,” he said, then looked at me. “Were the murders of Mr. Christopher and the vice president’s ex-wife professional hits, Dad?”
Ali, in addition to rock climbing, had long been interested in detection. At times, in our opinion, that interest had been borderline unhealthy. I said, “You know we can’t talk about active cases.” That irked Ali, but he said, “There are all sorts of theories already on the web.”
“You want to try to ignore the internet,” Nana Mama said. “It’s for idiots.”
“Well, the idiots all think that Mrs. Willingham is to blame because Mr. Christopher was such a good guy.”
My daughter, Jannie, came into the kitchen, upset. “He was a great guy. I can’t believe it. Everyone’s talking about it. Tina and Rachel are destroyed.”
My stomach sank. “They heard up at camp? Did their mother break the news to them?”
She shook her head, on the verge of tears. “They found out on Facebook hours ago, Dad, and they can’t find their mom. They said she’s not answering her cell.”
“She’ll call in soon, I’m sure,” Bree said.
The doorbell rang and Sampson called out, “Hello?”
I called back, “We’re in the kitchen, John.”
Sampson, his wife, Billie, and their seven-year-old daughter, Willow, appeared in the doorway. “Smells good in here,” John said.
Billie, ordinarily one of the most vivacious women on the face of the earth, nodded and smiled weakly. “It always smells good in here.”
“Just like I like it,” Nana Mama said, turning from her stove. “How are you, Willow?”
“Good,” Willow said, looking at my grandmother’s cookie jar.
Nana Mama winked at her, then turned to Sampson’s wife. “And you, Billie?”
“Getting better every day, Nana,” Sampson said, wrapping an arm around her shoulder. “She walked two miles this morning.”
“Two miles,” Bree said. “That’s huge!”
Billie smiled broadly. “I just wish I could do it without feeling so tired afterward.”
Sampson said, “The cardiologist said that will pass. He said in two weeks he’ll be taking the gizmo out of her chest.”
Billie had been stricken with Lyme disease that went un-diagnosed long enough to precipitate a crisis in the emergency room when her heart rate dropped to twenty beats per minute. Luckily, a sharp ER doc had questioned Sampson about her exposure in the woods. It turned out that Billie had gone hiking in Pennsylvania a month earlier. Even before the blood test came back positive for Lyme, the doctor was pumping her full of the antibiotics that saved her life.
“Have you all eaten?” Nana Mama asked.
“We don’t want to impose,” Billie said. “Just stopped in to say hi, though I think John wants to talk with Alex.”
Sampson nodded.
“Nonsense, you’re family,” Nana Mama said. “Ali, can you set three more places? We need to fatten Billie up a little.”
“Can you make mine and Alex’s to go?” Sampson asked, and he looked at Bree. “I want to tell Alex what’s going on with my end of the Willingham case, and I might have something on the Maya Parker case that should be checked out sooner rather than later.”
I smiled at Bree and said, “See? We’re already on it.”
CHAPTER 14
AS SOON AS SAMPSON AND I walked out the front door, he told me he’d spent much of the day canvassing the neighborhood around Harrison Charter High and looking for security-camera footage.
“Any luck?”
“A little,” Sampson said, getting into his car. “And that’s the problem.”
I got in on the other side. As he pulled away, he explained, “Due to lightning, we have no operating cameras on the apartment building opposite the front of the school. I got solid footage from the security cameras on the bodega on the northeast corner across from the school, but — ”
“Did you get it from Ronald Peters?”
“Yes, you know him?”
“Enough to say hello,” I said. “I used to use his laundromat. Have you looked at it?”
“Yes, and I found nothing, but that’s not the point,” Sampson said impatiently, waving his hand at me. “The point is there were nine other cameras around the perimeter of the school, including our two CTs on the west side of the campus.”
“The school faces east. So our traffic cams are behind the football field?”
“Correct. At the cross streets north and south.”
“Okay.”
“Both our cameras were shot out an hour before the crime,” Sampson said. “The other cameras facing the campus were all small, personal-surveillance types with strong lenses, and those lenses were smeared with Vaseline before our cameras were shot out.”
“This is not some junkie, then.”
“And this was not a rip-and-run deal gone bad, Alex. This was cold-blooded murder.”
I thought of my son Ali and wondered at his instincts. “By one or more professionals,” I said. “How did they miss the bodega cameras?”
“I almost missed them,” he said, smiling. “They’re painted white, like the building, everything but the lenses.” He slowed, pulled over, and parked on a street of row houses in DC a mile from my home.
“What are we doing?” I asked.
“Maya Parker went to Bragg High, but she had friends all over Southeast through her community-service work. One of them lives here. Her name is Dee Nathaniel. She evidently told someone that there was a creep after Maya in the weeks before she disappeared.” He took us to a brick building badly in need of repointing and knocked on the door. A tall, strikingly attractive African-American woman in her early forties answered the door on a chain. She was wearing a navy business suit and no shoes.
We identified ourselves and said we were hoping to talk to Dee Nathaniel.
“I’m her mother, Gina,” the woman said, concerned. “What’s this about? She hasn’t done a thing wrong, not that girl. She’s a straight arrow.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “But we heard she was a friend of Maya Parker.”
Gina Nathaniel’s face fell. “She was. That hit my baby and me very hard. We helped search for her for days.”
“Would you mind if we spoke to her?” Sampson said. “It might help us.”
Mrs. Nathaniel hesitated, then said, “We don’t need an attorney, right?”