Along Came a Spider Read Free

The mother and the daughter were bound to an imitation brass bedpost. Satin underwear, black and red mesh stockings, and flowery bed sheets had been used to tie them up.
    I took out the pocket recorder I carry and began to put down my first observations. “Homicide cases H234 914 through 916. A mother, teenage daughter, little boy. The women have been slashed with something extremely sharp. A straight razor, possibly.
    “Their breasts have been cut off. The breasts are nowhere to be found. The pubic hair of the women has been shaved. There are multiple stab wounds, what the pathologists call ’patterns of rage.’ There is a great deal of blood, fecal matter. I believe the two women, both the mother and daughter, were prostitutes. I’ve seen them around.”
    My voice was a low drone. I wondered if I’d be able to understand all the words later.
    “The little boy’s body seems to have been casually tossed aside. Mustaf Sanders has on hand-me-down pajamas that are covered with Care Bears. He is a tiny, incidental pile in the room.” I couldn’t help grieving as I looked down at the little boy, his sad, lifeless eyes staring up at me. Everything was very noisy inside my head. My heart ached. Poor little Mustaf, whoever you were.
    “I don’t believe he wanted to kill the boy,” I said to Sampson. “He or she.”
    “Or
it
.” Sampson shook his head. “I vote for
it
. It’s a
Thing
, Alex. The same
Thing
that did Condon Terrace earlier this week.”

CHAPTER 3

    SINCE SHE HAD BEEN THREE OR FOUR years old, Maggie Rose Dunne was always
watched
by people. At nine, she was used to special attention, to strangers gawking at her as if she was Maggie Scissorhands, or Girl Frankenstein.
    That morning she was being watched, but she didn’t know it. This one time, Maggie Rose would have cared. This one time, it mattered very much.
    Maggie Rose was at Washington Day School in Georgetown, where she was trying to blend in with the other hundred and thirty students. At that moment, they were all singing enthusiastically at assembly.
    Blending in wasn’t easy for Maggie Rose, even though she desperately wanted to. She was the nine-year-old daughter of Katherine Rose, after all. Maggie couldn’t walk past a mall video store without seeing a picture of her mother. Her mother’s movies seemed to be on the tube about every other night. Her mom got nominated for Oscars more often than most actresses got mentioned in
People
magazine.
    Because of all that stuff, Maggie Rose tried to disappear into the woodwork a lot. That morning she had on a beat-up Fido Dido sweatshirt with strategic holes front and rear. She’d picked out grungy, wrinkled Guess jeans. She wore old pink Reebok sneakers — her “trusty dusties” — and Fido socklets picked out from the bottom of her closet. She purposely hadn’t washed her long blond hair before school.
    Her mom’s eyes had bugged when she’d spotted the getup. She said, “Quadruple yuk,” but she let Maggie go to school that way anyway. Her mom was cool. She really understood the tough deal Maggie had to live with.
    The kids in the crowded assembly, first- through sixth-grade classes, were singing “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman. Before she played the folk/rock song on the auditorium’s gleaming black Steinway, Ms. Kaminsky had tried to explain the message of it for everybody.
    “This moving song, by a young black woman from Massachusetts, is about being dirt poor in the richest country in the world. It’s about being black in the nineteen nineties.”
    The petite, rail-thin music and visual arts teacher was always so intense. She felt it was a good teacher’s duty not only to inform, but to persuade, to mold the important young minds at the prestigious Day School.
    The kids liked Ms. Kaminsky, so they tried to imagine the plight of the poor and disadvantaged. Since the tuition at Washington Day was twelve thousand dollars, it took some imagination on their part.
    “
You got a fast