The Ways of the Dead Read Free Page A

from a beat cop almost an hour earlier. He seemed impressed the officer had thought to call him, an honest-to-god tip on something big. He was talking rapidly and his eyes were darting back and forth. Sully kept his mouth zipped.
    A few minutes later, traffic stalled. Sully leaned out the window. Georgia was blocked off up ahead, the revolving lights of the police squad cars and fire trucks marking the edge of the crime scene barricade.
    Chris cut the wheel hard to the left to make the turn onto Park Road, three blocks short of their destination. He went up to an alley, turned right, and then pulled into the parking lot of a bank and Giant Liquors, the letters on the sign in banana-yellow neon. He was turning off the ignition when his cell rang.
    “Hey, man. I’m here, parking. Where are you? Yeah. The where? I can go with that?” He listened again. “Okay. Yeah, yeah, right. Just as a basis of knowledge. Not attributing to you.”
    He hung up after a moment.
    “Sorry. My buddy. Gives us official confirmation on one Sarah Emily Reese, DOB February 14, 1984. Parents notified and are here. In the chief’s car at the moment, inside the cordon. FBI is here, so are the U.S. Marshals. Secret Service. D.C. cops. The mayor. It’s a cluster-fuck. The kid was at a dance class or something. My guy says it’s on the west side of Georgia. Apparently Sarah went to get a soda at the store catty-corner across the street. Ran out the back. Found in the dumpster in an alley behind the store. Body’s already been removed.”
    Sully wrote it all down.
    “Why was she taking classes here and not in some tony studio out in Potomac?”
    “The owner, what, Regina something or other, used to be a dancer in Alvin Ailey in New York.”
    “Why’d she run out the back?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “That would seem to be the question we would want to know.”
    They got out of the car and walked down to the commercial strip of Georgia, then up the sidewalk, Sully twisting his shoulders to get through the mass of bodies, the crowd stalling and spreading out against the yellow tape.
    Three squad cars were blocking off Georgia northbound at the intersection of Otis Place. Sully could see a knot of uniformed officers outside a building on the west side of Georgia, which he presumed to be the dance studio. There was another knot on the far side of the street, in front of Doyle’s Market.
    They were on the south side of the scene and the police barricade was keeping the crowd a block away from the store where the girl had been killed. Sully guessed they would also be blocking the north approach from the same distance. If the east and west approaches were also blocked off like that, the perimeter would be four city blocks. He wrote that down in his notebook, too. The wide swath of roped-off real estate told him MPD was clueless and was casting a wide net.
    He inhaled deeply, trying to get a read on the scene, trying to figure if Dusty would be pissed about his unannounced departure, trying to shake the whiskey out of his head.
    He looked to his right, up the slight incline onto Otis, and could see the Park View Recreation Center at the end of the block. The name Lana Escobar floated into his mind. That was last summer, the last time he’d written about the neighborhood. She was a working girl whose body had been found on the outfield grass of the complex’s baseball field. The police had scarcely bothered to block off the outfield. There had been no gawking crowd. It had been raining and the police tape had sagged to the ground. The mud beneath his feet, the techs lifting her into the body bag, the sound of the rain spattering on the hard plastic, Jesus.
    “So how are we doing this?”
    It was Chris at his elbow, the kid looping a lanyard with his photo ID badge around his neck. He had his mini-recorder and a small notebook in one hand. He looked like a fat puppy, ready to chase a tennis ball. Chris was beginning to annoy the shit out of him, and