Thirteen years old. I was still slightly stunned by that. Could a thirteen-year-old have committed the two vicious child murders? That might explain the amateurness at the crime scenes. But the rage, the relentless violence? The hatred?
He’s a good boy, Detective.
There was no lock, no hook, on the boy’s door. Here we go. Here we go. Sampson and I burst into the bedroom, our guns drawn.
The room was a regular teenager’s hideout, only with more computer and audio equipment than most I’d seen. A gray cadet dress uniform hung on the open closet door. Someone had slashed it to shreds!
Sumner Moore wasn’t in his bedroom. He wasn’t catching an extra half-hour of sleep that morning.
The room was empty.
There was a typewritten note on the crumpled bedsheets, where it couldn’t be missed.
The note simply said Nobody is gone.
“What is this?” Colonel Moore muttered when he read it. “What is going on? What is going on? Can somebody please explain? What’s happening here?”
I thought that I got it, that I understood the boy’s note. Sumner Moore was Nobody—that was how he felt And now, Nobody was gone.
An article of clothing lying beside the note was the second part of the message to whoever came to his room first. He had left behind Shanelle Green’s missing blouse. The tiny electric-blue blouse was covered with blood.
A thirteen-year-old boy was the Truth School killer. He was in a state of total rage. And he was on the loose somewhere in Washington.
Nobody was gone.
CHAPTER
66
THE SOJOURNER TRUTH SCHOOL killer traipsed along M Street reading the Washington Post from cover to cover, looking to see if he was famous yet. He had been panhandling all morning and had made about ten bucks. Life be good!
He had the newspaper spread wide open, and he wasn’t much looking where he was going, so he bumped into various assholes on his way. The Post was full of stories about goddamn Jack and Jill, but nothing about him. Not a paragraph, not a single word, about what he’d done. What a frigging joke newspapers were. They just lied their asses off, but everybody was supposed to believe them, right?
Suddenly, he was feeling so bad, so confused, that he wanted to just lie down on the sidewalk and cry. He shouldn’t have killed those little kids, and he probably wouldn’t have if he’d stayed on Ms medication. But the Depakote made him feel dopey, and he hated it as if it were strychnine.
So now his life was completely ruined. He was a goner. His whole life was over before it had really begun.
He was on the mean streets, and thinking about living out here permanently. Nobody is here. And nobody can stop Nobody.
He had come to visit the Sojourner Truth School again. Alex Cross’s son went there and he was pissed as hell at Cross. The detective didn’t think much of him, did he? He hadn’t even come to the Teddy Roosevelt School with Sampson. Cross had dissed him again and again.
It was approaching the noon recess at the Truth School and he decided to stroll by, maybe to stand up close to the fenced yard where they had found Shanelle Green. Where he had brought the body. Maybe it was time to tempt the fates. See if there was a God in heaven. Whatever.
Rock-and-roll music was pounding nonstop in his head now. Nine Inch Nails, Green Day, Oasis. He heard “Black Hole Sun” and “Like Suicide” from Soundgarden. Then “Chump” and “Basket Case” from Green Day’s Dookie.
He caught himself, pulled himself back from the outer edge.
Man, he had gone ya-ya for a couple of minutes there. He had completely zoned out. How long had he been out of it? he wondered.
This was getting bad now. Or was it getting very good? Maybe he ought to take just a wee bit of the old Depakote. See if it brought him back anywhere near our solar system.
Suddenly, he spotted the black bitch Amazon woman coming toward him. It was already too late to move out of the way of the cyclone.
He recognized her right away. She was the high-and-mighty principal from the Sojourner Truth School. She had a bead on him, had him in her sights. Man, she should have been wearing a NO FEAR T-shirt to play that kind of game. you put the bead on me—then I’ll put the bead on you, lady. You don’t ant my bead on you. Trust me on that, partner.
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? Kute 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 me seventh floor. The room was filled with bright light and was a far cry from my cube in the White House basement. I felt tike 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.
“Oh, but we do, Alex. We haven’t brought him in for an interview, because we don’t have anything concrete on him. Just nasty, nasty suspicions. That and a need to catch somebody. Let’s not forget about that Now you ‘re suspicious, too.”
“That’s all I have at this point,” I reminded her. “Suspicions.”
“Sometimes that’s enough, and you know it. Sometimes it has to be.”
We arrived at the small private garage underneath the CIA complex at Langley. The space was filled mostly with family vehicles like Taurus station wagons, but there were a few high-testosterone sports cars as well. Mustangs, Bimmers, Vipers. The cars matched up fairly well with the personnel I had seen upstairs.
“I guess we should take both our cars,” Jeanne suggested, and it made sense to me. “I’ll drive back here when we’re through. You can go on into D.C. Hawkins is staying with his sister in Silver Spring. He’s at the house now. It’s about half an hour on the beltway, if that.”
“You’re going to take him in now?’ I asked her. It sounded like it to me.
“I think we should, don’t you? Just to have a little chat, you know.”
I went to my car. She walked to her station wagon. ‘This man we’re going to see, he’s a professional killer,” I called to her across the garage floor.
She called back, her voice echoing against concrete and steel. “From what I gather, he’s one of our very best. Isn’t that a fun thought?”
“Does he have an alibi for any of the Jack and Jill murder dates?”
“Not that we know of. We’ll have to ask him more about it—in detail.”
We got into our respective cars and started up the engines. I was beginning to notice that the CIA inspector general wasn’t a bureaucrat; she certainly wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty. Mine, either. We were going to meet another “ghost.” Was he Jack? Could it be that easy? Stranger things had happened.
It took the full thirty minutes to get over to Hawkins’s sister’s house in Silver Spring, Maryland. The houses there were somewhat overpriced, but it was still considered a middle-class area. Not my middle class. Somebody else’s.
Jeanne pulled her Volvo wagon up alongside a black Lincoln parked three-quarters of a block from the sister’s house. She powered down the passenger-side window and talked to two agents inside the parked car. One of her surveillance teams, I guessed. Either that or she was asking directions to the assassin’s hideout, which struck me as humorous. One of the few laughs I’d had recently.
Suddenly, I saw a man come out of the sister’s Cape Cod-style house.
I recognized Kevin Hawkins from his file pictures. No doubt about it.
He threw a quick glance down the street, and he must have seen us. He started to run. Then he hopped on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle parked in the driveway.
I shouted, “Jeanne,” out my open window and gunned my engine at the same time.
I began to chase… Jack?
CHAPTER
69
THE FIRST THING Kevin Hawkins did on the motorcycle was to cut sharply sideways over the sliver of frost-covered lawn separating two split-level ranch houses. He raced past a few more houses, one of them with an aboveground pool covered by a baby-blue tarp for the winter.
I aimed my old Porsche along the same inland route that Hawkins was taking. Fortunately, the past few days had been cold, and the ground was mostly solid. I wondered if anybody from the houses had spotted the motorcycle and car crazily zigzagging through their backyards.
The motorcycle took a sharp right onto the development road past the last row of houses. I followed close behind. My car was bouncing high. Then it scraped bottom loudly against the high curb. It thudded hard onto the road pavement, and my head struck the rooftop.
As we approached an intersecting street, the Volvo station wagon and the Lincoln joined the race. A few neighborhood kids who were playing flag football in spite of the miserable weather stopped to gawk wide-eyed at the real-life police chase roaring up the suburban street.
I had my Glock out and the window rolled down. I wasn’t going to fire unless he did. Kevin Hawkins wasn’t wanted for any specific crime yet. No warrants had been served. Why was he running? He sure was acting guilty about something.
Hawkins leaned the Harley into a steep curve as he downshifted into fourth. I remembered another life and time spent on a fast motorcycle. I recalled its amazing maneuverability. The rawness of the speed. The feeling when your skin begins to tighten against your skull. I remembered Jezzie Flanagan, and her motorcycle.
Hawkins’s bike made a deep, guttural roar as it climbed the hilly road like a ground rocket.
I tried to keep up, and was doing a pretty decent job. Amazingly, so was the Volvo wagon and the sedan. The chase scene was complete madness, though—suburbia suddenly racing out of control
Was Jack up ahead?
Was Hawkins Jack?
I watched Kevin Hawkins stretch himself flat over the handlebars of the bike. He knew how to ride. What else did the trained killer know how to do?
He was accelerating into fifth, approaching ninety or so on a narrow suburban road repeatedly marked for thirty-five.
Then up ahead—traffic!
The bane of our existence was suddenly the most glorious and welcome sight in the world to me.
A traffic jam!
Several cars and vans were already backed up in the direction we were coming from.
A bright orange mini-school bus was stopped in the opposite lane. It was discharging a thin line of children, as it did probably every day about this time.
Hawkins hadn’t slowed the cycle much, though. Suddenly, he was riding the double line in the road. He hadn’t slowed the cycle at all.
I realized what he was going to do.
He was going to split the stopped traffic, and keep on going.
I started to brake and cursed loudly. I knew what I had to do.
I swerved off the road again, traveling cross-country over more lawns. A woman in a black pea jacket and jeans screamed at me from her porch and waved a snow shovel.
I headed toward where the main road looped down ahead to meet the lane I had been stuck in traffic in only a few seconds ago.
Jeanne Sterling followed in her station wagon. So did the Lincoln sedan. Madness and chaos helter-skelter in Silver Spring.
Was this Jack up ahead? Were we about to nab the celebrity stalker and killer?
I had high hopes. We were so close to him. Less than a hundred yards.
I kept my eyes pinned on the bouncing, speeding motorcycle. Suddenly, it went down!
The bike slid on one side, sending up a sheet of bright orange and white sparks against the roadway black. A few kids were still walking in a line between the bus and the stopped traffic.
Then Hawkins went down!
He had gone down to avoid hitting the children.
He h
ad swerved to avoid hitting the kids!
Hawkins was down on the road.
Could this be Jack up ahead?
If not, who in the name of God was he?
I was out of the car, holding my Glock, racing like a madman toward the bizarre accident scene. I was slip-sliding on the ice and snow, but I wouldn’t let it slow me down.
Jeanne Sterling and her two agents were out of their cars as well, but they weren’t doing as well in the slush. I was losing my cover.
Kevin Hawkins managed to pull himself up from the sprawling heap. He looked back. He saw us coming. Guns everywhere.
He had a gun out, but he didn’t fire. He was only a few feet away from the school bus and the children.
He left the kids alone, though. Instead, he ran to a black Camaro convertible at the head of the line of stopped cars.
What the hell was he up to now?
I could see him yelling into the driver-side window of the stopped sports car. Then blam, he fired directly into the open window.
Hawkins yanked open the car door, and a body fell out.
Jesus Christ, he’d shot the driver dead! Just like that.
I had seen it, but I couldn’t believe it.
The contract killer took off in the Camaro. He’d killed someone for his car. But he’d nearly killed himself to avoid hitting a row of innocent children.
No rules … or rather, make up your own.
I stopped running and stood helplessly in the middle of the street in Silver Spring. Had we just been that close to catching Jack? Had it almost been over?
CHAPTER
70
NANA MAMA was still up when I got home about eleven-thirty that night Sampson was with her.
Adrenaline fired through my body the moment I saw them waiting for me. The two of them looked even worse than I felt after a long bear of a day.
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