All of a sudden, my chest got tight. “Unusual.”
“Oh, it’s old-country stuff. The charm’s supposed to bring you luck.” Her tears started again. “I guess it didn’t work, did it?”
DC traffic’s a bitch. The station’s on Indiana, about two miles away from Rock Creek. So, I knew I could count on forty-five minutes, easy. That was okay because I needed to figure out why thinking about Adam made this knot, hard as a tennis ball, jam the back of my throat.
We did a case together last year, Adam Lennox—my first partner, my best friend—and me, right around this same time, Halloween. A bad case: nice girl murdered the day before her wedding, right behind her synagogue. Heart cut out. Swastika carved into the empty space. I thought it was the boyfriend because, as it happened, that nice Orthodox Jewish girl had a lover. A swastika’s a good way to say HATE to a Jew, and I figured Adam, who was Jewish, would see it my way. He didn’t. Instead, he dreamed up some theory about ritual Navajo shit, on account of the swastika being backward. Anyway, they buried that girl, and the case went cold.
Adam was never right afterward. Started talking to himself, and when I asked, he’d just say there was a ghost hitching a ride in his head and not to pay any attention. Then he decided, six months ago, that he liked the taste of gunmetal.
And, oh yeah—he blew his brains out in Rock Creek Park.
Coincidence? I’m superstitious. All cops are superstitious. Too much coincidence: Halloween, the Hebrew. Rock Creek. Bad karma, that’s what.
God, I missed Adam. Damn him.
My phone sputtered as I turned left on Indiana. I thumbed it on. “Saunders.”
“Jason.” It was Kay. “We’ve started the cut.”
“That was fast, Kay.”
“It’s a kid. Anyway, we found something.”
The autopsy suite was cold and smelled of disinfectant. After I gowned and put on a blue surgical cap and paper booties, I walked over to the autopsy table where they were doing the boy. Kay was there, along with the chief ME, a guy named Strand who’s been there about a thousand years.
“Detective Saunders.” Strand held a small circular saw, and I could see that they’d done the baby’s chest and abdomen. The boy’s neck was braced with a block from a two-by-four, his scalp peeled from his skull front and back. Strand powered up the saw. The saw hissed, like the pneumatic drills they use in dentist’s offices. “You’re just in time. Tricky job on a newborn, on account of the skull being so soft.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. Strand is not my favorite person.
“Over here, Jason,” Kay said. She thinks Strand’s an asshole too. She stood at a stainless steel counter along the far wall.
I walked over. Behind us, the whine of the saw dropped as it bit bone. “What do you have?”
“This.” She laid out an evidence bag. Inside the bag was a three-inch square of tan cloth. “We found it under the tongue.”
“Tongue?”
“Folded nice and neat. You took so long, I called for someone to laser it.”
“And?”
“No prints. Blood matches the baby’s. There’s something written on it. Drawn, anyway.”
“You’re kidding.” I turned the bag over, and felt my stomach bottom out.
In the center of the cloth was a Star of David. In the center of the star and at the three uppermost points were Hebrew letters. Below the star was a crude drawing of a bull’s-eye set atop a pole. Along the pole were six phalanges, curved up like scimitars: three to a side.
“First the tattoo,” said Kay. “Now this. This case is getting weird, Jason.”
I let my breath out a little at a time. “Yeah.”
There was a Behavioral Sciences guy worked a case with Adam and me a few years back. A holy shit case is an FBI name for something religious. You know: seven deadly sins in blood, that sort of crap. If you’re unsure, there’s probably a movie in the multiplex, bring you right up to speed.
So here’s what I had: a dead baby. A strange tattoo. A cloth with a Jewish star and Hebrew. Like I said, Holy Shit.
Before I left the morgue, I went into Kay’s office and called Rollins. As I suspected, he’d come up empty on the tattoo. I told him about the cloth. “So I’m going to fax a copy. I want you to run it against the gang symbols we’ve got in our database. Start with the star. That ought to be easy. I can think of a couple groups right off the bat, like Gangster Disciples, or Folk Nation. The New Breed Black Gangsters use the star along with three Ls. And I want you to call Gold. Tell her we want a formal statement. Have her there by four.”
“But tomorrow mor—”
“Just call her.”
“Okay. And you’ll be . . . ?”
“Checking something out.” I thumbed off, folded my phone, and tucked it into an inside pocket. Then I fed the fax.
Kay caught me as I left. “Photos of the tattoo and cloth in situ,” she said, handing over an envelope. “I’ll call you soonest. But so far, he’s clean.”
“Thanks. Look, I want you to run something for me.” I told her what I wanted.
“Looking for?”
“Maybe nothing. How long?”
“FBI developed a standard profile. We’ve got the setup. Say, three, four hours. You want a match with the FBI?”
“No, I just want it on file.”
“Okay.” Then: “You’ve got something.”
“All I’ve got is coincidence. That’s not something.” Yet, I thought.
This case was worse than what I’d done with Adam. No matter what Adam said, I knew that case hadn’t been about religion. But this—I corkscrewed the car down the parking garage, turned right on 23rd, and headed for the Lincoln Memorial—this case stunk to high heaven. Turning right on Constitution, I took the ramp past the E Street Expressway, the Kennedy Center on my right, and headed for Route 50 and Fairfax, Virginia.
When I found the place, I killed the engine and just sat. After all the junk last year, the congregation had relocated and built a new synagogue. As I watched, two men came out of a side door, their arms linked. They were arguing something, their free hands going like semaphores. They wore identical outfits: black overcoats that reached to their knees, black fedoras. One had a snowy white beard that reached his waist. The other was much younger, his beard full and black and bushy around his face, like a teddy bear.
There were security cameras mounted above the locked door, and I buzzed. They’d been vandalized, I heard. I selected a yarmulke from a wooden box mounted to the right of the door and patted it on. The rabbi’s secretary, a woman named Miriam who wore a kerchief over her hair, long-sleeved shirt, and ankle-length skirt, told me to go on up.
The rabbi was seeing someone else out. The other man was very old, his beard like gray fringe. He said something in querulous Yiddish. The rabbi responded in Yiddish, patting the old man on the back, his tone soothing.
The rabbi watched the old man totter down the stairs. “Not a happy man,” I said.
The rabbi, whose name is Dietterich, turned his brown gaze on me. “He doesn’t have a reason to be happy.” (Dietterich’s from Queens, so I think Shea Stadium every time he opens his mouth.) “Yakov’s daughter wants to marry a goy. Nice boy, I met him. He says he’ll convert, but for Yakov, it’s a calamity.”
“How so?”
“Yakov survived Birchenau. He’s the only one of his family left. For Yakov, his daughter does this, it’s like Hitler won. That’s why we Lubavitchers are so important. We keep the traditions alive, so people don’t forget.” Dietterich clapped his hands together as if to signal the subject closed. “So, Detective Saunders, come in, sit.”