The Night Gardener

'Black for me,' said Holiday, as Cook poured coffee into a couple of mugs. 'Thanks.'

A schoolhouse clock was hung on the wall, its time off by several hours. Holiday wondered if Cook had even noticed.

'I don't get many visitors,' said Cook, putting a mug in front of Holiday and sitting with his own across the table. 'My daughter once in a while. She's living down in the Tidewater area of Virginia. Married a navy man.'

'Your wife passed?'

'Ten years back.'

'I'm sorry.'

'It's a helluva thing, being where I'm at. You know those commercials on the TV, talking about the golden years? And those ads for retirement communities, handsome couples with straight teeth, golf clubs and swimming pools? It's all bullshit. There ain't one goddamn thing good about being old.'

'Did your daughter give you any grandchildren?'

'Yeah, she has a couple. So?'

Holiday gri

'I'm not even seventy yet. But I had a stroke a few years ago that knocked me on my ass. I guess you can tell, the way my mouth turns down. And I stutter some when I'm searching for words or I get flustered 'bout something.'

'That's rough,' said Holiday, hoping to end this part of the conversation.

'I can't write too good,' said Cook with determination, cataloging his ailments the way old folks tended to do. 'I can read the newspaper some, and I do it every morning, but it's a struggle. In the hospital, the doctor said I'd never read again, and that right there made me determined to prove him wrong. My motor skills are fine, though, and my memory is sharper than it was before I got ill. Fu

'Yep,' said Holiday. 'About the Johnson boy…'

'Yeah, you came over here for a reason.'

'Well, I was thinking that there might be a co

'Because of the boy's name.'

'And the fact that the body was found in that garden. The kid was shot in the head as well.'

'Why?'

'Why was he killed?'

'Why are you here?' said Cook.

'I discovered the body. Well, to be more accurate, I came upon the body and was the first one who called it in.'

'Now, how'd that happen?'

'It was late, after midnight. Around one-thirty, I would guess, sometime after last call.'

'You'd been drinking?'

'I was more tired than I was drunk.'

'Uh-huh.'

'I was driving down Oglethorpe, thinking it cuts through to New Hampshire.'

'And you hit a dead end. 'Cause it stops down there by the railroad tracks. The animal shelter and printing company on that street, too, if I recall.'

'You weren't kidding about your memory.'

'Go ahead.'

'I have a car service, like a limo thing. I had fallen asleep in my Lincoln, and when I woke up I got out to take a leak in the garden. There he was.'

'How long were you sleeping?'

'I'm not sure.'

'You were out cold?'

'No. I remember a couple of things. A police car with a perp in the back drove by me slow. And a young black man walking through the garden. The times and the spaces in between are foggy.'

'This police officer saw you sleeping in your car and he didn't stop to investigate it?'

'No.'

'You get a car number, something?'

'No.'

'Have you talked to the MPD?'

'Beyond the anonymous call-in, no.'

'So you really don't know anything.'

'Only what I saw and read in the Post.'

'I'm go

'Look, if you're not interested-'

'Not interested? Shit, boy.'

Cook made a come-on gesture with his head. Holiday got up and followed him out of the kitchen.

They went down a hall past an open bedroom door and one that was closed. And then a bathroom and toward a third room, from which Holiday began to hear squawk and a dispatcher's drone. Cook and Holiday walked into the room.

It was Cook's office. A computer monitor sat on a desk, its CPU beneath it. On the screen, a police sca

A large map of the metropolitan area was thumb-tacked to the wall. Yellow pushpins marked the various community gardens of the District. Red pushpins marked those gardens where the three victims of the Palindrome Murders had been found. Blue pins marked their home neighborhoods, the probable streets where they first disappeared. There was one lone green pin among the blues.

'Not interested,' said Cook. 'Three kids killed under my watch, and you say I'm not interested. Otto Williams, fourteen. Ava Simmons, thirteen. Eve Drake. Fourteen. Young man, I've been haunted by those murders for twenty years.'

'I was there,' said Holiday. 'I was in uniform at the Drake crime scene.'

'If you were, I don't remember you.'

'No reason why you would. But we all knew who you were. They used to call you the Mission Man.'

Cook nodded. 'That's 'cause I went after it. Most of the time I got it, too. That was before… well, that was before everything about the job got all fucked up. I retired with the Palindrome case unsolved. Hell of a note to go out on, right? Not that I didn't give it my best. We just couldn't get a handle on the killer, hard as we tried.

'The kids had been murdered in different spots from where they were found. They had been redressed in new clothes. That made the forensics work tough. All had semen and lubricant in their rectums. None had defensive marks or foreign tissue under their nails. To me it means that he had gained their confidence, or at least convinced them they wouldn't be harmed. He seduced them, in a way.

'All lived in Southeast. All of them had been picked up off the street, headed to the corner market or the convenience stores in their neighborhoods. Nobody saw them disappear or get into a car. It was unusual back then for no one to see anything or come forward, the way folks used to look out for their neighbors' kids. We had a ten-thousand-dollar reward out for any information. We got a lot of bullshit calls, but nothing that led to anything real.

'Had to be a black man for those black children to get into his car. I also figured it was a person of authority. Police, military, fireman, or someone wearing a uniform of some kind. Some said it was a taxi driver offering free rides, but I didn't buy into that. City kids wouldn't have fallen for it. A police or a police wa

'We canvassed friends, teachers, boyfriends and girlfriends, any potential sexual partner. I went to Saint Elizabeth's and interviewed the violent sex offenders they had there at the time. The criminally insane were locked up tight, so they couldn't have perpetrated those murders, but I interviewed them as well. Zombies on meds is all they were. So there was nothing there.

'I caught the first murder. Me and this white homicide police, Chip Rogers, who I considered to be my partner at the time. Chip's now deceased. After the second body they added a few other investigators. Finally, after the third and all the newspaper articles, the mayor ordered a force of twelve detectives, exclusively, to focus on the deaths. I was in charge of the detail. We shot miles of film at those kids' funerals, hoping the killer would post. We stationed squad cars at all the community gardens in the District, around the clock. I'd park my own car near those gardens some nights and just sit there, waiting.

'Some folks in the community said we weren't working the murders as hard as we would have if the victims had been white. I can't lie; that hurt me deep. Everything I went through, coming up in the ranks as a black man. First I wasn't smart enough to be police, then I wasn't seasoned enough to work Homicide. Not to mention, my own little girl was about the same age as those kids in nineteen eighty-five. You think didn't wear on me? Fu