Page 22 of The Family Cross

“We have to wait and see if she can heal.”

20

BEFORE DAWN THE NEXT day, some twenty-four hours after the Audi and the corpse inside it had been torched on the old roadbed, John Sampson jogged down to the scene of the crime.

It was foggy and damp. The derelict ramp was barely a dark smudge in the low light. Birds fluttered in the underbrush as he passed, and for a panicked moment he thought he smelled skunk.

Sampson, wearing a gray sweatshirt, sweatpants, and running shoes, looked at his watch and picked up his pace. He wanted to be right where Boog was at the same time the explosion happened.

As far as he was concerned, the car had been an aviation-gas-fueled bomb. He wanted to figure out where the liquid fuse was lit.

Sampson spotted the swirl of graffiti that announced the Bridge to Nowhere and glanced at the high corners under the ramp where he’d seen sentries watching the road twice before.

No one was there now, not this early, or if they were, they were lurking back in the shadows. But hopefully, he was going to get where he wanted to go unnoticed.

He put up his sweatshirt hood and ran even faster toward the ramp, wrinkling his nose when he passed a patch of brush that served as a latrine. He slowed when he saw the yellow police tape, then ducked under it and followed the flags on the ground in the growing light to the scorched spot where the Audi had been.

Breathing deep, sweating hard, Sampson stood there watching and listening as the sky paled and the residents of the homeless camp began to wake up. Above him he saw people starting to emerge on both tiered embankments.

He checked his watch again. Boog claimed the fuse had been lit at about a quarter to six.

From 5:40 a.m. to 5:50, Sampson focused on the tall bushes where Boog said he’d seen the hand torch flare and ignite the fuse to the car bomb. The fog today made visibility worse, but Sampson could understand why the thirteen-year-old had not seen the person responsible for the fire and probably the murder. It had been too dark.

He peered up through the fog and the gloom to the top tier of the south embankment. That was where a vet named Hawk ruled by force. Sampson thought about going up there and finding Hawk but decided to look for the leader of the north bank first, the head high troll who Boog said ruled more by wit than brawn.

She’ll know all about Hawk, John reasoned as he began to climb, seeing the shack against the stanchion where Anna Bananas lived with her kids, the tarp and hovel where Boog survived without a mother, and the shadows still shrouding the highest tier.

When Sampson was well past Boog’s place, the sun rose above the horizon, sending low-angle rays beneath the bridge and making him squint. He kept climbing, ignoring the suspicious glares he got from several people sitting outside shacks that were better built than the ones lower down.

Sampson climbed onto the upper tier, flushing pigeons and swallows from their nests between the concrete ramp and the rusting steel that supported it. He had to bend over not to hit his head on the underside of the ramp. No one was outside these shelters, which were the most elaborate of all.

The largest was near the middle of the upper tier, rectangular, with a roof and walls of stretched canvas. He walked over but couldn’t figure out where the entrance was. Finally, he just knocked on an aluminum crossbar that seemed to be holding the whole thing together.

No answer. He knocked again, said, “I’m looking for Lainey Locket.”

Something poked him from behind. Sampson straightened up fast, hit his head on the bottom of the ramp, winced, bent over, put his hand on his crown, and looked behind him.

A long, sharp scrawl of a woman, middle-aged and wild-eyed, stood there holding a pistol-grip shotgun pointed directly at Sampson, the gaping, deadly holes of the double barrel inches away.

“Who’s looking?” she said.

21

JOHN SAMPSON PANICKED A second before reasoning that if the woman really wanted to kill him, he’d be dead already.

“Detective John Sampson,” he said, using his deepest authoritarian-cop voice. “DC Metro Police. I have backup working the other wall of the camp. If you do not put that illegal weapon on the ground immediately, I will have to arrest you.”

She studied him a long moment. He studied her back.

She was a tall brunette with high cheekbones and dazzling green-blue eyes but gaunt, on the verge of emaciated—at least as far as he could tell under the wildly colorful layers of clothes. Imagine a tornado hitting a donation box and all the clothes inside landing haphazardly on a scarecrow—that was Locket.

She turned the gun around and handed it to Sampson by the barrels. “It’s legal, by the way.”

“A legal sawed-off shotgun?” Sampson said.

“It’s not sawed off,” she said. “Barrels are the exact legal limit. A woman has a right to protect herself, and I can’t think of a better way to do it than double-aught buckshot at close range. Especially in a place like this.”

There was nothing furtive or off about her. She struck him as the antithesis of Anna Bananas.