Murder Inside the Beltway Read Free

Hatcher’s tendency to berate him for every mistake. Jackson wasn’t thin-skinned and didn’t take Hatcher’s sarcastic comments and bombastic eruptions personally. What
did
bother him also had to do with his skin—its color.
    He was the product of a mixed marriage, his father a black man, his mother white. Fair-skinned, he sometimes passed for white, although he never tried to conceal his African-American roots. Hatcher used slang for every minority—blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, Jews, and women, an equal-opportunity bigot. That provided some solace for Jackson. At the same time, he sensed a deeper, darker disdain that Hatcher had for him because of his mixed parentage, and because he was a college graduate, his major sociology. As far as Hatcher was concerned, college was a waste of time and money for anyone seeking a career in law enforcement, and he never hesitated to say so. Too, Hatcher often said that Jackson didn’t
look
like a cop, whatever that meant. True, Jackson was reed thin and not tall, and leaned toward tweed jackets with leather elbow patches, button-down shirts, knit ties and desert boots, not a cop out of central casting. But this wasn’t Hollywood. This was Washington, D.C., with a police force of almost four thousand, two-thirds of them African American, twenty-five percent female. What did a typical cop look like? Like Walter Hatcher, big and rawboned, thick-necked, red-faced, and with a perpetual nasty scowl?
    Jackson often considered confronting his boss about his feelings, but hadn’t, deciding instead to ride out his apprenticeship and hope for a transfer when it was over. He wasn’t especially proud of his willingness to allow Hatcher to verbally abuse him, but rationalized that discretion was the better part of valor, at least in the short term. He was determined to get through this initial phase of his training without incident. He wanted to be a cop, the best cop he could be, and allowing Hatcher to derail that dream was anathema to him.
    He was deep into these thoughts when Hatcher and Mary Hall arrived. Mary carried a large take-out bag from a nearby Chinese restaurant that stayed open late. “I got you General Tso’s chicken, and brown rice,” she told Matt.
    “Great.” He wasn’t hungry, but it was nice of her to think of him.
    “Where’re the tapes?” Hatcher asked.
    “Right here,” Jackson said, pulling the bag from beneath the table.
    “Let’s get started,” Hatcher said. “Gimme the one that was in the camera.”
    Hatcher turned on the TV monitor, slid the tape into the video recorder, and pushed REWIND . Mary opened food containers and distributed them.
    Once the tape had rewound, Hatcher pushed PLAY .
    “What are these?” Mary asked. She’d posed that same question to Hatcher during the drive to the Met, as headquarters was called, but never received an answer.
    “We found them in the apartment,” Jackson said. “The victim had a video camera up on one of the bookshelves. Hatch figures that—”
    “Shut up,” Hatcher said as the screen came alive, and sound hissed through the speaker.
    They watched in silence as a very much alive Rosalie Curzon was seen walking into the frame, followed by a man. She wore the red kimono she’d worn in her still photo. The man was dressed in a suit.
    “Long time, no see,” Curzon said.
    “I haven’t been back to D.C. in a while,” he said.
    Jackson was surprised at how good the picture and sound were.
    “Got something for Rosie?” she asked.
    “Sure.” He reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out an undetermined number of bills that he’d obviously counted out beforehand. He handed them to her, and she disappeared.
    “Let’s get rid of these clothes,” she said when she came back, reaching for his tie.
    They moved out of camera range. When they reappeared, both were naked.
    “Look at that,” Hatcher said. “She’s turning the john so that he’s facing the camera. The bitch knows what she’s