Jack & Jill (Alex Cross 3)

I didn’t think so.

CHAPTER

46

IT WASN’T REALLY ANYBODY, ALEX. How the hell could that be?

A twenty-three-year-old law student from Georgetown was dead. Christ. It didn’t make sense to me, didn’t track at all. It changed everything. It seemed to blow the pattern.

I drove from our home to the Kennedy Center in record time. Jay Grayer wasn’t the only one partly out of control. I stuck a flasher on the roof of my car and rode like hell on wheels.

The second half of Miss Saigon had been canceled. The murder had taken place less than an hour before, and there were still hundreds of onlookers at the crime scene.

I heard “Jack and Jill” mumbled several times as I made my way to the Grand Foyer. Fear was a tangible, almost physical, presence in the crowd. A lot of elements of the murder at the Kennedy Center were torturing me when I arrived at the crime scene at quarter past ten. There were some similarities with the other Jack and Jill killings. A rhyming note had been left. The job had been done coldly and professionally. A single shot.

But there were huge differences this time. They seemed to have destroyed their pattern.

Copycat killer? Maybe. But I didn’t think so. Yet nothing could, or should, be dismissed. Not by me, and not by anyone else on the case.

The new twists nagged at me as I pushed my way through the curious, horrified, even dumbstruck, crowd on New Hampshire Avenue. The law student hadn’t been a national figure. So why had she been killed? Jay Grayer had called her a nobody. Grayer said she wasn’t the daughter of anybody famous, either. She had been out to the theater with Supreme Court Justice Thomas Henry Franklin, but that didn’t seem to count as a celebrity stalk-and-kill.

Charlotte Kinsey had been a nobody.

The killing just didn’t fit the pattern. Jack and Jill had taken a huge risk committing the murder in such a public place. The other killings had been private affairs, safer and more controllable.

Shit, shit, shit. What were they up to now? Was this whole thing changing? Escalating? Why had they varied their pattern? Were the killers moving into another, more random phase?

Had I missed their original point? Had we all missed the real pattern they were creating? Or had they made a mistake at the Kennedy Center?

Maybe they finally made a mistake.

That was our best hope. It would show that they weren’t invincible. Let this be a goddamn mistake! Please let it be their first. Just the same, whoever it was made a clever escape.

The six-hundred-foot-long lobby had been emptied of all but police officials, the medical examiner’s staff, and the morgue crew. I saw Agent Grayer and walked over to him. Jay looked as if he hadn’t slept in weeks, as if he might never be able to sleep again.

“Alex, thanks for getting down here so quickly,” the Secret Service agent said. I liked working with him so far. He was smart and usually even-tempered, with absolutely no bullshit about him. He had an old-fashioned dedication to his job, and especially to the President, both the office and the man.

“Anything worthwhile turn up yet?” I asked him. “Besides another corpse. The poem.”

Grayer rolled his eyes toward the glittering chandeliers hanging above us. “Oh yeah. Definitely, Alex. We found out some more about the murdered student. Charlotte Kinsey was just starting her second year at Georgetown Law. She was bright as hell, apparently. Did her undergraduate at New York University. However, she only had average grades as a Hoya, so she didn’t make Law Review.”

“How does a law student fit into the pattern? Unless they were shooting at Justice Franklin and actually missed. I’ve been trying to make some connection on the way over. Nothing comes to mind. Except that maybe Jack and Jill are playing with us?”

Grayer nodded. “They’re definitely playing with us. For one thing, your illicit sex theory is still intact. We know why Charlotte Kinsey didn’t excel at Georgetown. She was spending quality time with some very important men here in town. Very pretty girl, as you’ll see in a second. Shiny black hair down to her waist. Great shape. Questionable morals. She’d have made a terrific attorney.”

The two of us walked over to the dead woman’s body. The law student was lying facing away from us.

Beside the body was a bag she had been carrying. I couldn’t see the bullet hole, and Charlotte Kinsey didn’t even appear to be hurt. She looked as if she’d just decided to take a nap on the floor of the terrace at the Kennedy Center. Her mouth was open slightly, as if she wanted one last breath of the river air.

“Go ahead, tell me now,” I said to Jay Grayer. I knew that he had something more on the murder. “Who is she?”

“Oh, she’s somebody, after all. The girl was President Byrnes’s mistress,” he said. “She was seeing the President, too. He skipped out of the White House and saw her the other night. That’s why they killed her. Bingo, Alex. Right in our face.”

My chest felt seriously constricted as I bent over the dead woman. Claustrophobia again. She was very pretty. Twenty-three years old. Prime of her life. One shot to the heart had ended that.

I read the note they had left in the law student’s handbag.

Jack and Jill came to The Hill