The Avenger

The dead, you know, never quite leave you alone.

* * *

A winter morning, early.

Mianni and Aarius are already gone. There will be more.

DeMarcus Simmons, for instance, is 1 month old at the moment and he is still alive. He will join the others by midsummer, another file in Jeffries's office, another little horror story relegated to Page 4 of the local section. People think child homicide is big news, like Adam Walsh or JonBenet Ramsey (or, locally, Brianna Blackmond), but they're wrong. Six or seven infants, toddlers or children under the age of 10 are killed by adults in the District each year, about 1,500 across the country. Most of them, if they make the news at all, are dispatched with paragraphs as short as their lives.

Which is why Jeffries is walking into Superior Court, the bus station of justice in the District, without the bother of any television cameras out front, to handle yet another child murder. She walks past the judges' names lit up on what looks like a scoreboard in the atrium: rapes, robberies, homicides, break-ins.

Courts are life-numbing at this hour. It is gray, rainy, cold. People walk in with dripping umbrellas. Defendants, who would be dressed up in coats and ties if a jury were present, appear in courtrooms in orange jail uniforms, their hair a mess, for two-minute status hearings. Their faces are slack, the expressions stuck between surly and bored.

Jeffries is soon standing at the podium in the courtroom of Judge Erik Christian. She is a brown-skinned woman with a series of light freckles across her nose, under her eyes. Her short hair is straightened, her eyes a deep brown. She is wearing dark green slacks, a pink and yellow and white blouse. Red lipstick. Once, this thug she was prosecuting wrote her 72 love letters so graphic in detail that they cannot be described outside of an abnormal psych class. This guy, who was white, told her she was the most beautiful colored woman he'd ever seen.

"Clearly, he was at least competent ," she says. " We can't say he was wrong about everything ."

She laughs, full-throated. She kept every single letter the guy sent. Reads them aloud to amuse or horrify guests.

She adores "I Love Lucy" reruns. She has stills from the show and a jar full of Tootsie Rolls and Dubble Bubble gum in her office.

Today she's dropping the prosecutorial hammer on Gregory Whitehead, who beat the aforementioned Mianni Goodine to death. He was the boyfriend of Mianni's mother. He told police he got drunk and then angry that the toddler wet her diaper.