He fired at Christine!
She tried to spin out of the way. I couldn’t tell if she had.
I kept coming, then I was in the air.
Danny Boudreaux swung the semiautomatic back at me. His eyes were filled with terror and intense hatred. His body shook with rage, fear, desperation. Maybe he could get us both.
I moved a lot faster than he thought I could. I was inside the radius of his arm and the outstretched gun.
I crashed into Danny Boudreaux as if he were a full-grown man, an armed and dangerous one. I crushed him with a full body-blow. I relished the contact.
Danny Boudreaux and I were down in a sprawling heap. We were tangled up, a mass of flying arms and twitching, kicking legs. The gun went off again. I didn’t feel any blinding pain yet, but I tasted blood.
The boy screamed in his high-pitched wail. He wailed! I wrenched the gun out of his hand. He tried to bite me, to rip into my flesh. Then the boy growled.
He began to have a seizure, possibly from the drug withdrawal. A major surge of brain activity was being discharged in his body. He was thrashing his arms and legs. His pelvis thrust forward as if he were dry-humping my leg.
His eyes rolled back, and his body suddenly went limp. Foam spewed from his mouth. His arms and legs continued to flail and twitch. He might have lost consciousness for a second or two. He continued to drool, to make choking and gurgling sounds.
I flipped him on his side. His lips were dusky blue. His eyes finally rolled back into place. They started to blink rapidly. The seizure had ended as quickly as it had come. He lay limp on the floor, a pool of wild bad boy.
The police had heard the shots. They were all over the living room. Riot shotguns, drawn pistols. Lots of shouting and squawking radio-receivers. Christine Johnson went to her husband. So did two of the EMS medics.
The next time I looked, Christine was kneeling beside me. She didn’t seem to be hurt. “Are you all right, Alex?” she asked in a hoarse whisper.
I was still holding down Danny Boudreaux. He seemed unaware of his surroundings. He was streaming with cold, oily sweat. The Sojourner Truth School killer now looked sad, lost, and unbearably confused. Thirteen years old. Five homicides. Maybe more.
“Grand mal?” Christine asked.
I nodded. “I think so. Maybe just too much excitement.”
Danny Boudreaux was trying to say something, but I couldn’t hear what it was. He sputtered, still drooling the bubbling white foam.
“What did you say? What is it?” I asked. My voice was hoarse and my throat hurt. I was shaking and covered with sweat myself.
He spoke in a tiny whisper, almost as if there were no one inside him anymore. “I’m afraid,” he told me. “I don’t know where I am. I’m always so afraid.”
I nodded at the small, horrifying face looking up at me. “I know,” I said to the young killer. “I know what you’re feeling.”
That was the scariest thing of all.
CHAPTER
102
THE DRAGONSLAYER lives, but how many lives do I have left? Why was I taking chances with my life? Physician, heal thyself.
I stayed at the Johnson house for more than an hour, until the Boudreaux boy and the body of George Johnson were taken away. There were questions I had to ask Christine Johnson for my report. Then I called home and spoke to Nana. I told her to please go to bed. I was safe and basically sound. For tonight, anyway.
“I love you, Alex,” she whispered over the phone. Nana sounded almost as tired and beat-up as I was.
“I love you, too, old woman,” I told her.
That night, miracle of miracles, she actually let me get in the last word.
The crowd of ambulance-chasers on Summer Street finally broke up. Even the most persistent reporters and photographers left. One of Christine Johnson’s sisters had arrived to be with her in this terrible time. I hugged Christine hard before I left.
She was still trembling. She had suffered a horrible, unspeakable loss. We had both spent a night in hell. “I can’t feel anything. Everything is so unreal,” she told me. “I know this isn’t a nightmare, and yet I keep thinking that it has to be one.”
Sampson drove me home at one in the morning. My eyes felt lidless. My brain was still going at a million miles an hour, still buzzing loudly, still overheated.
What was our world coming to? Gary Soneji? Bundy? The Hillside Strangler? Koresh? McVeigh? On and on and on. Gandhi was asked once what he thought of western civilization. He replied, “I think it could be a good idea.”
I don’t cry too much. I can’t. The same is true for a lot of police officers I know. I wish I could cry sometimes, let it all out, release the fear and the venom, but it isn’t that easy. Something has gotten blocked up inside.
I sat on the stairs inside our house. I had been on my way to my bedroom, but I hadn’t made it. I was trying to cry, but I couldn’t.
I thought about my wife, Maria, who was killed in a drive-by shooting a few years back. Maria and I had fit together beautifully. That wasn’t just selective memory on my part. I knew how good love could be—I knew it was the best thing I’d ever done in my life—and yet here I was alone. I was taking chances with my life. I kept telling everybody that I was all right, but I wasn’t.
I don’t know how long I stayed there in the darkness with my thoughts. Maybe ten minutes, maybe it was much more than that. The house was quiet in a familiar, almost comfortable way, but I couldn’t be soothed that night.
I listened to sounds that I had been hearing for years. I remembered being a small boy there, growing up with Nana, wondering what I would become someday. Now I knew the answer to that question. I was a multiple-homicide expert who got to work the biggest, nastiest cases. I was the dragonslayer.
I finally climbed the rest of the stairs and stopped in at Damon and Jannie’s room. The two of them were fast asleep in the bedroom they share in our small house.
I love the way Damon and Jannie sleep, the trusting, innocent ways of my young son and daughter. I can watch them for long stretches, even on a howling-bad night like this one. I can’t count how many times I have peeked in and just stood in the doorway. They keep me going, keep me from flying apart some nights.
They’d gone to sleep wearing funky, heart-shaped sunglasses like the ones the kids wear in the singing group called Innocence. It was cute as hell. Precious, too. I sat on the edge of Jannie’s bed. I quietly took off my boots and carefully laid them on the floor without making any noise.
Then I stretched myself out across the bottom of both their beds. I listened to my bones crack. I wanted to be near my kids, to be with them, for all of us to be safe. It didn’t seem too much to ask out of life, too much reward for the day I had just lived through.
I gently kissed the rubber-soled slipper-sock of Jannie’s pajamas.
I laid my hand very lightly against Damon’s cool bare leg.
I finally closed my eyes, and I tried to push the rushing scenes of murder and chaos out of my mind. I couldn’t do it. The monsters were everywhere that night. They truly were all around me.
There are so goddamn many of them. Wave upon wave, it seems. Young and old, and everything in between. Where are these monsters coming from in America? What has created them?
Lying there alongside my two children, I finally was able to sleep somehow. For a few hours, I was able to forget the most horrifying thing of all, the reason for my extreme sorrow and upset.
I had heard the news before I left the Johnson house. President Thomas Byrnes had died early that morning.
CHAPTER
103
I WAS HOLDING and gently petting Rosie the cat. I had the kitchen door open and peered outside, squinted at Sampson.
He stood in a freezing-cold rain. He looked like a big, dark boulder in the teeming rainstorm, or maybe it was hail that he was weathering so stoically.
“The nightmare continues,” he said to me. A simple declarative sentence. Devastating.
&n
bsp; “Yeah, doesn’t it, though? But maybe I don’t care about it anymore.”
“Uh-huh. And maybe this is the year the Bullets win the NBA championship, the Orioles win the World Series, and the raggedyass Redskins go to the Super Bowl. You just never know.”
A day has passed since the long night at the Johnson house, since the even longer morning in New York City. Not nearly enough time for any kind of healing, or even proper grieving. President Edward Mahoney had been sworn in the day before. It was necessary according to law, but it almost seemed indecent to me.
I had on dungarees and a white T-shirt. Bare feet on a cold linoleum floor. Steaming coffee mug in hand. I was convalescing nicely. I hadn’t washed off my whiskers, as Jannie calls the act of shaving. I was almost feeling human again.
I hadn’t asked Sampson in yet, either.
“Morning, Sugar,” Sampson persisted. Then he rolled back his upper lip and showed off some teeth. His smile was brutally joyful. I finally had to smile back at my friend and nemesis.
It was a little past nine o’clock and I had just gotten up. This was late for me. It was shameful behavior by Nana’s standards. I was still sleep-deprived, trauma shocked, in danger of losing the rest of my mind, throwing up, something shitty and unexpected. But I was also much better. I looked good; I looked fine.
“Aren’t you even going to say good morning?” Sampson asked, pretending to be hurt.
“Morning, John. I don’t even want to know about it,” I said to him. “Whatever it is that brings you here this cold and bleak morning.”
“First intelligent thing I’ve heard out of your mouth in years,” Sampson said, “but I’m afraid I don’t believe it. You want to know everything. You need to know everything, Alex. That’s why you read four newspapers every damn morning.”
“I don’t want to know, either,” Nana contributed from behind me in the kitchen. She had been up for hours, of course. “I don’t need to know. Shoo, fly. Go fry some ice. Take a long walk off a short dock, Johnnyboy.”
“We got time for breakfast?” I finally asked him.
“Not really,” he said, careful to keep his smile turned on, “but let’s eat, anyway. Who could resist?”
“He invited you, not me,” Nana warned from over by her hot stove.
She was kidding Sampson. She loves him as if he were her own son, as if he were my physically bigger brother. She made the two of us scrambled eggs, homemade sausage, home fries, toast. She knows how to cook and could easily feed the entire Washington Redskins team at training camp. That would be no problem for Nana.
Sampson waited until we had finished eating before he got back into it, whatever it was, whatever had happened now. His dark little secret. It may seem odd—but when your life is filled with homicides and other tragedies, you have to learn to take time for yourself. The homicides will still be there. The homicides are always there.
“Your Mister Grayer called me a little while ago,” Sampson said as he poured his third cup of coffee. “He said to let you have a couple of days off, that they could handle this. Them, like the great old horror flick that used to scare the hell out of us.”
“That, what you just said, makes me suspicious and fearful right away. Handle what?” I asked.
I was finishing the last of half a loaf of cinnamon toast made from thick homemade bread. It was, honestly, quite seriously, a taste of heaven. Nana claims that she’s been there, stolen several recipes. I tend to believe her. I’ve seen and tasted the proof of her tale.
Sampson glanced at his wristwatch, an ancient Bulova given to him by his father when he was fourteen.
“They’re looking over Jill’s office in the White House right about now. Then they’re going to her apartment on Twenty-fourth Street. You want to go? As my guest? Got you a guest pass, just in case.”
Of course I wanted to be there. I had to go. I needed to know everything about Jill, just as Sampson had said I did.
“You are the devil,” Nana hissed at Sampson.
“Thank you, Nana.” He beamed bright eyes and a thousand and one teeth. “High praise, indeed.”
CHAPTER
104
WE DROVE to Sara Rosen’s apartment in Sampson’s slippery-quick black Nissan. Nana’s hot breakfast had brought me back to the real world at least. I was feeling partially revived. Physically, if not emotionally.
I was already highly intrigued about visiting Jill’s home. I wanted to see her office at the White House, too, but figured that could wait a day or two. But her house. That was irresistible for the detective, and for the psychologist.
Sara Rosen lived in a ten-story building on Twenty-fourth and K. The building had an officious front-desk “captain” who studied our police IDs and then reluctantly let us proceed. The lobby was cheery otherwise. Carpeted, lots of large potted plants. Not the kind of building where anyone would expect to find an assassin.
But Jill had lived right here, hadn’t she?
Actually, the apartment fit the profile we had of Sara Rosen. She was the only child of an Army colonel and a high school English teacher. She had grown up in Aberdeen, Maryland, then gone to Hollins College in Virginia. She had majored in history and English, graduating with honors. She’d come to Washington sixteen years ago, when she was twenty-one. She had never married, though she’d had several boyfriends over the years. Some of the staff at the White House press and communications offices called her “the sexy spinster.”
Her apartment was on the fifth floor of the ten-story building. It was bright, with a view of an interior courtyard. The FBI was already at work inside. Chopin came softly from a stereo. It was a relaxed atmosphere, almost pleasant, devil-may-care. The case was, after all, closed.
Sampson and I spent the next few hours with the Feebie technicians who were searching the apartment for anything that might give the Bureau a clue about Sara Rosen.
Jill had lived right there.
Who the hell were you, Jill? How did this happen to you? What happened, Jill? Talk to us. You know you want to talk, lonely girl.
Her apartment was a one-bedroom with a small den, and we would examine every square inch of it. The woman who had lived here had helped to murder President Thomas Byrnes. The den had been used as an editing room for their film. The apartment had historical importance now. For as long as this building stood, people would point at it and say, “That’s where Jill lived.”
She had bought anonymous-looking furniture in a country-club style. They were middle-class trappings. A sofa and armchair made of brushed cotton twill. Local furniture store tags: Mastercraft Interiors, Colony House in Arlington. Cool, cold colors in every room. Lots of ivory-colored things at Jill’s place. An ice-blue, patterned area rug. A pale, distressed pine armoire.
Several frames on the wall contained matted Christmas cards and letters from White House notables: the current press secretary, the chief of staff, even a brief note from Nancy Reagan. There were no pictures of any of the “enemies” mentioned to me by President Byrnes. Sara Rosen was a secret starfucker, wasn’t she? Had Jack been a star for her? Was Jack really Kevin Hawkins?
Talk to us, Jill. I know you want to talk. Tell us what really happened. Give us a clue.
Sitting out on a small rolltop desk were mailings from the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, both conservative organizations. There were several copies of U.S. News & World Report, Southern Living, Gourmet.
Also flyers about future poetry readings at Chapters on K Street, and Politics and Prose, bookstores in the Washington area. Was Jill the poet?
A poem had been cut from a book and taped to the wall above the desk.
How dreary—to be—Somebody!
How public—like a Frog—
To tell one’s name—the live-long June—
To an admiring Bog!
—Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson apparently had the same opinion of celebrities as Jack and Jill.
The walls of the den and bedroom were cov
ered with books. The walls were bookcases. Fiction, nonfiction, poetry. High- and low-brow stuff. Jill the reader. Jill the loner. Jill the sexy spinster.
Who are you, Jill? Who are you, Sara Rosen?
There was even one bit of evidence that showed a sense of humor. A sign was framed in the front hallway: use an accordion, go to jail. That’s the law.
Who are you, Sara-Jill?
Did anybody really care about you before now? Why did you help to commit this horrible crime? Was it worth it? To die like this, a lonely spinster? Who killed you, Jill? Was it Jack?
If I found one indisputable piece of truth, just one, all the rest would follow, and we would finally understand. I wanted to believe that it could go like that.
I looked through Jill’s clothes closets. I found conservative business suits mostly in dark colors. Labels that told me Brooks Brothers and Ann Taylor. Low pumps, running shoes, casual flats. There were several sweatsuits for running and exercise.
Not many evening dresses for parties, for fun.
Who were you, Sara?
I searched for false walls, false bottoms, anywhere that she might have kept private notes, something that might help us to close this case forever, or open it wide.
C’mon, Sara, let us in on your secret life. Tell us who you really were.
What kept you going, Jill? Who were you, Sara? Sexy spinster? You want us to know. I know you do. You’re still in this apartment. I can feel it. I can feel your loneliness everywhere I look.
You want us to know something. What is it, Sara? Give us one more rhyme. Just one.
Sampson came up behind me while I was standing at a bedroom window overlooking the courtyard. I was thinking about all the possibilities the case held.
“You got it solved yet? Got it all figured out, Sweets?”
“Not yet. There’s something more, though. Give me another couple of days here.”
Sampson groaned at the thought. And so did I. But I knew I would come back here. Sara Rosen had left something for us to remember her by. I was almost sure of it.