Cross Country

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Chapter 11
    EVERYBODY THERE KNEW there was trouble, but no one knew what kind or how bad it was.
    A dark green panel van had screeched to a stop in front of a low-level mosque in Washington called Masjid Al-Shura. More than one hundred fifty peaceful congregants were crowding the sidewalk in front.
    Even so, the very moment Ghedi Ahmed saw the gunmen scrambling out of the van, saw their gray hoodies, their black face masks and jaunty sunglasses, he knew they had come for him.
They were just boys — the Tiger’s boys.
    The first gunshots were aimed into the sky. Just warnings. Men and women screamed, and some scurried back into the mosque.
    Others flattened themselves on the sidewalk, shielding their children’s bodies as best they could.
    His hands held high, Ghedi Ahmed made his decision and moved away from his family.
Better to die alone than to take them with me,
he was thinking, shaking like a leaf now.
    He hadn’t gotten far when he heard his wife, Aziza, scream, and he realized what a terrible mistake he’d made. “Ghedi! Ghedi!” He turned as the wild boys carried, then threw, Aziza into the waiting van. And then — his children! They were taking the children, too! All four of them were hustled into the van.
    Ghedi reversed direction quickly, and now he was screaming, more loudly than anyone in the crowd, even more than Aziza.
    A courageous man from the congregation took a swing at one of the kidnappers. The boy yelled, “Dog!” and shot the man in the face. Then he fired again, where the man lay spread-eagled and already dying on the sidewalk.
    Another bullet took down an elderly woman just as Ghedi pushed past her.
    The next shot found his leg, and running became falling. Then two of the boys snatched him up off the ground and threw him into the van with his family.
    “The children! Not our children!” sobbed Aziza.
    “Where are you taking us?” Ghedi screamed at the kidnappers. “Where?”
    “To Allah,” came the answer from the driver, the Tiger himself.

Chapter 12
    THE MYSTERY WAS deepening and getting worse each day, but much of Washington didn’t seem to care, probably because this one happened in Southeast, and only black people were killed.
    Lorton Landfill is the final destination for much of Washington’s garbage. It is two hundred and fifty acres of foul and disgusting refuse, so we were fortunate the bodies had been found at all. I drove the Mercedes in through valleys of trash that rose thirty feet high on either side. I continued on to where the response team was parked around an orange-and-white DC sanitation truck. The gauze masks they’d provided Bree and me at the gate didn’t do much against the nauseating smell.
    “A drive in the country, Alex. This is so romantic,” Bree said as we plunged forward through the muck. She was good at keeping things upbeat, no matter what the circumstances.
    “I’m always thinking of new things for us to do.”
    “You’ve outdone yourself this time. Trust me on that.”
    I finally spotted Sampson talking to the truck’s driver as we got out of the car. Behind the two of them and a ribbon of crime scene tape, I could see yellow sheets covering the six bodies where they had been found.
    Two parents and four more kids here. That made four adults and seven children in just the past few days.
    Sampson walked over to brief us. “Garbage truck started on the empty streets this morning and made stops all over midtown. Forty-one Dumpsters at eighteen locations, some of them as close as a few blocks from the mosque. That’s a shitload of follow-up work for us.”
    “Any other good news?” I asked him.
    “So far, only the bodies have been found.
No word on the heads
.” We hadn’t released
that
so far to the press: All six of the victims had been decapitated.
    “I love my job, I love my job,” Bree said quietly. “I can’t wait to get to work in the morning.”
    I asked Sampson where the father’s body was, and we started there. When I pulled back the sheet, the sight was horrific, but I didn’t need an ME to tell me that the cutting was much cleaner this time. There were no extraneous wounds: no bullet holes, no slashes, no punctures. Plus, the lower body had been burned badly.
    Senseless murders, but probably not random,
I was thinking.
    But what did the Ahmed killings have to do with Ellie and her family?
    “We’ve got some similarities and some real differences here,” Sampson told us. “Two families taken out