Jack & Jill (Alex Cross 3)

CHAPTER

6

IT WAS REAL GOOD to be working the streets of Southeast with Sampson again. It always is, even on a horror-show murder case that can make my blood boil over. Our last big case had taken place in North Carolina and California, but Sampson had been around only for the beginning and end of it. The two of us have been fast friends since we were nine or ten, and growing up in this same neighborhood. We get closer every year it seems. No, we do get closer.

“What’s our primary goal here, Sugar?” Sampson asked as we walked along G Street. He had on the black leather car coat, nasty Wayfarer sunglasses, a slick black bandanna. It worked for him. “How do we know that we did good today?” he asked.

“We get the word out that we’re personally looking for the Truth School killer,” I said. “We show our pretty faces around. Make the families here feel as safe as we can.”

“Yeah, and then we catch Chop-It-Off-Chucky and chop his off,” Sampson said and grinned like the big bad wolf that he can be. “I’m not kidding.”

I didn’t doubt it for a minute.

When I finally got home that night, it was past ten. Nana Mama was waiting up for me. She had already put Damon and Jannie to bed. The concerned look on her face told me that she couldn’t get to sleep, which is unusual for her. Nana could sleep in the eye of a hurricane. Sometimes, she is the eye of a hurricane.

“Hello, sweetheart,” she said to me. “Bad day for you? I can see that it was.” Sometimes she can be unbelievably sympathetic and kind and sweet, too. I like that she goes both ways equally well, and I can never predict which way is coming at me next.

As we sat together on the living room couch, my eighty-one-year-old grandmother held my hand in both of hers. I told her what I knew so far. She was shaking slightly and that wasn’t like her, either. She is not a weak person, not in any way. She rarely shows fear to anyone, even me. Nana Mama does not seem to be losing anything of herself; instead, she is becoming more luminous and concentrated.

“I feel so bad about this killing at the Sojourner Truth School,” Nana said, and her head lowered.

“I know. It’s all I’ve thought about today. I’m working every angle I can.”

“You know much about Sojourner Truth, Ale

x?”

“I know she was a powerful abolitionist, an ex-slave.”

“Sojourner Truth should be talked about when they mention Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alex. She couldn’t read, so she memorized most of the Bible for her teaching. She actually helped stop segregation of the transportation system here in Washington. And now we have this abomination at the school named in her honor.

“Catch him, Alex,” Nana suddenly whispered in a low, almost desperate, voice. “Please catch this terrible man. I can’t even say the name they call him—this Chucky. He’s real, Alex. He’s not a made-up bogeyman.”

I would definitely try my damnedest. I was on the murder case. I was chasing down the chimera as best I could.

My mind was working overtime already. A child molester? Boys and girls. Now a child killer? Chop-It-Off-Chucky? Was he real, or had he been made up by frightened children? Was he a chimera? Had he murdered Shanelle Green?

I needed to pound the piano on our porch for a little while after Nana went up to bed. I played “Jazz Baby” and “The Man I Love,” but the piano wasn’t the ticket that night.

Just before I fell off to sleep, I remembered something. Senator Daniel Fitzpatrick had been murdered in Georgetown. What a day it had been. What a nightmare.

Two of them.

CHAPTER

7

JACK AND JILL.

Sam and Sara.

Whoever they really were, the two of them lay on their stomachs on a tasteful, knock-off Persian rug in the small living room of her Washington pied-à-terre. It was a kind of safe house. A fire blazed and crackled; fragrant apple logs were being crisped. They were playing a board game on a rug, which covered a hatched parquet floor. It was a special game. Unique in every way. The game of life and death, they called it.

“I feel like a damn Washington, D.C., Georgetown University white liberal yuppie,” Sam Harrison said and smiled at the unlikely image created in his mind.

“Hey, I resemble that remark.” Sara Rosen made a pouting face. She was kidding. She and Sam weren’t yuppies. Sam certainly wasn’t.

And yet a guinea hen was roasting in the kitchen, the aroma sweetening the air. They were playing a parlor game on the living room rug.