Criss Cross

Chapter 64

Twenty minutes later, Bree and I left her car and walked toward two patrol cars and barriers set up at Seventeenth and R in Southeast DC.

Sampson hurried over to us.

“How many victims?” Bree asked. The sidewalks were empty, but people, many still in their pajamas and robes, were looking out their windows at us.

“Six,” Sampson said. “And we haven’t brought in the dogs yet to look for more.”

I saw Bree’s shoulders adjust to the weight of that. Six victims. Sampson led us to a brick building midway down the block, once a small job-printing facility but now abandoned and condemned, with a chain-link fence around it. The windows were all gone, replaced by plywood that had been spray-painted with graffiti.

Two-by-fours had been pried off the double front doors, which sagged open. We went inside and were hit by the smell of stale urine, feces, and body odor.

The place was trashed. John seemed uninterested in anything inside. He went straight through the building and out the back onto a parking lot of cracked pavement.

On the far side of the lot, three-foot concrete posts were anchored in the ground every fifteen feet or so; lengths of heavy chain were slung between them.

A decapitated head sat atop each of the six nearest posts, eyes open, blankly gaping at us. Blood seeped from the necks and dribbled down the posts, looking like the tentacles of red jellyfish.

Bree said, “We’re going to need an army in here.”

She tugged her radio from its holster and went back into the abandoned building. I could hear her barking orders, summoning crime scene personnel, as Sampson and I crossed the lot toward the severed heads.

“Equal-opportunity killer,” Sampson said, and I understood.

The six victims were an African-American male, an Asian male, a Hispanic male, a Hispanic female, a Caucasian female, and a Caucasian male.

The Hispanic male and the Caucasian female appeared to be in their late thirties, early forties, and the rest looked to be in their twenties.

Noting the deep gray pallor of the Caucasian male, I put a gloved hand on his cheek and found the skin near ice-cold to the touch.

“The heads were frozen,” I said. “That’s why we’re seeing the blood leaking.”

“Pretty bold to move six frozen heads in the middle of the night. What kind of person does that?”

“The Meat Man would have,” I said, feeling toyed with again. “Freezing heads was Tanner Oates’s post-homicide fetish.”

“Oates is dead. You saw him die.”

“I saw Mikey Edgerton die too,” I said. “And Kyle Craig.”

Before Sampson could reply, I heard a dull thudding sound somewhere behind me, and then a huge explosion ripped through the abandoned print shop and blew out the plywood over the windows. The blast knocked me off balance and had my ears ringing, so it took me a moment to remember who had just gone into the building.

“Bree!” I roared and ran straight at the back door.