Page 39 of Return of the Spider
She shrugged and put down Damon; he giggled and ran over to his toys in the living room. “Honestly, I never heard of him. Why?”
“Long story,” I said. “What about Patrice Prince?”
Despite her small stature, my wife was rarely intimidated by anyone. I’d seen her walk up to dangerous men who outweighed her by a hundred pounds and quickly put them under her spell. But when I mentioned Prince’s name, Maria lost color and sat down in her chair. “That is one scary person, Alex.”
“You know him?”
A sour expression crossed her face. “I met Prince once. Last year.”
Maria said one of Prince’s young cousins was beaten and left for dead in an alley in Southeast. The gang leader had come to the hospital.
“He was very polished,” she said. “Nicely dressed. Expensive clothes, but not flashy. His English was very good. He was polite and soft-spoken, but…”
“What?”
She looked at me, the memory of a repellent experience etched on her face. “Alex, you know I’ve encountered more than my fair share of bad people at work.”
I nodded.
“Prince?” she continued with the barest of shivers. “He had the deadest eyes I have ever seen. No empathy. No compassion. No recognition. No soul. I mean, I felt like I was a few feet away from someone who wasn’t entirely human. He seemed reptilian to me, and I doubt he saw me as an equal.”
“He probably didn’t. Sounds like antisocial personality disorder.”
“I could see that,” Maria said, glancing over at Damon, who was playing with his blocks. “And now I don’t want to talk about that guy anymore other than to say I hope you find him doingsomething bad enough that you can put him in a cage for a long time.”
I got up to clear the plates. “If he’s behind the murder, that’s my plan.”
“Be very, very careful around him, Alex,” she said. “I’m telling you, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who radiated such a sense of threat.”
“I hear you loud and clear,” I said, and went to the sink with the plates.
On an impulse born of old habit, I reached over and turned on the little portable radio we had on the counter. WTOP all-news radio came on. The announcer finished the local forecast and began a recap of the day’s events.
“The Prince George’s County Sheriff investigators are still gathering evidence in the Beltsville double homicide of two young medical technicians. Twenty-three-year-old Selena DeMille and twenty-two-year-old Alice Ways were found this morning in Ms. DeMille’s vehicle.
“Sources say that the two women appeared to have been approached while they were parked on a secluded stretch of road and were shot multiple times at close range. Investigators concede they have very few leads and are asking the public to come forward with any information regarding the—”
Maria turned the radio off and fixed me with her irresistible smile. “Less attention on crime, more attention on the spell caster and our boy.”
But I couldn’t concentrate after hearing that another pair of victims had been shot while sitting in a parked car. It had to be related to the Talbot case. I felt pulled in multiple directions, but I quickly decided on the right one.
I put my hands on my wife’s shoulders. “Maria, I love you. Iadore you and Damon. But you’ll have to hold that thought. I promise all attention will be on the spell caster and our boy tomorrow night.”
I kissed her and walked to the front door.
“Where are you going?” she asked in frustration.
“Beltsville,” I said, and left.
CHAPTER
28
At ten o’clock thefollowing morning, I was under fire from multiple sides.
Maria had given me the cold shoulder at breakfast and left early to take Damon to day care. When I arrived at the office, Sampson was out getting his root canal, and I had a note on my desk from Chief Pittman ordering me to go see him as soon as I got in.
I knocked on the chief’s doorjamb a few moments later. Pittman looked up from some paperwork, his face expressionless.
