“Coming?” said Carmia, a devout Christian with pretty brown eyes who was built small and stocky, like a low-to-the-ground running back.
Anna shut down her government cell phone, then gathered the few belongings she had brought into the jail and placed them in a clear plastic handbag.
“Let’s go.”
Anna and Carmia exited the D.C. Central Detention Facility and walked to the lot where they had parked their cars. They passed a variety of guards, visitors, administrators, and law enforcement officers, driving, headed on foot to their vehicles, or standing around, catching smokes and talking about their day. The jail was at Nineteenth and D, Southeast, on the eastern edge of the 20003 zip code and residential Kingman Park. Longtime natives knew the area mainly as the 190-acre Stadium-Armory Campus, which housed the jail, the former D.C. General Hospital, now an enormous homeless shelter, and the beloved RFK Stadium, where the Washington Redskins had played during their glory years.
“Have a blessed day,” said Carmia, veering off toward a Japanese import that she would be paying on for the next five years.
“You also,” said Anna. She found her car, a boxy black-over-cream Mercury Mariner, the discontinued sister car to the Ford Escape. It had good sight lines and fulfilled its function as an urban runner. More important to Anna, it was paid for.
Seagulls glided down from overhead and landed in a small group in the parking lot. It sometimes took her aback to see the birds but of course she was steps from the Anacostia River and not far from the Potomac and the Chesapeake Bay.
She got into her SUV and retrieved her wallet and personal cell from the glove box, where she locked them up each morning. She let down her hair and lowered her driver’s-side window. Anna took a moment, breathed in fresh air, and listened to the call of the gulls.
Three
Phil Ornazian stepped out of his house, a neat brick brownstone southeast of Grant Circle, in Petworth, on the 400 block of Taylor Street, Northwest. The closing of his front door muffled the sounds of his two raucous dogs, his laughing sons, and his wife, Sydney, who was chastising the boys for something, like trampolining on the furniture or throwing a ball in the living room, or... something. For being kids. They were doing what children do, and she was doing what mothers do. His role, as he conveniently saw it, was to keep the roof over their heads, the utilities on, and the refrigerator and pantry full. “Going hunting,” he would typically say before he left the house. “Gotta drag the meat back to the cave.” This was his unsubtle rationalization for the time he spent away from home.
Ornazian quickstepped off the porch, went down to the street, and opened the gate on the chain-link fence he’d had installed as soon as his older boy had learned to walk. Toys, balls, a trike, and a training-wheeled bike were in the “yard,” which was mostly dirt. Ornazian couldn’t get to his car, a 2013 double-black Ford Edge, fast enough.
Men like him were at peace only when they were away from home. The office, which for him was mostly his car and the streets, was much more orderly and controllable than his house. He was into his wife and his children but felt it was unnatural and unproductive for a man to work at home.
They had agreed early on that Sydney would raise the children and he would bring in the dosh. Syd did not have a paying job but she worked as hard as any person he knew. She was not insecure around women who were professionals and didn’t want to miss out on the experience of being with her children as much as possible, knowing instinctively that time spent away from them, in a window that was, after all, very short, was time she could never get back. Unfortunately, it meant that they sacrificed extras and sometimes struggled financially. But Phil Ornazian was above all a hustler. When his legit business was not flourishing, when his investigation work dried up, as it tended to do, he improvised.
“Hello, Miss Mattie,” he said, to an elderly neighbor who was walking her small, short-haired mutt whose coat had gone gray. They both moved very slowly.
“Phillip,” she said. “Off to work?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Mattie Alston was one of the dwindling number of long-term home owners still on this block. Many of the homes had been sold off by their original owners at a tremendous profit or passed on to heirs who had either moved in themselves or taken the money and bought elsewhere. That was the upside of gentrification. Longtime property owners did well, if they wanted to. Renters, however, were typically displaced and left with nothing.
Ornazian had bought this house on the cheap when he was single, fifteen years earlier, before Petworth turned, before young, new-Camelot college graduates flowed in and put down roots in sections of the city that white Washingtonians had once fled. If he were to sell his house now, he’d walk with three, four hundred thousand dollars or more. But where would he go?
Ornazian got into his Ford, hit the push-button ignition, and heard the engine roar to life. With twenty-twos, custom rims, and extended pipes, the Sport model had a little more flair than the standard Edge, and it was as horsed up as a Mustang GT. Ornazian was something of a car freak and felt he needed the extra power in case he had to get out of trouble. That was how he explained it to his wife. Like all of the vehicles he had purchased since his marriage, this one was a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
“What’s this, then?” said Sydney, with her working-class-Brit accent, the day he’d driven the car home. From their concrete-and-brick-pillar porch, she eyed him and the black SUV suspiciously.
“Family car,” said Ornazian.
“The Dale Earnhardt Jr. family,” she’d said.
Ornazian took Fifth Street south to Park Place, going along the Soldiers’ Home, and then back on Fifth, between the McMillan Reservoir and behind Howard University, bypassing the congestion of Georgia Avenue and coming out around Florida to the western edge of LeDroit Park. He was headed for New York Avenue and a quick route out of the city. Ornazian knew the backstreets and the shortcuts. He didn’t need Waze or any other app. He’d lived in the District his whole life.
At dusk, he came off 295 onto Eastern Avenue, drove along the easternmost border of Maryland and D.C., crossed Minnesota Avenue, then hung a left and dipped off into Maryland.
A half mile out of the city, on a tough stretch of road, in a low-income area of Prince George’s County, he parked in a lot before a complex of brick buildings, a one-stop-shop arrangement catering to various needs. There was a barbecue restaurant with a drive-through, a supper club touting dancers, a barbershop, a pawnbroker, a check-cashing service, and a liquor store with barred windows. Beside the liquor store were the offices of a bail bondsman. The sign outside read WARD BONDS, 24 HOURS, AT YOUR SERVICE. A phone number was prominently displayed below the words.
At the door of Ward Bonds, Ornazian rang a buzzer, looked up into a camera mounted on the brick wall, and heard a click. He stepped into a kind of lobby, a small waiting area bordered by a dirty wall of Plexiglas, through which it was just possible to make out the main office. Customers or potential clients could talk to the employees through a circle of holes bored through the Plexiglas until they were cleared for entry. The setup resembled a combination bank and urban Chinese carryout.