Jack & Jill Page 2

  Jack and Jill.

  PART I

  IT’S TOMORROW AGAIN

  CHAPTER

  1

  OH NO, it’s tomorrow again.

  It seemed as if I had no sooner fallen asleep than I heard banging in the house. It was loud, as disturbing as a car alarm. Persistent. Trouble too close to home?

  “Shit. Dammit,” I whispered into the soft, deep folds of my pillow. “Leave me alone. Let me sleep through the night like a normal person. Go away from here.”

  I reached for the lamp and knocked over a couple of books on the table. The General’s Daughter and My American Journey and Snow Falling on Cedars. The mishap jolted me fully awake.

  I grabbed my service handgun from a drawer and hurried downstairs, passing the kids’ room on the way. I heard, or thought that I could hear, the sound of their soft breathing inside. I had been reading them Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit the night before. Don’t go into Mr. McGregor’s garden: Your father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor.

  I clutched the Glock even more tightly in my right hand. The banging stopped. Then started up again. Downstairs.

  I glanced at my wristwatch. It was three-thirty in the morning. Jesus, mercy. The witching hour again. The hour I often woke up without any help from outside forces, from things that go BANG, BANG, BANG in the middle of the night.

  I continued down the steep, treacherous stairs. Cautious, suspicious. Suddenly, it was quiet all around me.

  I made no sound myself. My skin felt electrified in the darkness. This was not the recommended way to start the day, or even the middle of the night. Don’t go into Mr. McGregor’s garden: Your father had an accident….

  I continued into the kitchen—my gun drawn—where I suddenly saw the source of the banging. The day’s first mystery was solved.

  My friend and partner was lurking at the back door like some high-octane version of a neighborhood hugger-mugger.

  John Sampson was the noisemaker; he was the trouble in my life; the day’s first disturbance, anyway. All six foot nine, two hundred forty pounds of him. Two-John as he’s sometimes called. Man Mountain.

  “There’s been a murder,” he said as I unlocked, unchained, and opened up for him. “This one is a honey, Alex.”

  CHAPTER

  2

  “OH JESUS, JOHN. You know what time it is? You have any concept of time? Please get the hell away from my house. Go home to your own house. Bang on your own door in the middle of the night.”

  I groaned and slowly shook my head back and forth, working nasty sleep-kinks out of my neck and shoulders. I wasn’t quite awake yet. Maybe this was all a bad dream that I was having. Maybe Sampson wasn’t on the back porch. Maybe I was still in bed with my pillow-lover. And maybe not.

  “It can wait,” I said. “Whatever the hell it is.”

  “Oh, but it can’t,” he answered, shaking his head. “Believe me, Sugar, it can’t.”

  I heard a creaking noise behind me in the house. I swung around quickly, still a little spooked and jumpy.

  My little girl was standing there in the kitchen. Jannie was in her electric-blue-butterfly pajamas, in her bare feet, with a frightened look on her face. The latest addition to our family, a beautiful Abyssinian cat named Rosie, trailed Jannie by a step or two. Rosie had heard the noise downstairs, too.

  “What’s the matter?” Jannie asked in a sleepy whisper, rubbing her eyes. “Why are you up so early? It’s something bad, isn’t it, Daddy?”

  “Go back to sleep, sweetheart,” I told Jannie in the softest voice I could manage. “It’s nothing,” I had to lie to my little girl. My work had followed me home again. “We’ll go upstairs now, so you can get your beauty sleep.”

  I carried her up the stairs, softly nuzzling her cheek on the way, whispering sweet nonsense, dream talk. I tucked her in and checked on my son, Damon. Soon the two of them would be heading off to their respective schools—Damon at Sojourner Truth, Jannie at Union Street. Rosie the cat continually crisscrossed between my legs as I performed my ministrations.

  Then I got dressed, and Sampson and I hurried to the early-morning crime scene in his car. We didn’t have far to go.

  This one is a honey, Alex.

  Just four blocks from our house on Fifth Street.

  “I’m awake now, whether I like it or not, and I don’t like it. Tell me about it,” I said to Sampson as I watched the glittering red and blue lights of police cars and EMS trucks come into focus up ahead.

  Four blocks from our house.

  A lot of blue-and-whites were clustered at the end of a tunnel of leafless oak trees and red-brick project buildings. The disturbance appeared to be at my son Damon’s school. (Jannie’s school is a dozen blocks in the opposite direction.) My body tensed all over. There was a roaring, wintry shitstorm inside my head.

  “It’s a little girl, Alex,” Sampson said in an unusually soft voice for him. “Six years old. She was last seen at the Sojourner Truth School this afternoon.”

  It was Damon’s school. We both sighed. Sampson is almost as close to Damon and Jannie as I am. They feel the same way about him.

  A lot of people were already gathered outside the Federal-style two-story building that was the Sojourner Truth Elementary School. Half the neighborhood seemed to be up at four in the morning. I saw angry and shocked faces everywhere in the crowd. Some folks were in bathrobes, others wrapped in blankets. Their frosty breath poured out like car exhaust all over the schoolyard. The Washington Post had reported that more than five hundred children under the age of fourteen had died in D.C. during the past year alone. But the people here knew that. They didn’t have to read it in the newspaper.

  A little six-year-old girl. Murdered at or near Damon’s school, the Truth School. I couldn’t have imagined a worse nightmare to wake up to.

  “Sorry about this, Sugar,” Sampson said as we climbed out of his car. “I figured you had to see this, though, to be here yourself.”

  CHAPTER

  3

  MY HEART was hammering and felt as if it were suddenly too big for my chest. My wife, Maria, had been shot down and killed not far from this place. Memories of the neighborhood, memories of a lifetime. I’ll always love you, Maria.

  I saw a dented and rusting truck from the morgue in the schoolyard, and it was an unbelievably disturbing sight for me and everybody else. Rap music with a lot of bass was playing from somewhere on the edge of the bright police lights.

  Sampson and I pushed and angled our way through the frightened and uneasy crowd. Some wiseass muttered, “What’s up, Chief?” and risked finding out. There was yellow crime-scene tape everywhere on the school grounds.

  At six three, I’m not as large as Man Mountain, but we are both big men. We make quite the pair when we arrive at a crime scene: Sampson with his huge shaved skull and black leather car coat; me usually in a gray warm-up jacket from Georgetown. Shoulder holster under the coat. Dressed for the game that I play, a game called sudden death.

  “Dr. Cross is here,” I heard a few low rumbles in the crowd. My name uttered in vain. I tried to ignore the voices as best I could. Block them out of my consciousness. Officially I was a deputy chief of detectives, but I was mostly working as a street detective these days. It was the way I wanted it for now. The way it had to be. This was definitely an “interesting” time for me. I had seen enough homicide and violence for one lifetime. I was considering going into private practice as a shrink again. I was considering a lot of things.

  Sampson lightly touched my shoulder. He sensed this was bad for me. He saw it was maybe too close to the bone. “You okay, Alex?”

  “I’m fine,” I lied for the second time that morning.

  “Sure you are, Sugar. You’re always fine, even when you’re not. You’re the dragonslayer, right?” Sampson said and shook his head.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a young woman wearing a black sweatshirt with I’LL ALWAYS LOVE YOU, TYSHEIKA in white let
ters. Another dead child. Tysheika. People in the neighborhood sometimes wore the dark shirts to funerals of murdered kids. My grandmother, Nana Mama, had quite a collection of them.

  Something else caught my eye. A woman standing back from the crowd, under the spectral branches of a withering elm. She didn’t seem to quite fit with the rest of the neighborhood group. She was tall and nice-looking. She wore a belted raincoat over jeans, and flat shoes. Behind her, I could see a blue sedan. A Mercedes.

  She’s the one. That’s her. She’s the one for you. The crazy thought just came out of nowhere. Filled my head with sudden, inappropriate joy.

  I made a mental note to find out who she was.

  I stopped to talk with a young, intense homicide detective wearing a red Kangol hat with a brown sport jacket and brown knitted tie. I was beginning to take control.

  “Bad way to start the day, Alex,” Rakeem Powell said as I came up to him. “Or to end one, in my case.”

  I nodded at Rakeem. “Can’t imagine a worse way.” I felt sick in the well of my stomach. “What do you know about this so far, Rakeem? Anything juicy for us to go on? I need to hear it all.”

  The detective glanced at his small black notepad. He flipped a few pages. “Little girl’s name is Shanelle Green. Popular girl. A sweetheart, from what I hear so far. She was in the first grade here at the Truth School. Lives two blocks from school in the Northfield Village projects. Parents both work. They let her walk home by herself. Not too goddamn smart, but what can you do, you know? They came home tonight, Shanelle wasn’t there. They reported her missing around eight. That’s the parents over there.”

  I glanced around. They were just a couple of kids themselves. Looked completely devastated and heartbroken. I knew they would never be the same after this horrifying night. Nobody could be.

  “Either of them suspects?” I had to ask.

  Rakeem shook his head and said, “I don’t think so, Alex. Shanelle was their life.”

  “Please check them, Rakeem. Check both parents. How did she get here in the schoolyard?” I asked him.

  Powell sighed. “That’s the first thing we don’t know. Where she was killed is the second. Who did it is strike three for the Mod Squad.”

  It was obvious from looking at Shanelle that she had been dumped here, probably murdered someplace else. We were right at the beginning of this terrible case. Lots of work to do. My case now.

  “You know how she was killed?” I asked Rakeem.

  The homicide detective frowned. “Take a look for yourself. Tell me what you think.”

  I didn’t want to look, but I had to. I bent down close to Shanelle. I could smell the little girl’s blood: copper, like a lot of pennies had been thrown on the ground. I couldn’t help thinking of Damon and Jannie, my own kids. I couldn’t stop the overwhelming sadness I felt. It ate at me, like acid splashed all over my body.

  I knelt on the cracked and broken concrete to examine the body of the six-year-old girl. Shanelle lay in a fetal position. All she had on was a pair of flowered pink-and-blue underpants. A red bow was impossibly tangled up in her braids, and she had tiny gold earrings in her ears.

  The rest of her clothes were missing. The killer had apparently taken the little girl’s school clothes with him.

  She was such a little beauty, such a sweetheart, I could see. Even after what someone had done to her. I was looking at the how; the manner in which the six-year-old girl had been brutally murdered sometime earlier that night, her whole life silenced in an instant of madness and horror.

  I gently turned the girl’s body a few inches. Her head lolled to one side, the neck probably broken. She weighed next to nothing. Just a baby. The right side of her little face was partly gone. Obliterated was a better description. The murderer had struck Shanelle so many times, and so violently, that little on the right side of the face was recognizable.

  “How could he do this to such a beautiful little girl?” I muttered under my breath. “Poor Shanelle. Poor baby,” I whispered to no one but myself. A tear formed in my eye. I blinked it away. There was no place for that here.

  One of Shanelle’s eyes was missing. Her face is like a two-sided, two-faced mask. Two sides to a child? Two faces? What did that mean?

  There was another fiend on the loose in Washington.

  A child killer this time.

  CHAPTER

  4

  A TALL, THIN MAN in a black raincoat and black floppy rain hat slowly, cautiously approached the door of Senator Daniel Fitzpatrick’s apartment a little before six o’clock Tuesday morning. He examined the outer hallway for signs of a break-in, a struggle of some sort, but didn’t find any.

  He was thinking that he didn’t want to be outside this apartment or anywhere near it. He wasn’t sure what he expected to find inside, but he had the feeling it would be bad. Powerfully, overwhelmingly bad. This was so unreal.

  It was so odd for him to be here, a mystery inside a mystery. But here he was.

  The man noticed everything about the hallway. Sprinkles of fallen plaster on the rug. Eight other doorways in sight. He had once been reasonably good at this routine. Being an investigator was like riding a bicycle, right? Sure it was.

  He jimmied open the door to 4J with a square of plastic very much like a credit card, only thinner, slicker to the touch. He guessed that breaking and entering was like riding a bike, too. You never forgot how.

  “I’m inside 4J,” he spoke softly into a compact hand radio.

  Sweat had begun to form all over his body. His legs quivered slightly. He was disgusted and he was afraid and he was definitely someplace that he shouldn’t be. Unrealville, he called it in his mind.

  He quickly walked through the foyer and into the small living room with photos of Senator Fitzpatrick on every wall. Still no sign of a break-in or any trouble.

  “This could be a very nasty hoax,” he reported into the radio. “I hope that’s what it is.” He paused. “Uh-oh. We have a problem.”

  Everything had happened in the bedroom, and whoever had done everything had left a terrible mess. It was worse than anything he could have imagined it might be.

  “This is real bad. Senator Fitzpatrick is dead. Daniel Fitzpatrick has been murdered. This is not a hoax. The body appears to be fully rigorous. Flesh has a waxy tone. There’s a lot of blood. Jesus, there’s a lot of blood.”

  He bent over the senator’s corpse. He could smell cordite, almost taste it on his tongue. Most likely from the gun that killed Fitzpatrick. Unfortunately, there was much more to the brutal murder scene. Too much for him to handle. He fought to keep his cool. Riding a bike, right?

  “Two shots to the head. Close-in. Execution-style,” he said into the handset. “Entry wounds about an inch apart.”

  He sighed heavily. Waited a moment, then began again. They didn’t need to know everything he was seeing and feeling right now.

  “The senator is handcuffed to his bedposts. Look like police cuffs to me. His body is nude and not a pretty sight. Penis and scrotum appear to have been gouged out of the body. There’s a lot of blood all over the bed, a humongous stain. Big stain on the rug, too, where it soaked through.”

  He forced his face even closer to the senator’s silver-haired chest. He didn’t like it, being this close to a dead man—or any man, for that matter. Probably real silver. He smelled of a woman’s perfume. The tall man, the investigator, was almost certain of it. “The D.C. police are going to be guessing jealous lover. Some kind of crime of high passion,” he said. “Wait—there’s something else here. Okay. Hold on. I’ve got to check this out.”

  He didn’t know how he’d missed it at first, but he sure as hell saw the note now. It was right next to the cordless telephone on the bed stand. Impossible to miss, right? But he’d missed it. He picked it up in his gloved hand.

  The note was typewritten on thick, expensive bond. He read it quickly. Then he read it again, just to be sure… that the note was for real.

  Ah Dannyboy, we kne
w ya all too well

  One useless, thieving, rich bastard down

  So many more to go.

  Jack and Jill came to The Hill

  To hose down all the slime

  Most imperiled

  Was poor Fitzpatrick

  Right schmuck, wrong place, wrong time.

  Truly,

  Jack and Jill

  He read the note over the hand phone. He took one more look around, then left the senator’s apartment as it was: in a state of bedlam and horror and death. When he was safely down on Q Street, he called in the homicide to the Washington police.

  He made the call anonymously. No one could know that he’d been inside the senator’s apartment, or especially, how it came to happen, and who he was. If anybody found out, all hell would really break loose—as if it hadn’t started already.

  Everything was unreal, and it promised to get much worse. Jack and Jill had promised it.

  One useless, thieving, rich bastard down

  So many more to go.

  CHAPTER

  5

  AT EVERY HUMAN TRAGEDY like this one, there is always someone who points. A man stood outside the crime scene tape and pointed at the murdered child and also at me. I was remembering Jannie’s prophetic words to me earlier that morning: It’s something bad, isn’t it, Daddy?

  Yes, it was. The baddest of the bad. The murder scene at the Sojourner Truth School was heartbreaking to me, and, I was sure, to everyone else. The schoolyard was the saddest, most desolate place in the world.

  The chatter of portable radios violated the air and made it hard to breathe. I could still smell the little girl’s blood. It was thick in my nostrils and my throat, but mostly inside my head.

  Shanelle Green’s parents were weeping nearby, but so were other people from the neighborhood, even complete strangers to the little girl. In most cities, in most civilized countries, a child murdered so young would be a catastrophe, but not in Washington, where hundreds of children die violent deaths every single year.