Patterson, James - Alex Cross 3 - Jack and Jill

“I'm fine,” I lied for the second time that morning.

“Sure you are, Sugar. You're always fine, even when you're not. You're the dragonslayer, right?” Sampson said and shook his head.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a young woman wearing a black sweatshirt with Alu. ALWAYS LOVE YOU, in white letters.

Another dead child. Tysheika. People in the neighborhood sometimes wore the dark shirts to funerals of murdered kids. My grandmother, Nana Mama, had quite a collection of them.

Something else caught my eye. A woman standing back from the crowd, under the spectral branches of a withering elm. She didn't seem to quite fit with the rest of the neighborhood group.

She was tall and nice-looking. She wore a belted raincoat over ieans, and flat shoes. Behind her, I could see a blue sedan. A Mercedes.

Shek the one. That's her. She the one for you. The crazy thought just came out of nowhere. Filled my head with sudden, inappropriate joy I made a mental note to find out who she was.

I stopped to talk with a young, intense homicide detective wearing a red Kangol hat with a brown sport jacket and brown nitted tie. I was beginning to take control.

“Bad way to start the day, Alex,” Rakeem Powell said as I came up to him. “Or to end one, in my case.”

I nodded at Rakeem. “Can't imagine a worse way.” I felt sick in the well of my stomach. “What do you know about this so far, Rakeem? Anything juicy for us to go on? I need to hear it all.”

The detective glanced at his small black notepad. He flipped a few pages. "kirtle girl's name is Shanelie reen. Popular girl.

A sweetheart, from what I hear so far. She was in the first grade here at the Truth School. lives two blocks from school in the Northfield Village projects. Parents both work. They let her walk home by herself. Not too goddamn smart, but what can you do, you know? They came home tonight, Shanelie wasn't there.

They reported her missing around eight. That's the parents over there."

I glanced around. They were just a couple of kids themselves.

kooked completely devastated and heartbroken. I knew they would never be the same after this horrifying night. Nobody could be.

“Neither of them suspects?” I had to ask.

Rakeera shook his head and said, "I don't think so, Alex.

Shanelie was their life."

“Please check them, Rakecm. Check both parents. How did she get here in the school yard?” I asked him.

Powell sighed. “That's the first thing we don't know. Where she was killed is the second. Who did it is strike three for the Mod Squad.”

It was obvious from looking at Shanelie that she had been dumped here, probably murdered someplace else. We were right at the beginning of this terrible case. kots of work to do. My case now.

“You know how she was killed?” I asked Rakeera.

The homicide detective frowned. "Take a look for yourself.

Tell me what you think."

I didn't want to look, but I had to. I bent down close to Shanelie. I could smell the little girl's blood: copper, like a lot of pennies had been thrown on the ground. I couldn't help thinking of Damon andJannie, my own kids. I couldn't stop the overwhelming sadness I felt. It ate at me, like acid splashed all over my body I knelt on the cracked and broken concrete to examine the body of the six-year-old girl. Shanelie lay in a fetal position. All she had on was a pair of flowered pink-and-blue underpants. A red bow was impossibly tangled up in her braids, and she had tiny gold earrings in her ears.

The rest of her clothes were missing. The killer had apparently taken the little girl's school clothes with him.

She was such a little beauty, such a sweetheart, I could see. Even after what someone had done to her. I was looking at the how; the manner in which the six-year-old girl had been brutally murdered sometime earlier that night, her whole life silenced in an instant of madness and horror.

I gently turned the girl's body a few inches. Her head lolled to one side, the neck probably broken. She weighed next to nothing.

Just a baby The right side of her little face was partly gone.

Obliterated was a better description. The murderer had struck Shanelie so many times, and so violently, that little on the right side of the face was recognizable.

“How could he do this to such a beautiful little girl?” I muttered under my breath. “Poor Shanelie. Poor baby,” I whispered to no one but myself. A tear formed in my eye. I blinked it away, There was no place for that here.

One of Shanelle's eyes was missing. Her face is like a two-sided, two-faced mask. Two sides to a child? Two faces? What did that mean?

There was another fiend on the loose in Washington.

A child killer this time.

A TALL, THIN MAN in a black raincoat and black floppy rain hat slowly, cautiously approached the door of Senator Daniel Fitzpatrick's apartment a little before six o'clock Tuesday morning.

He examined the outer hallway for signs of a break-in, a struggle of some sort, but didn't find any He was thinking that he didn't want to be outside this apartment or anywhere near it. He wasn't sure what he expected to find inside, but he had the feeling it would be bad. Powerfully, overwhelmingly bad. This was so unreal.

It was so odd for him to be here, a mystery inside a mystery. But here he was.

The man noticed everything about the hallway Sprinkles of fallen plaster on the rug. Eight other doorways in sight. He had once been reasonably good at this routine. Being an investigator was like riding a bicycle, right? Sure it was.

He jimmied open the door to 4J with a square of plastic very much like a credit card, only thinner, slicker to the touch. He guessed that breaking and entering was like riding a bike, too.

You never forgot how.

“I'm inside 4J,” he spoke softly into a compact hand radio.

Sweat had begun to form all over his body. His legs quivered slightly He was disgusted and he was afraid and he was definitely someplace that he shouldn't be. Unrealville, he called it in his mind.

He quickly walked through the foyer and into the small living room with photos of Senator Fitzpatrick on every wall. Still no sign of a break-in or any trouble.

“This could be a very nasty hoax,” he reported into the radio. “I hope that's what it is.” He paused. “Uh-oh. We have a problem.”

Everything had happened in the bedroom, and whoever had done everything had left a terrible mess. It was worse than anything he could have imagined it might be.

“This is real bad. Senator Fitzpatrick is dead. Daniel Fitzpatrick has been murdered. This is not a hoax. The body appears to be fully rigorous. Flesh has a waxy tone. There's a lot of blood. Jesus, there's a lot of blood.”

He bent over the senator's corpse. He could smell cordite, almost taste it on his tongue. Most likely from the gun that killed Fitzpatrick. Unfortunately, there was much more to the brutal murder scene. Too much for him to handle. He fought to keep his cool. Riding a bike, right?

“Two shots to the head. Close-in. Execution-style,” he said into the handset. “Entry wounds about an inch apart.”

He sighed heavily Waited a moment, then began again. They didn't need to know everything he was seeing and feeling right now.

“The senator is handcuffed to his bedposts. Look like police cuffs to me. His body is nude and not a pretty sight. Penis and scrotum appear to have been gouged out of the body There's a lot of blood all over the bed, a humongous stain. Big stain on the rug, too, where it soaked through.”

He forced his face even closer to the senator's silver-haired chest. He didn't like it, being this close to a dead man- or any man, for that matter. Fitzpatrick was wearing some kind of religious medal. Probably real silver. He smelled of a woman's perfume. The tall man, the investigator, was almost certain of it. "The D.C. police are going to be guessing jealous lover.