That’s where I came in. Or at least, so I thought.

It was a beautiful spring day. The best time of year in DC. The National Cherry Blossom Festival was on, and we hadn’t yet gotten hit with the first wave of summer humidity—or summer tourists. I had my windows down and Quincy Jones’s Soul Bossa Nostra up loud enough that I almost didn’t hear my phone when the second call came in.

Caller ID told me it was Marti Huizenga, my sergeant at the Major Case Squad. I juggled the volume down on the stereo and caught the call just before it went to voice mail.

“Dr. C.,” she said. “Where are you?”

“Pennsylvania and Twenty-First,” I told her. “Why?”

“Good. Take a right on New Hampshire. Another body just popped up, and it sounds god-awful, to tell you the truth.”

“So you thought of me.”

“Natch. I need someone over there right away. It’s a bad scene, Alex—a dead girl, hanging out of a sixth-floor window. Possible suicide, but I don’t know.”

“You want me on this instead of Georgetown?”

“I want you on both,” Huizenga said. “At least for now. I need one set of eyes on both scenes, as fresh as possible. And then I want you to tell me this is all just a coincidence, okay? I’m asking politely here.”

Huizenga’s sense of humor was as dark as mine could be sometimes. I liked working with her. And we both knew that the difference between two unrelated dead bodies and two related ones was the difference between not getting much sleep for the next forty-eight hours, and getting none at all.

“I’ll do my best,” I said.

“Vernon Street, between Eighteenth and Nineteenth,” she said. “I’ll tell Second District to get started without you at the garage in Georgetown, but try to be there as soon as you can.”

That’s kind of like telling the clouds when to rain. I had no idea how long I’d be at this new scene. You never do until you’re there.

And this one turned out to be a nightmare.

CHAPTER

3

VERNON STREET IS JUST A SINGLE TREE-LINED BLOCK OFF THE WEST END of U Street. It’s a quiet residential area, but I could see a crowd of people pooled on the sidewalk as soon as I turned the corner from Eighteenth. Most of them were looking up and pointing at a mansard-roofed brick building on the south side of the street.

As soon as I got out of my car, I saw the girl. It was like a check in the ribs. She hung suspended by her neck on a length of rope, about three feet below one of the dormered sixth-floor windows. Her face was visibly discolored, and her hands seemed to be tied behind her back.

Jesus. Oh Jesus.

There were two cruisers and an ambulance parked out front, but the only personnel I saw was a single cop on the door of the apartment building. The rest of the sidewalk was filled up with looky-loos, snapping away on their phones and cameras. It pissed me off as much as it amazed me.

“Get this street roped off, right now!” I told the cop on my way into the building. “I don’t want to see anyone on that sidewalk by the time I’m up there looking down, you got it?”

I knew he had his hands full, but I couldn’t help feeling revved up by the whole thing. This girl was someone’s daughter. She had a family. They didn’t need her picture on some goddamn Facebook page for the world to see.

I left the cop to it and took the stairwell instead of the elevator. It seemed like a more likely exit, if this was in fact a murder we were talking about. And you only get one chance to see a crime scene for the first time.

When I came out into the sixth-floor hall, another cop and two EMTs were waiting outside an open apartment door. The building had three units on this level, all facing the street. Our dead girl was apparently in the center one.

“Door was locked when we got here,” the police officer told me. “That splintering on the frame is us. We were inside just long enough to get a flatline on the girl, but it wasn’t easy. I can’t guarantee we didn’t move anything in there.”

The apartment was a small alcove studio. There was a closet kitchen to one side, an open bathroom door on the other, and a futon couch that looked like it doubled for a bed. As far as I could tell, there were no signs of a struggle. In fact, the only thing that looked out of place was the old-fashioned coat tree, braced sideways against the open window, with a loop of rope hanging down from the center.

I forced myself to enter the room slowly, checking for drag marks, or anything that might have been left behind. When I got to the window and looked down, I could see the top of the girl’s head, just out of reach. Her heel had broken through the window of the apartment below, and the cord around her wrists seemed to be more of the same rope that had been used in the hanging.

That didn’t rule out suicide, either. A lot of people will bind themselves just before they do the deed, to keep from trying to struggle free in the heat of the moment.

Down below, another cruiser had arrived and the street was clear. But now I had another problem. When I looked straight across, I could see at least a dozen people in the windows of the facing apartment building, looking my way—more phones, more cameras. I wanted to give them all the finger, but I held back.

Still, I wasn’t going to let this go on for one second longer than I had to.

“Give me a hand over here!” I shouted toward the hall.

Technically, the body at any crime scene belongs to the medical examiner, not the cops. But I wasn’t thinking about technicalities right now. I was thinking about this girl and her family.

I already had my own phone out, and I fired off a bunch of shots. I got the coat tree, the window frame, the rope, and the girl, from above. I needed to preserve as much detail as I could before I did what I was about to do.

“Sir?” a cop said behind me.

“Help me pull her in,” I said.

“Um…don’t you want to wait for the ME?”

“No,” I said, pointing at the audience we had across the street. “Not anymore. Now give me a hand, or get me someone who will!”

CHAPTER

4

WE LAID THE GIRL OUT AS CAREFULLY AS WE COULD ON THE FLOOR OF THE apartment, and left the rope around her neck. As long as she was out of the public eye, that’s all I needed. The rest I could leave to the investigation.

Her name was Elizabeth Reilly. According to the driver’s license I found in a purse by the front door, she was just two weeks shy of turning twenty-one. The apartment had all the signs of someone who lived alone, from the Lean Cuisines in the freezer to the single towel and washrag hanging neatly in the bathroom.

Obviously there was more to the story here, but I wasn’t seeing it yet.

When the ME did arrive I was glad to see it was Joan Bradbury. Joan’s an easygoing, sixty-something Texan. As far as I knew, she never came to work in anything but top-stitched cowboy boots, even after twenty years in DC. She’s opinionated, but also easy to work with, and didn’t give me any big lectures when she saw what I’d done with the body. Joan has four daughters of her own; I think she instinctively got it.

While she started her initial exam, I got our team of investigators out knocking on doors, especially across the street. This hanging had gone down in broad daylight. Someone had to have seen something.

I also got some more info from Sergeant Huizenga on our victim. Elizabeth Reilly had been a nursing student at Radians College on Vermont Avenue until the previous December, when she’d dropped out. There was no word yet on recent employment, but other than one unpaid parking ticket her record was squeaky clean.

By the time I got back to Joan, they were ready to wrap and bag the body for transport to the morgue.