My Soul to Keep by Tananarive Due Page B

complain about the snow.) Body wasn’t discovered until morning. Only clue at all was an unfamiliar black male who’d asked about her the day she was murdered. Composite sketch to follow, the report said.
    “Hey, Jessica, congrats on the book,” a female reporter called to Jessica, walking past the wire room, where she hovered over the whirring fax machine.
    “Thanks, Em.”
    Page eight was the composite sketch. The image on the fax was too dark and splotched to be helpful. All Jessica could see of the man was the curly outline of his hair and the whites of his eyes.
    It figured the suspect was supposed to be black, she thought. That could be some staffer’s convenient lie, like the white guy years ago who’d made up a story about a black attacker after he had killed his pregnant wife. That crazy woman who’d drowned her own sons, Susan Smith, had tried the same ploy. Pretty cozy, having a mystery visitor.
    “The thing I like about Banks,” Peter said, scanning the report over Jessica’s shoulder at her desk, “is that her father was a legend in Chicago. Didn’t the Trib say he was a jazz artist? Split, or vanished, when she was a kid. It’s just interesting to me. The father vanishes, one of the great mysteries in jazz lore, and now the daughter is murdered.”
    “I don’t know …” Jessica sighed. “This isn’t Unsolved Mysteries. The question is, Do we think this was abuse? We don’t want to include her and then have some nutcase step forward and say spacemen told him to do it.”
    “We can pin it on neglect, then, at the least. No night nurse. Someone comes in off the street and murders a patient.”
    Jessica still wasn’t convinced. They’d heard about some heinous cases of long-term abuse in the past few weeks, and suddenly the Chicago incident seemed pretty mild. She scrawled the woman’s name on a folder, slid the report inside, and dropped it on top of the pile of papers on her desk. “I don’t think this is for us. Too many loose ends.”
    Peter shrugged, walking away. “I’ll let you call it,” he said. “By the way, would you please take those damn flowers home?”
    “I’m saying,” the courts reporter who sat behind her spoke up, “you’re stinking the whole place up.”
    Jessica had two dozen purple-hued roses on her desk, awash in baby’s breath, delivered Monday from David to commemorate her last week until her book leave. A cynical part of her told her it wasn’t coincidence that David sent the flowers after he saw the troll Peter had given her, but the gesture was thoughtful anyway.
    He was being a good sport. Today, he was out pricing computers for her. He’d already cleared enough space in their tiny bedroom—how, she didn’t know—to furnish it with a small computer table. They would both be working at home, out of each other’s way. He joked about erotic midafternoon “work breaks,” when they could explore new areas of the house to ravage each other. The thought of it made her smile even now.
    Her phone bleeped, and she expected it to be David. Their telepathy was frightening sometimes. But it wasn’t him.
    “Hey, Miss Wol-dee. This is Boo.”
    Boo. For long seconds, Jessica’s brain was dumb with a lack of recognition. This man didn’t sound like one of her usual sources, and she didn’t recognize the street nickname.
    The man lowered his voice slightly. From the hollow echo, she guessed he was at a pay phone. “Evergreen Courts projects. You don’t ‘member me?”
    Boo. Evergreen Courts, Like microfilm, it all came into focus. He was a small-time crack dealer who’d called months earlier with a tip that the county’s housing maintenance staff was involved in trafficking and dealing in the projects. He’d given her one lead that turned out to be good and promised more, but she never heard from him again.
    Jessica couldn’t believe the bad timing. Here she was on her way out the door, and a potentially great story had reappeared.
    “What happened