Jack & Jill (Alex Cross 3)

He didn’t argue or object. A murder like this is usually solved in the first twenty-four hours, or it isn’t solved. We both knew that.

From 6:00 A.M. on, Sampson and I canvassed the neighborhood with the other detectives and patrolmen that cold, miserable morning. We had to do it our way, house by house, street by street, mostly on foot. We needed to be involved in this case, to do something, to solve the heinous murder quickly.

About ten in the morning, we heard about another shocking homicide in Washington. Senator Daniel Fitzpatrick had been murdered the night before. It had been a real bad night, hadn’t it?

“Not our job,” Sampson said with cold, flat eyes. “Not our problem. Somebody else’s.”

I didn’t disagree.

No one Sampson or I spoke to that morning had seen anything out of the ordinary around the Sojourner Truth School. We heard the usual complaints about the drug pushers, the zombielike crackheads, the prossies who work on Eighth Street, the growing number of gangbangers.

But nothing out of the usual.

“People loved that little sweetheart Shanelle,” the ageless Hispanic lady who seemed to have run the corner grocery near the school forever told Sampson and me. “She always buy her Gummi Bears. She have such a pretty smile, you know?”

No, I had never seen Shanelle Green smile, but I found that I could almost picture it. I also had a fixed image of the battered right side of the little girl’s face. I carried it around like a bizarre wallet photo inside my head.

Uncle Jimmie Kee, a successful and influential Korean American who owned several neighborhood businesses, was glad to talk with us. Jimmie is a good friend of ours. Occasionally, he comes along with us to a Redskins or Bullets game. He supplied a name that we already had on our short-list of suspects.

“What about this bad actor, Chop-It-Off-Chucky?” Uncle Jimmie volunteered as we spoke in the back of Ho-Woo-Jung, his popular restaurant on Eighth Street. I read the sign behind Jimmie: IMMIGRATION IS THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY.

“Nobody catch that motherfucker yet. He kill other children before. He the worst man in Washington, D.C. Next to the president,” Jimmie said and chuckled wickedly.

“No bodies, though. No proof of it,” Sampson said to Jimmie. “We don’t even know if there really is a Chucky.”

That was true enough. For years there had been rumors about a horrifying child molester who worked the Northfield Village neighborhood, but there was nothing concrete. Nothing had ever been proved.

“Chucky real,” Uncle Jimmie insisted. His dark eyes narrowed to even thinner slits. “Chucky real as the devil. I see Chop-It-Off-Chucky in my dreams sometimes, Alex. So do the children who live around here.”

“You ever hear anything more specific about Chucky? Where he’s been seen? Who saw him?” I asked. “Help us out if you can, Jimmie.”

“Oh, I gladly do that.” He nodded his head and bunched his thick brown lips, his triple chin, his bulging throat. Jimmie habitually wore a chocolate brown suit with a tan fedora that bobbed as he spoke. “You meditating yet, Alex, getting in touch with chi energy?” he asked me.

“I’m thinking about it, thinking about my chi, Jimmie. Maybe my chi is running a little low right now. Tell us about Chucky.”

“I know lots bad stories about Chop-It-Off-Chucky. Scare kids all the time. Even the gangbangers scared of him. Young mothers, grandmothers, put up handbills in playgrounds. In my stores, too. Sad stories of missing children. I always permit it, Detectives. Man who harms children is the worst. You agree, Alex? You see it differently?”

“No. I agree with you. That’s why Sampson and I are out here today.”

I knew a lot about the child molester who had been nicknamed Chop-It-Off-Chucky. The unsubstantiated rumor was that he sliced off the genitalia of young kids who lived in the projects. Little boys and girls. No gender preference. Whether or not it was true, it seemed undeniable that someone had molested several children from the Northfield and Southview Terrace projects, not far from here. Other children had simply disappeared.

The police in the area didn’t have the resources to create an effective crisis team to find Chucky, if Chucky existed. I had gone to the wall about it several times with the chief of detectives, but nothing had happened. Extra detectives never seemed available for duty in Southeast. The unfairness of the situation put me in a rage, made me as crazy as anything I can think of.

“Sounds like another Mission: Impossible,” Sampson said as we walked up G Street, in the general direction of the marine barracks. “We’re on our own. We’re supposed to catch a chimera.”

“Nice image,” I said, and had to smile at Man Mountain, his wild imagination, his mind.

“Thought you’d like it, man of culture and refinement that you are.”

We were sipping steaming herb tea from Jimmie’s restaurant. Patrolling the street. We looked like detectives, with our collars up and all. Big bad detectives. I wanted people to see us out working the neighborhood.

“No real leads, no clues, no support,” I said, agreeing with Sampson’s judgment of the current state of affairs. “We take the assignment, anyway?”

“We always do,” he said. His eyes were suddenly hard and dull and almost scary to me. “Watch out, Chucky, watch your back. We’re right on your sorry mythical ass.”

“Your chimera ass.”

“Exactly so, Sugar. Exactly so.”