“What do you know so far?” I asked as we rushed along the intensely bleak streets of Southeast, then crossed the slate-gray Anacostia River.

“She was dumped in a row house, Eighteenth and Garnesville. Jerome Thurman is out there with her. Says she’s probably been there since the weekend. Some needle pusher found the body. No clothes or I.D., Alex,” Sampson said.

I looked over at him. “So how did they know it was Nina?”

“Uniform guy on the scene recognized her. Knew her from the hospital. Everybody knew Nina.”

I shut my eyes, but I saw Nina Childs’s face and I opened them again. She had been the eleven-to-seven charge nurse in the E.R. unit at St. Anthony’s Hospital, where once I’d run like a tornado, with a dying little boy in my arms. Sampson and I had worked with Nina more times than I could remember. Sampson had also dated Nina for over a year, but then they’d broken it off. She’d married a neighborhood man who worked for the city. They had two kids, two little babies, and Nina had seemed so happy the last time I saw her.

I couldn’t believe she was lying dead in a tenement cellar on the wrong side of the Anacostia. She had been abandoned, like one of the Jane Does.

Chapter 9

NINA CHILDS’S BODY had been found in a battered row house in one of the city’s most impoverished, destroyed, and dismaying neighborhoods. There was only one patrol car on the scene, and a single rusted and dented EMS van; homicides in Southeast don’t attract much attention. A dog was barking somewhere, and it was the only sound on the desolate street.

Sampson and I had to walk past an open-air drug mart on the corner of Eighteenth Street. Mostly young males, but a few children and two women were also gathered there defiantly. The drug marts are everywhere in this part of Southeast. The neighborhood youth activity is the crack trade.

“Daily body pickup, Officers?” said one of the young men. He was wearing black trousers with black suspenders, no shirt, socks, or shoes. He had a prison-yard physique and tattoos everywhere.

“Come to take out the trash?” an older man cackled from behind an unruly patch of salt-and-pepper beard. “Take that muhfuckin’ barkin’-all-night dog while you here. Make yourselves useful,” he added.

Sampson and I ignored them and continued walking across Eighteenth, then into the boarded-up, three-storied row house straight ahead. A black and white boxer leaned out of a third-floor window, like a lifetime resident, and wouldn’t stop barking. Otherwise the building appeared deserted.