“I’ll start figuring out who’s who.”
“I’ll be along,” I said, and then stepped over the victim, stuck my head out the open window, and used my flashlight to look around.
There was a small backyard that featured a brick terrace, raised flower beds, brick walls about five feet high, and a few pieces of wrought-iron furniture. A low set of stairs climbed to French doors far to my right, probably behind those closed drapes in the main room.
The overgrown beds, the moldering leaves, dead branches on the brick, and an old Styrofoam coffee cup told me that those French doors and this terrace had rarely been used of late. I was about to draw my head back in when my flashlight beam caught something I’d missed on the first pass.
Below and to my left there was a cement stairwell littered with broken beer bottles. I leaned out farther, angled the flashlight, and saw liquid in the curve of some of the shards.
That didn’t make sense. Except for the matted leaves, there didn’t appear to be anything wet in the backyard, and it hadn’t rained in days. I wriggled out just a little farther and saw a steel door at the bottom of the stairs. A basement?
Wanting to get a closer look at those broken bottles and that liquid, I retreated, stepped back across the victim, and went out to the main room, where crime scene techs were beginning to photograph and otherwise document the scene. Sampson was in the kitchen, going through purses and wallets.
Rather than interrupt him, I went over to the drapes, drew them back, found the handles to the French doors. They were locked with a Master Lock that required a key, and I had no key.
Heading toward the kitchen, meaning to search the drawers and the pocketbooks for key rings, I noticed the closed doors in the hallway. The one nearest to me was a utility closet. The one nearest to the entry was locked.
Irritated, I looked up and saw the barest hint of brass sticking over the lip of the door sash. I smiled and reached up for the key. It fit the lock. It probably fit the locks on the French doors as well, but I opened the door nearest to the entry and found a steep staircase that dropped into darkness.
The air coming up from the basement was musty, a welcome break from the smell of Pine-Sol. The building was old, built back when people were smaller, and I had to duck while climbing down the stairs. And when I reached the dirty basement floor I still had to stoop to protect my head.
Slicing the flashlight beam around, I spotted eight pieces of new luggage lined up along the wall closer to me, stacks of old boxes, and garden tools covered in dust and cobwebs over by the furnace and oil tank. To the left of the furnace my flashlight found the other side of the steel door to the backyard.
I went toward it. When I passed the furnace I was digging in my pocket for the key, and my light was focused on the door. Finally getting the key out, I unlocked the door and pushed it open, getting a much better look at the broken beer bottles and the liquid in the curved shards and drying on the cement pad.
It was blood.
Not huge swaths of it like upstairs. More like spurts flaring in many directions, almost as if someone had run across the glass barefoot and…
I shined the flashlight down at the door’s threshold, seeing smeared blood there. Taking a step back, I spotted what I’d missed in my hurry to unlock the door: bloody footprints in the dust, leading—
Silk rustled against the floor before she screamed in what sounded like a Russian accent: “I kill you, motherfucker!”
I cocked the light up, catching a big, crazed woman in a black lace nightgown coming at me with a pitchfork.
Chapter
62
Maybe it was the fact that recently a homeless man had sprung from the darkness to hit me in the stomach with a baseball bat.
I don’t know.
But seeing the sharp tines of that pitchfork arc toward my face caused me to throw myself to the side and away from her. One tine caught my ear and cut me.
I hit the cement floor hard but rolled and clawed for the pistol in the shoulder holster beneath my jacket. I kept rolling, heard the steel tines ping off the cement right behind my back, and turned over once more, flashlight in one hand, service pistol in the other.
She had lifted the pitchfork high with both hands, ready to take another downward stab at me. But the light was blinding her.
“Police!” I shouted at her. “Drop your weapon or I’ll shoot!”
She looked deranged, said something in what sounded like Russian.
“Drop it!”
The young woman let go of the pitchfork. It clanged to the floor and she stood there trembling in shock and disbelief before she collapsed into a sobbing heap. That was when I saw her bare feet, all sliced up and draining blood.
It took a while for her to settle down and for paramedics to tend to her feet. In the ambulance on the way to Georgetown University Medical Center she gave me her initial statement in broken English.