database Sully kept that had the victim’s name, date of the crime, suspects (if any), relatives’ names (if any), and the name of the lead detective. Each killing then had a manila folder of its own, complete with photographs of the crime scene, the victim, the killer, and so on.
A half dozen years earlier, at the height of the crack cocaine epidemic, there would have been more than four hundred crosses each year. There were about two hundred so far this year, nearly all of them clustered in the city’s poorest quadrants: east of the Anacostia, then a spine up through the neighborhoods of eastern Capitol Hill, Trinidad, and on into Brookland. The most violent housing projects—Benning Terrace, Barry Farms, Potomac Gardens, Sursum Corda—were a thick red smear of crosses.
Rock Creek Park, its eastern edge reaching as far as Sixteenth Street, split the city, both in geography and homicide. Nearly all the slayings were to the east and south. West of the park—west of the park’s jogging trails and rising hills and tumbling streams—the city got wealthy and mostly white, and the few red murder crosses there appeared as droplets of blood.
He was looking for a pin and a red cross for Sarah.
“Sullivan, God, I’m glad to see you,” a voice called out, startling him. Melissa Baird, the Metro editor, was smiling, closing on him like a fast hawk on a slow rabbit. “R.J. tells me you’ve got a beautiful piece on this neighborhood, just really beautiful.”
She was wearing her shoulder-length brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, and her pressed jeans and an open-collared shirt—her idea of a casual Saturday—had an air that all but screamed Master’s in Fucking Journalism from Columbia, born on third base in Westchester. Social climber, vertical blur at a paper that idolized the Ivy League and East Coast wankerdom. He swiveled in the chair, eyes darting to a clock posted on a beam behind her. It was nearly five. Front-page meeting starting in fifteen.
“Thank God you’ve got something so eloquent,” she was saying. “Nothing happened on the investigation, other than they’re still looking for those three guys in the store.” She came into his cubicle and made a slight hop to sit on the edge of the desk, her newsroom trademark. Legs crossed at the ankles, back straight, hands on the desk beside her.
“Hunter’s sources on cops zipped up tight,” she continued. Sully itched, wondering how long this would go on. Pert. She was just so damn
pert
. “The feds aren’t even returning calls. Reese family is sequestered at home in McLean. We’ll put the investigation story on the front page—we’ve got to, right?—but we’re looking pretty thin. Your piece is saving us. The art’s already in. Have you seen it? Early-morning mist in an alley, looking across Georgia at the store where the girl was murdered, a couple of storefronts, a guy in ragged pants and shirt walking across the street, stepping in a puddle. R.J. saw it and said it was just the kind of atmosphere you’ve got.”
“R.J. is a kind man.”
“He said something about Charles Bukowski poetry.”
Sully recognized the drill, and he recognized Melissa’s skill at it. She was pumping him up while letting him know the pressure she, and by extension he, was under. And, he recognized, without telling him what to write, she was telling him
exactly
what to write.
“Well, a piece like this,” he said, thinking of something to bullshit her with, “I think we just tell people what it feels like on the block down there. We tell them what the beer delivery guy is talking about while he’s loading up a dolly and what song is thumping out of a car stopped at the light. We tell them what the bathroom in the strip club just down the street smells like. We tell them about the elementary school, swing sets in the rain and needles in the playground grass from the Friday night junkies, and that the people who live here, the people in left-behind America,
A half dozen years earlier, at the height of the crack cocaine epidemic, there would have been more than four hundred crosses each year. There were about two hundred so far this year, nearly all of them clustered in the city’s poorest quadrants: east of the Anacostia, then a spine up through the neighborhoods of eastern Capitol Hill, Trinidad, and on into Brookland. The most violent housing projects—Benning Terrace, Barry Farms, Potomac Gardens, Sursum Corda—were a thick red smear of crosses.
Rock Creek Park, its eastern edge reaching as far as Sixteenth Street, split the city, both in geography and homicide. Nearly all the slayings were to the east and south. West of the park—west of the park’s jogging trails and rising hills and tumbling streams—the city got wealthy and mostly white, and the few red murder crosses there appeared as droplets of blood.
He was looking for a pin and a red cross for Sarah.
“Sullivan, God, I’m glad to see you,” a voice called out, startling him. Melissa Baird, the Metro editor, was smiling, closing on him like a fast hawk on a slow rabbit. “R.J. tells me you’ve got a beautiful piece on this neighborhood, just really beautiful.”
She was wearing her shoulder-length brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, and her pressed jeans and an open-collared shirt—her idea of a casual Saturday—had an air that all but screamed Master’s in Fucking Journalism from Columbia, born on third base in Westchester. Social climber, vertical blur at a paper that idolized the Ivy League and East Coast wankerdom. He swiveled in the chair, eyes darting to a clock posted on a beam behind her. It was nearly five. Front-page meeting starting in fifteen.
“Thank God you’ve got something so eloquent,” she was saying. “Nothing happened on the investigation, other than they’re still looking for those three guys in the store.” She came into his cubicle and made a slight hop to sit on the edge of the desk, her newsroom trademark. Legs crossed at the ankles, back straight, hands on the desk beside her.
“Hunter’s sources on cops zipped up tight,” she continued. Sully itched, wondering how long this would go on. Pert. She was just so damn
pert
. “The feds aren’t even returning calls. Reese family is sequestered at home in McLean. We’ll put the investigation story on the front page—we’ve got to, right?—but we’re looking pretty thin. Your piece is saving us. The art’s already in. Have you seen it? Early-morning mist in an alley, looking across Georgia at the store where the girl was murdered, a couple of storefronts, a guy in ragged pants and shirt walking across the street, stepping in a puddle. R.J. saw it and said it was just the kind of atmosphere you’ve got.”
“R.J. is a kind man.”
“He said something about Charles Bukowski poetry.”
Sully recognized the drill, and he recognized Melissa’s skill at it. She was pumping him up while letting him know the pressure she, and by extension he, was under. And, he recognized, without telling him what to write, she was telling him
exactly
what to write.
“Well, a piece like this,” he said, thinking of something to bullshit her with, “I think we just tell people what it feels like on the block down there. We tell them what the beer delivery guy is talking about while he’s loading up a dolly and what song is thumping out of a car stopped at the light. We tell them what the bathroom in the strip club just down the street smells like. We tell them about the elementary school, swing sets in the rain and needles in the playground grass from the Friday night junkies, and that the people who live here, the people in left-behind America,
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