But there were huge differences this time. They seemed to have destroyed their pattern.
Copycat killer? Maybe. But I didn’t think so. Yet nothing could, or should, be dismissed. Not by me, and not by anyone else on the case.
The new twists nagged at me as I pushed my way through the curious, horrified, even dumbstruck, crowd on New Hampshire Avenue. The law student hadn’t been a national figure. So why had she been killed? Jay Grayer had called her a nobody. Grayer said she wasn’t the daughter of anybody famous, either. She had been out to the theater with Supreme Court Justice Thomas Henry Franklin, but that didn’t seem to count as a celebrity stalk-and-kill.
Charlotte Kinsey had been a nobody.
The killing just didn’t fit the pattern. Jack and Jill had taken a huge risk committing the murder in such a public place. The other killings had been private affairs, safer and more controllable.
Shit, shit, shit. What were they up to now? Was this whole thing changing? Escalating? Why had they varied their pattern? Were the killers moving into another, more random phase?
Had I missed their original point? Had we all missed the real pattern they were creating? Or had they made a mistake at the Kennedy Center?
Maybe they finally made a mistake.
That was our best hope. It would show that they weren’t invincible. Let this be a goddamn mistake! Please let it be their first. Just the same, whoever it was made a clever escape.
The six-hundred-foot-long lobby had been emptied of all but police officials, the medical examiner’s staff, and the morgue crew. I saw Agent Grayer and walked over to him. Jay looked as if he hadn’t slept in weeks, as if he might never be able to sleep again.
“Alex, thanks for getting down here so quickly,” the Secret Service agent said. I liked working with him so far. He was smart and usually even-tempered, with absolutely no bullshit about him. He had an old-fashioned dedication to his job, and especially to the President, both the office and the man.
“Anything worthwhile turn up yet?” I asked him. “Besides another corpse. The poem.”
Grayer rolled his eyes toward the glittering chandeliers hanging above us. “Oh yeah. Definitely, Alex. We found out some more about the murdered student. Charlotte Kinsey was just starting her second year at Georgetown Law. She was bright as hell, apparently. Did her undergraduate at New York University. However, she only had average grades as a Hoya, so she didn’t make Law Review.”
“How does a law student fit into the pattern? Unless they were shooting at Justice Franklin and actually missed. I’ve been trying to make some connection on the way over. Nothing comes to mind. Except that maybe Jack and Jill are playing with us?”
Grayer nodded. “They’re definitely playing with us. For one thing, your illicit sex theory is still intact. We know why Charlotte Kinsey didn’t excel at Georgetown. She was spending quality time with some very important men here in town. Very pretty girl, as you’ll see in a second. Shiny black hair down to her waist. Great shape. Questionable morals. She’d have made a terrific attorney.”
The two of us walked over to the dead woman’s body. The law student was lying facing away from us.
Beside the body was a bag she had been carrying. I couldn’t see the bullet hole, and Charlotte Kinsey didn’t even appear to be hurt. She looked as if she’d just decided to take a nap on the floor of the terrace at the Kennedy Center. Her mouth was open slightly, as if she wanted one last breath of the river air.
“Go ahead, tell me now,” I said to Jay Grayer. I knew that he had something more on the murder. “Who is she?”
“Oh, she’s somebody, after all. The girl was President Byrnes’s mistress,” he said. “She was seeing the President, too. He skipped out of the White House and saw her the other night. That’s why they killed her. Bingo, Alex. Right in our face.”
My chest felt seriously constricted as I bent over the dead woman. Claustrophobia again. She was very pretty. Twenty-three years old. Prime of her life. One shot to the heart had ended that.
I read the note they had left in the law student’s handbag.
Jack and Jill came to The Hill
Your mistress had no clue, Sir.
She was a pawn
But now she’s gone
And soon we’ll get to you, Sir.
The poetry seemed to be getting a little better. Certainly it was bolder. And so were Jack and Jill. God help us all, but especially President Thomas Byrnes.
And soon we’ll get to you, Sir.
CHAPTER
47
THE MORNING after the murder, I drove eight miles down to Langley, Virginia. I wanted to spend some time with Jeanne Sterling, the CIA’s inspector general and the Agency’s representative on the crisis team. Don Hamerman had made it clear to me that the Agency was involved because there was the possibility a foreign power might be behind Jack and Jill. Even if it were a long shot, it had to be checked. Somehow, I suspected there might be more to the CIA’s involvement than just that. This was my chance to find out.
Supposedly, the Agency had a lead that was worth checking out. Since the Aldrich Ames scandal, and the resulting Intelligence Authorization Act, the CIA had to share information with the rest of us. It was now the law.
I remembered the inspector general very well from our first meeting at the White House. Jeanne Sterling had listened mostly, but when she spoke, she was highly articulate and spotlight-bright. Dan Hamerman told me she had been a professor of law at the University of Virginia years before joining the Agency. Now her job was to help clean up the Agency from the inside. It sounded like an impossible task to me, certainly a daunting one. Hamerman told me she had been put on the crisis team for one reason: she was the Agency’s best mind.
Her office was on the seventh floor of the modern gray building that was the hub of CIA headquarters. I checked out the Agency’s interior design: lots of extremely narrow halls, green-hued fluorescent lighting everywhere, cipher locks on most of the office doors. Here it was in all its glory: the CIA, the avenging angel of U.S. foreign policy.
Jeanne Sterling met me in the gray-carpeted hallway outside her office. “Dr. Cross, thank you for coming down here. Next time, I promise we’ll do it up in Washington. I thought it best if we meet here. I think you’ll understand by the time we’re finished this morning.”
“Actually, I enjoyed the drive down, needed the escape,” I admitted to her. “Half an hour by myself. Cassandra Wilson on the tape deck. ‘Blue Light ’Til Dawn.’ Not so bad.”
“I think I know exactly what you mean. Trust me, though, this won’t be a trip in search of the wild goose. I have something interesting to discuss with you. The Agency was called in on this with good reason, Dr. Cross. You’ll see in a moment.”
Jeanne Sterling was certainly far removed from the stereotypical CIA Brahmin of the fifties and sixties. She spoke with a folksy, enthusiastic, mid-Southern accent, but she sat on the Agency’s Directorate of Operations. She was considered crucial to the CIA’s turnaround; indeed, its very survival.
We entered her large office, which had a commanding view of woods on two sides and a planted courtyard on another. We sat at a low-slung glass table covered with official-looking papers and books. Photographs of her family were up on the walls. Cute kids, I couldn’t help noticing. Nice-looking husband, tall and lean. She herself was tall, blond, but a little heavier than she ought to be. She had a friendly smile with a slight overbite, and just a hint of the farmer’s daughter about her.
“Something important has come up,” she said, “but before I get into it, I just heard that the gun used at the Kennedy Center wasn’t the same one used for the previous murders. That raises a question or two; at least, in my mind it does. Could the Kennedy Center murder have been a copycat killing?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Not unless the copycat and Jack or Jill happen to have the same handwriting. No, the latest rhyme was definitely from them. I also think it qualifies as a celebrity stalking.”
br />
“One more question,” Jeanne Sterling said. “This one is completely off the beaten track, Alex. So bear with me. Our analysts have been searching, but we’re not aware of any useful psychological study that’s looked at professional assassins. I’m talking about studies on the contract killers used by the Army, the DEA, the Agency. Are you aware of anything? Even we don’t have a comprehensive study on the subject.”
I had a feeling we were easing into what Jeanne Sterling wanted to discuss. Maybe that was also why the head of internal affairs for the Agency was involved with the crisis team. Contract killers for the Army and CIA. I knew that they existed and that a few lived in the area surrounding Washington. I also knew they were registered somewhere, but not with the D.C. police. Perhaps for that reason they were sometimes referred to as “ghosts.”
“There’s not much written about homicide in any of the psych journals,” I told Jeanne Sterling. “A few years back, a professor I know at Georgetown ran an interesting search. He found several thousand references to suicide, but less than fifty homicide references in the journals he sampled. I’ve read a couple of student papers written at John Jay and Quantico. There isn’t very much on assassins. Not that I’m aware of. I guess it’s hard to get subjects to interview.”
“I could get a subject for you to interview,” Jeanne Sterling said. “I think it might be important to Jack and Jill.”
“Where are you going with this?” I had a lot of questions for her suddenly. Familiar alarms were sounding inside my head.
A soft, pained look drifted across her face. She inhaled very slowly before she spoke again. “We’ve done extensive psychological testing on our lethal agents, Alex. So has the Army, I’ve been assured. I’ve even read some of the test reports myself.”
My stomach continued to tighten. So did my neck and shoulders. But I was definitely glad I’d taken the time to visit Langley.
“Since I’ve been in this job, about eleven months, I’ve had to open a number of dark, eerie closets here at Langley and elsewhere. I did over three hundred in-depth interviews on Aldrich Ames alone. You can imagine the cover-ups that we’ve had over the years. Well, you probably can’t. I couldn’t have myself, and I was working here.”
I still wasn’t sure where Jeanne Sterling was going with this. She had my full attention, though.
“We think one of our former contract killers might be out of control. Actually, we’re pretty sure of it, Alex. That’s why the CIA is on the crisis team. We think one of ours might be Jack.”
CHAPTER
48
JEANNE STERLING and I went for a ride through the surrounding countryside. The CIA inspector general had a new station wagon, a dark blue Volvo that she drove like a race car. Brahms was playing softly on the radio as we headed for Chevy Chase, one of Washington’s small, affluent bedroom communities. I was about to meet a “ghost.” A professional killer. One of ours.
Oh brother, oh shit.
“Plot and counterplot, ruse and treachery, true agent, double agent, false agent… didn’t Churchill describe your business something like that?”
Jeanne Sterling cracked a wide smile, her large teeth suddenly very prominent. She was a very serious person, but she had a quick sense of humor, too. The inspector general. “We’re trying to change from the past, both the perception and the reality. Either the Agency does that or somebody will pull the plug. That’s why I invited the FBI and the Washington police in on this. I don’t want the usual internal investigation, and then charges of a cover-up,” she told me as she engineered her car underneath towering, ancient trees that evoked Richmond or Charlottesville. “The CIA is no longer a ‘cult,’ as we’ve been called by several self-serving congressmen. We’re changing everything. Fast. Maybe even too fast.”
“You disapprove?” I asked her.
“Not at all. It has to happen. I just don’t like all the theater surrounding it. And I certainly don’t appreciate the media coverage. What an incredible assemblage of jerk-offs.”
We had crossed inside the beltway and were entering Chevy Chase now. We were headed for a meeting with a man named Andrew Klauk. Klauk was a former contract killer for the Agency: the so-called killer elite, the “ghosts.”
Jeanne Sterling continued to drive the way she talked, without effort and rapidly. It was the way she seemed to do everything. A very smart and impressive person. I guessed she needed to be. Internal affairs at the CIA had to be extremely demanding.
“So, what have you heard about us, Alex?” she finally asked me. “What’s the scuttlebutt? The intelligence?”
“Don Hamerman says you’re a straight arrow, and that’s what the Agency needs right now. He believes Aldrich Ames hurt the CIA even more than we read. He also believes Moynihan’s ‘End of the Cold War’ bill was an American tragedy. He says they call you Clean Jeanne out here at Langley. Your own people do. He’s a big fan of yours.”
Jeanne Sterling smiled, but the smile was controlled. She was a woman very much in control of herself: intellectually, emotionally, and even physically. She was substantial and sturdy, and her striking amber eyes always seemed to want to dig a little deeper into you. She wasn’t satisfied with surface appearances or answers: the mark of a good investigator.
“I’m not really such a goody-goody.” She made a pouty face. “I was a pretty fair caseworker in Budapest my first two years. Caseworker is our sobriquet for ‘spy,’ Alex. I was a spy in Europe. Harmless stuff, information-gathering mostly.
“After that I was at the War College. Fort McBain. My father is career Army. Lives with my mother in Arlington. They both voted for Oliver North. I fervently believe in our form of government. I’m also hooked on making it work better somehow. I think we actually can. I’m convinced of it.”
“That sounds pretty good to me,” I told her. It did. All except the Oliver North part.
We were just pulling up to a house that was very close to Connecticut Avenue and the Circle. The place was Colonial revival, three stories, very homey and nice. Beautiful. Attractive moss crawled over the hipped roof and down the north side.
“This is where you live?” I smiled at Jeanne. “But you’re not Miss Goody Two-shoes? You’re not Clean Jeanne?”
“Right. It’s all a clever facade, Alex. Like Disneyland, or Williamsburg, or the White House. To prove it to you, there’s a trained killer waiting for us inside,” Jeanne Sterling said, and winked.
“There’s one in your car, too.” I winked back at her.
CHAPTER
49
THE LATE-DECEMBER AFTERNOON was unusually bright and sunny. The temperature was in the high fifties, so Andrew Klauk and I sat in the backyard at Jeanne Sterling’s lovely home in Chevy Chase.
A simple, wrought-iron fence surrounded the property. The gate was forest green, recently painted, slightly ajar. A breach in security.
CIA hitmen. Killer elite. Ghosts. They do exist. More than two hundred of them, according to Jeanne Sterling. A freelance list. A weird, scary notion for the 1990s in America. Or anywhere else, for that matter.
And yet here I was with one of them.
It was past three when Andrew Klauk and I began our talk. A bright yellow school bus stopped by the fence, dropping off kids on the quiet suburban street. A small towheaded boy of ten or eleven came running up the driveway and into the house. I thought that I recognized the boy from the photos at her office. Jeanne Sterling had a boy and a little girl. Just like me. She brought her casework home, just like me. Scary.
Andrew Klauk was a whale of a man who looked as if he could move very well, anyway. A whale who dreamed of dancing. He was probably about forty-five years old. He was calm and extremely self-assured. Piercing brown eyes that grabbed and wouldn’t let go. Penetrated deeply. He wore a shapeless gray suit with an open-neck white shirt that was wrinkled and dingy. Brown Italian leather shoes. Another kind of killer, but a killer all the same, I was thinking.
Jeanne Sterling had raised a very provocative
question for me on our drive: What was the difference between the serial killers I had pursued in the past and the contract killers used by the CIA and Army? Did I think one of these sanctioned killers could actually be Jack of Jack and Jill?
She did. She was certain that it was a possibility that needed to be checked out, and not just by her own people.
I studied Klauk as the two of us talked in a casual, sometimes even lighthearted, manner. It wasn’t the first time I’d conversed like that with a man who murdered for a living, with a mass murderer, so to speak. This killer, however, was allowed to go home nights to his family in Falls Church, and lead what he described as a “normal, rather guilt-free life.”
As Andrew Klauk told me at one point: “I’ve never committed a crime in my life, Dr. Cross. Never got a speeding ticket.” Then he laughed—a bit inappropriately, I thought. He laughed a little too hard.
“What’s so funny?” I asked him. “Did I miss something?”
“You’re what, two hundred pounds, six foot four? That about right?”
“Pretty close,” I told him. “Six three. A little under two hundred. But who’s counting?”
“Obviously, I am, Detective. I’m grossly overweight and look out of shape, but I could take you out right here on the patio,” he informed me. It was a disturbing observation on his part, provocatively stated.
Whether or not he could do it, he needed to tell me. That was the way his mind worked. Good to know. He’d succeeded in shaking me up a little just the same, in making me extra cautious.
“You might be surprised,” I said to him, “but I’m not sure if I get the point you’re trying to make.”
He laughed again, a tiny, unpleasant nose snort. Scary guy to drink lemonade with. “That’s the point. I could and I would, if it was asked of me by our country. That’s what you don’t get about the Agency, and especially about men and women in my position,” he said.