Patterson, James - Alex Cross 3 - Jack and Jill

He looked for Cross's little boy, searched the school yard with his eyes. Found him, too. No sweat. Tall for his age. Beautiful, right? Kute as hell. Damon was his name-o, name-o.

The school principal was still out in the playground -- staring up the street at him, bad-eyeing him. Mrs. Johnson was her name-o.

Well, she was a dead woman now. She was already ancient history. Just like old Sojourner Truth -- the former slave former abolitionist. They all are the killer thought as he finally moved on. He had better things to do than loitering, wasting his precious time. He was a big star now. He was important. He was somebody Happy, happy. Joy, joy.

“You believe that,” he said to nobody in particular, just the generic voices crackling inside his head, “then you must be crazier than I am. I aren't happy There aren't no joy”

As he turned the corner, he saw a police car coming up the street toward the school. It was time to get the hell out of there, but he would be back.

THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON I gathered up my files and all my notes on Jack and Jill. I headed to Langley, Virginia, again.

No music in the car that morning. Just the steady whhrrr of my tires on the roadway Jeanne Sterling had asked to see what I had come up with so far. She'd called halfa dozen times. She promised to reciprocate this time. You show me yours, I'll show you mine.

Okay? Why not? It made a lot of sense.

An Agency assistant sporting a military-style crew cut, a woman in her twenties, escorted me into a conference room on the seventh floor. The room was filled with bright light and was a far cry from my cube in the White House basement. I felt like a mouse out of its hole. Speaking of the White House, I hadn't heard from the Secret Service about any plan to investigate possible enemies of the President in high places. I would stir that pot again when I got back to D.C.

“On a clear day you used to be able to see the Washington Monument,” Jeanne Sterling said as she came striding in behind me. "Not anymore. The air quality in Fairfax County is abysmal.

What's your reaction to the files on our killer elite, so far? Shock?

Surprise? Boredom? What do you think, Alex?"

I was starting to get used to Jeanne's rapid-fire style of speaking.

I could definitely see her as a law school professor. “My first reaction is that we need weeks to analyze the possibility that one of these people might be a psychotic killer. Or that one of them might be Jack,” I told her.

“I agree with you on that,” she nodded. “But just suppose we had to compress our search into about twenty-four fun-filled hours, which is about what we have to work with. Now then, are there any prime suspects in your mind? You have something, Alex. What is it?”

I held up three fingers. I had three somethings so far.

She smiled broadly Both of us did. You had to learn to laugh at the madness or it could bring you so far down, you'd never make it back up again.

“Okay All right. That's what I like to hear. Let me guess,” she said, and went ahead. “Jeffrey Daly, Howard Kamens, Kevin Hawkins.”

“Well, that's interesting,” I said. “That might tell us something at least. Maybe we better start with the one name that's on both of our shortlists. Tell me about Kevin Hawkins.”

JEANNE STERLING spent about twenty minutes briefing me on Kevin Hawkins. “You'll be gratified to hear that we have Hawkins under surveillance already,” she said as we rode a swift, smooth elevator down to the basement garage, where our cars were parked.

“See, you don't need my help, after all,” I said. I was buoyed by the prospect of any kind of progress on the case. I was actually feeling positive for the first time in several days.

“Oh, but we do, Alex. We haven't brought him in for an interview, because we don't have anything concrete on him. Just nasty, nasty suspicions. That and a need to catch somebody. Let's not forget about that. Now you're suspicious, too.”

“That's all I have at this point,” I reminded her. “Suspicions.”

“Sometimes that's enough, and you know it. Sometimes it has to be.”

We arrived at the small private garage underneath the CIA complex at Langley. The space was filled mostly with family vehicles like Taurus station wagons, but there were a few high-testosterone sports cars as well. Mustangs, Bimmers, Vipers.

The cars matched up fairly well with the personnel I had seen upstairs.

“i guess we should take both our cars,”Jeanne suggested, and it made sense to me. "I'll drive back here when we're through.

You can go on into D.C. Hawkins is staying with his sister in Silver Spring. He's at the house now. It's about half an hour on the beltway, if that."

“You're going to take him in now?” I asked her. It sounded like it to me.

“I think we should, don't you? Just to have a little chat, you know.”

I went to my car. She walked to her station wagon. “This man we're going to see, he's a professional killer,” I called to her across the garage floor.

She called back, her voice echoing against concrete and steel.

“From what I gather, he's one of our very best. Isn't that a fun thought?”

“Does he have an alibi for any of the Jack and Jill murder dates?”

“Not that we know of. We'll have to ask him more about it -- in detail.”

We got into our respective cars and started up the engines.

I was beginning to notice that the CIA inspector general wasn't a bureaucrat; she certainly wasn't afraid to get her hands dirT Mine, either. We were going to meet another “ghost.”

Was he Jack? Could it be that easy? Stranger things had happened.

It took the full thirty minutes to get over to Hawkins's sister's house in Silver Spring, Maryland. The houses there were somewhat overpriced, but it was still considered a middle-class area.

Not my middle class. Somebody else's.

Jeanne pulled her Volvo wagon up alongside a black Lincoln parked three-quarters of a block from the sister's house. She powered down the passenger-side window and talked to two agents inside the parked car. One of her surveillance teams, I guessed.

Either that or she was asking directions to the assassin's hideout, which struck me as humorous. One of the few laughs I'd had recently.

Suddenly, I saw a man come out of the sister's Cape Cod-style house.

I recognized Kevin Hawkins from his file pictures. No doubt about it.

He threw a quick glance down the street, and he must have seen us. He started to run. Then he hopped on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle parked in the driveway.

I shouted, “Jeanne,” out my open window and gunned my engine at the same time.

I began to chase... Jack?

THE FIRST THING Kevin Hawkins did on the motorcycle was to cut sharply sideways over the sliver of frost-covered lawn separating two split-level ranch houses. He raced past a few more houses, one of them with an aboveground pool covered by a baby-blue tarp for the winter.

I aimed my old Porsche along the same inland route that Hawkins was taking. Fortunately, the past few days had been cold, and the ground was mostly solid. I wondered if anybody from the houses had spotted the motorcycle and car crazily zigzagging through their backyards.

The motorcycle took a sharp right onto the development road past the last row of houses. I followed close behind. My car Was bouncing high. Then it scraped bottom loudly against the high curb. It thudded hard onto the road pavement, and my head struck the rooftop.

As we approached an intersecting street, the Volvo station wagon and the Lincoln joined the race. A few neighborhood kids who were playing flag football in spite of the miserable weather stopped to gawk wide-eyed at the real-life police chase roaring up the suburban street.