Weird Detectives Read online

  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.

  And, oh yeah—he blew his brains out in Rock Creek Park.

  Coincidence? I’m superstitious. All cops are superstitious. Too much coincidence: Halloween, the Hebrew. Rock Creek. Bad karma, that’s what.

  God, I missed Adam. Damn him.

  My phone sputtered as I turned left on Indiana. I thumbed it on. “Saunders.”

  “Jason.” It was Kay. “We’ve started the cut.”

  “That was fast, Kay.”

  “It’s a kid. Anyway, we found something.”

  The autopsy suite was cold and smelled of disinfectant. After I gowned and put on a blue surgical cap and paper booties, I walked over to the autopsy table where they were doing the boy. Kay was there, along with the chief ME,
a guy named Strand who’s been there about a thousand years.

  “Detective Saunders.” Strand held a small circular saw, and I could see that they’d done the baby’s chest and abdomen. The boy’s neck was braced with a block from a two-by-four, his scalp peeled from his skull front and back. Strand powered up the saw. The saw hissed, like the pneumatic drills they use in dentist’s offices. “You’re just in time. Tricky job on a newborn, on account of the skull being so soft.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. Strand is not my favorite person.

  “Over here, Jason,” Kay said. She thinks Strand’s an asshole too. She stood at a stainless steel counter along the far wall.

  I walked over. Behind us, the whine of the saw dropped as it bit bone. “What do you have?”

  “This.” She laid out an evidence bag. Inside the bag was a three-inch square of tan cloth. “We found it under the tongue.”

  “Tongue?”

  “Folded nice and neat. You took so long, I called for someone to laser it.”

  “And?”

  “No prints. Blood matches the baby’s. There’s something written on it. Drawn, anyway.”

  “You’re kidding.” I turned the bag over, and felt my stomach bottom out.

  In the center of the cloth was a Star of David. In the center of the star and at the three uppermost points were Hebrew letters. Below the star was a crude drawing of a bull’s-eye set atop a pole. Along the pole were six phalanges, curved up like scimitars: three to a side.

  “First the tattoo,” said Kay. “Now this. This case is getting weird, Jason.”

  I let my breath out a little at a time. “Yeah.”

  There was a Behavioral Sciences guy worked a case with Adam and me a few years back. A holy shit case is an FBI name for something religious. You know: seven deadly sins in blood, that sort of crap. If you’re unsure, there’s probably a movie in the multiplex, bring you right up to speed.

  So here’s what I had: a dead baby. A strange tattoo. A cloth with a Jewish star and Hebrew. Like I said, Holy Shit.

  Before I left the morgue, I went into Kay’s office and called Rollins. As I suspected, he’d come up empty on the tattoo. I told him about the cloth. “So I’m going to fax a copy. I want you to run it against the gang symbols we’ve got in our database. Start with the star. That ought to be easy. I can think of a couple groups right off the bat, like Gangster Disciples, or Folk Nation. The New Breed Black Gangsters use the star along with three Ls. And I want you to call Gold. Tell her we want a formal statement. Have her there by four.”

  “But tomorrow mor—”

  “Just call her.”

  “Okay. And you’ll be . . . ?”

  “Checking something out.” I thumbed off, folded my phone, and tucked it into an inside pocket. Then I fed the fax.

  Kay caught me as I left. “Photos of the tattoo and cloth in situ,” she said, handing over an envelope. “I’ll call you soonest. But so far, he’s clean.”

  “Thanks. Look, I want you to run something for me.” I told her what I wanted.

  “Looking for?”

  “Maybe nothing. How long?”

  “FBI developed a standard profile. We’ve got the setup. Say, three, four hours. You want a match with the FBI?”

  “No, I just want it on file.”

  “Okay.” Then: “You’ve got something.”

  “All I’ve got is coincidence. That’s not something.” Yet, I thought.

  This case was worse than what I’d done with Adam. No matter what Adam said, I knew that case hadn’t been about religion. But this—I corkscrewed the car down the parking garage, turned right on 23rd, and headed for the Lincoln Memorial—this case stunk to high heaven. Turning right on Constitution, I took the ramp past the E Street Expressway, the Kennedy Center on my right, and headed for Route 50 and Fairfax, Virginia.

  When I found the place, I killed the engine and just sat. After all the junk last year, the congregation had relocated and built a new synagogue. As I watched, two men came out of a side door, their arms linked. They were arguing something, their free hands going like semaphores. They wore identical outfits: black overcoats that reached to their knees, black fedoras. One had a snowy white beard that reached his waist. The other was much younger, his beard full and black and bushy around his face, like a teddy bear.

  There were security cameras mounted above the locked door, and I buzzed. They’d been vandalized, I heard. I selected a yarmulke from a wooden box mounted to the right of the door and patted it on. The rabbi’s secretary, a woman named Miriam who wore a kerchief over her hair, long-sleeved shirt, and ankle-length skirt, told me to go on up.

  The rabbi was seeing someone else out. The other man was very old, his beard like gray fringe. He said something in querulous Yiddish. The rabbi responded in Yiddish, patting the old man on the back, his tone soothing.

  The rabbi watched the old man totter down the stairs. “Not a happy man,” I said.

  The rabbi, whose name is Dietterich, turned his brown gaze on me. “He doesn’t have a reason to be happy.” (Dietterich’s from Queens, so I think Shea Stadium every time he opens his mouth.) “Yakov’s daughter wants to marry a goy. Nice boy, I met him. He says he’ll convert, but for Yakov, it’s a calamity.”

  “How so?”

  “Yakov survived Birchenau. He’s the only one of his family left. For Yakov, his daughter does this, it’s like Hitler won. That’s why we Lubavitchers are so important. We keep the traditions alive, so people don’t forget.” Dietterich clapped his hands together as if to signal the subject closed. “So, Detective Saunders, come in, sit.”

  Dietterich’s office was cramped, the shelves overflowing with books. He offered coffee, and I accepted: black with two sugars. He handed me a mug and then dropped into his seat with a slight groan. When we met last year, I judged him to be my age, thirty-five or so. He’d aged. Gray streaked his temples. Deep lines fanned the corners of his eyes and his face was pinched, with a furrow chiseled into either side of his nose.

  “So,” he said, blowing on his coffee. “How can I help you?”

  “I need your opinion.” I showed him the drawings, and he studied them in silence. I sipped coffee and waited. The coffee was worse than mine. I put the mug on the floor.

  When his eyes inched up again, he was frowning. “Where did you get this?”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you. It’s an ongoing investigation. I can only ask the questions, not answer them.”

  “All right.” Dietterich placed his mug on a side table. “Yes, I know the symbols. What this is, exactly, I’m not sure.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean it doesn’t make sense. In essence, you have part of a formula.”

  “Formula?”

  “Yes, for a protective amulet.”

  “Against what?”

  Dietterich hesitated, then said. “Evil. You have to understand, Detective. Judaism is a religion without a pantheon. In the distant past, calamities were ascribed to evil demons and dark forces, whereas Judaism holds that these things come from Hashem, from God. But illiterate and superstitious peasants are slow to change. Superstitions persisted into the early half of the last century.”

  I remembered Gold, and her key. “You’re talking mysticism.”

  “Yes. Our Tanya, for instance, is based upon very ancient Kabbalah, but only certain aspects, you understand. There are many obscure areas of Kabbalah known only to very devout Jews, or to scholars. Most work is not in translation, because of the dangers.”

  “Dangers.”

  “Of misinterpretation. Leading Jews to pursue paths that are specifically prohibited because these practices are antithetical to our faith. How do I say it?” Dietterich put a finger to his lips. “There is a branch of theory, and a branch of practice. Devout scholars study, but that is all.”

  “Tell me about the practice.”

  Dietterich raised his hands, palms up. “What’s to say? There are no Jewish witches.”


  “Well, someone hasn’t gotten the message.”

  “You think a Jew did this?” He moved his head firmly from side to side. “No. The prohibition in Exodus is very clear.”

  “But you said it yourself: superstitions persist. So, is this what the drawings are about?”

  “These drawings are just bits and pieces.” He went to a bookshelf, tilted out a book, and brought it back, flipping pages. I read the cover: Amulets and Superstitions. “Here,” he said, then came to stand behind my right shoulder.

  There was Hebrew text above and below a rectangle filled with crude, almost childish drawings. The rectangle was divided into two. On the left were what looked like bulbous birds with no wings, and bubble feet with no talons. On the right, there were two bizarre quadrangles, and then a drawing I recognized: the pole with the phalanges.

  “What is that?”

  “Part of a formula. This is a copy of a design for an amulet from a book that’s in the British Museum, the Book of Râzîêl.” He pronounced it RAY-zay-el. “The formula’s very precise. On the left are representations of three angels: Sanvi, Sanasanvi, and Samnaglof.”

  “And on the right?”

  “Adam, Eve,” and then he came to the pole, “and Lilith.”

  “Lilith?”

  Dietterich sighed. “A myth. In Genesis, there is a curious section concerning creation. At the end of the first chapter, Hashem creates male and female. But, if you look at the second chapter, verse eighteen, Adam is alone again, and Eve is not created until verse twenty-two.”

  “So who is that first woman?”

  “Lilith. The Mystics called her the First Eve. You find her in Midrash, in legends. According to Midrash, Lilith refused Hashem’s injunction to submit to Adam. So she fled, using Hashem’s Ineffable Name: Y–H–W–H. Hashem sent these three angels—Sanvi, Sanasanvi, and Samnaglof—to bring her back, but Lilith refused. In the end they let her go, but only if she agreed to leave whenever their names or images were invoked.”