Pop! Goes the Weasel

CHAPTER Fifty

I returned to Washington during the first week of September and I had never felt stranger in my own skin. I'd gone to Bermuda with my family and Christine, and now I was coming home without her. Whoever had taken Christine had contacted me only once. I missed her nearly every moment of every day, and I felt so far away from where she might still be.

It was an unusually cool and windy day when I got back to the city. It almost seemed as if summer had suddenly changed to the middle of fall. I felt as if I had been away much longer than I had. I had been in a fog of unreality in Bermuda, and I felt nearly the same once I was back in DC again. I'd never felt this badly before, never so lost, so unhinged, battered.

I wondered if Christine and I were part of a madman's elaborate fantasy, what profilers call an escalating fantasy. If so, who was this madman and where was he now? Was it the Weasel? Did I know him from some time in my past? The heartless, spineless bastard had communicated we have her. And that was it. No further word. Now only silence, which was deafening.

I took a taxi from the airport and I thought of Frank Odenkirk, who had innocently taken a cab one night in August and wound up murdered on Alabama Avenue near Dupont Park. I hadn't thought about the Odenkirk case during the past weeks. I rarely had a thought about the Jane Doe murders while in Bermuda, but I was guiltily reminded of them now. Others had suffered painful losses because of the killer.

I wondered if any progress had been made, and who in the department was running the case, at least the Odenkirk part of it. On the other hand, I didn't feel that I could work on any of the other unsolved murders right now. I felt my place was still in Bermuda, and strange as it sounds, I nearly headed back as soon as I landed.

Then I could see our house up ahead on Fifth Street. Something strange was happening - there was a crowd.