London Bridges

felt as though I was back in Homicide. I arrived in a familiar neighborhood that was mostly white clapboard row houses, many of them deserted, on New Jersey Avenue in Southeast. A crowd had already gathered at the murder scene, including some local gangbangers and little kids on bikes still up at that late hour.
    A man in a Rastafarian hat full of dreadlocks was shouting at the police from behind the yellow crime-scene tape. “Hey, ya hear dat music?” he called in a loopy, wheezy voice. “Ya like dat music? Dat mah people music.”
    Sampson met me outside one of the dilapidated row houses, and we went in together.
    “Just like bad old times,” John said, shaking his head. “That why you’re here, Dragonslayer? Are you nostalgic for the old days? Want to come back to the Washington PD?”
    I nodded and gestured around. “Yeah. I missed this. Bad homicide scenes in the middle of the night.”
    “Bet you do, too. I would.”
    The building where the body had been found was boarded up in front, but it was easy enough for us to get inside. There was no front door.
    “This is Alex Cross,” Sampson said to the patrolmen standing just outside the open doorway. “You heard of him? This is
the
Alex Cross, brother.”
    “Dr. Cross,” said the man as he stepped aside to let us enter.
    “Gone,” said John Sampson, “but not forgotten.”
    Once we were in, the scene was sadly familiar and reprehensible. Garbage was strewn in the hallways, and the smell of decaying food and urine was overpowering. Maybe it was because I hadn’t been inside one of these vacated rattraps in a while, over a year now.
    We were told that the body was on the top floor, the third, so Sampson and I began to climb.
    “Dumping grounds,” he muttered.
    “Yeah, I know. I remember the drill pretty well.”
    “At least we don’t have to visit the goddamn basement,” Sampson grumped. “So,
why
did you say you’re here? I didn’t catch that part.”
    “I just missed hanging with you. Nobody calls me Sugar anymore.”
    “Uh-huh. You Feebies aren’t into nicknames? So why are you here,
Sugar?
”
    Sampson and I had made our way to the third floor. There were Washington PD uniforms everywhere up there. This really was déjà vu all over again. I put on plastic gloves, and so did Sampson. I did miss working with him, and sadly, this brought it all home, the good and the bad.
    We stopped outside the second door on the right just as a young black patrolman was leaving. He had his hand over his mouth, a white handkerchief wrapped over the fist. I think he was going to be sick any second. That part doesn’t change, either.
    “Hope he didn’t barf all over our crime scene,” Sampson said. “Goddamn rookies.”
    Then we went inside. “Oh man,” I muttered. You see things like this over and over in Homicide, but you never get used to it, and you don’t forget the details, the sensations, the smells, the taste it leaves in your mouth.
    “He called it in to us first,” I told Sampson. “That’s why I’m here.”
    “Who’s
he?
” he asked.
    “You tell me,” I said.
    We walked over closer to the body that lay on the bare wooden floor. Young woman, probably still in her teens. Petite, pretty enough. Naked except for one platform hanging off the toes on her left foot. Golden ankle charm on her right foot. Her hands were tied behind her back with what looked like plastic cable. A black plastic bag had been stuffed inside her mouth.
    I’d seen this kind of murder before, exactly this kind. So had Sampson.
    “Prostitute.” Sampson sighed. “Patrolmen seen her around on South Capitol. Eighteen, nineteen years old, maybe even younger. So who is
he?
”
    It looked to me as if the girl’s breasts had been sliced right off her chest. Her face had been attacked, too. A checklist of deviant behavior ran through my head, the kind of things I hadn’t thought about for a while: expressive aggression (
check
), sadism (
check
), sexualization (
check
), offense planning (
check
).
Check, check, check.
    “It’s Shafer, John. It’s the Weasel. He’s back in Washington. But that’s not the worst of it. I wish to hell it were.”

Chapter 40
    WE KNEW A BAR that was open, so Sampson and I went for a beer after we left the slaughter scene on New Jersey Avenue. We were officially off duty, but I had my beeper clipped on. So did John. There were only two other guys drinking in the gin mill, so we pretty much had the place to