Murder in Foggy Bottom

Chapter 1 Monday Night Washington, DC The corpse was well dressed.Washington Postreporter Joe Potamos looked down at the body behind a bench in the pocket park in front of the hotel at Eye and K streets, on the eastern edge of Foggy Bottom. The victim was a white male with neatly trimmed and combed salt-and-pepper hair. His suit was blue, shirt white, tie gray with small red-and-white flags. "Canadian," Potamos said to a tall, box-like man writing in a small notebook. "Huh?" Peter Languth muttered as he continued to write. "Canadian. Those little flags arc Canadian," Potamos said. "The red maple leaf in the middle and those red blocks on each side. You don't know that?" Homicide detective Languth stopped writing and turned to look down at Potamos. Languth was six feet four; Potamos topped out at five-eleven. "You get off on flags, Joe?" Potamos shrugged and started writing in his own long, slender, spiral-bound notebook. Uniformed officers stretched yellow crime scene tape around the scene. A late-arriving EMS team knelt next to the body. Pressing in for a closer look were a half-dozen homeless men for whom the park passed for home in summer. One of them had alerted a passing squad car to the dead man's intrusion. "Get back," Languth growled at them. In the humid atmosphere of the nation's capital, the heavy air pressed down like a rubber blanket, capturing the men's pungent body odor. "You guys ever hear of a shower?" Languth asked, wrinkling his bulbous nose. "The hot water stopped working in my mansion," the youngest of the homeless men said. "Call a plumber," Languth said. Potamos hoped he wasn't contributing to the bouquet of the moment. He'd been wearing the same blue chambray shirt two days in a row, and hadn't gotten around to getting last summer's lighter-weight clothing back from the cleaners. He itched under the weight of his gray tweed jacket. "Sit over there till I want to talk to you," Languth told the odd assortment of men, pointing to a bench a few feet away. To a uniformed cop, he said, "Make sure nobody leaves." Potamos arched his back against stiffness and yawned. Eleven-twenty. He'd dozed off in front of the television set in his one-bedroom condo in Rosslyn, Virginia, just across the Potomac from the District, when the call came from his editor telling him to get to the park. Such a call wouldn't have been made a few years ago, when the State Department was his beat, and minor-crime reporting was only a memory. But that wasthen. "Whadda you see?" Languth asked one of the EMS technicians who'd left the body to come to where the beefy,, balding detective stood with Potamos. "Something in the ribs, right side." "No weapon?" Potarnos asked. Languth scowled. "You see any weapons, Joe? You see something nobody else does? Except flags?" Potamos nodded at the bench where the vagrants had gathered, smoking cigarettes and passing a brown paper bag among them. "You check them out?" he asked. "Joe, write your goddamn story and leave the investigation to me." "Just asking. I thought I'd let a few facts slip into the story." "Well, don't. How's it feel getting down and dirty, Joe, hanging around real people after being a media star? You used to cover this neighborhood, right?" "Don't start with me," Potamos said, feeling the familiar anger bubble up inside. He visualized a tranquil, sun-drenched beach and drew slow, even breaths, the way he'd been taught in the anger-management course he'd been forced to take after the incident that had cost him his State Department assignment. And the inherent perks and prestige that went with it. State wasn't exacTruman, Margaret is the author of 'Murder in Foggy Bottom' with ISBN 9780375500695 and ISBN 0375500693.