Thomas Byrnes lightly patted the edge of the bed, which was king-size with a partial canopy. Sally came and sat beside him. He reached for her hand, and she gave it to him willingly. She loved to hold hands with her Tom. She always had. She knew she still loved him in spite of past hurts and all their other troubles. She could forgive him for his affairs. She knew they meant nothing to him. She was secure in herself. Sally Byrnes also understood her husband better than anybody else. She knew how disturbed he was right now, how deeply frightened, and how vulnerable.
And she did love him, the whole complex package—the arrogance, the diffidence, the insecurities, the very large ego at times. She knew that he loved her and that they would always be best friends and soul mates.
“Tell you something weird,” he said as he pulled her closer, as he tenderly held his wife of twenty-six years.
“Tell me. I expect nothing less than full disclosure, Mr. King.” It was a phrase they had both laughed over in the London stage play The Madness of George III. The queen had called George III “Mr. King” in bed.
“I think it’s somebody we know. I had a talk about it with that homicide detective. He’s the only one who had the balls to come to me with the bad news. I think it could be somebody close to us, Sally. That makes it all the more horrible.”
Sally Byrnes tried not to show her fear. Her eyes traveled up and around the high-ceilinged bedroom. There was a chair rail halfway up the walls. Baby-blue-and-cream wallpaper rose above the rail. God, how she wished they could go home to Michigan. That’s what she really wanted more than anything, for her and Tom to go back home.
“Have you told that to Don Hamerman?”
“I’m telling you,” he whispered. “You, I can trust. You, I do trust.”
Sally kissed his forehead softly, then his cheek, and finally his lips. “You sure about that?”
“Hundred percent,” he whispered. “Although you have some good reasons to want to get me. Better reasons than most. Better than Jack and Jill, I’ll bet.”
“Hold me tight,” she said. “Don’t ever let go.”
“Hold me tight,” the President continued to whisper to his wife. “Don’t you ever let go. I could stay like this with you forever. And please, Sally, forgive me.”
It’s somebody close. It’s somebody very close to me. President Thomas Byrnes couldn’t turn off the disturbing thought as he held his wife. Somebody close.
“What would you like for Christmas, Tom? You know the press—they always want to know.”
President Byrnes thought for a moment.
“Peace. For this to be over.”
CHAPTER
83
IT WAS TIME to prove he was better than Jack and Jill. In his heart, he knew that he was. No contest. Jack and Jill were basically full of crap.
The Cross home stood in dark, shifting shadows on Fifth Street in Washington’s Southeast. It looked as if everyone inside had finally fallen asleep. We’ll soon see. We’ll just see about that, the killer thought to himself.
His name was Danny Boudreaux, if you really wanted to know the truth. He watched the streetlamp-lit scene from a clump of gum trees sprouting in an otherwise empty lot.
He was thinking about how much he hated Cross and his family. Alex Cross reminded him of his real father, who’d also been a cop devoted to his stupid job and who had left him and his mother because of it. Deserted them as if they were so much spit on the sidewalk. Then his mother had killed herself, and he’d wound up with foster parents.
Families made him sick, but bigshot Cross tried to be such a perfect daddy. He was such a phony, a real scam artist. Worse than that, Cross had severely underestimated him and also “dissed” him several times.
Danny Boudreaux had been a classmate of Sumner Moore at Theodore Roosevelt. Sumner Moore had always been the perfect suck-up cadet, the perfect student, the perfect student-athlete asshole. Moore had been his goddamn tutor since the previous summer. Danny Boudreaux had to go to the Moore house twice a week. He’d hated Sumner Moore from day one for being such a condescending and stuck-up little prick. He’d hated the whole condescending Moore family. Well, he’d taught them a lesson. He’d turned out to be the tutor.
His first totally outrageous idea had been to make it look as if Sumner Moore, the perfect cadet, were the child killer. He’d logged into the Moores’ Prodigy account and led the cops right to their house. What a great frigging prank that had been—the best. Then he’d decided to get rid of Sumner. That was the second outrageous idea. He’d enjoyed killing Sumner Moore even more than the little kids.
He wanted to teach Cross a lesson now, too. Cross obviously didn’t think the so-called Sojourner Truth School killer was worth much of his precious time. Danny Boudreaux was no Gary Soneji in the eyes of Alex Cross. He was no Jack and Jill. He was Nobody, right?
Well, we’ll see about that, Dr. Cross. We’ll just see how I stack up against Jack and Jill and the others. Watch this one real closely, Doctor Hotshit De-fective. You just might learn something.
In the next hour or so, a lot of people would learn not to underestimate Danny Boudreaux, not to snub him ever again.
Danny Boudreaux crossed Fifth Street, careful to keep his body in tree shadows. He walked right into the well-kept yard that bordered the Cross house.
He was thirteen, but small for his age. He was five three and only a hundred and ten pounds. He didn’t look like much. The other cadets called him Mister Softee because he would melt into tears whenever they teased him, which was just about all the time. For Danny Boudreaux hell week had lasted the whole school year. No, it had lasted for his entire life so far. Christ, he had enjoyed killing Sumner Moore! It was like killing his whole goddamn school!
He smeared gray eye shadow over his face, his neck, and his hands as he waited across from the Cross house. He had on dark jeans and a black shirt, and also a dark camo face mask made by Treebark. He had to fit in with the African-American neighborhood, right? Well, no one had paid much attention to him on Sixth Street, or even walking along E Street on his way to Fifth.
Danny Boudreaux touched the butt of the Smith & Wesson semiautomatic in the deep pocket of his poncho. The gun held a dozen shots. He was loaded for bear. The safety was off. He started crying again. Hot tears were streaming down his face. He wiped them away with his sleeve. No more Mr. Softee.
He did perfect murders.
CHAPTER
84
NOTHING IN HEAVEN or on earth could save Alex Cross’s cute little family now. They were next in line to die. It was the move he had to make. The right move at the right time. Hey, hey, what do you say?
Danny Boudreaux inched his way up the back-porch steps of the house. He didn’t make a freaking sound.
He could be a damn good cadet when he needed to be. A fine young soldier. He was on maneuvers tonight, that’s all it was. He was on a nocturnal mission.
Search and destroy.
He didn’t hear any noises coming from inside the house. No late-night TV sounds. No Letterman, Leno, and Beavis and Butt-Head, NordicTrack commercials. No piano playing, either. That probably meant Cross was sleeping now, too. So be it. The sleep of the dead, right?
He touched the doorknob and immediately wanted to pull his fingers away. The metal felt like dry ice against his skin. He held on, though. He turned the knob slowly, slowly. Then he pulled it toward him.
The goddamn door was locked! For some crazy reason he’d imagined it wouldn’t be. He could still get in the house through this door, but he might make some noise.
That wouldn’t do.
That wasn’t perfect.
He decided to go around front and check the situation there. He knew there was a sun porch. A piano on the porch. Cross played the blues out there—but the blues were only just beginning for the good doctor. After tonight, the rest of his life would be nothing but the blues.
Still no sound came from inside the house. He knew Cross hadn’t moved his family out of harm??
?s way. That showed more disrespect on his part. Cross wasn’t afraid of him. Well, he ought to be afraid. Dammit, Cross ought to be scared shitless of him!
Danny Boudreaux reached out to try the door to the sun porch. The young killer broke out in a sweat. Boudreaux could hardly breathe. He was seeing his worst nightmare, and his nightmares were really bad.
Detective John Sampson was staring right at him! The black giant was there on the porch. Waiting for him. Sitting there, all smug as hell.
He’d been caught! Jesus. They’d set a trap for him. He’d fallen for it like a true chump.
But, hey, wait a damn minute. Waitaminute!
Something was wrong with this picture… or rather something was very right with the picture!
Danny Boudreaux blinked his eyes, then he stared real hard. He concentrated hard. Sampson was sleeping in the big, fluffy armchair next to the piano.
His stockinged feet were propped up on a matching hassock. His holstered gun was on a small side table, maybe twelve inches from his right hand. His holstered gun.
Twelve inches. Hmmm. Just twelve little inches, the killer thought, mulled it over.
Danny Boudreaux held on to the doorknob for dear life. He didn’t move. His chest hurt as if he’d been punched.
What to do? What to do? What in hell to do?… TWELVE MEASLY INCHES…
His mind was going about a million miles a second. There were so many thoughts blasting through his brain that it almost shut down on him.
He wanted to go at Sampson. To rush in and take the big moke out. Then hurry upstairs and do the family. He wanted it so much that the thought burned in him, seared the inside of his brain, fried his thought waves.
He slid in and out of his military mind. The better part of valor and all that shit. Logic conquers all. He knew what he had to do.
Even more slowly than he’d come up the steps, he backed away from the porch door of the Cross house. He couldn’t believe how close he’d come to stumbling right into the huge, menacing detective.
Maybe he could have snuck up on the big moke—blown his brains out. Maybe not, though. The big moke was a really big moke.
No, the Truth School killer wouldn’t take the chance. He had too much fun, too many games, ahead of him to blow it like this.
He was too experienced now. He was getting better and better at this.
He disappeared into the night. He had other choices, other business he could take care of. Danny Boudreaux was on the loose in D.C., and he loved it. He had a taste for it now. There would be time for Cross and his stupid family later.
He’d already forgotten that just minutes before he had been crying his eyes out. He hadn’t taken his medicine in seven days. The hated, despicable Depakote, his goddamn mood-disorder medicine.
He was wearing his favorite sweatshirt again. Happy, happy. Joy, joy.
CHAPTER
85
I WOKE WITH A START and a trembling shiver. My skin was pricking, my heart racing furiously.
Bad dream? Something unholy, real, or imagined? The room was pitch-black, all the lights out, and it took me a second to remember where in the name of God I was.
Then I remembered. I remembered everything. I was part of the team assigned to try and protect the President—except the President had decided to make our job even harder than it had been. The President had decided to travel out of Washington—to show the colors—to demonstrate that he wasn’t afraid of terrorists and crackpots of any kind.
I was in New York City—at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on Park Avenue. Jack and Jill were in New York, too. They were so sure of themselves that they had sent us a calling card.
I groped around for the lamp on the bedside table, then for the damn lamp switch. Finally, I clicked it on. I looked at the night table clock. Two fifty-five.
“That’s terrific,” I whispered under my breath. “That’s great.”
I thought of calling my kids in Washington. Calling Nana. It wasn’t a real serious idea, but the notion floated across my mind. I thought about Christine Johnson. Calling her at home. Absolutely not! But I did have the thought, and I did like the idea of talking to her on the phone.
I finally pulled on a pair of khakis, stepped into battered Converse sneaks, slipped into an old sweatshirt. I wandered out into the hotel. I needed to be out of my hotel room. I needed to be out of my own skin.
The Waldorf-Astoria was sound asleep. As it should be. Except that very uptight Secret Service agents were posted everywhere, in every hallway where I wandered. The presidential detail was on its night watch. They were mostly athletic-looking men, who reminded me of very fit accountants. Only a couple of women were assigned to the detail in New York.
“You going for a late run through midtown New York, Detective Cross?” one of the Secret Service agents asked as I passed by. It was a woman named Camille Robinson. She was serious and very dedicated, as most of the Secret Service agents seemed to be. They seemed to like President Thomas Byrnes a lot, enough to take a bullet for.
“My mind is up and running, for sure,” I said and managed a smile. “Probably do a couple of marathons before morning. You okay? Need some coffee or anything?”
Camille shook her head and kept her serious face on. Watchdogs can be female, too. I’d met my share of them. I saluted the diligent agent, then kept on walking.
A few thoughts continued to plague me as I wandered inside the eerily quiet hotel. My mind was running way too hot.
The murder of Charlotte Kinsey was one disturbing puzzle piece. That murder might have been committed by somebody other than Jack and Jill. Could there be a third killer? Why would there be a third killer? How did it fit?
I continued down another long hallway, and down still another track in my mind.
What about larger and more complicated conspiracies? Dallas and JFK? Los Angeles and RFK? Memphis and Dr. King? Where did that insane and depressing line of thinking take me? The list of possible conspirators was impossibly long, and I didn’t have the resources to get at most of the suspects, anyway. The crisis group talked about conspiracies a lot. The Federal Bureau was obsessed with conspiracies. So was the CIA… but a powerful fact remained: thirty years after the Kennedy assassinations, no one was really convinced that either of those murders had been solved.
The more I delved into conspiracy theories, the more I realized that getting to the core was almost impossible. Certainly, no one had yet. I’d talked to several people at the Assassination Archives and Research Center in Washington, and they had come to exactly the same conclusion. Or dead end.
I wandered into the hallway on the twenty-first floor, where the President was sleeping. I had a chilling thought that he might be dead in his room; that Jack and Jill had already struck and left a note, another poem for us to discover in the morning.
“Everything okay?” I asked the agents stationed just outside the door of the presidential suite.
They watched me carefully, as if they were asking themselves, Why is he here? “So far,” one of them said stiffly. “No problems here.”
Eventually, I made a full circle back to my room. It was almost four in the morning.
I slipped inside the room. Lay down on the bed. I thought of my conversation with Sampson earlier that night, hearing about the murder of Sumner Moore. Apparently, the Moore boy wasn’t the Truth School killer. I tried not to think about either case anymore.
I finally dozed until six—when the clock radio went off like a fire alarm next to my head.
Rock-and-roll music blared. “K-Rock” in New York. Howard Stern was talking to me. He had worked down in Washington years ago. Howard said, “The prez is in town. Can Jack and Jill be far away?”
Everybody knew about it. The President’s motorcade through Manhattan started at eleven. Stagecoach was ready to roll again.
CHAPTER
86
HISTORY was about to be made in New York City. At the very least, it was white-knuckle time. Definitely that. The game
had ceased being a game.
Jack jogged at a strong, steady pace through Central Park. It was a little before six in the morning. He’d been out running since just after five. He had a lot on his mind. D day had finally arrived. New York City was the war zone, and he couldn’t imagine a better one.
He observed the very striking Manhattan skyline from where he was running alongside Fifth Avenue, heading south. Above the tall, uneven line of buildings, the sky was the color of charcoal seen through tissue paper. Huge plumes of smoke billowed up from turn-of-the-century buildings.
It was pretty as hell, actually. Close to glorious. Not the way he usually thought of New York City. It was just a facade, though. Like Jack and Jill, he was thinking.
As he ran alongside a blue city bus charging down Fifth Avenue, he wondered if he might die in the next few hours. He had to be ready for that, to be prepared for anything.
Kamikaze, he thought. The final plan was deadly, and it was as surefire as these things could be. He didn’t believe that the target could possibly survive this attack. No one could. There would be other deaths as well. This was a war, after all, and people died in war.
Jack finally emerged from the park at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-ninth. He continued to run south, picking up his pace.
A few moments later, he entered the formal and attractive lobby of the Peninsula Hotel in the West Fifties. It was ten past six in the morning. The Peninsula was a little more than twenty blocks from Madison Square Garden, where President Byrnes was scheduled to appear at twenty-five past eleven. The New York Times was just being delivered into the hotel lobby. He caught the headline: JACK AND JILL KILLERS FEARED IN NEW YORK AS PRESIDENT VISITS. He was impressed. Even the Times was on top of things.