“People are still out there crying in the streets,” George said. After the hug, he shucked off his wool Brooks Brothers suit jacket and loosened his tie, but he didn’t go upstairs to change. He was breaking all his usual patterns tonight. Well, good for George.
“I didn’t vote for President Byrnes, but this has really gotten to me anyway, Chris. What a damn shame.” There were tears in his eyes, and that started her up again, too.
George usually kept his feelings to himself, everything all bottled up. Christine was touched by her husband’s emotion. She was touched a great deal.
“I’ve cried a couple of times,” she confided to George. “You know me. I did vote for the President, but that’s not it. It just seems as though we’re losing respect for every institution, everything permanent. We’re losing respect for human life at a very fast rate. I even see it in the eyes of six-year-old schoolchildren. I see it every day at the Truth School.”
George Johnson held his wife again, held her tight. At five eleven, he was exactly her height. Christine rested her head softly against the side of his. She smelled of light citrus fragrance. She’d worn it to school. He loved her so much. She was like no other woman, no other person he’d ever met. He felt incredibly lucky to have her, to be loved by her, to hold her like this.
“Do you know what I’m saying?” she asked, wanting to talk with George tonight, not willing to let him disappear on her, as he so often did.
“Sure I do,” he said. “Everybody feels it, Chrissie. Nobody knows how to begin to make it stop, though.”
“I’ll fix us something to eat. We can watch the dregs on CNN,” she finally said. “Part of me doesn’t want to watch the news, but part of me has to watch this.”
“I’ll help with the grub,” George offered, which was rare. She wished that he could be like this more often and that it didn’t take a national tragedy to get him in touch with his emotions. Well, a lot of men were like that, she knew. There were worse things in a marriage.
They made a vegetarian gumbo together and opened a bottle of Chardonnay. They had barely finished supper in front of the TV when the front doorbell rang. It was a little before nine, and they weren’t expecting anyone, but sometimes neighbors dropped in.
CNN was covering the scene at New York University Hospital, where the President had been rushed after the shooting. Alex Cross had appeared with various other officers who had been at the scene of the shooting, but he wouldn’t say much to the media. Alex looked upset, spent, but also, well—noble. Christine didn’t mention to George that she knew him. She wondered why. She hadn’t told George about Alex’s visit to their house late one night. He had slept right through it; but that was George.
Before he could get up off the couch, the doorbell rang a second time. Then, a third ring. Whoever it was wouldn’t go away.
“I’ll get it, Chrissie,” he said. “Don’t know who in hell that could be, this time of night. Do you?”
“I don’t, either.”
“All right, already,” he snapped. Christine found herself smiling. George the Impatient was back.
“I’m coming for Christmas’ sake. I’m coming. I’m coming. Hold your water, I’m coming,” he said as he hobbled toward the door in his stockinged feet.
He peered through the peephole, then turned to look at Christine with a questioning scowl on his face.
“It’s some white kid.”
CHAPTER
95
DANNY BOUDREAUX stood on the shiny, white-painted porch of the schoolteacher’s house. He was dressed in an oversized army-green rain poncho that made him look bigger than he actually was, somewhat more impressive. The Sojourner Truth School killer in the flesh! He was in his glory now. But even in his megahyper mood, he sensed that something was wrong with him now.
He didn’t feel good, and he was getting sad—kind of depressed as hell, actually. The machine was breaking down. The doctors couldn’t figure whether he was a bipolar disorder or conduct disorder. If they couldn’t, how the hell was he supposed to? So what if he was a little impulsive, had huge mood swings, was a social misfit? The fuse was lit. He was ready to blow. Like, who cared?
He had stopped his dosages of Depakote. Just say no, right? He was humming the “Mmm mm mm” song over and over. Crash Test Dummies. Sad, angry music that just wouldn’t stop playing in his head like MTV Muzak.
His “mad button” seemed to be stuck—permanently.
He was mad at Jack and Jill. Real mad at Alex Cross. Mad at the principal of the Truth School. Mad at just about everybody on the planet. He was even mad at himself now. He was such a goddamn screwup. Always had been, always would be.
I’m a loser, baby.
So why don’t you kill me?
He snapped back to semireality when a black fucker wearing a blue pinstriped shirt, suit trousers, and mellow-yellow suspenders answered the door. Hey, welcome to the Cyburbs!
At first, Danny Boudreaux didn’t understand who the hell the round-faced black dude was. He’d been expecting the big-deal school principal Mrs. Johnson, or maybe even Alex Cross, if Cross hadn’t gone to New York. He had seen Cross and the principal together on three different occasions. He guessed they were getting it on.
He didn’t know why that made him mad, but it did. Cross was just like his goddamn father, his real father. Another fuckup cop who had deserted him, who didn’t think he was worth dogshit. And now Cross was humping this teacher on the side.
Wait, wait, hold on, Danny Boudreaux suddenly got something clear. A flash. This self-righteous Kunta Kinte dude has to be her husband, right? Of course he was.
“Yes? Can I help you with something?” George Johnson asked the strange-looking and disheveled young man on the porch. He didn’t know the paper-delivery boy in the neighborhood, but maybe this was he. For some strange reason, the white boy reminded him of a disturbing movie called Kids that he’d watched with Christine. The boy looked as if he had some trouble in his life right now.
In Danny Boudreaux’s humble opinion, the black guy seemed real unfriendly and uppity as hell. Especially for the nobody husband of some nobody schoolteacher. That pissed him off even more. Made him see about twelve different shades of red. Put him over the edge.
He felt one of the worst rages coming on. Hurricane Daniel was about to strike in Mitchellville.
“Noooooo!” he nearly yelled at the man. “You can’t even help yourself. You sure as shit can’t help me!”
Danny Boudreaux suddenly yanked out his semiautomatic. George Johnson looked at the gun in disbelief. He stepped back quickly from the door. He threw up both his arms in self-defense.
Without any hesitation, Boudreaux fired twice. “Take that, you silly black rabbit!” he yelled, letting the voices come as they may. The two bullets hit George Johnson in the chest.
He flew back through the open door as if he’d been struck with a sledgehammer. He bounced once off the cream marble floor.
The cat was DOA for sure. Blood was surging from the two holes in his chest.
The Sojourner Truth School killer then walked right into the teacher’s house. He stepped over the fallen body as if it were worth nothing. He was feeling nothing.
“I’ll just go ahead in, thanks,” he said to the dead man on the floor. “You’ve been most helpful.”
Christine Johnson had risen from the couch in the living room when she heard the shots. He had forgotten how goddamn tall she was. Danny Boudreaux could see her from the front hallway. She could see him and her husband’s body as well.
She didn’t look so almighty-in-charge anymore. He had knocked her ass down a peg real quick. She deserved it, too. She’d hurt his feelings the first time they met. She probably didn’t even remember the incident.
“Remember me?” he called to her. “Remember hassling me, bitch? At the Truth School? You remember me, don’t you?”
“Oh, my God. Oh, George. Oh, God, George,” she moaned the words. A dry sob was shaking her body. She looked as
if she might collapse. He saw that fucking Jack and Jill was on the tube. Goddammit. They were always trying to one-up him. Even here, even now!
Danny Boudreaux could tell that the schoolteacher wanted to run real bad. There was nowhere to go, though. Not unless she went right through the picture window and out onto her lawn. She had her hand up to her mouth. Her hand looked as if it were stuck there with Velcro. Probably in shock.
Lady, who isn’t these days?
“Don’t yell anymore,” he warned her in a high-pitched scream of his own. “Don’t scream again or I’ll shoot you, too. I can and I will. I’ll shoot you dead as the doorman.”
He closed in on her now. He kept the Smith & Wesson pointed out in front of him. He wanted her to see that he was very comfortable with the weapon, very expert with firearms—which he was, thanks to the Teddy Roosevelt School.
His hand was shaking some, but so what? He wouldn’t miss her at this distance.
“Hi, there, Mrs. Johnson,” he said and gave her his best spooky-guy grin. “I’m the one who killed Shanelle Green and Vernon Wheatley. Everybody’s been looking all over for me. Well, I guess you found me,” he told her. “Congratulations, babe. Nice work.”
Danny Boudreaux was crying now, and he couldn’t remember why he was so sad. All he knew for sure was that he was furiously angry. With everybody. Everybody had fucked up real bad this time. This was about the worst so far.
No happy, happy. No joy, joy.
“I’m the Truth School killer,” he repeated. “You believe that? You got it? It’s a true tale. Tale of heartbreak and woe. Don’t you even remember me? Am I that forgettable? I sure remember you.
CHAPTER
96
I RUSHED BACK to the Washington, D.C., area that night about eleven o’clock. The Sojourner Truth School killer was rampaging. I had predicted he was going to go off, but being right held no rewards for me. Stopping the explosion might.
Maybe it was no accident that he was blowing the same night as Jack and Jill. He wanted to be better than them, didn’t he? He wanted to be important, famous, in the brightest spotlight. He couldn’t bear being Nobody.
I tried to put my mind somewhere else for the short time I was on the military jet. I was feeling so low, I could have jumped off a dime. I scanned the late papers, which carried front-page stories about President Byrnes and the shooting in New York. The President was in extremely critical condition at New York University Hospital on East Thirty-third Street in Manhattan. Jack and Jill were both reported dead. Doctors at University Hospital didn’t know if the President would survive the night.
I was numb, disoriented, overloaded, on the slippery borderline of shock trauma myself. Now it was getting worse. I didn’t know for certain if I could handle this, but I hadn’t been given a choice.
The killer had demanded to see me. He claimed that I was his detective and that he’d been calling my house for the past few days.
A police cruiser was scheduled to meet me at Andrews Air Force Base. From there I’d be taken to nearby Mitchellville, where Danny Boudreaux was holding Christine Johnson hostage. So far, Boudreaux had murdered two small children, a classmate of his named Sumner Moore, and his own foster parents. It was an extraordinary rampage, and the case deserved more resources than it had received from the Metro police.
A police cruiser was waiting at Andrews as promised. Somebody had put together material for me on Daniel Boudreaux. The boy had been under a psychiatrist’s care since he was seven. He had been severely depressed. He’d apparently committed bizarre acts of animal torture as early as seven. Daniel Boudreaux’s real mother committed suicide, and he blamed himself. His real father had deserted them. The father had been a state trooper in Virginia. Another cop, I noted. Probably some kind of transference going on inside the boy’s head.
I recognized Summer Street as soon as we branched off the John Hanson Highway. A detective from Prince Georges County sat with me in the backseat of the cruiser. His name was Henry Fornier. He tried to brief me on the hostage situation as best he could under the bizarre circumstances.
“As we understand it, Dr. Cross, George Johnson has been shot, and he may be dead in the house. The boy won’t allow the body to be removed or to receive any medical attention,” Officer Fornier told me. “He’s a nasty bastard, I’ll tell you. A real little prick.”
“Boudreaux was being treated for his anger, his depression and rage cycles, with Depakote. I’ll bet anything that he’s off it now,” I said. I was thinking out loud, trying to prepare myself for whatever was coming just a few blocks up this peaceful-looking street.
It didn’t matter that the Boudreaux boy was thirteen years old. He had already killed five times. That’s what he did: he killed. Another monster. A very young, horrifying monster.
I spotted Sampson, who was half a head taller than the other policemen stationed outside the Johnson house. I tried to take in everything. There were scores of police, but also soldiers in riot gear with military camouflage at the scene. Cars and trucks with government license plates were parked all over the street.
I walked right over to Sampson. He knew the things I needed to hear, and he would know how to talk to me. “Hey there, Sugar,” he greeted me with a hint of his usual ironic smile. “Glad you could make it to the party.”
“Yeah, nice to see you, too,” I said.
“Friend of yours wants to see you. Wants to talk the talk with Dr. Cross. You’ve got the damnedest friends.”
“Yeah. I sure do,” I said to Sampson. He was one of them. “They’re holding back firepower because he’s a kid? Is that what’s going on so far?”
Sampson nodded. I had it right. “He’s just another stone killer, Alex,” he said. “You remember that. He’s just another killer.”
CHAPTER
97
A THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD MURDERER.
I began to pay very close attention to the staging area that had been set up around the perimeter of the Johnson house. Even relatively small, local police forces were getting good at this sort of thing. Terror was invading towns with names like Ruby Ridge and Waco, and now, Mitchellville.
A late-model, dark blue van with its back doors open held TV monitors, state-of-the-art sound equipment, phones, a desktop workstation. A techie was crouched near a windblown willow tree listening to the house with a microphone gun. The gun could pick up voices from well over a hundred yards.
Surveillance shots and also assorted photos of the boy were tacked to a board propped against a squad car. A helicopter was spraying high-intensity beams on the rooftops and trees. Here the hostage drama was unfolding as we know and love it.
In suburbia this time.
A thirteen-year-old boy named Daniel Boudreaux.
Just another stone killer.
“Who do they have talking to him?” I asked Sampson as we wandered closer to the house. I spotted a black Lexus parked in the driveway. George Johnson’s car? “Who’s the negotiator on this?”
“They got Paul Losi down here as soon as they found out about the hostage situation, and how goddamn bad it was.”
I nodded and felt a little relief at the choice of a negotiator. “That’s good. Losi is tough. He’s good under pressure, too. How is the boy communicating from the house?”
“At first, over the phone lines. Then he demanded a megaphone. Threw a real tantrum. Threatened to shoot the teacher and himself on the spot. So the bad boy got his own blowhorn. He uses that now. He and Paul Losi are not exactly what you call ‘hitting it off.’”
“How about Christine Johnson? She still okay? What do you hear?”
“Appears to be all right, so far. She’s been cool under fire. We think she’s holding the bad boy in control somehow, but just barely. She’s tough.”
That much I knew already. She’s even tougher than you are, Daddy. I hoped Damon was one hundred percent right. I hoped she was tougher than all of us.
George Pittman wandered up beside Sampson and me while we w
ere talking. The chief of detectives was the last person I wanted to see then, absolutely the last. I still suspected he was the one who had “volunteered” me to the White House. I swallowed any anger I was feeling; swallowed my pride, too.
“FBI has sharpshooters in place,” Pittman informed us. “Trouble is, the powers won’t let us use them. The little bastard’s been out in the open a couple of times.”
I stayed even and calm with Pittman. He still had a gun to my head. We both knew it. “Trouble is, the killer is thirteen years old. He’s probably suicidal,” I said. I was making an educated guess, but I was almost certain it was the right one. He had cornered himself in the Johnson house, then started screaming come and get me.
Pittman’s face became a dark scowl. His face was tinged with red down to his bull neck. “He thinks the five murders he’s committed are funny. Little fucker told the negotiator that already. He laughs about the murders. He’s asking for you specifically. Now how do you feel about the sharpshooters?” Pittman came back at me before he walked away.
Sampson shook his head. “Don’t even think about going in there to play games with Dennis the Menace,” he said.
“I need to understand him better. I have to talk to him to do that,” I muttered and looked at the Johnson house. There were plenty of lights on downstairs. None up on the second floor.
“You understand him too goddamn much already, though you’d deny it. You understand so much about the crazies, you’re going over the edge yourself. You hear me? You understand that?”
I did understand. I had a fair idea of my own strengths and weaknesses. Most of the time, anyway. Maybe not on a night like this one, though.
A voice on a megaphone interrupted us. The Sojourner Truth School killer had decided to speak.
“Hey! Hey, out there! Hey, you dumb bastards! Did you forget something? Remember me?”
I got to hear Danny Boudreaux for the first time. He sounded like a boy. Nasal, high-pitched, ordinary as hell. Thirteen years old.