Jack & Jill (Alex Cross 3)

“Good,” I said and laughed again. Some people turn on Comedy Central for a good laugh. I go to my shrink.

“Lots of hostility. How nice for you. I don’t think you’re regressing, Alex. I think you’re doing beautifully.”

“God, I love talking to you,” I told her. “Let’s do this in a month or so, when I’m really screwed up again.”

“I can’t wait,” Adele said and rubbed her small, thin hands together greedily. “In the meantime, as Bart Simpson has said many times, ‘Don’t have a cow, man.’”

CHAPTER

51

DETECTIVE JOHN SAMPSON couldn’t remember working so many brutal, absolutely shitty days in a row. He couldn’t remember it ever being so godawful, goddamn bad. He had an overload of really bad homicides and he had the Sojourner Truth School killer case, which didn’t seem to be going anywhere.

On the morning after the Kennedy Center killing, Sampson worked the upscale side of Garfield Park, the “west bank.” He was keeping his eyes out for Alex’s homeless suspect, who’d been spotted the afternoon of Shanelle Green’s murder, though not since, so even that lead was growing cold. Alex had a simple formula for thinking about complex cases like this one. First, you had to answer the question that everybody had: What kind of person would do something like this? What kind of nutcase?

He had decided to visit the Theodore Roosevelt School on his street canvass. The exclusive military academy used Garfield Park for its athletics and some paramilitary maneuvers. There was a slim possibility that a sharp-eyed cadet had seen something.

A white-haired homeless motherfucker, Sampson thought as he climbed the military school’s front graystone steps. A sloppy and disorganized thrill killer who left fingerprints and other clues at both crime scenes, and still nobody could nail his candyass to the wall. Every single clue leads to a dead end.

Why was that? What were we getting all wrong here? What were they messing up on? Not just him. Alex and the rest of the posse, too.

Sampson went looking for the commandant at the school, The Man In Charge. The detective had served four years in the Army, two of them in Vietnam, and the pristine school brought to mind ROTC lieutenants in the war. Most of them had been white. Several had died needlessly, in his opinion—a couple of them, his friends.

The Theodore Roosevelt School consisted of four extremely well-kept, red-brick buildings with steep, slate-shingle roofs. Two of the roofs had chimneys spouting soft curls of gray smoke. Everything about the place shouted “structure,” “order,” and “dead, white louies” to him.

Imagine something like this school, only in Southeast around the projects, he thought as he continued his solitary walk around the school. The image made him smile. He could almost see five hundred or so homies resplendent in their royal blue dress uniforms, their spit-shined boots, their plumed dress hats. Really something to contemplate. Might even do some good.

“Sir, can I help you?” A scrawny towheaded cadet came up to him as he started down what looked to be an academic hall in one of the buildings.

“You on guard here?” Sampson asked in a soft drawl that was the last vestige of a mother who’d grown up in Alabama.

The toy soldier shook his head. “No, sir. But can I help you anyway?”

“Washington police,” Sampson said. “I need to speak with whoever’s in charge. You arrange that, soldier?”

“Yes, sir!”

The cadet saluted him, of all people, and Sampson had to fight back the day’s first, and maybe only, smile.

CHAPTER

52

MORE THAN THREE HUNDRED scrubbed and steam-pressed cadets from the middle school and the academy’s high school were crammed into Lee Hall at nine o’clock in the morning. The cadets wore their regular school uniform loose-fitting gray pants, black shirt and tie, gray waist-jacket.

From his stiff wooden seat in the school auditorium, the Sojourner Truth School killer saw the towering black man entering Lee Hall. He recognized him instantly. That sucker was Detective John Sampson. He was Alex Cross’s friend and partner.

This was not a good thing. This was very bad, in fact. The killer immediately began to panic, to experience the outer edges of fear. He wondered if the Metro police were coming for him right now. Did they know who he was?

He wanted to run—but there was no way out of here now. He had to sit this one out, to gut it out.

The killer’s initial reaction was to feel shame. He thought he was going to be sick. Throw up or something. He wanted to put his head between his legs. He felt like such a chump to get caught like this.

He was seated about twenty yards from where that stuffed shirt Colonel Wilson and the detective were standing around as if something incredibly fucking important were about to happen. Every passing cadet saluted the adults, like the robotic morons that they were. A buzz of apprehension began to fill the room.

Was something earth-shattering going to happen? The thought screaming inside the killer’s head. Were the police about to arrest him in front of the entire school? Had he been caught?

How could they have traced anything to him, though? It didn’t make sense. That thought calmed him somewhat.