Patterson, James - Alex Cross 3 - Jack and Jill

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 Washington 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.