Holiday's mouth fell open and his eyes flared. "My
sister died of leukemia when she was eleven years old, you piece a
shit."
Ramone looked away. For a while there was only the
squawk and hiss of the police radios and the low conversations of the
spectators in the crowd. Then Holiday cackled and slapped Ramone on the
back.
"I'm kiddin you, Giuseppe.Oh, Christ, but I had your
ass." The description of the victim had been matched to a list of
missing teenagers in the area. A half hour later, a man was brought to
the scene to identify her. As he looked at the body, a father's
anguished howl filled the night. The victim's name was Eve Drake. In the
past year, two other black teenagers, both living in the poorer sections
of town, had been murdered and dumped in similar fashion in community
gardens, both discovered shortly after sunrise. Shot in the head, both
had traces of semen in their rectums. Their names were Otto Williams and
Ava Simmons. Like Otto and Ava, Drake's first name, Eve, was spelled the
same way backward as it was forward. The press had made the connection
and dubbed the events the Palindrome Murders. Within the department,
some police had begun to refer to the perpetrator as the Night Gardener.
A CROSS TOWN, AT THE same time the father cried out
over his daughter's body, young Washingtonians were in their homes,
tuning in to Miami Vice, doing lines of coke as they watched
the exploits of two hip undercover cops and their quest to take down the
kingpins of the drug trade. Others read bestselling novels by Tom
Clancy, John Jakes, Stephen King, and Peter Straub, or sat in bars and
talked about the fading play-off prospects of the Jay Schroeder-led
Washington Redskins. Others watched rented VCR tapes of Beverly
Hills Cop and Code of Silence, the top picks that week at
Erol's Video Club, or barely sweated to Jane Fonda's Workout, or went
out and caught the new Michael J. Fox at the Circle Avalon or
Caligula at the Georgetown. Mr. Mister and Midge Ure were in town,
playing the clubs.
As these movers of the Reagan generation entertained
themselves west of Rock Creek Park and in the suburbs, detectives and
techs worked at a crime scene at 33rd and E, in the neighborhood of
Greenway, in Southeast D.C. They could not know that this would be the
last victim of the Palindrome Killer. For now, there was only a dead
teenager, one of three unsolved, and someone out there, somewhere, doing
the murders. On a cool rainy night in December 1985, two young uniformed
police and a middle-aged homicide detective were on the scene.
A bold, mesmerizing novel about the woman known as "Typhoid Mary," the first known healthy carrier of typhoid fever in the burgeoning metropolis of early twentieth century New York.
Z, the novel about the life of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald is at points charming and; like another reviewer, I kept thinking of the movie, "Midnight...
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Although heavy on the scientific details, which slowed down the story for me (OK, I admit, I was one of those liberal arts majors who skipped out on...
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Loved this book. Magical, quirky, enchanting I could go on. All books do not have to be literary fiction, sometimes it is just so comforting to read...
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British Parliament asks Amazon to clarify why it pays $9 million in income tax on $23 billion of UK sales.(May 20 2013) Amazon will be called back to give further evidence to members of the British Parliament "to clarify how its activities in the U.K. justify its low corporate...
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