Pop Goes the Weasel

everything they needed to know about the neighborhood. It read Y OU A RE N OW L EAVING THE W AR Z ONE, AND Y OU L IVED TO T ELL ABOUT I T .
    We were taking the boys out to Lorton Prison in Virginia. They would be visiting their fathers for the afternoon. They were all young, between eight and thirteen. The Alliance transports forty to fifty kids each week to see their fathers and mothers in different prisons. The goal is a lofty one: to bring the crime rate in Washington down by a third.
    I’d been out to the prison more times than I cared to remember. I knew the warden at Lorton pretty well. A few years back I’d spent a lifetime there, interviewing Gary Soneji.
    Warden Marion Campbell had set up a large room on Level One where the boys met with their fathers. It was a powerful scene, even more emotional than I’d expected. The Alliance spends time training the fathers who want to participate in the program. There are four steps: how to show love; accept fault and responsibility; attain parent-and-child harmony; discover new beginnings.
    Ironically, the boys were all trying to look and act tougher than they actually were. I heard one boy say, “You weren’t in my life before, why should I listen to you now?” But the fathers were trying to show a softer side.
    Sampson and I hadn’t made the run to Lorton before. It was our first time, but I was already sure I’d do it again. There was so much raw emotion and hope in the room, so much potential for something good and decent. Even if some of it would never be realized, it showed that an effort was being made, and something positive could come from it.
    What struck me most was the bond that still existed between some of the fathers and their young sons. I thought about my own boy, Damon, and how lucky we were. The thing about most of the prisoners in Lorton was that they knew what they had done was wrong; they just didn’t know how to stop doing it.
    For most of the hour and a half, I just walked around and listened. I was occasionally needed as a psychologist, and I did the best I could on short notice. At one little group, I heard a father say, “Please tell your mother I love her and I miss her like crazy.” Then both the prisoner and his son broke into tears and hugged each other fiercely.
    Sampson came up to me after we’d been in the prison for an hour or so. He was grinning broadly. His smile, when it comes, is a killer. “Man, I love this. Do-gooder shit is the best.”
    “Yeah, I’m hooked myself. I’ll drive the big orange bus again.”
    “Think it’ll help? Fathers and sons meeting like this?” he asked me.
    I looked around the room. “I think today, right now, this is a success for these men and their sons. That’s good enough.”
    Sampson nodded. “The old one-day-at-a-time approach. Works for me, too. I am flying , Alex.”
    So was I, so was I. I’m a sucker for this kind of stuff.
    As I drove the young boys home that afternoon, I could see by their faces that they’d had positive experiences with their fathers. The boys weren’t nearly as noisy and rambunctious on the way back to D.C. They weren’t trying to be so tough. They were just acting like kids.
    Almost every one of the boys thanked Sampson and me as he got off the big orange bus. It wasn’t necessary. It sure was a lot better than chasing after homicidal maniacs.
    The last boy we dropped off was the eight-year-old from Benning Terrace. He hugged both John and me, and then he started to cry. “I miss my dad,” he said before running home.

Chapter 2
    THAT NIGHT, Sampson and I were on duty in Southeast. We’re senior homicide detectives, and I’m also liaison between the FBI and the D.C. police. We got a call at about half past midnight telling us to go to the area of Washington called Shaw. There’d been a bad homicide.
    A lone Metro squad car was at the murder scene, and the neighborhood psychos had turned out in pretty fair numbers.
    It looked like a bizarre block party in the middle of hell. Fires were blazing nearby, throwing off sparks in two trash barrels, which made no sense, given the sweltering heat of the night.
    The victim was a young woman, probably between fourteen and her late teens, according to the radio report.
    She wasn’t hard to find. Her nude, mutilated body had been discarded in a clump of briar bushes in a small park less than ten yards off a paved pathway.
    As Sampson and I approached the body, a boy shouted at us from the other side of the