Pop Goes the Weasel

crime tape: “Yo, yo, she just some street whore!”
    I stopped and looked at him. He reminded me of the boys we’d just transported to Lorton Prison. “Dime-a-dozen bitch. Ain’t worth your time, or mine, Dee-fectives ,” he went on with his disturbing rap.
    I walked up to the young wisecracker. “How do you know that? You seen her around?”
    The boy backed off. But then he grinned, showing off a gold star on one of his front teeth. “She ain’t got no clothes on, an’ she layin’ on her back. Somebody stick her good. Sure sound like a whore to me.”
    Sampson eyed the youth, who looked to be around fourteen but might have been even younger. “You know who she is?”
    “Hell no! ” The boy pretended to be insulted. “Don’t know no whores, man.”
    The boy finally swaggered off, looking back at us once or twice and shaking his head. Sampson and I walked on and joined two uniformed cops standing by the body. They were obviously waiting for reinforcements. Apparently, we were it.
    “You call Emergency Services?” I asked the uniforms.
    “Thirty-five minutes ago and counting,” said the older-looking of the two. He was probably in his late twenties, sporting an attempted mustache and trying to look as if he were experienced at scenes like this one.
    “That figures.” I shook my head. “You find any I.D. anywhere around here?”
    “No I.D. We looked around in the bushes. Nothing but the body,” said the younger one. “And the body’s seen better days.” He was perspiring badly and looked a little sick.
    I put on latex gloves and bent down over the corpse. She did appear to be in her mid- to late teens. The girl’s throat had been slit from ear to ear. Her face was badly slashed. So were the soles of her feet, which seemed odd. She’d been stabbed a dozen or more times in her chest and stomach. I pushed open her legs.
    I saw something that made me sick. A metal handle was barely visible between her legs. I was almost sure it was a knife and that it had been driven all the way into her vagina.
    Sampson crouched and looked at me. “What are you thinking, Alex? Another one?”
    I shook my head, shrugged my shoulders. “Maybe, but she’s an addict, John. Tracks on her arms and legs. Probably behind her knees, under her arms. Our boy doesn’t usually go after addicts. He practices safe sex. The murder’s brutal, though. That fits the style. You see the metal handle?”
    Sampson nodded. He didn’t miss much. “Clothes,” he said. “Where the hell did they go to? We need to find the clothes.”
    “Somebody in the neighborhood probably stripped them off her already,” said the young uniform. There was a lot of disturbance around the body. Several footprints in the dirt. “That’s how it goes around here. Nobody seems to care.”
    “We’re here,” I said to him. “ We care. We’re here for all the Jane Does.”

Chapter 3
    GEOFFREY SHAFER was so happy he almost couldn’t hide it from his family. He had to keep from laughing out loud as he kissed his wife, Lucy, on the cheek. He caught a whiff of her Chanel No. 5 perfume, then tasted the brittle dryness of her lips as he kissed her again.
    They were standing around like statues in the elegant galley hall of the large Georgian house in Kalorama. The children had been summoned to say good-bye to him.
    His wife, the former Lucy Rhys-Cousins, was ash-blond, her sparkling green eyes even brighter than the Bulgari and Spark jewelry that she always wore. Slender, still a beauty of sorts at thirty-seven, Lucy had attended Newnham College at Cambridge for two years before they were married. She read useless poetry and literary novels, and spent most of her free time at equally pointless lunches, shopping with her expatriate girlfriends, going to polo matches, or sailing. Occasionally, Shafer sailed with her. He’d been a very good sailor once upon a time.
    Lucy had been considered a prize catch, and he supposed that she still would be, for some men. Well, they could have her skinny, bony ass and all the passionless sex they could stomach.
    Shafer hoisted up four-year-old twins Tricia and Erica, one in each arm. Two mirror images of their mother. He’d have sold the twins for the price of a postage stamp. He hugged the girls and laughed like the good papa he always pretended to be.
    Then he formally shook twelve-year-old Robert’s hand. The debate being waged in the house was over whether Robert should be sent back to England for boarding