Chapter 83
W HAT HAPPENED THAT NIGHT blew my mind. Actually, everything had been really good about the night, until it went bad. I had treated Nana and the kids to a special dinner at Kinkead’s, near the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, our favorite restaurant in Washington. The great jazzman Hilton Fenton came over to our table and told us a funny story about the actor Morgan Freeman. Back at home, I climbed the steep wooden stairs to my office in the attic, cursing the steps under my breath, one by one.
I put on some Sam Cooke, starting with a popular favorite, “You Send Me.” Then I pored over old DC police files from the time of Maria’s murder ? hundreds of pages.
I was looking for unsolved rape cases from back then, particularly ones that had occurred in Southeast or nearby. I worked intently and listened to the music, and was surprised when I looked at my watch and saw that it was ten past three. Some interesting things had surfaced in the files from the serial case I’d remembered was going on around the same time Maria died.
In fact, the rapes had started a few weeks before Maria was shot and ended just after the murder. They never started up again. Which meant what ? that the rapist might have been a visitor to Washington?
Even more interesting to me, there were no IDs of the rapist from any of the victimized women. They had received medical attention but refused to talk to the police about what had happened to them. It didn’t substantiate anything, but it kept me flipping through more pages.
I went over several more transcripts and still found no IDs from the victims.
Could it be a coincidence? I doubted it. I kept reading.
Then I was stopped cold by a page in the police notes. A name and more information jumped out at me.
Maria Cross.
Social worker at Potomac Gardens.
A Detective Alvin Hightower, whom I had vaguely known back then ? I was pretty sure he was dead now ? had written a workup on the rape of a college girl from George Washington University. The attack took place inside a bar on M Street.
As I continued to read, I was having a hard time breathing. I was remembering a conversation that I’d had with Maria a couple of days before she died. It was about a case she was working on, about a girl who’d been raped.
According to the detective’s report, the coed had given some kind of description of the rapist to a social worker ? Maria Cross. He was a white male, a little over six foot, possibly from New York. When he had finished with the girl he had taken a little bow.
My fingers shaking, I turned the page and checked the date of the initial report. And there it was ? the day before Maria was murdered.
And the rapist?
The Butcher . The mob killer we’d been tracking. I remembered his rooftop bow, his unexplainable visit to my house.
The Butcher.
I would bet my life on it.