spelled out her name at the top, above the picture. Below, it read, “Last seen—April 24, 1998.” There was a phone number underneath.
“Mind if I hang on to this?” Sully asked. “I’m sorry, I didn’t ask your name.” He leaned forward to shake his hand. White guys in this town, you didn’t really do this with, lean forward, shake, make the eye contact. Black men, you damn well better.
“Rodney,” the man said, taking his hand in a solid grip. “Rodney Wilson. Grew up over on Warder. Keep the poster, put her name out there, hunh?” The man looked at him, taunting: “Do a little something for the block, other than just feed off it?”
Sully nodded, letting it slide. A couple of television crews were doing stand-ups in front of Doyle’s Market. The rain had started misting again. He pulled out his cell and called the number at the bottom of the Pittman flyer. A recorded woman’s voice said to leave a message if the caller had information about Noel, no questions asked. There was a beep and Sully explained himself and asked for a call back.
The watch on his wrist read 4:17.
• • •
The sixth floor of the newsroom was vast and unpopulated, nobody around on a Saturday afternoon except the sports staff, televisions hanging from the ceiling, ablaze with college games.
He walked through the low cubicles spread across the expanse of the room, checking to see if the top staff were in their glass offices on the south wall. Edward Winters was in his executive editor’s office—always always—but Sully didn’t see anyone else. In the main newsroom, a handful of weekend editors were seeing the Sunday edition into print. Over on National, there were a hardful of reporters. It was quiet and most of the overhead fluorescents were dark.
His desk was tucked into the far left corner, around a small nook, in the no-man’s-land between Investigative and Metro. Chris had draped his jacket over the chair and set his helmet on the desk. There was a spent brass mortar shell, carved in intricate patterns, that he had bought from refugees in Bosnia. There were a dozen or so prayer beads he’d collected, more as tourist keepsakes than religious talismans, draped over it, along with purple and yellow and green Mardi Gras beads.
But the main feature of his space was the hand-sketched homicide map of the city, his pride and possibly his joy. It was a poster-sized grid, thirty-six inches wide and fifty inches tall, marked off by the seven police districts with a few major roads indicated, and it was his oracle of Washington. It was his manner of understanding the living, by studying the ways of the dead, a habit so natural to him after years of covering war and conflict that it was no longer a conscious thought. If you wanted to understand any animal, he would tell college classes when they asked him to give talks, then you have to understand the behavior that made them unique, and what made human beings unique among animals were the prefrontal cortex, the opposing thumb, the well-developed voice box, and the propensity to torture and kill other members of their species. When students sometimes objected to this as morbid, or sought to invoke deities and religious perspectives, he would say that he had yet to see evidence of deity, but any textbook offered three thousand years or so of recorded history to back up his thoughts on humanity.
“Even if you believe the Bible is literally true,” he would say, “when the population of the planet was four, Cain killed Abel, reducing it to three. Homicide is not an aberration. It is the norm. It is part of who we are.”
On his map, each killing of the current year was marked with a pushpin, a tiny cross, and a number. The pins were color coded to the race of the victim. The crosses denoted case status: black for closed, red for open. The tiny numbers taped to the pins denoted the chronological order of the killings in each year. These numbers correlated to a
“Mind if I hang on to this?” Sully asked. “I’m sorry, I didn’t ask your name.” He leaned forward to shake his hand. White guys in this town, you didn’t really do this with, lean forward, shake, make the eye contact. Black men, you damn well better.
“Rodney,” the man said, taking his hand in a solid grip. “Rodney Wilson. Grew up over on Warder. Keep the poster, put her name out there, hunh?” The man looked at him, taunting: “Do a little something for the block, other than just feed off it?”
Sully nodded, letting it slide. A couple of television crews were doing stand-ups in front of Doyle’s Market. The rain had started misting again. He pulled out his cell and called the number at the bottom of the Pittman flyer. A recorded woman’s voice said to leave a message if the caller had information about Noel, no questions asked. There was a beep and Sully explained himself and asked for a call back.
The watch on his wrist read 4:17.
• • •
The sixth floor of the newsroom was vast and unpopulated, nobody around on a Saturday afternoon except the sports staff, televisions hanging from the ceiling, ablaze with college games.
He walked through the low cubicles spread across the expanse of the room, checking to see if the top staff were in their glass offices on the south wall. Edward Winters was in his executive editor’s office—always always—but Sully didn’t see anyone else. In the main newsroom, a handful of weekend editors were seeing the Sunday edition into print. Over on National, there were a hardful of reporters. It was quiet and most of the overhead fluorescents were dark.
His desk was tucked into the far left corner, around a small nook, in the no-man’s-land between Investigative and Metro. Chris had draped his jacket over the chair and set his helmet on the desk. There was a spent brass mortar shell, carved in intricate patterns, that he had bought from refugees in Bosnia. There were a dozen or so prayer beads he’d collected, more as tourist keepsakes than religious talismans, draped over it, along with purple and yellow and green Mardi Gras beads.
But the main feature of his space was the hand-sketched homicide map of the city, his pride and possibly his joy. It was a poster-sized grid, thirty-six inches wide and fifty inches tall, marked off by the seven police districts with a few major roads indicated, and it was his oracle of Washington. It was his manner of understanding the living, by studying the ways of the dead, a habit so natural to him after years of covering war and conflict that it was no longer a conscious thought. If you wanted to understand any animal, he would tell college classes when they asked him to give talks, then you have to understand the behavior that made them unique, and what made human beings unique among animals were the prefrontal cortex, the opposing thumb, the well-developed voice box, and the propensity to torture and kill other members of their species. When students sometimes objected to this as morbid, or sought to invoke deities and religious perspectives, he would say that he had yet to see evidence of deity, but any textbook offered three thousand years or so of recorded history to back up his thoughts on humanity.
“Even if you believe the Bible is literally true,” he would say, “when the population of the planet was four, Cain killed Abel, reducing it to three. Homicide is not an aberration. It is the norm. It is part of who we are.”
On his map, each killing of the current year was marked with a pushpin, a tiny cross, and a number. The pins were color coded to the race of the victim. The crosses denoted case status: black for closed, red for open. The tiny numbers taped to the pins denoted the chronological order of the killings in each year. These numbers correlated to a
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