“If you want, I’ll wait until tomorrow. But my instincts tell me not to,” I told him in a soft but firm voice.
“Tell us what you want to say to him,” James Dowd spoke up. “Then we’ll decide.”
“I’m afraid that it’s only for the President to hear. I need to talk with him, alone, just like we did the first time we met.”
Hamerman exploded. “Jesus Christ, you arrogant son of a bitch. We’re the ones who let you in here in the first place.”
“Then you’re the ones to blame, I guess. I told you that I was here to conduct a murder investigation and that you wouldn’t like some of my methods. I told the President the same thing.”
Hamerman stormed away from us, but he returned in a couple of minutes. “He’ll see you up on the third floor. This shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes of his time. It won’t take more than a few minutes.”
“We’ll see what the President has to say about that.”
CHAPTER
62
THE TWO OF US met in a solarium that is attached to the living quarters on the third floor. The room had been a favorite of Reagan’s. Outside the windows, the lights of Washington were shining brightly. I felt as if I were living a chapter out of All the President’s Men.
“Good evening, Alex. You needed to see me,” the President said, and seemed calm and cheerful enough. Of course, there was no way for me to judge his true feelings. He was dressed casually in khakis and a blue sport shirt.
“I apologize for coming in and causing a lot of upset and inconvenience,” I said to him.
The President raised his hand to stop me from apologizing further. “Alex, you’re here because we wanted you to do exactly what you’re doing. We didn’t think anybody on the inside would have the balls. Now, what’s on your mind? How can I help you?”
I relaxed a little bit. How could the President help me? That was a question most of us had always wanted to hear. “I spent the day thinking about this morning’s phone call, and also the murders out in McLean. Mr. President, I don’t think we have a lot of time left. Jack and Jill are making that pretty clear. They’re impatient, very violent; they’re taking more and more risks. They also have a psychological need to rub it in our face every time they can.”
“Are they just flattering their egos, Alex?”
“Possibly, but maybe they want to diminish your power. Mr. President, I wanted to see you alone because what I have to say needs absolute confidentiality. As you know, we’ve been checking out everyone who works at the White House. The Secret Service has been cooperative. So has Don Hamerman.”
The President smiled. “I’ll bet Don has.”
“In his own way, he has. A watchdog is a watchdog, though. Based on our findings so far, we’ve placed three members of the current staff under surveillance by the Secret Service. We would rather watch than dismiss them. They’ve been added to the seventy-six others currently under surveillance around Washington.”
“The Secret Service always has a number of potential threats to the President under surveillance,” Thomas Byrnes said.
“Yes, sir. We’re just taking precautions. I don’t have particularly high hopes for the three staff members. They’re all males. Somehow I thought we might turn up Jill. But we didn’t.”
The President’s look darkened. “I would have liked to meet Jill and have a private chat with her. I’d have liked that a lot.”
I nodded. Now came the really difficult part of our little talk. “I have to broach a tough subject, sir. We need to talk about some of the other people around you, the people closest to you.”
Thomas Byrnes sat forward in his chair. I could tell that he didn’t like this at all.
“Mr. President, we have reason to suspect that someone with access into the White House, or possibly with power and influence here, might be involved in all of this. Jack and Jill are certainly getting into high places with the greatest of ease. The people close to you have to be checked, and checked very closely.”
Both of us were suddenly quiet. I could almost visualize Don Hamerman waiting outside, chewing on his silk tie.
I broke the awkward silence.
“I know that we’re talking about things you would rather not,” I said.
The President sighed. “That’s why you’re here. That’s why you’re here.”
“Thank you,” I told him. “Sir, you have no reason not to trust me on this. As you said yourself, I’m an outsider. I have nothing to gain.”
Thomas Byrnes sighed a second time. I sensed that I had reached him, at least for the moment. “I trust many of these people with my life. Don Hamerman is one of them, my bulldog, as you correctly surmised. Whom don’t I trust? I’m not completely comfortable with Sullivan or Thompson at the Joint Chiefs. I’m not even sure about Bowen at the FBI. I’ve made serious enemies on Wall Street already. Their reach inside Washington is very deep and very powerful. I understand that organized crime is none too pleased with my programs, and they are much more organized now than they’ve ever been. I’m challenging an old, powerful, very fucked-up system—and the fucked-up system doesn’t like it. The Kennedys did that—especially Robert Kennedy.”
I was having trouble catching my breath all of a sudden. “Who else, Mr. President? I need to know all your enemies.”
“Helene Glass in the Senate is an enemy…. Some of the reactionary conservatives in the Senate and House are enemies…. I believe… that Vice President Mahoney is an enemy, or close to one. I made a compromise before the convention to put him on the ticket. Mahoney was supposed to deliver Florida and other parts of the South. He did deliver. I was supposed to deliver certain considerations to patrons of his. I haven’t delivered. I’m screwing with the system, and that isn’t done, Alex.”
I listened to Thomas Byrnes without moving a muscle. The effect of talking to the President like this was numbing and disturbing. I could see by the look on his face what it cost Thomas Byrnes to admit some of what he had to me.
“We should put surveillance on these people,” I said.
The President shook his head. “No, I can’t allow it. Not at this time. I can’t do that, Alex.” The President rose from his chair. “How did your kids like the keepsakes?” he asked me.
I shook my head. I wouldn’t be held off like that. “Think about the vice president, and about Senator Glass, too. This is a murder investigation. Please don’t protect someone who might be involved. Please, Mr. President, help us… whoever it is.”
“Goodnight, Alex,” the President said in a strong, clear voice. His eyes were unflinching.
“Goodnight, Mr. President.”
“Keep at it,” he said. Then he turned away from me and walked out of the solarium.
Don Hamerman entered the room. “I’ll see you out,” he said stiffly. He was cold—unfriendly.
Perhaps I also had an enemy in the White House.
CHAPTER
63
NO WAY, JOSE! Couldn’t be. Could not be. This just could not be happening. Welcome to the X-Files meets The Twilight Zone meets the Information Superhighway.
At five one and two hundred ten pounds, Maryann Maggio was a powerhouse. She thought of herself as a “censor of the obscene and dangerous” on the Prodigy interactive network. Her job with Prodigy was to protect travelers on the Information Superhighway. An emergency was developing before her eyes right now. There was an intruder on the network.
This couldn’t be happening. She couldn’t take her eyes off her IBM desktop screen. “This is the interactive age, all right. Well, people, get ready for it,” she muttered at the screen. “There’s a train wreck a-comin’.”
Maryann Maggio had been a censor with IBM-owned Prodigy for nearly six years. By far, the most popular service on Prodigy was the billboards. The billboards were used by members to broadcast personal messages for other members to react to, learn from, plan their vacations, find out about a new restaurant, that sort of thing.
Usuall
y the messages were pretty harmless, covering topical subjects, questions and answers on anything from welfare reform to the ongoing murder trial of the month.
But not the messages that she was staring at right now. This called for Infante the Censor, the protector of young minds, as she sometimes thought of herself. “Big Sister,” according to her bearded, three-hundred-pound husband, Terry the Pirate.
She had been monitoring messages from a particular subscriber in Washington, D.C., since around eleven that night. In the beginning, the quirky messages were borderline judgment calls for her to make. Should she censor or hold back? After all, Prodigy now had to compete with the Internet, which could get pretty damn wild and wacky.
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?”
“That’s window-cleaning solution,” I said.
“There goes my career with FTD,” Rakeem Powell laughed, and so did his partner Chester.
“Might not be the Partridge Family living in that nice house up yonder,” Sampson cautioned the two detectives. “Beautiful surroundings, peaceful street and all, maybe a homicidal maniac shitheel waiting for us inside, though. You copy?”
Sampson turned to me. “What are you thinking about, Sugar? You having your usual nasty thoughts on this? Feeling the gris-gris?”
Sampson had told me what he knew on the short ride over to Seward Square. A subscriber to the Prodigy interactive service, an Army man, Colonel Frank Moore, had been sending messages about the child killings over the service. He appeared to know details about the murders that only the police and the real killer knew. He sounded like our freak.
“I don’t like what I’m hearing from you so far, Mister John. The killings suggest he’s in a rage state, and yet he’s fairly careful. Now he’s reaching out for help? He’s virtually leading us to his doorstep? I don’t know if I get that. And I don’t like it too much, either. That’s what I’m feeling so far, partner.”
“I was thinking the same thing.” Sampson nodded and kept staring at the house in question. “At any rate, we’re here. Might as well check out what the colonel wanted us to see.”
“Not mutilated bodies,” Rakeem Powell said and frowned deeply. “Not at five on a Monday morning. Not more little kids stashed somewhere in that big house.”
“Alex and I will take the back door in,” Sampson said to Rakeem. “You and Popeye Doyle here can cover the front. Watch the garage. If this is the killer’s house, you might expect a surprise or two. Everybody wide-awake? Wakee-wakee!”
Rakeem and the white man in the hat nodded. “Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed,” Rakeem said with fake enthusiasm.
“We h
ave you covered, Detectives.” Chester Mullins finally said something.
Sampson nodded calmly. “Let’s do it, then. Not daylight yet, maybe he’s still in his coffin.”
Five-twenty A.M. and my adrenaline was pumping wildly. I had already met all the human monsters I cared to meet in my lifetime. I didn’t need any more on-the-job experience in this particular area.
“Am I here to watch your ass?” I asked as Man Mountain and I moved toward the big house perched on the corner.
“You got it, Sugar. I need you on this. You got the magic touch with these psycho-killers,” Sampson said without looking back at me.
“Thanks. I think,” I muttered. There was a real loud noise roaring in my head, as if I’d just taken nitrous oxide at the dentist’s. I really didn’t want to meet another psychopath; I didn’t want to meet Colonel Franklin Moore.
We cut across a spongy lawn leading to a long, deep porch with an ivy trellis.
I could see a man and woman standing in the kitchen. Two people were already up inside.
“Must be Frank and Mrs. Frank,” Sampson muttered.
The man was eating something as he leaned over the kitchen counter. I could make out a box of strawberry Pop-Tarts pastry, a carton of skim milk, and the morning’s Washington Post.
“Very Partridge Family,” I whispered to John. “I really don’t like this at all. He’s leading us all the way, right to the door.”
“Homicidal maniac,” he said through brilliantly white, gritted teeth. “Don’t let the pop-m-ups fool you. Only psychos eat that shit.”
“Not easily fooled,” I said to Sampson.
“So I hear. Let’s do it then, Sugar. Time to be unsung heroes again.”
We both crunched down below the level of the kitchen windows—no easy task. We couldn’t see the man and woman from there, and they couldn’t see us.
Sampson grasped the doorknob and slowly turned it.
CHAPTER
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