“Really bizarre that he wound up here in Benning Heights. I don’t know if he’s connected to the Jane Does. But if he is, the killer wanted us to find this one in a hurry. Bodies around here usually get dumped in Fort Dupont Park. He’s getting stranger and stranger. And you’re right, he’s very angry with the world.”

My mind was rapidly filling with crime-scene notes, plus the usual stream of homicide-detective questions. Why leave the body in a street gutter? Why not in an abandoned building? Why in Benning Heights? Was the killer black? That still made the most sense to me, but a very low percentage of pattern killers are black.

The sergeant from the Crime Scene Unit came strolling up to Sampson and me. “What do you want from us, Detective?”

I looked back at the naked white body. “Videotape it, photograph it, sketch it,” I told him.

“And take some of the trash in the gutter and sidewalk?”

“Take everything. Even if it’s soaking wet.”

The sergeant frowned. “Everything? All this wet trash? Why?”

Alabama Avenue is hilly, and I could see the Capitol Building brightly illuminated in the distance. It looked like a faraway celestial body, maybe heaven. It got me thinking about the haves in Washington, and the have-nots.

“Just take everything. It’s how I work,” I said.

Chapter 23

DETECTIVE PATSY HAMPTON arrived at the chilling homicide scene around 2:15. The Jefe’s assistant had called her apartment about an unusual murder in Benning Heights that might relate to the Jane Does. This one was different in some ways, but there were too many similarities for her to ignore.

She watched Alex Cross work the crime scene. She was impressed that he’d come out at this early hour. She was curious about him, had been for a long time. Hampton knew Cross by reputation and had followed a couple of his cases. She had even worked a few weeks on the tragic kidnapping of Maggie Rose Dunne and Michael Goldberg.

So far, she had mixed feelings about Cross. He was personable enough, and more than good-looking. Cross was a tall, strongly put-together man. She felt that he received undeserved special treatment because he was a forensic psychologist. She’d done her homework on Cross.

Hampton understood that she had been assigned to show Cross up, to win, to knock him down a peg. She knew it would be a tough competition, but she also knew that she was the one to do it; she never failed at anything.

She’d already done her own examination of the crime scene. She had stayed on at the scene only because Cross and Sampson had unexpectedly shown up.