Alex Cross 3 - Jack and Jill Read online

  I rose to my full height. At six three I was only a few inches taller than Mrs. Johnson.

  “You've been at both murder scenes,” I said to her. “You live around here? You live nearby?”

  She shook her head. She looked straight up into my eyes. Her eyes were so intense, so large and round. They held mine and wouldn't let go. "I know a lot of people in the neighborhood.

  Someone called me at home. They felt I should know. I grew up near here in the Eastern Market section,“ she volunteered. ”This is the same killer, isn't it?"

  I didn't answer her question. “I may need to talk to you about the murders later,” I said. “We might have to talk to some of the children at school again. I won't do that unless we have to, though. They've been through enough. Thank you for your concern. I'm sorry about Vernon Wheatley.”

  Mrs. Johnson nodded and kept looking at me with incredibly penetrating eyes. Who exactly are you? they seemed to ask.

  You've been at both murder scenes, too.

  “How can you do this kind of work?” she suddenly blurted out.

  It was an unexpected and startling question. It should have seemed tactless, but somehow it didn't. It happened to be my own personal mantra. How do you do this work, Alex? Why are you the dragonslayer? Who exactly are you? What have you become?

  “I don't really know.” I told her the truth.

  Why had I admitted the weakness to her? I rarely did that with anyone, not even with Sampson. It had suffered. The autopsy of a murdered child is as bad as it gets.

  Two detectives from the local precinct waited nearby. So did the morgue team. Everything was so quiet, so sad, so horribly bad, at the scene. There is nothing any worse than the murder of a child. Nothing I've seen, anyway. I remember every one that I've been to. Sampson sometimes tells me I'm too sensitive to be a homicide detective. I counter that every detective should be as sensitive and human as possible.

  I rose to my full height. At six three I was only a few inches taller than Mrs. Johnson.

  “You've been at both murder scenes,” I said to her. “You live around here? You live nearby?”

  She shook her head. She looked straight up into my eyes. Her eyes were so intense, so large and round. They held mine and wouldn't let go. "I know a lot of people in the neighborhood.

  Someone called me at home. They felt I should know. I grew up near here in the Eastern Market section,“ she volunteered. ”This is the same killer, isn't it?"

  I didn't answer her question. “I may need to talk to you about the murders later,” I said. “We might have to talk to some of the children at school again. I won't do that unless we have to, though. They've been through enough. Thank you for your concern. I'm sorry about Vernon Wheatley.”

  Mrs. Johnson nodded and kept looking at me with incredibly penetrating eyes. Who exactly are you? they seemed to ask.

  You've been at both murder scenes, too.

  “How can you do this kind of work?” she suddenly blurted out.

  It was an unexpected and startling question. It should have seemed tactless, but somehow it didn't. It happened to be my own personal mantra. How do you do this work, Alex? Why are you the dragonslayer? Who exactly are you? What have you become?

  “I don't really know.” I told her the truth.

  Why had I admitted the weakness to her? I rarely did that with anyone, not even with Sampson. It was something about her eyes. They demanded the truth.

  I lowered my eyes and turned away from her. I had to. I went back to my note taking. My head was thick with questions, bad questions, bad thoughts, and worse feelings about the murder.

  The two murders. The two cases.

  Why does he hate children so much? I kept asking myself. Who could possibly hate these little children so much? He had to have been badly abused himself. Probably a male in his twenties. Not too organized or careful.

  I had the thought that we would catch this one -- but would we catch him soon enough?

  I WAS WAITING for possible disciplinary action from the department, waiting for the whisper of the ax. It didn't come right away Chief Pittman was holding his sharp knife over my head.

  The Jefe was playing with me. Cat and mouse.

  Maybe the higher powers wouldn't let him act... on account of Jack and Jill. That was it. It had to be. They felt that they needed me on the celebrity stalkings and murders.

  While I waited in limbo, there was plenty of work to do. I passed the hours checking and rechecking the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit data for anything that might possibly connect the two child murders to any others in Washington--or anywhere else, for that matter. Then I repeated almost the same process on Jack and Jill. If you want to understand the killer, look at his work.

  Jack and Jill were organized. The child killer was disorganized and sloppy The cases couldn't have been more different.

  I continued to feel that I couldn't work two complex homicide cases like these at the same time. I believed it was time for my so-called deal with the department to start working both ways.

  I made some phone calls late in the afternoon. I called in a few chips, favors I was owed inside the department. What did I have to lose?

  That night four homicide detectives from the 1st District met me in the deserted parking lot behind the Sojourner Truth School. pounds was a genuine badass in the department. All in all, four troublemakers. Four very good cops, though. Probably the best I knew in Washington.

  The detectives I'd chosen all lived right in Southeast. They each took the child murders personally and wanted the gruesome case solved quickly -- no matter what their other priority assignments were.

  Sampson was the last one to arrive, but he was only a few minutes past the ten o'clock starting time. The secret get-together would definitely have been shut down by the chief of detectives.

  I was about to set up an off-duty unit to help find the killer of Shanelle Green and Vernon Wheatley. We weren't vigilantes, but we were close.

  “The late John Sampson,” Jerome Thurman quipped and let out a high-pitched laugh when Sampson finally entered the tight circle of homicide detectives. Thurman was close to two hundred seventy pounds, not much of it soft. He and Sampson liked to go at each other, but they were good friends. It had been that way since we all played roundball in the D.C. high school leagues a thousand or so years ago.

  "My watch says ten on the dot,,' Sampson said, without peeking at his ancient Bulova.

  “Then ten o'clock it is,” contributed Shawn Moore. Moore was a hard-driving, young detective with three kids of his own. His family lived less than a mile from the Truth School, as it's usually called in the neighborhood. One of his boys went there with Damon.

  “I'm glad you all could come out to play on this chilly night,” I said after the ribbing and small talk had settled down. I knew that these detectives got along and had respect for one another. I also knew this meeting would never get back to TheJefe through any of them.

  "Sorry to get you out here so late. Best we don't be seen together.

  Thanks for coming, though. This school yard seemed like the right place for what we have to talk about. I'll make it as short as possible," I said, looking around at all the faces.

  “You'd better, Alex,” Jerome warned me. “Freezin' my fat ass off.”

  “You've all heard about the Seven-year-old boy found in Garfield Park this morning?” I asked the detectives. “Boy by the name of Vernon Wheatley.”

  Heads nodded solemnly around the circle. Bad homicide news always travels quickly.

  "Well, I've been thinking about these child murders a lot.

  I've run the evidence we have through the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program and also the Behavioral Science Unit databanks. Nothing comes up that's a match. I have a preliminary psych profile working. I hope that I'm wrong, but I'm afraid there's a pattern killer working in this neighborhood. This is probably a serial killer of children. I'm almost sure of it."

  “How bad a situation are w
e talking, Alex?” Rakeem Powell leaned in and asked me.

  I knew what Rakeem was getting at. He and I had worked on a tough pattern-killer case a few years back. “I think this one is already in heat, Rakeem. The two murders came within days. There was a high level of violence. He seems to be in a rage, or damn close to it. I say he, though it might be a she.”

  “Violent for a female,” Sampson said. He cleared his throat.

  “Too much... blood... crushed skulls... little kids.” He shook his head no. “Doesn't feel like a woman to me.”

  “I tend to agree,” I said, “but you never know these days. Look at Jill.”

  “How many detectives assigned to the child murders? ”Jerome Thurman asked through thick lips that were pursed and stuck way out from his face, like those candy lips kids wear and then eat when they tire of having fat lips.

  “Two teams.” I told them the bad news. “Only one is full-time, though. That's the reason I wanted us to meet. The chief of detectives is resisting any theory that the same person killed both children. Emmanuel Perez is stilll on the books as the killer of the girl.”

  “That dumb motherfuck asshole,” Jerome Thurman growled angrily. “That bastard's as useless as titties on a bull.”

  The other detectives cursed and grumbled. I had expected a negative reaction to anything The Jefe said or did. Still, I wasn't into cheap shots. Much as I was tempted.

  “How sure are you about this being the same killer, Alex?” Rakeem asked. “You said your profile is preliminary. I know this shit takes time.”

  I sniffed in the cold, then went on. “The second child, the little boy, had his face badly smashed in, Rakeem. Only one side of the face, though. It was exactly like the murdered little girl's face. Same side, the right. No significant variation that I could find. The medical examiner corroborates that. The ”unsub" probably feels that he has a good and a bad side. The bad side gets punished--destroyed, is more like it.

  “The final thing, and this is just a best guess at this point, I think he's a beginner at this. But devious and clever just the same... a risk taker. He'll make a mistake. I think we can get him soon, if we work together. But it has to be soon. I think we can nail this one!”

  Sampson finally spoke up. “You going to talk about what's really going down here, Alex, or you want me to?”

  I smiled at what Sampson had said, the cranky way he'd said it. “No, I thought I'd leave the real dirty work to you.”

  “As usual,” he said. "Here's what Alex hasn't said so far. Just to get it out on the dance floor. The real reason one team of detectives is assigned to these murders goes something like this.

  One, it happened in the area of the projects, and we know all the shit flows downhill in D.C. and eventually ends up here. Two, Jack and Jill is sucking up everybody's time in the department.

  Rich white people are being killed. They're scared shitless up on Capitol Hill and such. So of course we drop everything else. Two little black kids don't matter much, not in the greater scheme, not in the big picture."

  “Sampson and I have been working on the Truth School murders.”

  I picked up his thread, just lowered the volume a touch.

  “Strictly off the books. We have to do our own surveillance,” I added, so that everybody knew the deal. “We need some help now. This is a major homicide case. Unfortunately, there are two major cases in Washington at this time.”

  “Only one case on my mind,” Rakeem Powell said. “One guess which case it is.”

  “You know you've got the Fatman on board.” Jerome Thurman raised his high-pitched voice and punched his stubby club of an arm into the air. “I'm in. I'm on your nonpayroll with all its nonbenefits and risks for forced early retirement. Sounds great.”

  “My boy goes to the Sojourner Truth School, Alex,” Shawn Moore said. “I'll make the time for this. Hope I can fit in Jack and Jill.”

  We laughed at the jokes. It was our hardass approach to the difficult problems at hand. The five of us were in. We just didn't have any idea what we were in for.

  There were definitely two major murder cases in Washington and now there were two task forces to try and solve them. One and a half task forces, anyway.

  “Cocktails, anyone?” Jerome Thurman asked in the softest, most cultivated voice. You'd have thought we were at the old Cotton Club in Harlem as he passed around his beat-up Washington Redskins game flask.

  We all took a hit; more like two or three.

  We were blood brothers.

  I WORKED the Jack and Jill case from five in the morning until three o'clock in the afternoon. Me and about ten thousand other harried law officers around D.C. I was checking for a possible link between Senator Fitzpatrick and Natalie Sheehan. We even looked at news photos taken of them in the past months.

  Maybe somebody interesting would show up in the background of a shot. Or even better, show up twice. I had a detective visiting all of the kinky sex shops around D.C. He called the assignment the ultimate Jack-off.

  I met Sampson at the Boston Market restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue at three-thirty It was time for our second job. Our other homicide case, the “back burner” case. This arrangement was definitely much better -- not great, but a significant improvement over the past few days of frustration and utter madness for me.

  “I think you might be right on the button about one thing, Alex,” Sampson told me over a lunch of double-glazed meat loaf and mashed potatoes made from scratch. “The Truth School killer is an amateur. He's sloppy Maybe a first-timer at this. He left prints all over the second crime scene, too. The techies got his prints, some hair, threads off his clothing. Based on the prints, the killer is a small man -- or possibly a woman. If this squirrel isn't careful, he or she is going to get their squirrel ass caught.”

  “Maybe the killer wants to,” I said between bites of a meat loaf sandwich spiced with decent tomato sauce. “Or maybe the killer just wants us to think he's a first-timer. That could be the act. Someone might play it like that.”

  Sampson grinned broadly It was his best killer smile. “Do you have to double- and triple-think everything, Sugar?”

  “Of course I do. That's my job description. That's Alex's cross,” I said and offered my own killer smile.

  “Oh, ho !” said Man Mountain and grinned again. Man, I loved being with him, loved to make him laugh.

  “Anything in from the rest of the team?” I asked him. "Jerome?

  Rakeem?"

  "They're all working the case, but still no tangible results.

  Nothing yet from the go-team."

  “We need surveillance at the boy's funeral and at Shanelle's gravesite. The killer might not be able to stay away A lot of them can't.”

  Sampson rolled his eyes. "We'll do what we can. Do our best.

  Surveillance at a child's gravesite. Shee-it."

  At quarter past four, the two of us split. I headed over to the Sojourner Truth School.

  The principal's car was sitting in the small, fenced-in parking lot. I remembered that Mrs. Johnson sometimes worked late after classes. That was good for me. I wanted to talk to her about Shanelie Green and Vernon Wheatley What connection was there between the Truth School and the killer? What could it be?

  I knew approximately where the principal's office was located in the annexed building, so I walked directly there. It was a very nice school, for just about any area of the city Outside, near the street, a chain-link fence with razor wire ran the perimeter of the school yard, but the inside was festive, very bright, imaginatively decorated.

  I read several hand-lettered posters and banners as I walked.

  CHILDREN FIRST. GROW WHERE YOU ARE PLANTED. SUCCESS COMES IN CANS, Comball, but nice. Inspiring for the children, and for me as well.

  That particular week the hallway display cases were filled with “animal shelters,” which were made by the kids, each one illustrating an animal and its habitat. It struck me that the Sojoumer Truth School was a terrific habitat i
tself. Under normal circumstances, it was a sweet place for Damon to grow and learn.

  Unfortunately, two little babies from this school had been murdered in the last week.

  That made me furiously angry, and it also frightened me more than I wanted to admit. When I was growing up, tough as it was supposed to have been in D.C., kids seldom if ever died at our school. Now, for a lot of reasons, it happened all the time in schools. Not only in Washington but in L.A."s schools. New York's. Chicago's. Maybe even Sioux City's.

  What the hell was going on from sea to shining sea?

  The heavy wooden door to the inner administrative office was open, but the assistant appeared to have left. On her desk was a collection of Caucasian, African-American, and Asian play dolls.

  A sign read: Barbara Breckenridge, I can really tap-dance.

  I felt like a housebreaker, a neighborhood break-and-enter artist', a bad character of some sort or other. Suddenly, I was concerned about the principal working late by herself in the school.

  Anyone could walk in here, just as I had done. The Sojoumer Truth School killer could walk in here some night. It would be so easy This easy.

  I turned the corner into the main office and was about to announce my presence when I saw Mrs. Johnson. I thought of my made-up name for her -- Christine.

  She was busy at work at an old-fashioned rolltop desk that looked at least a hundred years old. She was lost in the work, actually I watched her for a couple of seconds. She wore gold-wire glasses to do her paperwork. She was humming the “Shoop Shoop” song from Waiting to Exhale. Sounded nice.

  There was something enormously right, even touching, about the scene -- the dedicated teacher, the educator, at work. A smile passed across my lips. She's even tougher than you are, Daddy.

  I still wondered about that. She didn't look tough at the moment.