The game wasn’t anything like Monopoly or Risk, though.
Actually, they were playing a game to choose their next murder target. In turn, they calmly rolled the dice, then moved a marker around a rectangle of photos. The photos were of very famous people.
The board game was important to Jack and Jill. It was a game of chance. It made it impossible for the police or FBI to predict their movements or their motive.
If there was a motive. But of course there was a motive.
Sam rolled the dice again. Then he moved the marker. Sara watched him in the warm, flickering glow of the fire. Her eyes glazed over slightly. She was remembering their very first meeting, the initial contact between them. The beginning of everything that was happening now.
This was how the complex and beautiful and very mysterious game had begun. They had agreed to meet at a coffee shop inside a bookstore in downtown D.C. Sara had arrived first, her heart trapped in her throat. Everything about the meeting was insane, maybe dangerously insane, and insanely irresistible to her. She couldn’t pass up this chance, this opportunity, or especially this cause. The cause was everything to her.
At the time of their first meeting, she had no idea what Sam Harrison would look like, and she was surprised and delighted when he sat at her table. He excited her.
She had seen him enter the coffeehouse area, watched him order espresso and a scone. She hadn’t imagined that the dreamy-looking man at the counter would turn out to be Harrison, though.
So this was The Soldier. This was her potential partner. He kind of fit in at the bookstore. He would fit in anywhere. He didn’t look like a killer, but then again, neither did she. He looks a little like an airline pilot, Sara thought as she sized him up. A successful Washington lawyer? He was over six feet tall, trim and fit. He had a strong, confident face. And he also had the brightest, clearest blue eyes. He had a sensitive, gentle look about him. Not at all what she had expected. She liked him immediately. She knew that they agreed on the important things in life, that they shared a vision.
“You’re looking at me as if I’m supposed to be a bad person, and you’re surprised that I’m not,” he’d said as he sat across from her at the café. “I’m not a bad person, Sara. You can call me Sam, by the way. I’m a pretty good guy, actually.”
No, Sam was much better than that. He was amazing—extremely smart, strong, and yet always considerate of her feelings, and committed to their cause. Sara Rosen had fallen in love with him within a week of their meeting. She knew that she shouldn’t, but she had; and now here they were. Living this secret life.
Playing the game of life and death as a guinea hen slowly spun on the spit. Sitting before a cozy fire. Thinking about making love—at least, she was. She thought about being with Sam, with Jack, all the time. She loved it when he was inside her.
“This roll should do it,” Sam said, and he handed her the dice. “Your turn. Six rolls for each of us. You do the honors, Sara.”
“Here we go, huh?”
“Yes, here we go again.”
Sara Rosen’s heart began to thunder. She could feel it thump, thump under her blouse. She had the paralyzing thought that this single roll of the dice was like the murder itself. It was almost as if she were pulling the trigger right now.
Who was going to die next? It was all in her hand, wasn’t it? Who would it be?
She squeezed the three dice incredibly tight. Then she shook them and let the dice go, watched them wobble and roll forward and then stop abruptly, as if someone had pulled an invisible string. She quickly added up the number of the roll—nine.
Sam picked up the marker and counted off nine places, nine photographs.
She stared down at the face of the next target, the next celebrity to die. It was a woman!
It’s for the cause, she told herself, but Sara Rosen’s heart continued to beat loudly all the same.
The next victim was a very famous woman.
Washington, the whole world, would be shocked and outraged for a second time.
CHAPTER
8
SAMPSON AND I walked into the fog-shrouded heart of Garfield Park, which borders the Anacostia River and the Eisenhower Freeway and isn’t far from the Sojourner Truth School. The color of truth is gray, I was thinking as we entered the ground smog. Always gray. We weren’t out for an early-morning run—we were hurrying to the place where Shanelle Green had actually been murdered, her skull crushed by some fiend.
Several uniforms, a captain, and another detective were already at the homicide scene. A dozen or so casual onlookers were on hand—looky-loos. Search dogs originally brought in from Georgia had led a search party to the murder site. I could see Sixth Street from the thicket of evergreens where the killer had brutally savaged the little girl. I could almost see the Sojourner Truth School.
“Think he carried the body out of here to the schoolyard?” Sampson asked. His tone of voice indicated he didn’t believe it. Neither did I. So how did the little girl’s body get to the schoolyard?
A bright red balloon floated a couple of feet above the overgrown bushes where the terrible murder had occurred.
“O marks the spot?” Sampson asked. “That balloon the marker?”