Page 36

“How old did you say the victim was?”

“Fifteen.”

“Fifteen and on the street,” she said, shaking her head sadly.

“I think. Here, look.”

I got out the evidence bag containing Corey McGovern’s smartphone. I put on gloves and keyed in the passcode I’d discovered.

“Lot of pictures,” I said, showing her a few. “These are fairly recent.”

“Anyone report her missing yet?”

“No,” I said. “But John and I think we saw her yesterday morning under the Bridge to Nowhere. We’re pretty sure she was coming from seeing Hawk.” I scrolled over to the picture showing McGovern, Rodriguez, and the mysterious Choir Boy.

“Huh,” Bree said. “Got extra gloves?”

I reached into an inner coat pocket where I often carried a few and handed her a pair.

“May I?” she asked after putting them on.

I handed her the phone and watched as she closed the photo album and pulled up Instagram. It immediately jumped to Corey McGovern’s page and a post from the day before, a selfie of her wearing the same clothes we’d seen her in yesterday afternoon.

McGovern was standing on a large manicured lawn, probably a park, though I could not place which one. Her yellow cap was on backward. Her pigtails were sticking out. She was making a goofy face at the camera.

“‘Make way for a positive day, y’all,’” Bree said, reading the caption aloud.

“Yeah.”

Bree scrolled down through more selfies. Picture after picture on Instagram showed the girl in front of swanky restaurants, trendy nightclubs, and other fancy settings around Washington, DC. The captions suggested that she visited these places often.

McGovern wore a simple black cocktail dress and heels in most of those photos. In one pic, however, she was dressed in jeans, a white T-shirt, and white sneakers and was sitting on the front stoop of a beautiful town house on a leafy street with brick sidewalks.

The caption read No place like home and was tagged as Georgetown.

“She’s projecting a fantasy life,” I said.

“Like most people on social media do to one degree or another. You’re positive that you saw her under the bridge yesterday?”

“If it wasn’t Corey, it was her twin sister,” I said, then glanced at my watch and saw it was almost noon. “Damon was saying Nana won’t be all the way off the drugs until later this afternoon?”

“Around five,” Bree said, nodding.

“I’ll be back by four, but text if she starts waking up sooner,” I said, putting the phone back into the evidence bag.

“Where are you going now?”

“Back to the bridge and its trolls.”

34

IT WAS NEARLY ONE in the afternoon and brutally hot and humid for May when John Sampson and I climbed out of our car and once again walked toward the ghost ramp and the desperate denizens living beneath the Bridge to Nowhere.

As before, sentries posted in the high corners of the north and south embankments watched us as we approached. For the first time, I saw hand signals exchanged on the north side, the one run by Lainey Locket, and I thought I heard a whistle come from one of the watchers on Hawk’s aerie.

Sampson and I had discussed going straight to the high troll of the south. But then we saw Anna Bananas in the shade of the ghost ramp, sitting on the retaining wall at the base of the north embankment.

“Two coppers going up, up, up,” she said when she saw us.