Roses Are Red

jumpy.”
    “Are you being helpful?”
I asked Snow.
    He whined pathetically. “I told you where Brianne Parker be seen, din’t I? Why don’ you just go over there? Check it out, man. Leave me the hell alone. You two like the
Blair Witch Project
or somethin’. Scary, man.”
    “Much scarier,” said Sampson, and he grinned. “
Blair Witch
is just a movie, Darryl. We’re for real.”

Chapter 13
    “I HATE THIS nasty, eerie, middle-of-the-night shit,” Sampson said as we approached the First Avenue project on foot. What we saw up ahead were abandoned tenement buildings where junkies and homeless people lived, if you could call it living, in America’s capital city.
    “
Night of the Living Dead
all over again,” Sampson muttered. He was right; the hangarounds outside the buildings did look like zombies.
    “Errol Parker? Brianne Parker?” I said in a low voice as I walked past badly strung-out men with hollow, unshaven faces. Nobody answered. Most of them wouldn’t even look at me or Sampson. They knew we were police.
    “Errol? Brianne Parker?” I continued, but still no one answered.
    “Thanks for the help. God loves you,” Sampson said. He was mimicking the rap of the more irritating panhandlers around town.
    We began to walk through each of the buildings, floor by floor, basement to the roof. The final building we came to looked deserted and for a good reason: It was the most squalid and broken down.
    “After you, Alphonse,” Sampson growled. It was late and he was getting grumpy.
    I had the flashlight, so I led the way. As we’d done in the other buildings, we started in the cellar. The floor was potholed, heavily stained cement. Dusty cobwebs wove from one end of the basement to the other.
    I came to a closed wooden door and pushed it open with my foot. I could hear rodents of various sizes scurrying around inside the walls, scratching furiously as if they were trapped. I waved my flashlight around. Nothing but a couple of glaring rats.
    “Errol? Brianne?” Sampson called to them. They chittered back at us.
    He and I continued the floor-to-floor search. The building was damp and smelled of urine, feces, mildew. The stench was unbearable.
    “I’ve seen better Holiday Inns,” I said, and Sampson finally laughed.
    I shoved open another door, and knew by the putrescent odor that we’d found dead bodies. I waved the flashlight and saw Brianne and Errol. They no longer looked human. The building was warm and decomposition began fast. I calculated they’d been dead for at least a day, probably more.
    I shone the Maglite flashlight at Errol first, then at his wife. I sighed and felt a little sick inside. I thought of Maria and how she had liked something about Errol. When he was little, my son Damon had called him Uncle Errol.
    The corneas of Brianne’s eyes were cloudy, as if she had cataracts. Her mouth was wide open, the jaw slack. Errol looked pretty much the same. I thought of the family that had been executed in Silver Spring. What kind of killers were we dealing with? Why had they killed the Parkers?
    Brianne’s top had been removed, and I didn’t see it anywhere in the room. Her jeans were pulled down, exposing red panties and her thighs.
    I wondered what it meant. Had the killer taken Brianne’s top? Had someone else been in here since the murders? Had they played around with Brianne after she was dead? Was it the killer?
    Sampson looked troubled and puzzled. “Doesn’t look like an overdose,” he said. “Too violent. These two suffered.”
    “John,” I finally spoke in a quiet voice, “I think they might have been poisoned. Maybe they were
supposed
to suffer.”
    I made a call to Kyle Craig and told him about the Parkers. Had we solved part of the Silver Spring robbery? Was at least one killer still out there?

Chapter 14
    A RUSH-RUSH AUTOPSY confirmed my suspicion that Errol and Brianne Parker had been poisoned. The ingestion of a massive dose of Anectine had caused rapid muscle contractions and led to cardiac arrest. The poison had been mixed into a bottle of Chianti. Brianne Parker had been sexually violated after she was dead. What a mess.
    Sampson and I spent another couple of hours talking to the hangarounds, the homeless, the junkies living in the abandoned project buildings on First Avenue. No one admitted knowing Errol or Brianne; no one had seen any unusual visitors at the building where the couple had been hiding.
    I finally drifted home for a few hours’ sleep,