Jack & Jill (Alex Cross 3)

I nodded and left it at that. I knew the feeling exactly; I lived with it. It was my single greatest fear as an investigator. My worst nightmare.

They know where we live.

They can come to our houses if they want to… anytime they want to.

Nobody was safe anymore.

There are no rules.

There are “ghosts” and human monsters, and they are very real in our lives. Especially in my life.

There was Jack and Jill.

There was the Sojourner Truth School killer.

CHAPTER

50

AT A LITTLE PAST SEVEN the next morning, I sat across from Adele Finaly and unloaded everything that I possibly could on her. I unloaded—period. Dr. Adele Finaly has been my analyst for a half-dozen years, and I see her on an irregular basis. As needed. Like right now. She’s also a good friend.

I was ranting and raving a little bit. This was the place for it, though. “Maybe I want to leave the force. Maybe I don’t want to be part of any more vile homicide investigations. Maybe I want to get out of Washington, or at least out of Southeast. Or maybe I want to trot down and see Kate McTiernan in West Virginia. Take a sabbatical at just about the worst possible time for one.”

“Do you really want to do any of those things?” Adele asked when I had finished, or at least had quieted down for a moment. “Or are you just venting?”

“I don’t know, Adele. Probably venting. There’s also a woman I met whom I could become interested in. She’s married,” I said and smiled. “I’d never do anything with a married woman, so she’s perfectly safe for me. She couldn’t be safer. I think I’m regressing.”

“You want an opinion on that, Alex? Well, I can’t give you one. You certainly have a lot on your plate, though.”

“I’m right smack in the middle of a very bad homicide investigation. Two of them, actually. I just came off another particularly disturbing one. I think I can sort that part out for myself. But, you know, it’s funny. I suspect that I still want to please my mother and father, and it can’t be done. I can’t get over the feeling of abandonment. Can’t intellectualize it. Sometimes I feel that both my parents died of a kind of terminal sadness, and that my brothers and I were part of their sorrow. I’m afraid that I have it, too. I think that my mother and father were probably as smart as I am, and that they must have suffered because of it.” My mother and father had died in North Carolina, at a very young age. My father had killed himself with liquor, and I hadn’t really gotten over it. My mom died of lung cancer the year before my father. Nana Mama had taken me in when I was nine years old.

“You think sadness can be in the genes, Alex? I don’t know what to think about that myself. Did you see that New Yorker piece on twins by any chance? There’s some evidence for the genes theory. Scary note for our profession.”

“Detective work?” I asked her.

Adele didn’t comment on my little joke.

“Sorry,” I said. “Sorry, sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry. You know how happy it makes me when you get any of your anger out.”

She laughed. We both did. I like talking to her because our sessions can bounce around like that, laughter to tears, serious to absurd, truth to lies, just about anything and everything that’s bothering me. Adele Finaly is three years younger than I am, but she’s wise beyond her years, and maybe my years as well. Seeing her for a skull session works even better than playing the blues on my front porch.

I talked some more, let my tongue wag, let my mind run free, and it felt pretty good. It’s a wonderful thing to have somebody in your life whom you can say absolutely anything to. Not to have that is almost unthinkable to me.

“Here’s a connection I’ve made recently,” I to

ld Adele. “Maria is murdered. I grieve and grieve, but I never come close to getting over the loss. Just like I’ve never gotten past the loss of my mother and father.”

Adele nods. “It’s incredibly hard to find a soul mate.” She knows. She’s never been able to find one herself, which is sad.

“And it’s hard to lose one—a soul mate. So, of course, now I’m petrified about losing anyone else whom I care deeply for. I shy away from relationships—because they might end in loss. I don’t leave my job with the police—because that would be a kind of loss, too.”

“But you’re thinking about these things a lot now.”

“All the time, Adele. Something’s going to happen.”

“Something has. We’ve run way over our time,” Adele finally said.