Weird Detectives Read Free

by a jogger in a DC park. A strange tattoo and a small piece of cloth inscribed with arcane symbols are the only clues.
    The Investigators: Kay Rollins and Jason Saunders, DCPD detectives. Both are good cops, but Saunders is still trying to shake the suicide of his last partner.
    THE KEY
    Ilsa J. Bick
    Kay said he was probably a week old. Two weeks, tops: the stub of the umbilical cord was still there. Found in a shallow grave, on the far side of a hill in Rock Creek Park, off Klingle Valley Parkway, not far from the National Zoo. The jogger was hunched in the back seat of a black-and-white, the golden retriever that went nuts over something that wasn’t a chipmunk looking embarrassed, nose on its front paws, wondering what the hell it did wrong. There was a uniform with the jogger. We—my partner, Rollins, and I—passed them on our way down the hill that was high with grass and damp from last night’s rain. The retriever looked up, hopeful, its tail thumping. The jogger’s eyes slid past to stare at nothing.
    The baby was a little white boy. Hair short and fuzzy, like a wool cap. Thick, sludgy purge fluid flowed from his nose and mouth. If you didn’t know better, you’d think the stuff was blood. I know better. The purge meant the boy had been dead about three, four days. Luckily, it’d been a cold October so far; Halloween coming up that week, and Kay figured this slowed the rot. Still, there was that sick-sweet smell of death, and the baby’s abdomen was huge with gangrene and greenish yellow, like a bruise changing color. Thick green-blue vessels showed beneath the skin of his chest, and his eyelids were bloated and black. Made me want to rip someone’s head off.
    “Anything?” I asked Kay.
    “We won’t know until we do the cut, Jason. Kid might have been delivered at home, though.”
    “Why?”
    She pointed. “Not circumcised. These days, all hospitals circumcise unless parents specifically ask that they not.”
    “Anything else?”
    “Nothing obvious. My guess is exposure and dehydration. Of course, there’s the tattoo.” Her gloved finger hovered over a blue smudge above the baby’s left nipple. “I’d say gang-related, Jason.”
    I didn’t buy it. “I don’t buy it. I’ve lived in DC all my life. I’ve seen little babies in dumpsters, washed up along the Potomac. I’ve seen kids splattered in drive-bys while they’re doing their homework. But a gang revenge killing? Of a baby? That’d be a first.”
    “But the tattoo . . . what else could it be?”
    She had me there. I flipped to the page in my notebook where I’d written the symbols down. We used a magnifying glass: L-M-Z-2-9, as best we could make out. The M was done in cursive. The entire tattoo was smudged, like a rush job.
    “Maybe they’re Roman numerals,” said Kay. “You know, L for fifty and M for a thousand.”
    “That makes sense,” Rollins said. “ New Black Gangster Disciples Use a Roman Numeral Three .”
    “You see a Roman three?” I asked. “I don’t see a three. And what’s Z? ”
    Kay said, “Maybe it stands for twenty-six, the last letter of the alphabet.”
    “A code?” It wasn’t a bad idea. I scribbled down the numbers. “Adds up to one thousand eighty-nine. No combination I know of.”
    We left Kay bagging the baby’s hands and the crime scene techs crawling around for evidence. I picked my way up the slope. Burrs stuck to my black pea coat. “Listen,” I said to Rollins. “I’ll talk to the jogger, see what she says.”
    “Okay. What do you want me to do?”
    “Run that tattoo. I’ll sign off on the scene.”
    The jogger’s name was Rachel Gold. She was twenty-seven and lived on the third floor of a townhouse off 26th, near George Washington University. “Across from the Watergate,” she said. She was still sitting in the black-and-white, and she had to crane her neck. (Some people think I look like Patrick Ewing, except I only have the mustache and I’m about eighty gazillion