Alex Cross 03 - Jack & Jill Read online

  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 letters. 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 mast 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. Fitzpatrick was wearing some kind of religious medal. 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 knew 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.

  “I want as large a street canvass as we can manage on this one,” I told Rakeem Powell. “Sampson and I will be part of the canvass ourselves.”

  “I hear you. We’re on it in a big way. Sleep is overrated, anyway.”

  “Let’s go, John. We’ve got to move on this now,” I finally said to Sampson.

  He didn’t argue or object. A murder like this is usually solved in the first twenty-four hours, or it isn’t solved. We both knew that.

  From 6:00 A.M. on, Sampson and I canvassed the neighborhood with the other detectives and patrolmen that cold, miserable morning. We had to do it our way, house by house, street by street, mostly on foot. We needed to be involved in this case, to do something, to solve the heinous murder quickly.

  About ten in the morning, we heard about another shocking homicide in Washington. Senator Daniel Fitzpatrick had been murdered the night before. It had been a real bad night, hadn’t it?

  “Not our job,” Sampson said with cold, flat eyes. “Not our problem. Somebody else’s.”

  I didn’t disagree.

  No one Sampson or I spoke to that morning had seen anything out of the ordinary around the Sojourner Truth School. We heard the usual complaints about the drug pushers, the zombielike crackheads, the prossies who work on Eighth Street, the growing number of gangbangers.

  But nothing out of the usual.

  “People loved that little sweetheart Shanelle,” the ageless Hispanic lady who seemed to have run the corner grocery near the school forever told Sampson and me. “She always buy her Gummi Bears. She have such a pretty smile, you know?”

  No, I had never seen Shanelle Green smile, but I found that I could almost picture it. I also had a fixed image of the battered right side of the little girl’s face. I carried it around like a bizarre wallet photo inside my head.

  Uncle Jimmie Kee, a successful and influential Korean American who owned several neighborhood businesses, was glad to talk with us. Jimmie is a good friend of ours. Occasionally, he comes along with us to a Redskins or Bullets game. He supplied a name that we already had on our shortlist of suspects.

  “What about this bad actor, Chop-It-Off-Chucky?” Uncle Jimmie volunteered as we spoke in the back of Ho-Woo-Jung, his popular restaurant on Eighth Street. I read the sign behind Jimmie: IMMIGRATION IS THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY.

  “Nobody catch that motherfucker yet. He kill other children before. He the worst man in Washington, D.C. Next to the president,” Jimmie said and chuckled wickedly.

  “No bodies, though. No proof of it,” Sampson said to Jimmie. “We don’t even know if there really is a Chucky.”

  That was true enough. For years there had been rumors about a horrifying child molester who worked the Northfield Village neighborhood, but there was nothing concrete. Nothing had ever been proved.

  “Chucky real,” Uncle Jimmie insisted. His dark eyes narrowed to even thinner slits. “Chucky real as the devil. I see Chop-It-Off-Chucky in my dreams sometimes, Alex. So do the children who live around here.”

  “You ever hear anything more specific about Chucky? Where he’s been seen? Who saw him?” I asked. “Help us out if you can, Jimmie.”

  “Oh, I gladly do that.” He nodded his head and bunched his thick brown lips, his triple chin, his bulging throat. Jimmie habitually wore a chocolate brown suit with a tan fedora that bobbed as he spoke. “You meditating yet, Alex, getting in touch with chi energy?” he asked me.

  “I’m thinking about it, thinking about my chi, Jimmie. Maybe my chi is running a little low right now. Tell us about Chucky.”

  “I know lots bad stories about Chop-It-Off-Chucky. Scare kids all the time. Even the gangbangers scared of him. Young mothers, grandmothers, put up handbills in playgrounds. In my stores, too. Sad stories of missing children. I always permit it, Detectives. Man who harms children is the worst. You agree, Alex? You see it differently?”

  “No. I agree with you. That’s why Sampson and I are out here today.”

  I knew a lot about the child molester who had been nicknamed Chop-It-Off-Chucky. The unsubstantiated rumor was that he sliced off the genitalia of young kids who lived in the projects. Little boys and girls. No gender preference. Whether or not it was true, it seemed undeniable that someone had molested several children from the Northfield and Southview Terrace projects; not far from here. Other children had simply disappeared.

  The police in the area didn’t have the resources to create an effective crisis team to find Chucky, if Chucky existed. I had gone to the wall about it several times with the chief of detectives, but nothing had happened. Extra detectives never seemed available
for duty in Southeast. The unfairness of the situation put me in a rage, made me as crazy as anything I can think of.

  “Sounds like another Mission: Impossible,” Sampson said as we walked up G Street, in the general direction of the Marine barracks. “We’re on our own. We’re supposed to catch a chimera.”

  “Nice image,” I said, and had to smile at Man Mountain, his wild imagination, his mind.

  “Thought you’d like it, man of culture and refinement that you are.”

  We were sipping steaming herb tea from Jimmie’s restaurant. Patrolling the street. We looked like detectives, with our collars up and all. Big bad detectives. I wanted people to see us out working the neighborhood.

  “No real leads, no clues, no support,” I said, agreeing with Sampson’s judgment of the current state of affairs. “We take the assignment, anyway?”

  “We always do,” he said. His eyes were suddenly hard and dull and almost scary to me. “Watch out, Chucky, watch your back. We’re right on your sorry mythical ass.”

  “Your chimera ass.”

  “Exactly so, Sugar. Exactly so.”

  CHAPTER

  6

  IT WAS REAL GOOD to be working the streets of Southeast with Sampson again. It always is, even on a horror-show murder case that can make my blood boil over. Our last big case had taken place in North Carolina and California, but Sampson had been around only for the beginning and end of it. The two of us have been fast friends since we were nine or ten, and growing up in this same neighborhood. We get closer every year it seems. No, we do get closer.

  “What’s our primary goal here, Sugar?” Sampson asked as we walked along G Street. He had on the black leather car coat, nasty Wayfarer sunglasses, a slick black bandanna. It worked for him. “How do we know that we did good today?” he asked.