Pop Goes the Weasel

has to offer . He counted the numerals on the special dice. They appeared fuzzy in the dark.
    Shafer couldn’t believe what he saw. He wanted to howl like the crazed and bewildered neighborhood dogs.
    The dice count was five .
    Death had to leave! This instant! There could be no murders tonight!
    No! He wouldn’t do it! To hell with the dice. He wouldn’t leave. He couldn’t. He was losing all impulse control, wasn’t he? Well, so be it. Alea jacta est , he remembered from his schoolboy Latin classes—Julius Caesar before he crossed the Rubicon: “The die is cast.”
    This was a monumental night. For the first time, he was breaking the rules. He was changing the game forever.
    He needed to kill someone, and the urge was everything to him.
    He hurried to the house before he changed his mind. He was nervous. Adrenaline punched through his system. He used his glass cutter at first, but then just smashed in a small window with a gloved hand.
    Once inside, he moved quickly down the darkened hallway. He was sweating — so unlike him. He entered Deirdre’s bedroom. She was asleep, despite the breaking of the glass. Her bare arms were thrown up over her head, the surrender position.
    “Lovely,” he whispered.
    She was wearing white bikini panties and a matching bra. Her long legs were spread delicately, expectantly. In her dreams, she must have known he was coming. Shafer believed that dreams told you the truth, and you had better listen.
    He was still hard, and so glad he’d chosen to disobey the rules.
    “Who the hell are you?” he heard, suddenly. The voice came from behind.
    Shafer whirled around.
    It was Lindsay, the daughter. She wore nothing but coral-pink underwear, a brassiere and briefs. He calmly raised his gun until it pointed between her eyes.
    “Shhh. You don’t want to know, Lindsay,” he said in the calmest voice, not bothering to disguise his English accent. “But I’ll tell you anyway.”
    He fired the gun.

Chapter 54
    FOR THE SECOND TIME in my life I understood what it felt like to be a victim of a terrible crime rather than the detective investigating it. I was disconnected and out of it. I needed to be doing something positive on a case, or get back to volunteer work at St. Anthony’s — anything to take my mind off what had happened.
    I had to be busy, but I knew I’d lost my ability to concentrate, something that had always come so naturally to me. I came across a pair of shocking murders in Maryland that bothered me for some unspecified reason. I didn’t follow up on them. I should have.
    I wasn’t myself; I was lost. I still spent endless hours thinking about Christine, remembering everything about our time together, seeing her face wherever I went.
    Sampson tried to push me. He did push me. He and I made the rounds of the streets of Southeast. We put the word out that we were looking for a purple and blue cab, possibly a gypsy. We canvassed door to door in the Shaw neighborhood where Tori Glover and Marion Cardinal had been found. Often we were still going at ten or eleven at night.
    I didn’t care. I couldn’t sleep anyway.
    Sampson cared. He was my friend.
    “You’re supposed to be working the Odenkirk case, right? I’m not supposed to be working at all. The Jefe would be livid. I kind of like that,” Sampson said as we trudged along S Street late one evening. Sampson had lived in this neighborhood for years. He knew all the local hangarounds.
    “Jamal, you know anything I should know?” he called out to a goateed youth sitting in shadows on a graystone stoop.
    “Don’t know nothin’. Just relaxin’ my mind. Catchin’ a cool night breeze. How ’bout yourself?”
    Sampson turned back to me. “Damn crack runners working these streets everywhere you look nowadays. Real good place to commit a murder and never get caught. You talk to the police in Bermuda lately?”
    I nodded, and my eyes stared at a fixed point up ahead. “Patrick Busby said the story of Christine’s disappearance is off the front pages. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. It’s probably bad.”
    Sampson agreed. “Takes the pressure off them. You going back down there?”
    “Not right away. But yeah, I have to go back. I have to find out what happened.”
    He looked me in the eye. “Are you here with me right now? Are you here , sugar?”
    “Yeah, I’m here. Most of the time. I’m functioning okay.” I pointed up at a nearby redbrick building. “That place would have a view of the