On the bureau, by the bed, was a picture of Maria Cross. Three years before, my wife had been murdered in a drive-by shooting. That murder, like the majority of murders in Southeast, had never been solved.
I kissed my grandmother on the way out the kitchen door. We've done that since I was eight years old. so say good-bye, just in case we never see each other n. It's been like that for almost thirty years, ever since Nana Mama first took me in and decided she could make something of me.
She made a homicide detective, with a doctorate in psychology, who works and lives in the ghettos of Washington, D.C.
Along Came A Spider
CHAPTER 2
I AM OFFICIALLY a Deputy Chief of Detectives, Which, in the words of Shakespeare and Mr. Faulkner, is a lot of sound and fury, signifying nada. The title should make me the number-six or -seven person in the Washington Police Department. It doesn't. People wait for my appearance at crime scenes in D.C., though.
A trio of D.C. Metro blue-and-whites were parked helter-skelter in front of 41-15 Benning Road. A crime lab van with blackened windows had arrived. So had an EMS ambulance. MORTUARY was cheerfully stenciled on the door.
There were a couple of fire engines at the murder house. The neighborhood's ambulance-chasers, mostly eye-fucking males, were hanging around. Older women with winter coats thrown over their pajamas and night gowns, and pink and blue curlers in their hair, were up on their porches shivering in the cold.
The row house was dilapidated clapboard, painted a gaudy Caribbean blue. An old Chevette with a broken, taped-up side window looked as if it had been abandoned in the driveway.
“Fuck this. Let's go back to bed,” Sampson said. “I just remembered what this is going to be like. I hate this job lately.”