Alex Cross 3 - Jack and Jill

by Patterson, James

  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 Magio 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 foul-mouthed, 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 Magio'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.

  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 have 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 Washin
gton 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 crouched 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.

  THE BACK DOOR into the Moore house was unlocked, and Sampson pushed it right in. The two of us exploded into the homey kitchen with its smells of freshly toasted Pop-Tarts and coffee. We were in the Capitol Hill section of Washington. The house and kitchen looked it. So did the Moores. Neither Sampson nor I was fooled by the trappings of normaIcy, though. We'd seen it before, in the homes of other psychos.

  “Hands on top of your heads! Both of you. Put your arms up slow and easy,” Sampson yelled at the man and woman we had surprised in the kitchen.

  We had our Glocks trained on Colonel Moore. He didn't look like too much of a threat: a short man, thin and balding, middle-aged paunch, eyeglasses. He wore a standard-issue Army uniform, but even that didn't help his image too much.

  “We're detectives with the Metro D.C. police,” Sampson identified the two of us. The Moores looked in shock. I couldn't blame them. Sampson and I can be shocking under the wrong circumstances, and these were definitely the wrong circumstances.

  “There's been some kind of really bad, really crazy mistake,” Colonel Moore finally said very slowly and carefully.

  "I'm Colonel Franklin Moore. This is my wife, Connie Moore.

  The address here is 418 Seward Square North.“ He slowly enunciated each word. ”Please lower your weapons, Officers. You're in the wrong place."

  “We're at the correct address, sir,” I told the colonel. And you're the crank caller we want to talk to. Either you ''re a crank or you're a killer.

  “And we're looking for Colonel Frank Moore,” Sampson filled in. He hadn't lowered his revolver an inch, not a millimeter.

  Neither had I.

  Colonel Moore maintained his cool pretty well. That concerned me, set my inner alarms off in a loud jangle.

  “Well, can you please tell us what this is all about? And please do it quickly Neither of us has ever been arrested. I've never even had a traffic violation,” he said to both Sampson and me, not sure who was in charge.

  “Do you subscribe to Prodigy, Colonel?” Sampson asked him.

  It sounded a little crazy when it came out, like everything else lately Colonel Moore looked at his wife, then he turned back to us.

  “We do subscribe, but we do it for our son, Sumner. Neither of us has much time in our schedules for computer games. I don't understand them much and don't want to.”

  “How old is your son?” I asked Colonel Moore.

  "What difference does that make? Sumner is thirteen years old. He's in the ninth grade at the Theodore Roosevelt School.

  He's an honor student. He's a great kid. What is this all about, Officers? Will you please tell us why you're here?"

  “Where is Sumner now?” Sampson said in a very low and threatening voice.

  Because maybe young Sumner was listening somewhere near in the house. Maybe the Sojourner Truth School killer was listening to us right now.

  “He gets up half an hour to forty-five minutes later than we do. His bus comes at six-thirty Please? What is this about?”

  “We need to talk to your son, Colonel Moore,” I said to him.

  Keep it real simple for right now.

  “You have to do better --” Colonel Moore started to say “No, ;ve don't have to do better,” Sampson interrupted him.

  “We need to see your son right now. We're here on a homicide investigation, Colonel. Two small children have already been killed. Your son may be involved with the murders. We need to see your son.”

  “Oh, dear God, Frank,” Mrs. Moore spoke up for the first time. Connie, I remembered her name. "This can't be happening.

  Sumner couldn't have done anything."

  Colonel Moore seemed even more confused than when we first burst in, but we had gotten his full attention. “I'll show you up to Sumner's room. Could you please holster your weapons, at least?”

  “I'm afraid we can't do that,” I told him. The look in his eyes was inching closer to panic. I didn't even look at Mrs. Moore anymore.

  “Please take us to the boy's bedroom now,” Sampson repeated.

  “We need to go up there quietly. This is for Sumner's own protection. You understand what I'm saying?”

  Colonel Moore nodded slowly His face was a sad, blank stare.

  “Frank?” Mrs. Moore pleaded. She was very pale.

  The three of us went upstairs. We proceeded in single file.

  I went first, then Colonel Moore, followed by Sampson. I still hadn't ruled out Franklin Moore as a suspect, as a potential madman, as the killer.

  “Which room is your son's?” Sampson asked in a whisper.

  His voice barely made a sound. Last of the Masai warriors. On a capital-murder case in Washington, D.C.

  “It's the second door on the left. promise you, Sumner hasn't done anything. He's thirteen years old. He's first in his class.”

  “Is there a lock on the bedroom door?” I asked.

  “No... I don't think so... there might be a hook. I'm not sure. He's a good boy, Detective.”

  Sampson and I positioned ourselves on either side on the closed bedroom door. We understood that a murderer might be waiting inside. Their good boy might be a child killer. Times two.

  Colonel Moore and his wife might have no idea about their son, and what he was truly all about.

  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.

  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 his 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 Shanelie 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 o FVR 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 want 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.