Jack & Jill (Alex Cross 3)

“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.”

“As usual,” he said. “Here’s what Alex hasn’t said so far. Just to get it out on the dance floor. The real reason one team of detectives is assigned to these murders goes something like this. One, it happened in the area of the projects, and we know all the shit flows downhill in D.C. and eventually ends up here. Two, Jack and Jill is sucking up everybody’s time in the department. Rich white people are being killed. They’re scared shitless up on Capitol Hill and such. So of course we drop everything else. Two little black kids don’t matter much, not in the greater scheme, not in the big picture.”

“Sampson and I have been working on the Truth School murders.” I picked up his thread, just lowered the volume a touch. “Strictly off the books. We have to do our own surveillance,” I added, so that everybody knew the deal. “We need some help now. This is a major homicide case. Unfortunately, there are two major cases in Washington at this time.”

“Only one case on my mind,” Rakeem Powell said. “One guess which case it is.”

“You know you’ve got the Fatman on board.” Jerome Thurman raised his high-pitched voice and punched his stubby club of an arm into the air. “I’m in. I’m on your nonpayroll with all its nonbenefits and risks for forced early retirement. Sounds great.”

“My boy goes to the Sojourner Truth School, Alex,” Shawn Moore said. “I’ll make the time for this. Hope I can fit in Jack and Jill.”

We laughed at the jokes. It was our hardass approach to the difficult problems at hand. The five of us were in. We just didn’t have any idea what we were in for.

There were definitely two major murder cases in Washington—and now there were two task forces to try and solve them. One and a half task forces, anyway.

“Cocktails, anyone?” Jerome Thurman asked in the softest, most cultivated voice. You’d have thought we were at the old Cotton Club in Harlem as he passed around his beat-up Washington Redskins game flask.

We all took a hit; more like two or three.

We were blood brothers.

CHAPTER

27

I WORKED the Jack and Jill case from five in the morning until three o’clock in the afternoon. Me and about ten thousand other harried law officers around D.C. I was checking for a possible link between Senator Fitzpatrick and Natalie Sheehan. We even looked at news photos taken of them in the past months. Maybe somebody interesting would show up in the background of a shot. Or even better, show up twice. I had a detective visiting all of the kinky sex shops around D.C. He called the assignment the ultimate Jack-off.