He found it curious, although not particularly disturbing anymore, that he had little or no conscience, no guilt about the killings; and yet he could be perfectly normal in many other areas of his life. His sister, Eileen, for example, called him the “last believer” and the “last patriot.” Her children thought he was the nicest, kindest Uncle Kevin imaginable. His parents back in Hudson adored him: He had plenty of nice, normal, close friends all around the globe. And yet here he was, ready for another cold-blooded kill. Looking forward to it, actually. Craving it.
His adrenaline was pumping, but he felt less than nothing about the intended victim tonight. There were billions of people on the earth, far too many of them. What did one less human mean? Not a whole lot, any goddamn way you looked at it. If you took a logical view of the world.
At the same time, he was extremely cautious as he entered the glittery Kennedy Center, with its gleaming crystal chandeliers and Matisse tapestries. He glanced up at the chandeliers in the Grand Foyer. With their hundreds of different prisms and lamps, they probably weighed a ton apiece.
He was going to murder in public view, under the bright lights, under all these prisms and lamps.
And not get caught!
What an incredible magic trick. How good he was at this.
His seat had been purchased for him, the theater ticket left in a locker at Union Station. The seat was in the back of the orchestra. It was almost underneath the “President’s Box.” Very nice. Just about perfect. He purposely arrived just as the houselights dimmed.
He was actually surprised when the intermission came. So fast! The time had really flown. The melodramatic stage play really moved along.
He glanced at his wristwatch: 9:15. The intermission was right on schedule. The houselights came up and Hawkins idly observed that the crowd was highly enthused about the hit musical.
This was good news for him: genuine excitement, ebullience, lots of noisy small talk filling the air. He slowly rose from his cushy seat. Now for the night’s real drama, he was thinking.
He entered the Grand Foyer with the huge chandeliers that resembled stalactites. The carpeting was a plush red sea beneath his feet. Up ahead was the proud bronze bust of John Kennedy.
Very fitting and appropriate.
Just so. Just right.
Jack and Jill would be the biggest thing since Kennedy, and that was more than thirty years ago. He was happy to be a part of it Thrilled, actually. He felt honored.
For tonight’s performance, the part of Jack will be played by Kevin Hawkins.
Watch closely now, theater fans. This act will be unforgettable.
CHAPTER
44
THE GRAND FOYER of the Kennedy Center was mobbed with uppity Washingtonian assholes. Theater people, Jesus It was mostly an older crowd—season subscribers. Tables were set up selling junky T-shirts and high-priced programs A woman with a gaudy red umbrella was guiding a tour of high school kids through the intermission crowd.
There was a very nasty and difficult trick to this killing Kevin Hawkins knew.
He had to get unbelievably close to the victim, physically close, before he actually committed the murder.
That bothered him a lot, but there was no way around it He had to get right on top of the target, and he could not fail at this part of the job.
The photojournalist was thinking about it as he successfully blended into the noisily buzzing theater crowd.
He eventually spotted Supreme Court Justice Thomas Henry Franklin. Franklin was the youngest member of the current Court. He was an African-American. He looked haughty, which fitted his reputation around Washington. He was not a likable man. Not that it mattered.
Snapshot! Kevin Hawkins took a mind photo of Thomas Henry Franklin.
On the justice’s left arm was a twenty-three-year-old woman. Snapshot. Snapshot.
Hawkins had done his homework on Charlotte Kinsey, too. He knew her name, of course. He knew that she was a second-year law student at Georgetown. He knew other dark secrets about Charlotte Kinsey and Justice Franklin as well. He had watched the two of them together in bed.
He took another moment to observe Thomas Franklin and the college girl as they talked in the Grand Foyer. They were as animated and bubbly as any of the other couples there. Even more so. What great fun (he theater could be!
He took several more mind photos. He would never forget the image of the two of them talking together like that. Snapshot. And that. Snapshot.
They laughed very naturally and spontaneously, and appeared to like each other’s company. Hawkins found himself frowning. He had two nieces in Silver Spring. The thought of the young law student with this middle-aged phony irked the hell out of him!
The irony of his harsh judgment brought a sudden smile to his lips. The morality of a stone-cold killer—how droll! How insane. How very cool.
He watched the two of them move onto the large terrace off the lobby. He followed several paces behind. The Potomac stretched out before them and was black as night. A dinner-cruise boat from Alexandria—the Dandy—was floating by.
The sheer curtains between the lobby and terrace flapped dramatically in the crisp river wind. Kevin Hawkins carefully moved toward the Supreme Court justice and his beautiful date. He took more mind photos of the two of them.
He noted that Justice Franklin’s white shirt was a size too small, grabbing at his neck. The yellow silk tie was too loud for his subdued gray suit. Charlotte Kinsey had a quick, sweet smile that was irresistible. She had lovely rounded breasts. Her long black hair swirled in the river breeze.
He physically brushed against the two of them. He got that close to Charlotte and Thomas. He actually touched the law student’s long shiny hair. He could smell her perfume. Opium or Shalimar. Snapshot.
He was right there. So close. He was practically on top of them, in every sense of the phrase.
His mind’s eye continued to snap off photo after photo of the two of them. He would never forget any of this, not a single frame of the intimate murder scene.
He could see, hear, touch, smell; and yet he couldn’t feel a thing.
Kevin Hawkins resisted all human impulses now. No pity. No guilt. No shame. And no mercy.
The law student carried a leather bag on her left shoulder. It was slightly open, just a sliver, just enough. Ah, carefree, casual, careless youth.
The photojournalist was good with his hands. Still good. Still steady. Still very quick. Still one of the best.
He slid something into her bag. C’est ça. That was it! Success. The first of the night.
Neither she nor Justice Franklin noticed the fleeting movement, or him, as he passed by in the crowd. He was the river breeze, the night, the’ light of the moon.
He felt incredible exhilaration at that special moment. There was nothing in the world like this. The power in taking, stealing, another human life was like nothing else in the full palette of human experiences.
The hard part was over, he knew. The close work. Now the simple act of murder.
To murder in public view.
And not get caught.
His heart suddenly jumped, bucked horribly. Something was going wrong. Very wrong. As wrong as could be. Wrong, wrong, wrong!
Jesus, Charlotte Kinsey was reaching into her bag.
Snapshot.
She’d found the note he’d left there—the note from Jack and Jill! Wrong, wrong, wrong!
Snapshot.
She was looking at it curiously, wondering what it was, wondering how it had gotten in her handbag.
She began to unfold the note, and he could feel his temples pounding horribly. She had gotten the justice’s attention. He glanced down at the note as well.
Nooooo! Jesus, nooo, he wanted to scream.
Kevin Hawkins operated on pure instinct. The purest. No time to second-guess himself now.
He moved forward very quickly and surely.
His Luger was out, dangling below his waist. The gun was
concealed because of the closeness of the crowd, the forest of legs and arms, pleated trousers, fluffed dresses.
He raised and fired the Luger just once. Tricky angle, too. Far from ideal. He saw the sudden blossom of crimson red. The body jolted, then crumbled and fell to the marble floor.
A heartshot! Certainly a miracle, or close to it. God was on his side, no?
Snapshot!
Snapshot!
His heart almost couldn’t take it. He wasn’t used to this sudden improvising.
He thought about getting caught, after all of these years, and on such an unbelievably important job. He had a vision of total failure. He felt… he felt something.
He dropped the Luger into the jumble of legs, trousers, satin and taffeta gowns, high-heeled slippers, highly polished dark cordovans.
“Was that a gunshot?” a woman shrieked. “Oh, God, Phillip. Someone’s been shot.”
He backed away from the spectacle as just about everyone else did. The Grand Foyer looked as if it were ablaze.
He was part of them, part of the fearful, bolting crowd. He had nothing to do with the terrifying disturbance, the murder, the loud gunshot.
His face was a convincing mask of shock and disbelief. God, he knew this look so well. He had seen it so many times before in his lifetime.
In another tense few moments, he was outside the Kennedy Center. He was heading toward New Hampshire Avenue at a steady pace. He was one with the crowd.
“Seems Like Old Times” raced through his head, playing much too fast, at double or triple speed. He remembered humming the tune on his walk in. And as the photojournalist knew, the old times were definitely the best.
The old times were coming back now, weren’t they?
Jack and Jill had come to The Hill.
The game was so beautiful, so delicate and exquisite.
Now for the greatest shocker of them all.
CHAPTER
45
AGENT JAY GRAYER called me at home from his car phone. I was in the middle of reading approximately two hundred background security checks done on White House personnel by the Secret Service uniformed division. The deputy director was speeding downtown to the Kennedy Center complex, doing ninety on the beltway. I could hear the siren blaring from his car.
“They struck again. Jesus, they made a hit at the Kennedy Center tonight. Right under our noses. It’s another real bad acid trip, Alex. Just come.” He definitely sounded out of control.
Just come.
“They hit during intermission of Miss Saigon. I’ll meet you there, Alex. I’m seven to ten minutes away.”
“Who was it this time?” I asked the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. I almost didn’t want to hear the answer. No, not almost. I didn’t want to hear the victim’s name.
“That’s part of the problem. This whole thing is nuts. It wasn’t really anybody, Alex.”
“What do you mean, ‘it wasn’t really anybody’? That doesn’t make sense to me, Jay.”
“It was a law student from Georgetown University. A young woman named Charlotte Kinsey. She was only twenty-three years old. They left one of their notes again. It’s them for sure.”
“I don’t get it. I do not get this,” I muttered over the phone. “Goddammit.”
“Neither do I. The girl might have caught a bullet meant for somebody else. She was out with a Supreme Court justice, Alex. Thomas Henry Franklin. Maybe the bullet was meant for him. That would fit the colabrity pattern. Maybe they’ve finally made a mistake.”
“I’m on my way,” I told Jay Grayer. “I’ll meet you inside the Kennedy Center.”
Maybe they finally made a mistake.
I didn’t think so.
CHAPTER
46
IT WASN’T REALLY ANYBODY, ALEX. How the hell could that be?
A twenty-three-year-old law student from Georgetown was dead. Christ. It didn’t make sense to me, didn’t track at all. It changed everything. It seemed to blow the pattern.
I drove from our home to the Kennedy Center in record time. Jay Grayer wasn’t the only one partly out of control. I stuck a flasher on the roof of my car and rode like hell on wheels.
The second half of Miss Saigon had been canceled. The murder had taken place less than an hour before, and there were still hundreds of onlookers at the crime scene.
I heard “Jack and Jill” mumbled several times as I made my way to the Grand Foyer. Fear was a tangible, almost physical, presence in the crowd. A lot of elements of the murder at the Kennedy Center were torturing me when I arrived at the crime scene at quarter past ten. There were some similarities with the other Jack and Jill killings. A rhyming note had been left. The job had been done coldly and professionally. A single shot.
But there were huge differences this time. They seemed to have destroyed their pattern.
Copycat killer? Maybe. But I didn’t think so. Yet nothing could, or should, be dismissed. Not by me, and not by anyone else on the case.
The new twists nagged at me as I pushed my way through the curious, horrified, even dumbstruck, crowd on New Hampshire Avenue. The law student hadn’t been a national figure. So why had she been killed? Jay Grayer had called her a nobody. Grayer said she wasn’t the daughter of anybody famous, either. She had been out to the theater with Supreme Court Justice Thomas Henry Franklin, but that didn’t seem to count as a celebrity stalk-and-kill.
Charlotte Kinsey had been a nobody.
The killing just didn’t fit the pattern. Jack and Jill had taken a huge risk committing the murder in such a public place. The other killings had been private affairs, safer and more controllable.
Shit, shit, shit. What were they up to now? Was this whole thing changing? Escalating? Why had they varied their pattern? Were the killers moving into another, more random phase?
Had I missed their original point? Had we all missed the real pattern they were creating? Or had they made a mistake at the Kennedy Center?
Maybe they finally made a mistake.
That was our best hope. It would show that they weren’t invincible. Let this be a goddamn mistake! Please let it be their first. Just the same, whoever it was made a clever escape.
The six-hundred-foot-long lobby had been emptied of all but police officials, the medical examiner’s staff, and the morgue crew. I saw Agent Grayer and walked over to him. Jay looked as if he hadn’t slept in weeks, as if he might never be able to sleep again.
“Alex, thanks for getting down here so quickly,” the Secret Service agent said. I liked working with him so far. He was smart and usually even-tempered, with absolutely no bullshit about him. He had an old-fashioned dedication to his job, and especially to the President, both the office and the man.
“Anything worthwhile turn up yet?” I asked him. “Besides another corpse. The poem.”
Grayer rolled his eyes toward the glittering chandeliers hanging above us. “Oh yeah. Definitely, Alex. We found out some more about the murdered student. Charlotte Kinsey was just starting her second year at Georgetown Law. She was bright as hell, apparently. Did her undergraduate at New York University. However, she only had average grades as a Hoya, so she didn’t make Law Review.”
“How does a law student fit into the pattern? Unless they were shooting at Justice Franklin and actually missed. I’ve been trying to make some connection on the way over. Nothing comes to mind. Except that maybe Jack and Jill are playing with us?”
Grayer nodded. “They’re definitely playing with us. For one thing, your illicit sex theory is still intact. We know why Charlotte Kinsey didn’t excel at Georgetown. She was spending quality time with some very important men here in town. Very pretty girl, as you’ll see in a second. Shiny black hair down to her waist. Great shape. Questionable morals. She’d have made a terrific attorney.”
The two of us walked over to the dead woman’s body. The law student was lying facing away from us.
Beside the body was a bag she had been carrying. I couldn’t see the bullet h
ole, and Charlotte Kinsey didn’t even appear to be hurt. She looked as if she’d just decided to take a nap on the floor of the terrace at the Kennedy Center. Her mouth was open slightly, as if she wanted one last breath of the river air.
“Go ahead, tell me now,” I said to Jay Grayer. I knew that he had something more on the murder. “Who is she?”
“Oh, she’s somebody, after all. The girl was President Byrnes’s mistress,” he said. “She was seeing the President, too. He skipped out of the White House and saw her the other night. That’s why they killed her. Bingo, Alex. Right in our face.”
My chest felt seriously constricted as I bent over the dead woman. Claustrophobia again. She was very pretty. Twenty-three years old. Prime of her life. One shot to the heart had ended that.
I read the note they had left in the law student’s handbag.
Jack and Jill came to The Hill
Your mistress had no clue, Sir.
She was a pawn
But now she’s gone
And soon we’ll get to you, Sir.
The poetry seemed to be getting a little better. Certainly it was bolder. And so were Jack and Jill. God help us all, but especially President Thomas Byrnes.
And soon we’ll get to you, Sir.
CHAPTER
47
THE MORNING after the murder, I drove eight miles down to Langley, Virginia. I wanted to spend some time with Jeanne Sterling, the CIA’s inspector general and the Agency’s representative on the crisis team. Don Hamerman had made it clear to me that the Agency was involved because there was the possibility a foreign power might be behind Jack and Jill. Even if it were a long shot, it had to be checked. Somehow, I suspected there might be more to the CIA’s involvement than just that. This was my chance to find out.
Supposedly, the Agency had a lead that was worth checking out. Since the Aldrich Ames scandal, and the resulting Intelligence Authorization Act, the CIA had to share information with the rest of us. It was now the law.
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