JACK: Look at the faces. Now do you understand why we are coming to get you? Do you see?… Just look at the faces. Look at what you have done. Look at the unspeakable crimes you have committed.
JILL: Jack and Jill have come to The Hill. This is why we’re here. Beware to all those who work and live in the capital, and attempt to control the rest of us. You’ve been playing with all of our lives—now we’re going to play with yours. It’s our turn to play. It’s Jack and Jill’s turn.
The film ended with striking images of masses of homeless people in Lafayette Square, right across from the White House. Then another poem, another warning rhyme.
Jack and Jill came to The Hill
On a grave and somber mission.
You’ve made them mad
The time’s so bad
To be a politician.
JACK: These are the times that try men without souls. You know who you are. So do we.
“How long does their little masterpiece run?” One of the television producers wanted an answer to the most practical of questions. CNN was supposed to be on the air live with the film in less than ten minutes.
“Just over three minutes. Seemed like forever, I know,” a technician with a stopwatch reported. “If you’re thinking about editing it down, tell me right now.”
I felt a chill after hearing the rhyme, even though the viewing room was warm. No one had left yet. The CNN people were talking among themselves, discussing the film, as if the rest of us weren’t even there. The talk-show host was looking pensive and troubled. Maybe he understood where mass communications was heading, and realized it couldn’t be stopped.
“We’re live in eight minutes,” a producer announced to his crew. “We need this room, people. We’re going to make dupes for all of you.”
“Souvenirs,” someone in the crowd quipped. “I saw Jack and Jill on CNN.”
“They’re not serial killers,” I said in a soft mumble, more for myself than anyone else. I wanted to hear what the thought, the hunch, sounded like out loud.
I was in the minority, but my belief was strong. They’re not pattern killers, not in the ordinary scene. They were extremely organized and careful, though. They were clever or personable enough to get close to a couple of famous people. They had a hang-up with kinky sex, or maybe they just wanted us to think so. They had some kind of overarching cause.
I could still hear their words, their eerie voices on the tape: “On a grave and somber mission.”
Maybe this wasn’t a game to them. It was a war.
CHAPTER
24
IT WAS the worst of times; it was the worst of times. On Wednesday morning, just two days after Shanelle Green’s murder, a second murdered child was found in Garfield Park, not far from the Sojourner Truth School. This time the victim was a seven-year-old boy. The crime was similar. The child’s face had been crushed, possibly with a metal club or pipe.
I could walk from my house on Fifth Street to the horrifying murder scene. I did just that, but I dragged my feet. It was the fourth of December and children were already thinking of Christmas. This shouldn’t have been happening. Not ever, but especially not then.
I felt bad for another reason, besides the murder of another innocent child. Unless someone was copycatting the first murder, and that seemed highly unlikely to me, the killer couldn’t have been Emmanuel Perez, couldn’t have been Chop-It-Off-Chucky. Sampson and I had made a mistake. We had run down the wrong child molester. We were partly responsible for his death.
The wind swirled and howled across the small park as I entered across from the bodega. It was a miserable morning, terribly cold and darkly overcast. Two ambulances and a half-dozen police cruisers were parked on the grounds inside the rim of the park. There were at least a hundred people from the neighborhood at the crime scene. It was eerie, ghastly, completely unreal. Police and ambulance sirens screamed in the background, a terrifying dirge for the dead. I shivered miserably, and it wasn’t only from the cold.
The horrifying crime scene reminded me of a bad time a few years back when we had found a little boy’s body the day before Christmas. The image was everlasting in my mind. The boy’s name was Michael Goldberg, but everybody had called him Shrimpie. He was only nine years old. The murderer’s name was Gary Soneji, and he had escaped from prison after I caught him. He had escaped, and he had disappeared off the face of the earth. I’d come to think of Soneji as my Dr. Moriarty, evil incarnate, if there was such a thing, and I had begun to believe that there was.
I couldn’t help thinking and wondering about Soneji. Gary Soneji had a perfect reason to commit murders near my home. He had vowed to pay me back for his time spent in prison: every day, every hour, every minute. Payback time, Dr. Cross.
As I ducked under the crisscrossing yellow crime-scene tapes, a woman in a white rain poncho yelled out to me, “You’re supposed to be a policeman, right? So why the hell won’t you do something! Do something about this maniac killing our children! Oh yeah, and have a happy, goddamn holiday!”
What could I possibly say to the angry woman? That real police work wasn’t like N.Y.P.D. Blue on television? We had no leads on the two child killings so far. We had no Chop-It-Off-Chucky to blame anymore. There was no getting around a simple fact: Sampson and I had made a mistake. A bad hombre was dead, but probably for the wrong reason.
The news coverage continued to be very limited, but I recognized a few reporters at the tragic scene: Inez Gomez from El Diario and Fern Galperin from CNN. They seemed to cover everything in Washington, occasionally even murders in Southeast.
“Does this have anything to do with the child murder last week, Detective? Did you get the real murderer? Is this a serial killer of little kids?” Inez Gomez shot off a clipped barrage of questions at me. She was very good at her job, smart and tough and fair most of the time.
I said nothing to any of the reporters, not even to Gomez. I didn’t even look their way. There was an ache at the center of my chest that wouldn’t go away.
Is this a serial killer of little kids? I don’t know, Inez, I think it might be. I pray that it isn’t. Was Emmanuel Perez innocent? I don’t believe so, Inez, I pray that he wasn’t.
Could Gary Soneji be the killer of these two children? I hope not. I pray that isn’t the case, Inez.
Lots of prayers this cold, dismal morning.
It was too harsh for early December, too much snow. Somebody on the radio said they’ve been shoveling so much in D.C., it felt like an election year.
I pushed my way through the crowd to the dead child lying like a broken doll on an expanse of frost-covered grass. The police photographer was taking pictures of the small boy. He had a short haircut like Damon’s, what Damon called a “baldie.”
Of course, I knew it wasn’t Damon, but the effect was incredibly powerful. It was as if I had been punched in the stomach, hard. The sight took all the breath out of my chest and stomach, and left me wheezing. Cruelty isn’t softened by tears. I had learned that lesson many times by then.
I knelt down low over the murdered boy. He looked as if he were sleeping, but having a terrible nightmare. Someone had closed his eyes, and I wondered if it could have been the killer. I didn’t think so. More likely it was the work of some Good Samaritan or possibly a good-hearted, but very careless, policeman. The little boy had on worn, loose gray sweats that had holes in the knees and tattered Nike sneakers. The right side of his face had been virtually destroyed by the killer blow, just like Shanelle’s. The face was crushed, but also pocked with jagged holes and tears. Bright red blood was pooled under his head.
The maniac likes to decimate beautiful things. It gave me an idea. Is the killer disfigured in some way himself? Physically? Emotionally? Maybe both.
Why does he hate small children so much? Why is he killing them near the Sojourner Truth School?
I opened the little boy’s eyes. The child stared up at me. I don’t know why I did it. I just needed to look.
&nbs
p; CHAPTER
25
“DR. CROSS… Dr. Cross… I know this boy,” said a shaky voice. “He’s in our lower school. His name is Vernon Wheatley.”
I looked up and saw Mrs. Johnson, the principal at Damon’s school. She held back a sob; she grabbed the sob back hard.
She’s even tougher than you are, Daddy. That’s what Damon had said to me. Maybe he was right about that. The school principal wouldn’t cry, wouldn’t allow herself to.
The medical examiner was standing next to Mrs. Johnson. I knew her, too. She was a white woman, Janine Prestegard. Looked to be about the same age as Mrs. Johnson. Mid-thirties, give or take a few years. They had been talking, consulting, probably consoling each other.
What was there about the Sojourner Truth School? Why this school? Why Damon’s school? Shanelle Green and now Vernon Wheatley. What did the principal know, if anything? Did the school principal believe she could help solve these terrifying murders? She had known both victims.
The medical examiner was arranging for an autopsy to determine the cause of death. She looked shaken by the savage attack the child had suffered. The autopsy of a murdered child is as bad as it gets.
Two detectives from the local precinct waited nearby. So did the morgue team. Everything was so quiet, so sad, so horribly bad, at the scene. There is nothing any worse than the murder of a child. Nothing I’ve seen, anyway. I remember every one that I’ve been to. Sampson sometimes tells me I’m too sensitive to be a homicide detective. I counter that every detective should be as sensitive and human as possible.
I rose to my full height. At six three I was only a few inches taller than Mrs. Johnson.
“You’ve been at both murder scenes,” I said to her. “You live around here? You live nearby?”
She shook her head. She looked straight up into my eyes. Her eyes were so intense, so large and round. They held mine and wouldn’t let go. “I know a lot of people in the neighborhood. Someone called me at home. They felt I should know. I grew up near here in the Eastern Market section,” she volunteered. “This is the same killer, isn’t it?”
I didn’t answer her question. “I may need to talk to you about the murders later,” I said. “We might have to talk to some of the children at school again. I won’t do that unless we have to, though. They’ve been through enough. Thank you for your concern. I’m sorry about Vernon Wheatley.”
Mrs. Johnson nodded and kept looking at me with incredibly penetrating eyes. Who exactly are you? they seemed to ask. You’ve been at both murder scenes, too.
“How can you do this kind of work?” she suddenly blurted out.
It was an unexpected and startling question. It should have seemed tactless, but somehow it didn’t. It happened to be my own personal mantra. How do you do this work, Alex? Why are you the dragonslayer? Who exactly are you? What have you become?
“I don’t really know.” I told her the truth.
Why had I admitted the weakness to her? I rarely did that with anyone, not even with Sampson. It was something about her eyes. They demanded the truth.
I lowered my eyes and turned away from her. I had to. I went back to my note taking. My head was thick with questions, bad questions, bad thoughts, and worse feelings about the murder. The two murders. The two cases.
Why does he hate children so much? I kept asking myself. Who could possibly hate these little children so much? He had to have been badly abused himself. Probably a male in his twenties. Not too organized or careful.
I had the thought that we would catch this one—but would we catch him soon enough?
CHAPTER
26
I WAS WAITING for possible disciplinary action from the department, waiting for the whisper of the ax. It didn’t come right away. Chief Pittman was holding his sharp knife over my head. The Jefe was playing with me. Cat and mouse.
Maybe the higher powers wouldn’t let him act… on account of Jack and Jill. That was it. It had to be. They felt that they needed me on the celebrity stalkings and murders.
While I waited in limbo, there was plenty of work to do. I passed the hours checking and rechecking the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit data for anything that might possibly connect the two child murders to any others in Washington—or anywhere else, for that matter. Then I repeated almost the same process on Jack and Jill. If you want to understand the killer, look at his work. Jack and Jill were organized. The child killer was disorganized and sloppy. The cases couldn’t have been more different.
I continued to feel that I couldn’t work two complex homicide cases like these at the same time. I believed it was time for my so-called deal with the department to start working both ways.
I made some phone calls late in the afternoon. I called in a few chips, favors I was owed inside the department. What did I have to lose?
That night four homicide detectives from the 1st District met me in the deserted parking lot behind the Sojourner Truth School. Each was a genuine badass in the department. All in all, four troublemakers. Four very good cops, though. Probably the best I knew in Washington.
The detectives I’d chosen all lived right in Southeast. They each took the child murders personally and wanted the gruesome case solved quickly—no matter what their other priority assignments were.
Sampson was the last one to arrive, but he was only a few minutes past the ten o’clock starting time. The secret get-together would definitely have been shut down by the chief of detectives. I was about to set up an off-duty unit to help find the killer of Shanelle Green and Vernon Wheatley. We weren’t vigilantes, but we were close.
“The late John Sampson,” Jerome Thurman quipped and let out a high-pitched laugh when Sampson finally entered the tight circle of homicide detectives. Thurman was close to two hundred seventy pounds, not much of it soft. He and Sampson liked to go at each other, but they were good friends. It had been that way since we all played roundball in the D.C. high school leagues a thousand or so years ago.
“My watch says ten on the dot,” Sampson said, without peeking at his ancient Bulova.
“Then ten o’clock it is,” contributed Shawn Moore. Moore was a hard-driving, young detective with three kids of his own. His family lived less than a mile from the Truth School, as it’s usually called in the neighborhood. One of his boys went there with Damon.
“I’m glad you all could come out to play on this chilly night,” I said after the ribbing and small talk had settled down. I knew that these detectives got along and had respect for one another. I also knew this meeting would never get back to The Jefe through any of them.
“Sorry to get you out here so late. Best we don’t be seen together. Thanks for coming, though. This schoolyard seemed like the right place for what we have to talk about. I’ll make it as short as possible,” I said, looking around at all the faces.
“You’d better, Alex,” Jerome warned me. “Freezin’ my fat ass off.”
“You’ve all heard about the seven-year-old boy found in Garfield Park this morning?” I asked the detectives. “Boy by the name of Vernon Wheatley.”
Heads nodded solemnly around the circle. Bad homicide news always travels quickly.
“Well, I’ve been thinking about these child murders a lot. I’ve run the evidence we have through the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program and also the Behavioral Science Unit databanks. Nothing comes up that’s a match. I have a preliminary psych profile working. I hope that I’m wrong, but I’m afraid there’s a pattern killer working in this neighborhood. This is probably a serial killer of children. I’m almost sure of it.”
“How bad a situation are we talking, Alex?” Rakeem Powell leaned in and asked me.
I knew what Rakeem was getting at. He and I had worked on a tough pattern-killer case a few years back. “I think this one is already in heat, Rakeem. The two murders came within days. There was a high level of violence. He seems to be in a rage, or damn close to it. I say he, though it might be a she.”
“Violent for a
female,” Sampson said. He cleared his throat. “Too much… blood… crushed skulls… little kids.” He shook his head no. “Doesn’t feel like a woman to me.”
“I tend to agree,” I said, “but you never know these days. Look at Jill.”
“How many detectives assigned to the child murders?” Jerome Thurman asked through thick lips that were pursed and stuck way out from his face, like those candy lips kids wear and then eat when they tire of having fat lips.
“Two teams.” I told them the bad news. “Only one is full-time, though. That’s the reason I wanted us to meet. The chief of detectives is resisting any theory that the same person killed both children. Emmanuel Perez is still on the books as the killer of the girl.”
“That dumb motherfuck asshole,” Jerome Thurman growled angrily. “That bastard’s as useless as titties on a bull.”
The other detectives cursed and grumbled. I had expected a negative reaction to anything The Jefe said or did. Still, I wasn’t into cheap shots. Much as I was tempted.
“How sure are you about this being the same killer, Alex?” Rakeem asked. “You said your profile is preliminary. I know this shit takes time.”
I sniffed in the cold, then went on. “The second child, the little boy, had his face badly smashed in, Rakeem. Only one side of the face, though. It was exactly like the murdered little girl’s face. Same side, the right. No significant variation that I could find. The medical examiner corroborates that. The ‘unsub’ probably feels that he has a good and a bad side. The bad side gets punished—destroyed, is more like it.
“The final thing, and this is just a best guess at this point, I think he’s a beginner at this. But devious and clever just the same… a risk taker. He’ll make a mistake. I think we can get him soon, if we work together. But it has to be soon. I think we can nail this one!”
Sampson finally spoke up. “You going to talk about what’s really going down here, Alex, or you want me to?”
I smiled at what Sampson had said, the cranky way he’d said it. “No, I thought I’d leave the real dirty work to you.”