“My great pleasure,” Acadia said.
As he walked through the apartment to the front door, Sunday felt the building thrill of anticipation pulse through him again. He opened the door, shut it again, and slipped off his shoes and thin belt. He stood there inside the door, listening.
Acadia laughed seductively and said, “Come to my room, sugar? See what a good old Louisiana girl can do between the sheets?”
A few moments later Sunday heard a door open, and soft music begin to play. He flashed on the image of himself at eighteen with the shovel in his hands, slipping up behind that figure, starting to swing.
Feeling insanely alive now, beyond all laws, all rules, beyond any sense of moral order, the writer crept down the hall toward the bedroom. He was embracing freedom, true freedom, and it left him panting.
Sunday stood in the hallway, listening to Preston grunting and Acadia urging him on. It was over in less than a minute. Probably a sophomore.
Five minutes later, Acadia said, “Something more exotic, more erotic, sugar?”
“P-p-please,” Preston said.
“Get off the bed and onto your knees, then, chéri,” Acadia ordered. “I want you to orally worship me this time before we join.”
Preston gave a pleasurable sigh. Sunday moved to the open door. The stutterer was indeed on his knees, his back to the writer. Acadia was stunningly naked, gently writhing her sex in front of the computer genius’s face.
Preston’s attention never wavered from her. But Acadia’s did when Sunday looped the belt around the programmer’s neck and began to throttle him.
The entire time the stutterer struggled toward death, she stared into Sunday’s eyes with a reckless desire that matched his own.
Chapter
18
I hung up the phone in my office around six thirty that Friday evening, exasperated that we were having trouble getting copies of the feed from the closed-circuit television cameras mounted at intersections in the blocks around the Superior Spa.
The guys over in the IT department said some kind of programming glitch or bug or something had corrupted the files. They weren’t gone, but they weren’t opening, either. The IT guys were feeling the strain of the high murder rate and the Francones case as much as we were. It might take several days before a tech could debug the relevant files.
Earlier, I had tracked down Francones’s agent and business manager, or figured out who they were, anyway. But the two of them were currently in a private jet en route from Los Angeles to DC to help arrange memorial services for the Hall of Famer. Their secretaries said they’d be free to meet with us in the morning.
Trenton Wiggs, the named owner of the massage parlor, was not in any of the metro-area phone books I looked at. I ran the name through Google, found ten different men of that name in various locales around the country, but nothing that pegged any of them as a sleaze merchant. Then again, who advertised that kind of thing?
In the meantime, Francones’s murder had become the hottest news story of the moment. Nearly every cable and network news show had led with the case, almost all of the coverage slanted at the Mad Man’s bloody demise in a massage parlor in what they were calling the Murder Capital of the World.
“I’m going home, see how the renovation is going,” I told Sampson. He was feeling the stress as much as anybody. “You should go home to Billie. We were up late and up early.”
“Reading my mind,” he said, yawned. “Beer?”
“Nah, not tonight,” I said, and left.
Twenty minutes later, I drove past my house, seeing that the Dumpster in the front yard was almost full of construction debris. I almost parked, but then drove on by, heading over to Anacostia, one of the toughest neighborhoods in the city and the reigning champion when it came to murders per capita.
Ava Williams had lived on the streets in Anacostia before Nana had rescued her. I went to some of the places she’d told us about: a convenience store in Congress Heights, the ER at St. Elizabeths Hospital, the woods east of Mississippi Avenue, Fort Stanton Park. I showed her picture to groups of young people hanging in all those places, and to every homeless person I could find. Not one of them recognized her.
Frustrated, I finally drove to the abandoned factory building where we’d discovered the burned body. There was a police seal on the place, but it had been broken already. I got a flashlight and went inside, climbed down the near stairs to the basement room where the burning had been done, found where the cement floor was charred with death.
I stared at it for a long time and then flashed my light around. The basement had been gone over by a forensics team and was still fairly clean. Then I felt a sudden breeze, coming from back toward the
second set of stairs, as if some window or door had been opened.
I went back out there, trying to find where the draft was coming from. I shined the light into a room beyond those stairs.
He came at me wild-eyed and insane, swinging a Louisville Slugger that caught me flush in the stomach, knocked all the wind out of me, and drove me to my knees.
Part Two