Page 84 of Holmes, Margaret and Poe

“Bree took the car.”

“It’s seven blocks from here.”

“What? Where?”

“Baseball fields near Tyler Elementary.”

“Oh, dear God.”

“I’ll see you later,” I said, and left the room and the house, becoming increasingly upset. I hurried down the road, sipping my coffee, nodding to people moving quickly in the chilly air. The closer I got to Tenth Street, the more I focused on the baseball field and the elementary school.

This would be the second time the Dead Hours killer had left a victim on a sports field near a school. Bart Masters, the fifth victim, had been found near a lacrosse field at Stoddert Middle School in Marlow Heights.

Uniformed police had Tenth Street shut off. I found Sampson standing on the pitcher’s mound looking at victim number seven. He’d been propped up against the backstop behind home plate.

Like all the others, he was covered with a sheet. Bloody tears had seeped through the sheet and down the front.

“Who found him?” I said.

“Local guy out for an early run. He wore a headlamp, said there was steam coming off the body when he spotted it at five a.m.”

Carly Rodgers, a deputy medical examiner, arrived on the scene.

“Hold up, Carly,” I said as she started toward the body.

The ME halted, looked at me as I walked across the infield grass to her. “What’s up, Dr. Cross?” she asked.

“That’s soft soil there all around home plate. I’m thinking there have to be footprints.” But when I checked the area, it looked freshly raked. The ground around the corpse had recently been scored as well.

“Are you kidding me?” Sampson said. “He kills the guy, puts the sheet on him, then hangs around to rake the area?”

“He’s bold and doesn’t want to be caught,” I said, looking for the rake but not seeing it.

A criminalist arrived and began photographing the corpse in situ. We waited until he was done before going with Rodgers to the body. We told her about the steam coming off the body when he was discovered. “He’d probably been dead only twenty or thirty minutes at that point,” Rodgers said, helping Sampson gingerly lift the sheet.

He was male, Caucasian, bearded, and bald. He wore a bloody blue tracksuit that said tyler athletics.

“Oh, Jesus, he works for the school,” Sampson said.

“Or he’s a proud parent,” I said, noticing a bulge in the right lower pocket of the jacket. With gloved hands I unzipped it and found a woven leather wallet. I eased it out of the pocket, opened it, and studied the DC driver’s license and a district school employee ID. “Dalton McCoy. Thirty-nine. A physical education teacher here at Tyler.”

Sampson squatted and gazed at the eyeless dead man. “Were you lured here, Dalton, or did you just blunder into him?”

CHAPTER 74

AFTER EXAMINING MCCOY’S CORPSE,Carly Rodgers said he’d died around four thirty in the morning, which jibed with the jogger seeing steam coming off the sheet.

Sampson began organizing a door-to-door canvass of the houses around the baseball field and the school. I went up the street to the school’s main entrance and found it open. I went inside. The principal, Helen Lawton, and her secretary had come in even though it was a weekend; Ms. Lawton was standing in the lobby talking to her secretary and wringing her hands.

I introduced myself. “I’m sorry to be here under the circumstances, Ms. Lawton. The body we found was one of your teachers, I’m afraid. Dalton McCoy.”

One hand flew to her mouth and she gasped. The other hand sought the wall for support. “Oh my God. No.”

Behind her, the secretary sat down hard on a chair outside the main offices.

“I’m going to need counselors,” the principal said. “Mr. McCoy was one of the favorites here at Tyler.” She began to cry. “This is going to shatter his wife and kids. Just shatter them.”

When she composed herself, Lawton said that McCoy taught phys ed and was one of the most conscientious people she’d ever worked with, always enthusiastic, always learning, always motivating the kids and his fellow teachers. He lived in Laurel, Maryland, with his wife, Karen, and their young children.

---