“Help me to get it,” I said. “I don’t mean you should try to kill me here in the Sterlings’ backyard, but keep talking.”
His tight smile turned to a wide-open grin. “Not try. Trust me on that one.”
He was a truly scary man. He reminded me a little of a psychopathic killer named Gary Soneji. I had talked to Soneji just like this. Neither of them had much affect in their faces. Just this cold fixed glare that wouldn’t go away. Then sudden bursts of laughter. My skin was crawling. I wanted to get up from the table and leave.
Klauk stared at me for a long moment before he went on. I could hear Jeanne Sterling’s kids inside the house. The refrigerator door opening and closing. Ice tinkling against glass. Birds whooping and twittering in background trees. It was a strange, strange scene. Indescribably eerie for me.
“There is one basic proposition in covert action. In subversion, sabotage, being better at it than the other guy. We can do anything we want.” Klauk said it very, very slowly, word by word.
“And we often do. You’re a psychologist and a homicide detective, right? What’s your objective take on this? What are you hearing from me?”
“No rules,” I said to him. “That’s what you’re telling me. You live, you work, in a closed world that virtually isn’t governed. You could say that your world is completely antisocial.”
He snorted a laugh again. I was a decent student, I guess. “Not a fucking one of them. Once we’re commissioned for a job—there are no rules. Not a one. Think about it.”
I definitely would think about it. I started right then and there. I considered the idea of Klauk trying to kill me—if our country asked him to. No rules. A world peopled by ghosts. And even scarier was that I could sense he believed every word he’d said.
After I finished with Klauk, for that afternoon at least, I talked with Jeanne Sterling for a while more. We sat in an idyllic, multiwindowed sunroom that looked out on the idyllic backyard. The subject of conversation continued to be murder. I hadn’t come down yet from my talk with the assassin. The ghost.
“What did you think of our Mr. Klauk?” Jeanne asked me.
“Disturbed me. Irritated me. Scared the hell out of me,” I admitted to her. “He’s really unpleasant. Not nice. He’s a jerk, too.”
“An incredible asshole,” she agreed. Then she didn’t say anything for a couple of seconds. “Alex, somebody inside the Agency has killed at least three of our agents. That’s one of the skeletons I’ve dug up so far in my time as inspector. It’s an ‘unsolved crime.’ The killer isn’t Klauk, though. Andrew is actually under control. He isn’t dangerous. Somebody else is. To tell you the complete truth, the Directorate of Operations has demanded that we bring in somebody from the outside on this. We definitely think one of our contract killers could be Jack. Who knows, maybe Jill is one of ours, too.”
I didn’t talk for a moment, just listened to what Jeanne Sterling had to say. Jack and Jill came to The Hill. Could Jack be a trained assassin? What about Jill? And then, why were they killing celebrities in Washington? Why had they threatened President Byrnes?
My mind whirled around in great looping circles. I thought about all the possibilities, the connections, and also the disconnects. Two renegade contract killers on the loose. It made as much sense as anything else I had heard so far. It explained some things about Jack and Jill for me, especially the absence of passion or rage in the murders. Why were they killing politicians and celebrities, though? Had they been commissioned to do the job? If so, by whom? To what end? What was their cause?
“Let me ask you a burning question, Jeanne. Something else has been bothering me since we got here.”
“Go ahead, Alex. I want to try and answer all your questions. If I can, that is.”
“Why did you bring him here to talk? Why take Andrew Klauk right into your own house?”
“It was a safe place for the meeting,” she said without any hesitation. She sounded so unbelievably certain when she said it. I felt a chill ease up my spine. Then Jeanne Sterling sighed loudly. She knew what I was getting at, what I was feeling, as I sat inside her home.
“Alex, he knows where I live. Andrew Klauk could come here if he wanted to. Any of them can.”
I nodded and left it at that. I knew the feeling exactly; I lived with it. It was my single greatest fear as an investigator. My worst nightmare.
They know where we live.
They can come to our houses if they want to… anytime they want to.
Nobody was safe anymore.
There are no rules.
There are “ghosts” and human monsters, and they are very real in our lives. Especially in my life.
There was Jack and Jill.
There was the Sojourner Truth School killer.
CHAPTER
50
AT A LITTLE PAST SEVEN the next morning, I sat across from Adele Finaly and unloaded everything that I possibly could on her. I unloaded—period. Dr. Adele Finaly has been my analyst for a half-dozen years, and I see her on an irregular basis. As needed. Like right now. She’s also a good friend.
I was ranting and raving a little bit. This was the place for it, though. “Maybe I want to leave the force. Maybe I don’t want to be part of any more vile homicide investigations. Maybe I want to get out of Washington, or at least out of Southeast. Or maybe I want to trot down and see Kate McTiernan in West Virginia. Take a sabbatical at just about the worst possible time for one.”
“Do you really want to do any of those things?” Adele asked when I had finished, or at least had quieted down for a moment. “Or are you just venting?”
“I don’t know, Adele. Probably venting. There’s also a woman I met whom I could become interested in. She’s married,” I said and smiled. “I’d never do anything with a married woman, so she’s perfectly safe for me. She couldn’t be safer. I think I’m regressing.”
“You want an opinion on that, Alex? Well, I can’t give you one. You certainly have a lot on your plate, though.”
“I’m right smack in the middle of a very bad homicide investigation. Two of them, actually. I just came off another particularly disturbing one. I think I can sort that part out for myself. But, you know, it’s funny. I suspect that I still want to please my mother and father, and it can’t be done. I can’t get over the feeling of abandonment. Can’t intellectualize it. Sometimes I feel that both my parents died of a kind of terminal sadness, and that my brothers and I were part of their sorrow. I’m afraid that I have it, too. I think that my mother and father were probably as smart as I am, and that they must have suffered because of it.” My mother and father had died in North Carolina, at a very young age. My father had killed himself with liquor, and I hadn’t really gotten over it. My mom died of lung cancer the year before my father. Nana Mama had taken me in when I was nine years old.
“You think sadness can be in the genes, Alex? I don’t know what to think about that myself. Did you see that New Yorker piece on twins by any chance? There’s some evidence for the genes theory. Scary note for our profession.”
“Detective work?” I asked her.
Adele didn’t comment on my little joke.
“Sorry,” I said. “Sorry, sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry. You know how happy it makes me when you get any of your anger out.”
She laughed. We both did. I like talking to her because our sessions can bounce around like that, laughter to tears, serious to absurd, truth to lies, just about anything and everything that’s bothering me. Adele Finaly is three years younger than I am, but she’s wise beyond her years, and maybe my years as well. Seeing her for a skull session works even better than playing the blues on my front porch.
I talked some more, let my tongue wag, let my mind run free, and it felt pretty good. It’s a wonderful thing to have somebody in your life whom you can say absolutely anything to. Not to have that is almost unthinkable to me.
“Here’s a connection I’ve made recently,” I to
ld Adele. “Maria is murdered. I grieve and grieve, but I never come close to getting over the loss. Just like I’ve never gotten past the loss of my mother and father.”
Adele nods. “It’s incredibly hard to find a soul mate.” She knows. She’s never been able to find one herself, which is sad.
“And it’s hard to lose one—a soul mate. So, of course, now I’m petrified about losing anyone else whom I care deeply for. I shy away from relationships—because they might end in loss. I don’t leave my job with the police—because that would be a kind of loss, too.”
“But you’re thinking about these things a lot now.”
“All the time, Adele. Something’s going to happen.”
“Something has. We’ve run way over our time,” Adele finally said.
“Good,” I said and laughed again. Some people turn on Comedy Central for a good laugh. I go to my shrink.
“Lots of hostility. How nice for you. I don’t think you’re regressing, Alex. I think you’re doing beautifully.”
“God, I love talking to you,” I told her. “Let’s do this in a month or so, when I’m really screwed up again.”
“I can’t wait,” Adele said and rubbed her small, thin hands together greedily. “In the meantime, as Bart Simpson has said many times, ‘Don’t have a cow, man.’”
CHAPTER
51
DETECTIVE JOHN SAMPSON couldn’t remember working so many brutal, absolutely shitty days in a row. He couldn’t remember it ever being so godawful, goddamn bad. He had an overload of really bad homicides and he had the Sojourner Truth School killer case, which didn’t seem to be going anywhere.
On the morning after the Kennedy Center killing, Sampson worked the upscale side of Garfield Park, the “west bank.” He was keeping his eyes out for Alex’s homeless suspect, who’d been spotted the afternoon of Shanelle Green’s murder, though not since, so even that lead was growing cold. Alex had a simple formula for thinking about complex cases like this one. First, you had to answer the question that everybody had: What kind of person would do something like this? What kind of nutcase?
He had decided to visit the Theodore Roosevelt School on his street canvass. The exclusive military academy used Garfield Park for its athletics and some paramilitary maneuvers. There was a slim possibility that a sharp-eyed cadet had seen something.
A white-haired homeless motherfucker, Sampson thought as he climbed the military school’s front graystone steps. A sloppy and disorganized thrill killer who left fingerprints and other clues at both crime scenes, and still nobody could nail his candyass to the wall. Every single clue leads to a dead end.
Why was that? What were we getting all wrong here? What were they messing up on? Not just him. Alex and the rest of the posse, too.
Sampson went looking for the commandant at the school, The Man In Charge. The detective had served four years in the Army, two of them in Vietnam, and the pristine school brought to mind ROTC lieutenants in the war. Most of them had been white. Several had died needlessly, in his opinion—a couple of them, his friends.
The Theodore Roosevelt School consisted of four extremely well-kept, red-brick buildings with steep, slate-shingle roofs. Two of the roofs had chimneys spouting soft curls of gray smoke. Everything about the place shouted “structure,” “order,” and “dead, white louies” to him.
Imagine something like this school, only in Southeast around the projects, he thought as he continued his solitary walk around the school. The image made him smile. He could almost see five hundred or so homies resplendent in their royal blue dress uniforms, their spit-shined boots, their plumed dress hats. Really something to contemplate. Might even do some good.
“Sir, can I help you?” A scrawny towheaded cadet came up to him as he started down what looked to be an academic hall in one of the buildings.
“You on guard here?” Sampson asked in a soft drawl that was the last vestige of a mother who’d grown up in Alabama.
The toy soldier shook his head. “No, sir. But can I help you anyway?”
“Washington police,” Sampson said. “I need to speak with whoever’s in charge. You arrange that, soldier?”
“Yes, sir!”
The cadet saluted him, of all people, and Sampson had to fight back the day’s first, and maybe only, smile.
CHAPTER
52
MORE THAN THREE HUNDRED scrubbed and steam-pressed cadets from the middle school and the academy’s high school were crammed into Lee Hall at nine o’clock in the morning. The cadets wore their regular school uniform loose-fitting gray pants, black shirt and tie, gray waist-jacket.
From his stiff wooden seat in the school auditorium, the Sojourner Truth School killer saw the towering black man entering Lee Hall. He recognized him instantly. That sucker was Detective John Sampson. He was Alex Cross’s friend and partner.
This was not a good thing. This was very bad, in fact. The killer immediately began to panic, to experience the outer edges of fear. He wondered if the Metro police were coming for him right now. Did they know who he was?
He wanted to run—but there was no way out of here now. He had to sit this one out, to gut it out.
The killer’s initial reaction was to feel shame. He thought he was going to be sick. Throw up or something. He wanted to put his head between his legs. He felt like such a chump to get caught like this.
He was seated about twenty yards from where that stuffed shirt Colonel Wilson and the detective were standing around as if something incredibly fucking important were about to happen. Every passing cadet saluted the adults, like the robotic morons that they were. A buzz of apprehension began to fill the room.
Was something earth-shattering going to happen? The thought screaming inside the killer’s head. Were the police about to arrest him in front of the entire school? Had he been caught?
How could they have traced anything to him, though? It didn’t make sense. That thought calmed him somewhat.
A false calm? A false sense of security? he wondered and lowered himself slightly in the stiff wooden seat, wishing that somehow he could disappear.
Then he sat straight up in his seat again. Oh, shit. Here we go! He watched closely as the homicide detective slowly walked toward the podium with Colonel Wilson. His heartbeat was like the rhythm section in a White Zombie song.
The assembly began with the usual, dumb cadet resolutions, “honesty, integrity in thought and deed,” all that crap. Then Colonel Wilson began to talk about the “cowardly murders of two children in Garfield Park.” Wilson went on: “The Metro police are canvassing the park and surrounding environs. Maybe a cadet at Theodore Roosevelt has unwittingly seen something that might help the police with their investigation. Maybe one of you can help the police in some way.”
So that was why the imposing homicide detective was here. A goddamn fishing expedition. The ongoing frigging investigation of the two murders.
The killer was still holding his breath, though. His eyes were very large and riveted to the stage as Sampson went over to the podium mike. The tall black man really stood out in the room of nothing but uniforms and short haircuts and mostly pink faces. He was huge. He was also kind of cool-looking in his black leather car coat, gray shirt, black necktie. He towered over the podium, which had seemed just the right height for Colonel Wilson.
“I served in Vietnam, under a couple of lieutenants who looked about your age,” the detective said into the mike. His voice was calm and very deep. He laughed then, and so did most of the cadets. He had a lot of presence, a whole world of presence. He definitely seemed like the real deal. The killer thought that Sampson was laughing down at the cadets, but he couldn’t be sure.
“The reason I’m here at your school this morning,” the detective went on, “is that we’re canvassing Garfield Park and everything that it touches. Two little kids were savagely killed there, both within the past week. The skulls of the children were crushed. The killer is a fiend, in no uncertain terms.”
/> The killer wanted to give Sampson the finger. The killer isn’t a fiend. You’re the fiend, mojoman. The killer is a lot cooler than you think.
“As I understand it from Colonel Wilson, many of you go home from school through the park. Others run cross-country, and you also play soccer and lacrosse in the park. I’m going to leave my number at the precinct with the office here at school. You can contact me at any time, day or night, at the number if you’ve seen anything that could be helpful to us.”
The Sojourner Truth School killer couldn’t take his eyes off the towering homicide detective who spoke so very calmly and confidently. He wondered if he could possibly be a match for this one. Not to mention motherhumping Detective Alex Cross, who reminded him of his own real father—a cop.
He thought that he could be a match for them.
“Does anybody have any questions?” Sampson asked from the stage. “Any questions at all? This is the time for it. This is the place. Speak up, young men.”
The killer wanted to shout from his seat. He had an overwhelming impulse to throw his right arm high in the air and volunteer some real help. He finally sat on his hands, right on his fingers.
I unwittingly saw something in Garfield Park, sir. I might just know who killed those two kids with an eighteen-inch, tape-reinforced baseball bat.
Actually, to be truthful, I killed them, sir. I’m the child killer, you feeble asshole! Catch me if you can.
You’re bigger. You’re much bigger. But I’m so much smarter than you could ever be.
I’m only thirteen years old. I’m already this good! Just wait until I get a little older. Chew on that, you dumb bastards.
PART IV
A-HUNTING WE WILL GO
CHAPTER
53
I LAY ON THE COUCH with Rosie the cat and a full sack of nightmares. Rosie was a beautiful, reddish brown Abyssinian. She was wonderfully athletic, independent, feral, and also a great nuzzler. She reminded me of the much larger cats of Africa in the way she moved. One weekend morning she just showed up at the house, liked it, and stayed.