I hadn’t expected anything, but she had some news. “One surprise,” Angelina said. “He was sodomized after he died. Someone had sex with him, Alex. Our killer seems to swing both ways.”

Chapter 28

ON THE DRIVE HOME that evening, I needed a break from the murder case. I thought about Christine, and that was much better, easier on the frontal lobe. I even switched off my beeper. I didn’t want any distractions for ten or fifteen minutes.

Even though she hadn’t talked about it recently, she still felt my job was too dangerous. The trouble was, she was absolutely right. I sometimes worried about leaving Damon and Jannie alone in the world, and now Christine as well. As I drove along the familiar streets of Southeast near Fifth, I considered whether I could actually leave police work. I’d been thinking about going into private practice and working as a psychologist, but I hadn’t done anything to make it happen. It probably meant that I didn’t really want to do it.

Nana was sitting on the front porch when I arrived home at around seven-thirty. She looked peeved, an expression of hers that I know all too well. She can still make me feel like I’m nine or ten years old and she’s the one with all the answers.

“Where are the kids?” I called out as soon as I opened the car door and climbed out. A fractured Batman and Robin kite was still up in a tree in the yard, and I was annoyed at myself for not getting it down a couple of weeks ago.

“I shackled them to the sink, and they’re doing the dishes,” Nana said.

“Sorry about missing dinner,” I told her.

“Tell that to your children,” Nana said, frowning up a storm. She’s about as subtle as a hurricane. “You better tell them right now. Your friend Sampson called a little earlier. So did your compatriot Jerome Thurman. There’s been more murders, Alex. I used the plural noun, just in case you didn’t notice. Sampson is waiting for you at the so-called crime scene. Two bodies over in Shaw, near Howard University, of all places. Two more young black girls are dead. It won’t stop, will it? It never stops in Southeast.”

No, it never does.

Chapter 29

THE HOMICIDE SCENE was an old crumbling brownstone in a bad section of S Street in Shaw. A lot of college kids and also some young professionals live in the up-and-down, mostly middle-class neighborhood. Lately, prostitution has become a problem there. According to Sampson, the two dead girls were both prostitutes who occasionally worked in the neighborhood but mostly turned tricks over in Petworth.