Patterson, James - Alex Cross 3 - Jack and Jill

Some kind of crime of high passion,“ he said. ”Wait -- there's something else here. Okay Hold on. I've got to check this out."

He didn't know how he'd missed it at first, but he sure as hell saw the note now. It was right next to the cordless telephone on the bed stand. Impossible to miss, right? But he'd missed it. He picked it up in his gloved hand.

The note was typewritten on thick, expensive bond. He read it quickly Then he read it again, just to be sure... that the note was for real.

Ah Dannyboy, we knew ya all too well One useless, thieving, rich bastard down So many more to go.

Jack and Jill came to The Hill To hose down all the slime Most imperiled Was poor Fitzpatrick Right schmuck, wrong place, wrong time.

Truly, He read the note over the hand phone. He took one more look around, then left the senator's apartment as it was: in a state of bedlam and horror and death. When he was safely down on Q Street, he called in the homicide to the Washington police.

He made the call anonymously No one could know that he'd been inside the senator's apartment, or especially, how it came to happen, and who he was. If anybody found out, all hell would really break loose -- as if it hadn't started already Everything was unreal, and it promised to get much worse.

Jack and Jill had promised it.

One useless, thieving, rich bastard down So many more to go.

AT EVERY HUMAN TRAGEDY like this one, there is always someone who points. A man stood outside the crime-scene tape and pointed at the murdered child and also at me. I was remembering Jannie's prophetic words to me earlier that morning: It's something bad, isn't it, Daddy?

Yes, it was. The baddest of the bad. The murder scene at the Sojourner Truth School was heartbreaking to me and, I was sure, to everyone else. The school yard was the saddest, most desolate place in the world.

The chatter of portable police radios violated the air and made it hard to breathe. I could still smell the little girl's blood. It was thick in my nostrils and my throat, but mostly inside my head.

Shanelle Green's parents were weeping nearby, but so were other people from the neighborhood, even complete strangers to the little girl. In most cities, in most civilized countries, a child murdered so young would be a catastrophe, but not in Washington, where hundreds of children die violent deaths every single year.

“I want as large a street canvass as we can manage on this one,” I told Rakeem Powell. “Sampson and I will be part of the canvass ourselves.”

“I hear you. We're on it in a big way. Sleep is overrated, anyway”

“Let's go John. We've got to move on this now,” I finally said to Sampson.

He didn't argue or object. A murder like this is usually solved in the first twenty-four hours, or it isn't solved. We both knew that.

From 6:00 A.M. on, Sampson and I canvassed the neighborhood with the other detectives and patrolmen that cold, miserable morning. We had to do it our way, house by house, street by street, mostly on foot. We needed to be involved in this case, to do something, to solve the heinous murder quickly, About ten in the morning, we heard about another shocking homicide in Washington. Senator Daniel Fitzpatrick had been murdered the night before. It had been a real bad night, hadn't it?

“Not our job,” Sampson said with cold, flat eyes. “Not our problem. Somebody else's.”

I didn't disagree.

No one Sampson or I spoke to that morning had seen anything out of the ordinary around the Sojourner Truth School. We heard the usual complaints about the drug pushers, the zombielike crackheads, the prossies who work on Eighth Street, the growing number of gangbangers.

But nothing out of the usual.

“People loved that little sweetheart Shanelie,” the ageless Hispanic lady who seemed to have run the corner grocery near the school forever told Sampson and me. “She always buy her Gummi Bears. She have such a pretty smile, you know?”

No, I had never seen Shanelle Green smile, but I found that I could almost picture it. I also had a fixed image of the battered right side of the little girl's face. I carried it around like a bizarre wallet photo inside my head.

Uncle Jimmie Kee, a successful and influential KoreanAmerican who owned several neighborhood businesses, was glad to talk with us. Jimmie is a good friend of ours. Occasionally, he comes along with us to a Redskins or Bullets game.

He supplied a name that we already had on our shortlist of suspects.

“What about this bad actor, Chop-It-Off-Chucky?” Uncle Jimmie volunteered as we spoke in the back of Ho-Woo-Jung, his popular restaurant on Eighth Street. I read the sign behind Jimmie: IMMIGRATION IS THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY.

“Nobody catch that motherfucker yet. He kill other children before. He the worst man in Washington, D.C. Next to the president,” Jimmie said and chuckled wickedly, “No bodies, though. No proof of it,” Sampson said to Jimmie.

“We don't even know if there really is a Chucky.”

That was true enough. For years there had been rumors about a horrifying child molester who worked the Northfield Village neighborhood, but there was nothing concrete. Nothing had ever been proved.

“Chucky real,” UncleJimmie insisted. His dark eyes narrowed to even thinner slits. “Chucky real as the devil. I see Chop-it-Off-Chucky in my dreams sometimes, Alex. So do the children who live around here.”

“You ever hear anything more specific about Chucky? Where he's been seen? Who saw him?” I asked. “Help us out if you can, Jimmie.”

“Oh, I gladly do that.” He nodded his head and bunched his thick brown lips, his triple chin, his bulging throat. Jimmie habitually wore a chocolate brown suit with a tan fedora that bobbed as he spoke. “You meditating yet, Alex, getting in touch with chi energy?” he asked me.

“I'm thinking about it, thinking about my chi Jimmie. Maybe my chi is running a little low right now. Tell us about Chucky.”

"I know lots bad stories about Chop-It-Off-Chucky. Scare kids all the time. Even the gangbangers scared of him. Young mothers, grandmothers, put up handbills in playgrounds. In my stores, too. Sad stories of missing children. I always permit it, Detectives.

Man who harms children is the worst. You agree, Alex? You see it differently?"

“No. I agree with you. That's why Sampson and I are out here today.”

I knew a lot about the child molester who had been nicknamed Chop-It-Off-Chucky. The unsubstantiated rumor was that he sliced off the genitalia of young kids who lived in the projects. Little boys and girls. No gender preference. Whether or not it was true, it seemed undeniable that someone had molested several children from the Northfield and Southv'ew Terrace projects, not far from here. Other children had simply disappeared.

The police in the area didn't have the resources to create an effective crisis team to find Chucky, if Chucky existed. I had gone to the wall about it several times with the chief of detectives, but nothing had happened. Extra detectives never seemed available for duty in Southeast. The unfairness of the situation put me in a rage, made me as crazy as anything I can think of.

“Sounds like another Mission: Impossible,” Sampson said as we walked up G Street, in the general direction of the Marine barracks. “We're on our own. We're supposed to catch a chimera.”

“Nice image,” I said, and had to smile at Man Mountain, his wild imagination, his mind.

“Thought you'd like it, man of culture and refinement that you are.”

We were sipping steaming herb tea from Jimmie's restaurant.

Patrolling the street. We looked like detectives, with our collars up and all. Big bad detectives. I wanted people to see us out working the neighborhood.