“Watch our manners. Always pay attention in class, even if the teacher’s boring. Lead with our left if it ever comes to a fight in the schoolyard,” Jannie offered with a wink.

I rolled my eyes. “What I was going to say,” I said, “is that you should be especially nice to Mrs. Johnson today. You see, last night Christine said that she’d marry me. I guess that means she’s marrying all of us.”

At that point, everything became hugging and loud celebrating in the kitchen. The kids got chocolate milk and bacon grease all over me. I’d never seen Nana happier. And I felt exactly the same. Probably even better than they did.

I eventually made it to work that morning. I had made some progress on the John Doe homicide, and early on Tuesday morning, I learned that the man whose body had been dumped on Alabama Avenue was a thirty-four-year-old research analyst named Franklin Odenkirk. He worked at the Library of Congress for the Congressional Research Service.

We didn’t release the news to the press, but I did inform Chief Pittman’s office as soon as I knew. Pittman would find out anyway.

Once I had a name for the victim, information came quickly, and as it usually is, it was sad. Odenkirk was married and had three small children. He had taken a late flight back from New York, where he’d given a talk at the Rockefeller Institute. The plane landed on time, and he deboarded at National around ten. What happened to him after that was a mystery.

For the remainder of the week, I was busy with the murder case. I visited the Library of Congress and went to the newest structure, the James Madison Building, on Independence Avenue. I talked to nearly a dozen of Frank Odenkirk’s coworkers.

They were courteous and cooperative, and I was told repeatedly that Odenkirk, while haughty at times, was generally well liked. He wasn’t known to use drugs or drink to excess; wasn’t known to gamble, either. He was faithful to his wife. He hadn’t been involved in a serious argument at the office for as long as he’d been there.

He was with the Education and Public Welfare Division and spent long days in the spectacular Main Reading Room. There was no apparent motive for his murder, which was what I had feared. The killing roughly paralleled the Jane Does so far, but of course the chief of detectives didn’t want to hear that. There was no Jane Doe killer, according to him. Why? Because he didn’t want to shift dozens of detectives to Southeast and begin an extensive investigation on the basis of my instincts and gut feelings. I had heard Pittman joke that Southeast wasn’t part of his city.