“I’m sayin, I’m just an average guy. Down there, I mean. Don’t get me wrong; it’s Kielbasa Street when the blood gets to it, but when it’s just layin there —”
“What’s your point?”
“Knowin this girl was hanging off the end of this guy’s dick, it just ruined her for me, I guess.”
“So you what, let her go?”
“Not with that ass of hers, I wasn’t gonna let her go. No, sir.”
A woman had wandered under the tape while they were talking, and as she approached the body of the girl and got a look at it, she vomited voluminously into the grass. Sergeant Cook removed his hat, ran a finger along the brim, and breathed deeply. He replaced the Stetson on his head, adjusted it, and allowed his eyes to search the perimeter of the scene. He turned to the man beside him, a white detective named Chip Rogers, and pointed to Ramone and Holiday.
“Tell those white boys to do their jobs,” said Cook. “People regurgitatin, fucking up my crime scene… If they can’t keep these folks back, find some men who will. I’m not playin.”
Ramone and Holiday immediately went to the yellow tape, turned their backs to it, and affected a pose of authority. Holiday spread his feet and looped his fingers through his utility belt, unfazed by Cook’s words. Ramone’s jaw tightened as he felt a twinge of anger at being called a white boy by the homicide cop. He had heard it occasionally growing up outside D.C. and many times while playing baseball and basketball in the city proper. He didn’t like it. He knew it was meant to cut him and he was expected to take it, and that made it burn even more.
“How about you?” said Holiday.
“How ’bout me what?” said Ramone.
“You been gettin any hay for your donkey?”
Ramone did not answer. He had his eye on one woman in particular, a cop, God help him. But he had learned not to let Holiday into his personal world.
“C’mon, brother,” said Holiday. “I showed you mine, now you show me yours. You got someone in your gun sights?”
“Your baby sister,” said Ramone.
Holiday’s mouth fell open and his eyes flared. “My sister died of leukemia when she was eleven years old, you piece a shit.”
Ramone looked away. For a while there was only the squawk and hiss of the police radios and the low conversations of the spectators in the crowd. Then Holiday cackled and slapped Ramone on the back.
“I’m kiddin you, Giuseppe. Oh, Christ, but I had your ass.”
The description of the victim had been matched to a list of missing teenagers in the area. A half hour later, a man was brought to the scene to identify her. As he looked at the body, a father’s anguished howl filled the night.
The victim’s name was Eve Drake. In the past year, two other black teenagers, both living in the poorer sections of town, had been murdered and dumped in similar fashion in community gardens, both discovered shortly after sunrise. Shot in the head, both had traces of semen in their rectums. Their names were Otto Williams and Ava Simmons. Like Otto and Ava, Drake’s first name, Eve, was spelled the same way backward as it was forward. The press had made the connection and dubbed the events the Palindrome Murders. Within the department, some police had begun to refer to the perpetrator as the Night Gardener.
ACROSS TOWN, AT THE same time the father cried out over his daughter’s body, young Washingtonians were in their homes, tuning in to Miami Vice, doing lines of coke as they watched the exploits of two hip undercover cops and their quest to take down the kingpins of the drug trade. Others read bestselling novels by Tom Clancy, John Jakes, Stephen King, and Peter Straub, or sat in bars and talked about the fading play-off prospects of the Jay Schroeder-led Washington Redskins. Others watched rented VCR tapes of Beverly Hills Cop and Code of Silence, the top picks that week at Erol’s Video Club, or barely sweated to Jane Fonda’s Workout, or went out and caught the new Michael J. Fox at the Circle Avalon or Caligula at the Georgetown. Mr. Mister and Midge Ure were in town, playing the clubs.
As these movers of the Reagan generation entertained themselves west of Rock Creek Park and in the suburbs, detectives and techs worked at a crime scene at 33rd and E, in the neighborhood of Greenway, in Southeast D.C. They could not know that this would be the last victim of the Palindrome Killer. For now, there was only a dead teenager, one of three unsolved, and someone out there, somewhere, doing the murders.
On a cool rainy night in December 1985, two young uniformed police and a middle-aged homicide detective were on the scene.