Page 39 of The Family Cross

He shrugged. “I’m no expert. She says she’s twenty-two.”

“Why does she come to see you?”

“Her uncle Marco was in the ’Stan too. Messed him all up, and he offed himself. Sometimes she just needs to talk about him.”

Rodriguez got a confused look then, as if in his overly high state, he’d just realized that he’d been missing something in the conversation. “Hey, what’s this all about, anyway?”

“Corey is dead,” I said. “She was shot and set on fire last night near a homeless camp about three miles from here.”

Rodriguez got a gut-punched expression on his face that rippled to tortured as he slowly collapsed onto the pocked hot surface of the ghost ramp, racked with deep sobs from a hallucinating heart.

36

JOHN SAMPSON DROPPED ME back at the hospital around three thirty. He was headed to the Avid Eyeball to review their security-camera footage.

On the way to my grandmother’s room, I chewed over the things we’d gotten out of Alejandro Rodriguez after his initial reaction to Corey McGovern’s death.

Between crying fits as he came down off the psilocybin, Hawk told us what he knew about McGovern. He claimed she was originally from West Virginia and had run away from an abusive family and a more abusive boyfriend. They’d met six months earlier while standing in line outside the Salvation Army facility in Hyattsville, Maryland.

“She was looking for a warm coat,” he remembered. “She was funny. And bright. Real personality, even though you could tell she’d been through rough times.”

Hawk recognized her when he saw her under the Bridge to Nowhere, and they’d chatted some more. When he mentioned his service in Afghanistan, she’d told him about Marco, her uncle, a Marine who’d spent too much time in a forward operating base south of Kandahar.

“The constant combat twisted him,” Rodriguez said. “Does that to most people.”

“Just to make sure we’re all on the same page, where were you last night around one a.m.?” Sampson asked.

“In a coma in my shelter,” he said.

“Anybody who can corroborate that?”

“The occasional rat. Honestly, I wasn’t feeling well and crashed around eleven.”

We showed him the pictures on McGovern’s Instagram account, and he said he wasn’t surprised that she’d taken selfies in those locations. She’d longed to lead a life of luxury.

“Never knew she had this dress, though, or the heels.”

John said, “She was shot and lit on fire near the Avid Eyeball strip joint. You know it?”

He shook his head. “Nah. I got over visiting that kind of place when I was on leave in Thailand back in the day. I thought you said she died near a homeless camp.”

“She did,” I said. “Any idea why she’d be there at one in the morning?”

“Going home? I don’t know. Maybe she lived there. She was kind of secretive about her life other than that she was on the streets. Even with me.”

“We also found a lot of cash in her purse. A thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills.”

Hawk frowned. “If she had that kind of money, she could’ve rented a room. She didn’t need to sleep in a camp. How’d she come by it? Hooking?”

“We don’t know,” Sampson said.

“Were you sleeping with her?” I said. “With Corey?”

He looked annoyed. “Nah, man, it wasn’t like that. Corey was a little sister who needed to talk from time to time. I never laid a hand on her in any kind of way. Swear.”

“Know anyone who did?”

“No.”