Weird Detectives Read Free Page A

bucks poorer.) Gold was wearing a black sweatshirt and black jogging sweats. The sweatshirt was speckled with vomit. She’d pulled her brown hair, which was very long and thick, into a ponytail that was taut against her scalp. A loop of gold chain spilled over the neck of her sweatshirt. Attached to the chain was a tiny gold key, maybe as big as my thumbnail. “Twenty-sixth and H.”
    “You’re a student?”
    “No.” Gold’s eyes were very dark and so large she looked like one of those porcelain figurines: all eyes. “I’m assistant curator of special collections at the Holocaust Museum.”
    “Special collections?”
    “Yes. I just did an exhibition on Holocaust musicians, and I’m working on Eastern European folk art.”
    “Okay. Let’s go through it again. What happened?”
    She did. She’d left her apartment at eight to jog and, since her neighbor was away, to exercise her neighbor’s golden retriever. Gold had planned to run to the turn-off for the National Zoo at Porter, and back. “Only I never made it,” she said, her left hand slowly pulling the dog’s ears. She flicked a couple of burrs from her fingers. “I let Rugby . . . the dog run free. All of a sudden, I’m running and she’s not with me anymore. I call and then I hear her barking like, you know, she’d treed a squirrel. When she wouldn’t come, I backtracked and then I saw her down there and . . . ” She looked away, swallowed hard. “Rugby was standing over this mound. First, I think it’s a groundhog. Then I get closer, and there’s this . . . this little . . . f-foot.” Tears tracked her cheeks. Her right hand snuck up to her neck and her slim fingers stroked the pendant. “I go a little closer to make sure, and then I see the leg and part of the fa-face . . . ”
    “You didn’t touch anything?”
    Shuddering, she gave her head a quick jerk from side to side. “After I saw, I couldn’t . . . ”
    “And then you called nine-one-one? You got a cell?”
    “No. There’s an Exxon not far back,” she gestured east, toward the Potomac and the Kennedy Center, “at Virginia, next to the Watergate. And then . . . ” She trailed off. Toyed with her necklace.
    A uniform huffed up. “Okay if they move the body?”
    “Yeah.” I tucked my notebook into an inside breast pocket. I was starting to feel the cold. My toes were icy. I craned my neck to see if Kay was starting up, but the angle of the hill was too steep.
    Rachel Gold stood. “Is it okay if I go now? I’m cold and . . . ” She glanced down at her stained sweatshirt. “I’m kind of a mess.”
    I made sure I had her home and office numbers and reminded her she’d get a call to come make a formal statement. As she turned to go, her pendant flickered in the sun.
    “Pretty,” I said.
    “Oh,” she said, glancing down. “It’s old.”
    The key was modeled after those antique keys you see in old movies. At the top, I saw a single letter engraved in black. It looked like a W, but the ends were fashioned like the flames of tiny candles. “What is that?”
    “Hebrew. A shin. ”
    All of a sudden, my chest got tight. “Unusual.”
    “Oh, it’s old-country stuff. The charm’s supposed to bring you luck.” Her tears started again. “I guess it didn’t work, did it?”
    DC traffic’s a bitch. The station’s on Indiana, about two miles away from Rock Creek. So, I knew I could count on forty-five minutes, easy. That was okay because I needed to figure out why thinking about Adam made this knot, hard as a tennis ball, jam the back of my throat.
    We did a case together last year, Adam Lennox—my first partner, my best friend—and me, right around this same time, Halloween. A bad case: nice girl murdered the day before her wedding, right behind her synagogue. Heart cut out. Swastika carved into the empty space. I thought it was the boyfriend because, as it happened, that nice Orthodox Jewish girl had a lover. A swastika’s a good way to