"The police reports are funny," he said. He shifted in the restaurant's booth opposite me. "But I know different. The peanut butter enticed rodents to come and gnaw away her body. A clever means of natural corpse disposal, if you will."

"Okay, I can buy that. But Quincy killed Brett, then went and jumped off Key Bridge. Case closed," I said. "Why is the peanut butter detail important?"

"Because it bothers me," said Gatlin. "Look, I intended to sponsor Brett for a college scholarship. That is before she ran into this Quincy and got sidetracked with what she insisted on calling love. I never did cozy up to Quincy, though."

"All right, what is it that I should do?" I asked him.

Gatlin looked grave. "Find out what went wrong between those two kids. Hightail it up to Georgetown where they lived. Here's their street address. Pry around. Surf the bars. Eavesdrop. Sniff the air. I'll never believe the cops' story until you investigate from wire to wire what really happened that night."

"You want me to go into D.C.?" I asked, incredulous. "That place is too dangerous. Hell, just last week a guard was shot and killed in a Wells Fargo holdup."

"You have a gun permit," said Gatlin.

Sighing, I asked, "You suspect there's something screwy about this murder and suicide?"

"With all my heart, I do," said Gatlin.

"All right," I said. "I'll get on it done right after our lunch."

"Skip lunch," Gatlin said.

* * *

I hated Georgetown. It's that ritzy, trendy corner of Washington, D.C. abutting the Potomac River. On balmy Friday and Saturday nights, college kids from American, Catholic, Georgetown, and a half dozen lesser universities converge to make it like party central. My fear wasn't of the young, bumptious faces teeming on the sidewalks but of the unseen creeps haunting the alleys and sewers.

Ages ago, I'd seen The Exorcist at the drive-in theater and was robbed of my youthful innocence. I, like a host of viewers, was left seeing devils for weeks. The movie scenes shot on location in Georgetown included those long, steep stairs and fog thick as, well, as peanut butter.

I took Interstate 66 East that snaked through Rosalyn and its canyons of tinted glass skyscrapers to reach Key Bridge which I crossed at happy hour. On the D.C. side of the Potomac, revelers had already kicked off festivities. Congested traffic up M Street was stop-and-go and at last I hooked down a side street and docked five blocks away. I would've rather cut out a kidney than give the DC government any of my money in a parking meter. Their crack smoking ex-mayor bred that animosity even if it happened over a decade ago. Cynicism dies hard.

It was a moderate, almost sultry night. I ranged out of my Prizm, peeled out of my windbreaker to shirtsleeves. By reflex, I ducked back inside to tap the glove compartment's button. Inside, I laid hands on a .44 Pug, then hesitated a moment. The glove compartment snapped back and I stood up empty-handed. D.C. had a no-gun ordinance and I had no wish to spend the night in a squalid jail cell on a weapons violation.

I marched up the dim side street. My eyes ticked off the address numbers tacked on lintels over doorways until I stood at the wrought iron gate to the brownstone where Brett Larson and her beau Quincy had "shacked up," Gatlin's term and not mine. My scan up and down the street was nonchalant and unhurried. Had I still smoked, I'd fired up a cigarette. The deserted, peopleless stretch of city block emboldened me enough to slip out a lock pick set and invite myself inside the brownstone.

The light switch at the door snapped but no there was juice. PEPCO, maybe unpaid for several billing cycles, had turned it off. No matter. I'd fetched along a pocket flash that illuminated just enough. I prowled further inside and talk about your minimalist lifestyle. Either that or the repo man had dropped by to get his.

The living room had a single wood ladderback chair and a dry brown ficus plant in a corner. The kitchen had been stripped down to its bare appliances and yellow floor tiles. I didn't find any peanut butter jars in the pantry, either. Only a bag of dry brown rice which the resident mice had taken a shine to. My footfall echoed over the floor planks and off the plaster walls.

Things only got stranger. Mounting the stairs I conjured visions of hell-haunted priests at the top of those damn long steps at 36th and Prospect Streets made famous in The Exorcist but shook off the reverie. Three rooms occupied the upper level. Two small bedrooms for the kids were barren. The larger master bedroom astonished me -- it was nicely and fully furnished.

The mahogany bedroom suite appeared secondhand, serviceable but not too badly dinged up from years of active living. The blue chenille bedspread I judged as new. The mirror over the bureau caught me nudging out drawers. Their contents were as expected. Petite lady's lingerie took up the first drawer. Tops and T-shirts in the one under it were neatly folded up. The closet's folding doors collapsed to unveil racks of dresses and blouses. Puzzled, I riffled my fingers through them.

It was as if I was a voyeur and Brett and Quincy's bedcovers were still warm.

The paperback on the nightstand was a romance, on its cover a well-endowed lady in the muscular arms of some stud sporting ringlets and white, even teeth. I thumbed through its pages but didn't see any dog-eared or marked. The spine was still pristine and uncracked. After tugging away a corner, I examined the bed sheets. Crisp, white percale, they looked unslept in.

Before leaving the brownstone, I made one more circuit through the upstairs, then downstairs and came away with the same confused, contradictory impressions. Maybe and maybe not someone had been inside here in the last forty-eight hours. Certainly since yellow PD barrier tape had been removed and the crime scene released back to the landlord, humans had invaded the premises. It was almost as if the previous occupants, Brett and Quincy, had never really left.

See what I mean? Georgetown. Always spooky and weird. I let myself out.

Under a streetlight spraying down its orangish rays, I pointed my cell phone in order to get a strong, clear signal. Lieutenant Rodriguez happened to be home, much to his chagrin when he heard it was me bending his ear.

"You're leaning on me for a favor," he said. "Lemme see if I feel a tilt . . . nope, so very sorry. Can't help you, Johnson."

"Yuk-yuk," I said. "Now, try this test. Substitute Gatlin in my place. Do you feel a tilt yet?"

"Robert Gatlin? That billionaire shyster is mixed up in this?"

"Up to his eyeballs. Now, do I win cooperation or get more static from you?"

"What-da-ya-need?"

"That's more like it. The Larson woman, the one found naked and dead in Rock Creek, I'm working on her case."

"Peanut Butter Brett? That's been closed out. It's yesterday's news, Frank."

"Not quite. Was her boyfriend's bag of bones ever fished out of the Potomac River?"

"Quincy? Negative. High tide must've dragged him out to the bay. Or he just lays on the riverbottom somewhere decomposing. At any rate, we had enough evidence to piece together all the ins and outs. No doubt you've read the final report."

"Yeah and it's Grade-A bullshit, too. How can you close this case without recovering Quincy's body? Or are you a soothsayer?"

"Obviously not," he said in a dry, clipped tone. "Look, the TV commercial is over and the Wizards are back on. They're playing the Utah Jazz. Malone and Stockton are shooting out the lights. I gotta go."

"All right then, blow me off, Rodriguez. But fair warning. I'm here to hurl a monkey wrench in your well-oiled theories about Brett Larson and Quincy. Care to comment?"

"Hurl away," he said, before cutting our connection.

"Prick," I murmured palming the cell phone into my pocket.

For a little while, I slouched there noodling things around in my head. The cavalier if not sloppy attitude of DC Homicide astounded me. Maybe it was just Rodriguez coasting until his twenty years were up and retire to a farm in Harper's Ferry. I'd like to have thought so. For me, it was elementary. No body found, no case closed. I checked my cheap watch and figured I'd hit Gatlin on the hip at the Racket Ball Club. He picked up on the third buzz.

"Did you know the cops never recovered Quincy's body?"

"You're kidding," said Gatlin. "What the hell are those people up there thinking? Trying to smooth this all over as a done deal. Was Brett ever ID'd at the autopsy?"

"You tell me, Zorro."

"Go bang on the Medical Examiner's office door," said Gatlin. "I'll work through back channels on this end to assure at least a warm body is there to meet you. Bring all our questions, too."

* * *

The prospect of dropping by the city morgue earned my special contempt. Still, driven by a perverse work ethic, I climbed back into the Prizm and headed in that direction. The squatty brick building I sought was dark and forbidding but a tepid yellow foamed around the window shades. I parallel parked at a fire hydrant and centered a stolen placard on my dash saying: "POLICE BUSINESS." The exterior door to rap knuckles on (its passkey reader was broken) was steel and the girl attired in a white lab coat and plaid skirt who let me in was twenty-two, maybe.

In the better light, she looked younger but, sad to say, I didn't. Smiling, I smelled an intoxicating sandalwood perfume or bath soap scent. Every damn city morgue, I guessed, had its silver lining.

"I'm Petula," she said, no accent. "Are you Mr. Johnson?"

"Frank, please. Can we get right to the Brett Larson cadaver?"

"Don't be nervous, Frank. Nobody here has a pulse except you and me."

"I don't dispute you, it's just that I break out in a bad rash from my formaldehyde allergy."

"Huh-uh. I wonder why you just called the deceased by name."

"How's that?"

"We never did determine that Jane Doe was your Brett Larson. Or should I say what was left to autopsy since her soft matter was ninety percent devoured."

"The DNA didn't match to Brett's?" I asked.

"Inconclusive. We gave this all to the police. Lieutenant Rodriguez investigated it."

"Yeah, well, that speaks volumes on why that didn't make it into their report."

We trawled by cadaver coolers with glass fronts. Inside, between patches of frost on the glass I saw fiberglass trays stuffed with corpses stacked to the ceiling. Petula seemed to pick up on my thoughts.

"We are a little backlogged," she said. "Still, we strive to do our absolute possible best."

"I don't doubt you in the least," I said.

At the last walk-in cooler, we advanced into the nippy cluttered space.

"The peanut butter corpse is here." Petula lifted away the flap to a blue polyester body bag unzipped down the middle. "Most of her internal organs were missing along with legs and arms. The skull was still intact but no flesh or brain matter was. Unfortunately, we can't rely on the ancient art of phrenology to read the bumps and marks on her crown for identification.

"So, you know nothing more now," I said, "than the night when she was wheeled in here."

"That's correct, Frank," she said. "You know what bugs me most about this one? The peanut butter. The police stood on their heads to explain it away with cock-eyed theories. I told my boss, the Deputy Medical Examiner, that the peanut butter was smeared on the corpse to attract rats, skunks, foxes, and any similar scavengers to feed on her flesh."

"Yeah, my boss has the same idea. I take it you got overruled."

Petula smiled as much as one can inside a morgue's cooler. "Well, I usually do on the most controversial cases that roll through here. Sometimes I wonder if this is what I want to be doing for the rest of my life."

I tapped her elbow. "Listen Petula, you pegged this one right. You just keep doing what you're doing, hear? For you, this line of work is instinctual. Hang in there."

Petula followed me out of the walk-in cooler and secured its door. "Thank you for the compliment, detective," she said. "I've got so many balls in the air, I don't which one is coming down anymore. I work three jobs just to make ends meet. I may even have to drop out of college for a couple semesters. Rent is high in the city and I have to live here to satisfy the resident requirement."

"Yeah, I know about that screwy law," I said. We walked by the stainless steel autopsy table. A Stryker bone saw on a corkboard liner was clean as a whistle. "I have an idea to pitch you but first I have to make a private phone call."

"By all means," she said. "Here, use my boss's office."

The office oddly reeked of Absorbine, Junior for athlete's foot. Lieutenant Rodriguez answered with a grim grunt. "Did the Wizards loose again?" I asked him.

"Their flashy point guard flubbed a three-pointer in the final nine-tenths of a second," replied Rodriguez. "Damn, I tried my best to get rid of you, but here you are bugging me again. What is it this time, Johnson?"

"You screwed up," I told him. "Your report got the wrong girl down for the peanut butter corpse. It wasn't Brett Larson. You should listen better to your M.E. folks. They're not all bozos. This gal Petula, for instance, knows her shit."

"Man, go hassle somebody else," said Rodriguez. "I ain't got the time to deal with the likes of you."

Prick, I thought. My second telephone call was also a repeater. After Gatlin brayed his greeting, I said, "Listen, I've got no idea what stunt Brett Larson and Quincy managed to pull off but you can scratch the murder and suicide angle."

"Yeah, tell me about it," he said in a weary voice. "No more than three minutes ago, I fielded a call from authorities in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Both of them, Brett and Quincy, were grabbed up on a routine traffic stop. Bags of cash in their trunk came from that Wells Fargo armor truck heist. They faked their murder and suicide to cover it up. Brett begged me to represent them. It nearly broke my heart in half to tell her no even if slick Quincy was the mastermind."

"Interesting," I said, turning to gaze through the office glass into the autopsy suite. Petula hummed while emptying the autoclave of sterilized instruments. "I might have a new young nominee deserving of your college scholarship if it still holds."

"Of course it does," said Gatlin. "When can I meet this young person?"

"As soon as I can tear her away from the city morgue," I told Gatlin. "It might take a while, though."