Patterson, James - Alex Cross 3 - Jack and Jill

His tight smile turned to a wide-open grin. “Not try. Trust me on that one.”

He was a truly scary man. He reminded me a little of a psychopathic killer named Gary Soneji. I had talked to Soneji just like this. Neither of them had much affect in their faces. Just this cold fixed glare that wouldn't go away. Then sudden bursts of laughter.

My skin was crawling. I wanted to get up from the table and leave.

Klauk stared at me for a long moment before he went on. I could hear Jeanne Sterling's kids inside the house. The refrigerator door opening and closing. Ice tinkling against glass. Birds whooping and twittering in background trees. It was a strange, strange scene. Indescribably eerie for me.

“There is one basic proposition in covert action. In subversion, sabotage, being better at it than the other guy. We can do anything we want.” Klauk said it very, very slowly, word by word.

“And we often do. You're a psychologist and a homicide detective, right? What's your objective take on this? What are you hearing from me?”

“No rules,” I said to him. "That's what you're telling me. You live, you work, in a closed world that virtually isn't governed.

You could say that your world is completely antisocial."

He snorted a laugh again. I was a decent student, I guess. “Not a fucking one of them. Once we're commissioned for a job -- there are no rules. Not a one. Think about it.”

I definitely would think about it. I started right then and there.

I considered the idea of Klauk trying to kill me -- if our country asked him to. No rules. A world peopled by ghosts. And even scarier was that I could sense he believed every word he'd said.

After I finished with Klauk, for that afternoon at least, I talked with Jeanne Sterling for a while more. We sat in an idyllic, multiwindowed sunroom that looked out on the idyllic backyard. The subject of conversation continued to be murder. I hadn't come down yet from my talk with the assassin. The ghost.

“What did you think of our Mr. Klauk?” Jeanne asked me.

“Disturbed me. Irritated me. Scared the hell out of me,” I admitted to her. "He's really unpleasant. Not nice. He's a jerk,

“An incredible asshole,” she agreed. Then she didn't say anything for a couple of seconds. “Alex, somebody inside the Agency has killed at least three of our agents. That's one of the skeletons I've dug up so far in my time as inspector. It's an 'unsolved crime.” The killer isn't Klauk, though. Andrew is actually under control.

He isn't dangerous. Somebody else is. To tell you the complete truth, the Directorate of Operations has demanded that we bring in somebody from the outside on this. We definitely think one of our contract killers could be Jack. Who knows, maybe Jill is one of ours, too."

I didn't talk for a moment, just listened to what Jeanne Sterling had to say. Jack and Jill came to The Hill. Could Jack be a trained assassin? What about Jill? And then, why were they killing celebrities in Washington? Why had they threatened President Byrnes?

My mind whirled around in great looping circles. I thought about all the possibilities, the connections, and also the disconnects.

Two renegade contract killers on the loose. It made as much sense as anything else I had heard so far. It explained some things about Jack and Jill for me, especially the absence of passion or rage in the murders. Why were they killing politicians and celebrities, though? Had they been commissioned to do the job? If so, by whom? To what end? What was their cause?

“Let me ask you a burning question, Jeanne. Something else has been bothering me since we got here.”

"Go ahead, Alex. I want to try and answer a]l your questions.

If I can, that is."

“Why did you bring him here to talk? Why take Andrew Klauk right into your own house?”

“It was a safe place for the meeting,” she said without any hesitation.

She sounded so unbelievably certain when she said it. I felt a chill ease up my spine. Then Jeanne Sterling sighed loudly.

She knew what I was getting at, what I was feeling, as I sat inside her home.

“Alex, he knows where I live. Andrew Klauk could come here if he wanted to. Any of them can.”

I nodded and left it at that. I knew the feeling exactly; I lived with it. It was my single greatest fear as an investigator. My worst nightmare.

They know where we live.

They can come to our houses if they want to... anytime they want to.

Nobody was safe anymore.

There are no rules.

There are “ghosts” and human monsters, and they are very real in our lives. Especially in my life.

There was Jack and Jill.

There was the Sojourner Truth School killer.

AT A LITTLE PAST SEVEN the next morning, I sat across from Adele Finaly and unloaded everything that I possibly could on her. I unloaded -- period. Dr. Adele Finaly has been my analyst for a half-dozen years, and I see her on an irregular basis. As needed. Like right now. She's also a good friend.

I was ranting and raving a little bit. This was the place for it, though. "Maybe I want to leave the force. Maybe I don't want to be part of any more vile homicide investigations. Maybe I want to get out of Washington, or at least out of Southeast. Or maybe I want to trot down and see Kate McTiernan in West Virginia.

Take a sabbatical at just about the worst possible time for one."

“Do you really want to do any of those things?” Adele asked when I had finished, or at least had quieted down for a moment.

“Or are you just venting?”

“I don't know, Adele. Probably venting. There's also a woman I met whom i could become interested in. She's married,” I said and smiled. “I'd never do anything with a married woman, so she's perfectly safe for me. She couldn't be safer. I think I'm regressing.”

"You want an opinion on that, Alex? Well, I can't give you one.

You certainly have a lot on your plate, though."

"I'm right smack in the middle of a very bad homicide investigation.

Two of them, actually. I just came off another particularly disturbing one. I think I can sort that part out for myself.

But, you know, it's funny. I suspect that I still want to please my mother and father, and it can't be done. i can't get over the feeling of abandonment. Can't intellectualize it. Sometimes I feel that both my parents died of a kind of terminal sadness, and that my brothers and I were part of their sorrow. I'm afraid that I have it, too. I think that my mother and father were probably as smart as I am, and that they must have suffered because of it." My mother and father had died in North Carolina, at a very young age. My father had killed himself with liquor, and I hadn't really gotten over it. My mom died of lung cancer the year before my father.

Nana Mama had taken me in when I was nine years old.

“You think sadness can be in the genes, Alex? I don't know what to think about that myself. Did you see that New Yorker piece on twins by any chance? There's some evidence for the genes theory. Scary note for our profession.”

“Detective work?” I asked her.

Adele didn't comment on my little joke.

“Sorry,” I said. “Sorry, sorry.”

“You don't have to be sorry. You know how happy it makes me when you get any of your anger out.”

She laughed. We both did. I like talking to her because our sessions can bounce around like that, laughter to tears, serious to absurd, truth to lies, just about anything and everything that's bothering me. Adele Finaly is three years younger than I am, but she's wise beyond her years, and maybe my years as well. Seeing her for a skull session works even better than playing the blues on my front porch.

I talked some more, let my tongue wag, let my mind run free, and it felt pretty good. It's a wonderful thing to have somebody in your life whom you can say absolutely anything to. Not to have that is almost unthinkable to me.