Jack & Jill (Alex Cross 3)

She wondered if the sender knew this. Cranks sometimes knew the rules. They wanted to push the edge of the envelope. Sometimes they just seemed to need human contact, even contact with her. The censor of their thoughts and actions. Big Sister is watching.

The first messages had asked other subscribers for their “sincere” point of view on a controversial subject. A child-murder case in Washington, D.C., was described. Then subscribers were asked whether the child murders or the Jack and Jill case deserved more attention from the police and from the press. Which case was more important, morally and ethically?

Maryann Maggio had been forced to pull two of the early messages. Not because of their content per se, but because of the repeated use of four-letter words, especially the dreaded f word and the s word and one of the c words.

When she pulled the messages, though, it seemed to cause an unbelievable emotional explosion from the subscriber in Washington. First came a long, nasty diatribe about the “obscene and unnecessary censorship plague on Prodigy.” It urged subscribers to switch to CompuServe and other rival on-line services. Of course, CompuServe and America Online had their censors, too.

The messages continued to fly out of Washington faster than the D.C.–New York shuttle. One called for Prodigy to “fire the ass of your absurdly incompetent censor.” Maryann Maggio censored it.

Another message used the f word eleven times in two paragraphs. She censored that fucker, too.

Then the message sender became more than just another foulmouthed, annoying loose cannon on the service. At 1:17 the subscriber in Washington began to claim responsibility for the two brutal child murders.

The subscriber claimed that he was the murderer, and he would prove it, live on Prodigy.

“Big Sister” pulled the message immediately. She also called her supervisor to her cubicle at the Prodigy center in White Plains, New York. Her huge body was shaking all over like jelly by the time her boss arrived, bringing black coffee for both of them. Black coffee? Maryann needed a couple of Little John’s “fully loaded” pizzas to get her through this total disaster.

Suddenly, a brand-new message flashed across the screen from the Washington subscriber, who seemed articulate and intelligent enough, but incredibly angry and really, really crazy. The latest message listed gory details about the murder of a black child, “details only the D.C. police would know,” the subscriber wrote.

“Jesus, Maryann, what a nasty, weird creep,” the Prodigy supervisor said over Maryann Maggio’s shoulder. “Are all the messages like this one?”

“Pretty much, Joanie. He’s toned down his language some, but the violence is really graphic stuff. Vampire creepy. Been that way since I clipped his wings.”

The latest message from Washington continued to scroll before their eyes. The description seemed to be of an actual murder of a small black child in Garfield Park. The killer claimed to have used a sawed-off baseball bat reinforced with electrical tape. He claimed to have struck the child twenty-three times, and to have counted every single blow.

“Stop this awful, freakish crap now. Pull the damn plug on him!” the supervisor quickly made her decision.

Then the supervisor made an even more important decision. She decided the Washington Police Department had to be alerted about the suspicious subscriber. Neither she nor Maryann Maggio knew whether the child murders were real, but they sure sounded that way.

At one-thirty in the morning, the Prodigy supervisor reached a detective at the 1st District in D.C. The supervisor made a note of the detective’s rank and also his name in her own log: Detective John Sampson.

CHAPTER

64

I HAD GOTTEN TO BED at a little past one. Nana came and woke me at quarter to five. I heard her slippers scuffing across the bare wood of the bedroom floor. Then she spoke in a low whisper just above my ear. Made me feel as if I were six years old again.

“Alex? Alex? You awake?”

“Mm, hmm. You bet. I am now.”

“Your friend’s down in the kitchen. Eating bacon and tomatoes out of my skillet like there’s no tomorrow, and he would know, wouldn’t he? He still eats it faster than I can cook it.”

I held in a soft, painful moan. My eyes blinked twice and felt badly puffed and swollen each time they opened. My throat was scratchy and sore.

“Sampson’s here?” I finally managed to say.

“Yes, and he says he might have a lead on the Truth School killer. Isn’t that a good way to start your day?”

She was taunting me. Same as always. It wasn’t even five o’clock in the morning and Nana had her rusty shiv in me already.

“I’m up,” I whispered. “I don’t look like it, but I’m up.”

Less than twenty minutes later, Sampson and I pulled up in front of a brick townhouse on Seward Square. He admitted that he needed me at the scene. Rakeem Powell and a white detective named Chester Mullins, who wore an ancient porkpie hat, were standing outside their own cars, waiting for us. They looked extremely tense and uncomfortable.

The street was on the moderately upscale side of Seward Square Park, less than a mile and a half from the Sojourner Truth School. This was probably Mullins’s home beat.

“It’s the white-on-white Colonial motherlode on the corner,” Rakeem said, pointing to a big house about a block away. “Man, I like working in these high-rent neighborhoods. You’all smell the roses?”