The Case: The body of a newborn is found by a jogger in a DC park. A strange tattoo and a small piece of cloth inscribed with arcane symbols are the only clues.
The Investigators: Kay Rollins and Jason Saunders, DCPD detectives. Both are good cops, but Saunders is still trying to shake the suicide of his last partner.
THE KEY
Ilsa J. Bick
Kay said he was probably a week old. Two weeks, tops: the stub of the umbilical cord was still there. Found in a shallow grave, on the far side of a hill in Rock Creek Park, off Klingle Valley Parkway, not far from the National Zoo. The jogger was hunched in the back seat of a black-and-white, the golden retriever that went nuts over something that wasn’t a chipmunk looking embarrassed, nose on its front paws, wondering what the hell it did wrong. There was a uniform with the jogger. We—my partner, Rollins, and I—passed them on our way down the hill that was high with grass and damp from last night’s rain. The retriever looked up, hopeful, its tail thumping. The jogger’s eyes slid past to stare at nothing.
The baby was a little white boy. Hair short and fuzzy, like a wool cap. Thick, sludgy purge fluid flowed from his nose and mouth. If you didn’t know better, you’d think the stuff was blood. I know better. The purge meant the boy had been dead about three, four days. Luckily, it’d been a cold October so far; Halloween coming up that week, and Kay figured this slowed the rot. Still, there was that sick-sweet smell of death, and the baby’s abdomen was huge with gangrene and greenish yellow, like a bruise changing color. Thick green-blue vessels showed beneath the skin of his chest, and his eyelids were bloated and black. Made me want to rip someone’s head off.
“Anything?” I asked Kay.
“We won’t know until we do the cut, Jason. Kid might have been delivered at home, though.”
“Why?”
She pointed. “Not circumcised. These days, all hospitals circumcise unless parents specifically ask that they not.”
“Anything else?”
“Nothing obvious. My guess is exposure and dehydration. Of course, there’s the tattoo.” Her gloved finger hovered over a blue smudge above the baby’s left nipple. “I’d say gang-related, Jason.”
I didn’t buy it. “I don’t buy it. I’ve lived in DC all my life. I’ve seen little babies in dumpsters, washed up along the Potomac. I’ve seen kids splattered in drive-bys while they’re doing their homework. But a gang revenge killing? Of a baby? That’d be a first.”
“But the tattoo . . . what else could it be?”
She had me there. I flipped to the page in my notebook where I’d written the symbols down. We used a magnifying glass: L-M-Z-2-9, as best we could make out. The M was done in cursive. The entire tattoo was smudged, like a rush job.
“Maybe they’re Roman numerals,” said Kay. “You know, L for fifty and M for a thousand.”
“That makes sense,” Rollins said. “New Black Gangster Disciples Use a Roman Numeral Three.”
“You see a Roman three?” I asked. “I don’t see a three. And what’s Z?”
Kay said, “Maybe it stands for twenty-six, the last letter of the alphabet.”
“A code?” It wasn’t a bad idea. I scribbled down the numbers. “Adds up to one thousand eighty-nine. No combination I know of.”
We left Kay bagging the baby’s hands and the crime scene techs crawling around for evidence. I picked my way up the slope. Burrs stuck to my black pea coat. “Listen,” I said to Rollins. “I’ll talk to the jogger, see what she says.”
“Okay. What do you want me to do?”
“Run that tattoo. I’ll sign off on the scene.”
The jogger’s name was Rachel Gold. She was twenty-seven and lived on the third floor of a townhouse off 26th, near George Washington University. “Across from the Watergate,” she said. She was still sitting in the black-and-white, and she had to crane her neck. (Some people think I look like Patrick Ewing, except I only have the mustache and I’m about eighty gazillion bucks poorer.) Gold was wearing a black sweatshirt and black jogging sweats. The sweatshirt was speckled with vomit. She’d pulled her brown hair, which was very long and thick, into a ponytail that was taut against her scalp. A loop of gold chain spilled over the neck of her sweatshirt. Attached to the chain was a tiny gold key, maybe as big as my thumbnail. “Twenty-sixth and H.”
“You’re a student?”
“No.” Gold’s eyes were very dark and so large she looked like one of those porcelain figurines: all eyes. “I’m assistant curator of special collections at the Holocaust Museum.”
“Special collections?”
“Yes. I just did an exhibition on Holocaust musicians, and I’m working on Eastern European folk art.”
“Okay. Let’s go through it again. What happened?”
She did. She’d left her apartment at eight to jog and, since her neighbor was away, to exercise her neighbor’s golden retriever. Gold had planned to run to the turn-off for the National Zoo at Porter, and back. “Only I never made it,” she said, her left hand slowly pulling the dog’s ears. She flicked a couple of burrs from her fingers. “I let Rugby . . . the dog run free. All of a sudden, I’m running and she’s not with me anymore. I call and then I hear her barking like, you know, she’d treed a squirrel. When she wouldn’t come, I backtracked and then I saw her down there and . . . ” She looked away, swallowed hard. “Rugby was standing over this mound. First, I think it’s a groundhog. Then I get closer, and there’s this . . . this little . . . f-foot.” Tears tracked her cheeks. Her right hand snuck up to her neck and her slim fingers stroked the pendant. “I go a little closer to make sure, and then I see the leg and part of the fa-face . . . ”
“You didn’t touch anything?”
Shuddering, she gave her head a quick jerk from side to side. “After I saw, I couldn’t . . . ”
“And then you called nine-one-one? You got a cell?”
“No. There’s an Exxon not far back,” she gestured east, toward the Potomac and the Kennedy Center, “at Virginia, next to the Watergate. And then . . . ” She trailed off. Toyed with her necklace.
A uniform huffed up. “Okay if they move the body?”
“Yeah.” I tucked my notebook into an inside breast pocket. I was starting to feel the cold. My toes were icy. I craned my neck to see if Kay was starting up, but the angle of the hill was too steep.
Rachel Gold stood. “Is it okay if I go now? I’m cold and . . . ” She glanced down at her stained sweatshirt. “I’m kind of a mess.”
I made sure I had her home and office numbers and reminded her she’d get a call to come make a formal statement. As she turned to go, her pendant flickered in the sun.
“Pretty,” I said.
“Oh,” she said, glancing down. “It’s old.”
The key was modeled after those antique keys you see in old movies. At the top, I saw a single letter engraved in black. It looked like a W, but the ends were fashioned like the flames of tiny candles. “What is that?”
“Hebrew. A shin.”