Pop Goes the Weasel

country and that most of the boys were said to profit immensely from the dedicated training and discipline. He was already organizing the boys up on the stage. He was a very broad man of below-average height. I guessed he carried about two hundred fifty pounds on his five-seven frame. He wore a black suit with a black shirt buttoned at the collar, no tie. He started the boys off with a few playful verses of “Three Blind Mice” that didn’t sound half bad.
    “I’m really happy for Damon. He looks so proud up there,” I whispered to Nana and Jannie. “He is a handsome devil, too.”
    “Mr. Dayne is starting a girls choir in the fall,” Jannie loudwhispered in my ear. “You watch. I mean, you listen . I’ll make it.”
    “Go for it, girl,” Nana said, and gave Jannie a hug. She is very good at encouraging others.
    Dayne suddenly called out loudly, “Ugh. I hear a swoop . I don’t want any swoops here, gentlemen. I want clean diction and pure pitch. I want silver and silk. I do not want swoops .”
    Out of the corner of my eye, I suddenly saw Christine in the hallway. She was watching Dayne and the boys, but then she looked my way. Her face was principal-serious for just a moment. Then she smiled and winked.
    I walked over to see her. Be still my heart.
    “That’s my boy,” I said with mock pride as I came up to her. She was dressed in a soft gray pantsuit with a coral-pink blouse. God, I loved seeing her now, being with her, hanging out, doing nothing — the works.
    Christine smiled. Actually, she laughed a little at me. “He does everything so damn well.” She didn’t hold back, no matter what. “I was hoping you might be here, Alex,” she whispered. “I was just this very minute missing you like crazy. You know that feeling?”
    “Yes, that feeling and I are well acquainted.”
    We held hands as the choir practiced Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” Everything felt so right, and it was hard to get used to.
    “Sometimes … I still have this dream about George being shot and dying,” she said as we were standing there. Christine’s husband had been murdered in her home, and she had seen him die. It was one of the big reasons she was hesitant about being with me: the fear that I might die in the line of duty, and also the fear that I could bring terror and violence into the house.
    “I remember everything about the afternoon I heard Maria was shot. It eases with time, but it never goes away.”
    Christine knew that. She had figured out the answers to most of her questions, but she liked to talk things through. We were both that way.
    “And yet I continue to work here in Southeast. I come to the inner city every day. I could choose a nice school in Maryland or Virginia,” she said.
    I nodded. “Yes, Christine, you do choose to work here.”
    “And so do you.”
    “And so do I.”
    She held my hand a little tighter. “I guess we were made for each other,” she said. “Why fight it.”

Chapter 33
    EARLY THE NEXT MORNING I was back in the write-up room at the Seventh District Station, working the John Doe homicide. I was the first one in there.
    Apparently no one had noticed Frank Odenkirk as he was leaving the airport. His clothing still hadn’t been recovered. The M.E. reported that he had definitely been sodomized after he was killed. As I had suspected, there was no semen. The killer had used a condom. Just as with the Jane Does.
    The police commissioner was involved in the Odenkirk case and was putting added pressure on the department. It was making everyone angry and a little crazy. Chief Pittman was riding his detectives hard, but the only case he seemed interested in was the Odenkirk killing, especially since a suspect had been arrested in the German tourist murder.
    At around eleven that morning, Rakeem Powell stopped by my desk. He bent low and whispered, “Might have something interesting, Alex. Downstairs in the jail, if you’ve got a minute. Could be a first break on those two murdered girls in Shaw.”
    The jail was down a set of steep concrete stairs, just past a tight warren of small interrogation rooms, a holding room, and a booking room. All over the ceiling and walls, prisoners had scratched their street names or used black ink from fingerprinting to write the names. This was incredibly dumb of them, since it gave us information for our files.
    It’s purposely kept dark down in the jail. Each cell is six by five feet, with a metal bed and a