Jack & Jill (Alex Cross 3)

She was yelling, raising her voice anyway. “Where do you go to school? Why aren’t you there now? You can’t stand around here.” She called loudly as she kept walking straight toward him.

FUCK YOU, BLACK BITCH. MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS.

WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU’RE TALKING TO?

YOU… TALKIN’… TO… ME?

“Do you hear me, mister? You deaf or something? This is a drug-free area, so move on. Now. There’s absolutely no loitering near this school. That means you, in the fatigue jacket! Move on. Go on, get out of here.”

Just fuck you, all right? I’ll move on when I’m good and ready.

She came right up to him, and she was big. A lot bigger than he was, anyway.

“Move it or lose it. I won’t take any crap from you. None at all. Now get out of here. You heard me.”

Well, hell. He moved on without giving her the satisfaction of word one. When he got up the block, he saw all the schoolkids being let outside into the yard with the high fence that didn’t mean squat in terms of protection. Can’t keep me out, he thought.

He looked for Cross’s little boy, searched the schoolyard with his eyes. Found him, too. No sweat. Tall for his age. Beautiful, right? Cute as hell. Damon was his name-o, name-o.

The school principal was still out in the playground—staring up the street at him, bad-eyeing him. Mrs. Johnson was her name-o.

Well, she was a dead woman now. She was already ancient history. Just like old Sojourner Truth—the former slave, former abolitionist. They all are, the killer thought as he finally moved on. He had better things to do than loitering, wasting his precious time. He was a big star now. He was important. He was somebody.

Happy, happy. Joy, joy.

“You believe that,” he said to nobody in particular, just the generic voices crackling inside his head, “then you must be crazier than I am. I ain’t happy. There ain’t no joy.”

As he turned the corner, he saw a police car coming up the street toward the school. It was time to get the hell out of there, but he would be back.

CHAPTER

67

THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON I gathered up my files and all my notes on Jack and Jill. I headed to Langley, Virginia, again. No music in the car that morning. Just the steady whhrrr of my tires on the roadway. Jeanne Sterling had asked to see what I had come up with so far. She’d called half a dozen times. She promised to reciprocate this time. You show me yours, I’ll show you mine. Okay? Why not? It made a lot of sense.

An Agency assistant sporting a military style crew cut, a woman in her twenties, escorted me into a conference room on the seventh floor. The room was filled with bright light and was a far cry from my cube in the White House basement. I felt like a mouse out of its hole. Speaking of the White House, I hadn’t heard from the Secret Service about any plan to investigate possible enemies of the President in high places. I would stir that pot again when I got back to D.C.

“On a clear day you used to be able to see the Washington Monument,” Jeanne Sterling said as she came striding in behind me. “Not anymore. The air quality in Fairfax County is abysmal. What’s your reaction to the files on our killer elite, so far? Shock? Surprise? Boredom? What do you think, Alex?”

I was starting to get used to Jeanne’s rapid-fire style of speaking. I could definitely see her as a law school professor. “My first reaction is that we need weeks to analyze the possibility that one of these people might be a psychotic killer. Or that one of them might be Jack,” I told her.

“I agree with you on that,” she nodded. “But just suppose we had to compress our search into about twenty-four fun-filled hours, which is about what we have to work with. Now then, are there any prime suspects in your mind? You have something, Alex. What is it?”

I held up three fingers. I had three somethings so far.

She smiled broadly. Both of us did. You had to learn to laugh at the madness or it could bring you so far down, you’d never make it back up again.

“Okay. All right. That’s what I like to hear. Let me guess,” she said, and went ahead. “Jeffrey Daly, Howard Kamens, Kevin Hawkins.”

“Well, that’s interesting,” I said. “That might tell us something at least. Maybe we better start with the one name that’s on both of our shortlists. Tell me about Kevin Hawkins.”

CHAPTER

68

JEANNE STERLING spent about twenty minutes briefing me on Kevin Hawkins. “You’ll be gratified to hear that we have Hawkins under surveillance already,” she said as we rode a swift, smooth elevator down to the basement garage, where our cars were parked.

“See, you don’t need my help, after all,” I said. I was buoyed by the prospect of any kind of progress on the case. I was actually feeling positive for the first time in several days.