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.”
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.