Patterson, James - Alex Cross 3 - Jack and Jill

I don't know how long I stayed there in the darkness with my thoughts. Maybe ten minutes, maybe it was much more than that. The house was quiet in a familiar, almost comfortable way, but I couldn't be soothed that night.

I listened to sounds that I had been hearing for years. I remembered being a small boy there, growing up with Nana, wondering what I would become someday Now I knew the answer to that question. I was a multiple-homicide expert who got to work the biggest, nastiest cases. I was the dragonslayer.

I finally climbed the rest of the stairs and stopped in at Damon and Jannie's room. The two of them were fast asleep in the bedroom they share in our small house.

I love the way Damon andJannie sleep, the trusting, innocent ways of my young son and daughter. I can watch them for long stretches, even on a howling-bad night like this one. I can't count how many times have peeked in and just stood in the doorway.

They keep me going, keep me from flying apart some nights.

They'd gone to sleep wearing funky, heart-shaped sunglasses like the ones the kids wear in the singing group called Innocence.

It was cute as hell. Precious, too. I sat on the edge of Jannie's bed.

I quietly took off my boots and carefully lay them on the floor without making any noise.

Then I stretched myself out across the bottom of both their beds. I listened to my bones crack. I wanted to be near my kids, to be with them, for all of us to be safe. It didn't seem too much to ask out of life, too much reward for the day I had just lived through.

I gently kissed the rubber-soled slipper-sock of Jannie's pajamas.

I lay my hand very lightly against Damon's cool bare leg.

I finally closed my eyes, and I tried to push the rushing scenes of murder and chaos out of my mind. I couldn't do it. The monsters were everywhere that night. They truly were all around me.

There are so goddamn many of them. Wave upon wave, it seems, Young and old, and everything in between. Where are these monsters coming from in America? What has created them?

Lying there alongside my two children, I finally was able to sleep somehow. For a few hours, was able to forget the most horrifying thing of all, the reason for my extreme sorrow and upset.

I had heard the news before I left the Johnson house. President Thomas Byrnes had died early that morning.

I WAS HOLDING and gently petting Rosie the cat. I had the kitchen door open and peered outside, squinted at Sampson.

He stood in a freezing-cold rain. He looked like a big, dark boulder in the teeming rainstorm, or maybe it was hail that he was weathering so stoically

“The nightmare continues,” he said to me. A simple declarative sentence. Devastating.

“Year, doesn't it, though? But maybe I don't care about it anymore.”

“Uh-huh. And maybe this is the year the Bullets win the NBA championship, the Orioles win the World Series, and the raggedyass Redskins go to the Super Bowl. You just never know.”

A day had passed since the long night at the Johnson house, since the even longer morning in New York City. Not nearly enough time for any kind of healing, or even proper grieving.

President Edward Mahoney had been sworn in the day before.

It was necessary according to law, but it almost seemed indecent to me.

I had on dungarees and a white T-shirt. Bare feet on a cold linoleum floor. Steaming coffee mug in hand. I was convalescing nicely. I hadn't washed off my whiskers, as Jannie calls the act of shaving. I was almost feeling human again.

I hadn't asked Sampson in yet, either.

“Morning, Sugar,” Sampson persisted. Then he rolled back his upper lip and showed off some teeth. His smile was brutally joyful. I finally had to smile back at my friend and nemesis.

It was a little past nine o'clock and I had just gotten up. This was late for me. It was shameful behavior by Nana's standards. I was still sleep-deprived, trauma-shocked, in danger of losing the rest of my mind, throwing up, something shitty and unexpected.

But I was also much better. I looked good; I looked fine.

“Aren't you even going to say good morning?” Sampson asked, pretending to be hurt.

“Morning, John. I don't even want to know about it,” I said to him. “Whatever it is that brings you here this cold and bleak morning.”

“First intelligent thing I've heard out of your mouth in years,” Sampson said, “but I'm afraid I don't believe it. You want to know everything. You need to know everything, Alex. That's why you read four newspapers every damn morning.”

“I don't want to know, either,” Nana contributed from behind me in the kitchen. She had been up for hours, of course. “I don't need to know. Shoo, fly Go fry some ice. Take a long walk off a short dock, Johnnyboy”

“We got time for breakfast?” I finally asked him.

“Not really,” he said, careful to keep his smile turned on, “but let's eat, anyway Who could resist?”

“He invited you, not me,” Nana warned from over by her hot stove.

She Was kidding Sampson. She loves him as if he were her own son, as if he were my physically bigger brother. She made the two of us scrambled eggs, homemade sausage, home fries, toast. She knows how to cook and could easily feed the entire Washington Redskins team at training camp. That would be no problem for Nana.

Sampson waited until we had finished eating before he got back into it, whatever it was, whatever had happened now. His dark little secret. It may seem odd--but when your life is filled with homicides and other tragedies, you have to learn to take time for yourself. The homicides will still be there. The homicides are always there.

“Your Mister Grayer called me a little while ago,” Sampson said as he poured his third cup of coffee. “He said to let you have a couple days off, that they could handle this. Them, like the great old horror flick that used to scare the hell out of us.”

“That, what you just said, makes me suspicious and fearful right away. Handle what?” I asked.

I was finishing the last of half a loaf of cinnamon toast made from thick homemade bread. It was, honestly, quite seriously, a taste of heaven. Nana claims that she's been there, stolen several recipes. I tend to believe her. I've seen and tasted the proof of her tale.

Sampson glanced at his wristwatch, an ancient Bulova given to him by his father when he was fourteen.

“They're looking over Jill's office in the White House right about now. Then they're going to her apartment on Twenty-fourth Street. You want to go? As my guest? Got you a guest pass, just in case.”

Of course I wanted to be there. I had to go. I needed to know everything about Jill, just as Sampson had said I did.

“You are the devil,” Nana hissed at Sampson.

“Thank you, Nana.” He beamed bright eyes and a thousand and one teeth. “High praise, indeed.”

WE DROVE to Sara Rosen's apartment in Sampson's slippery-quick black Nissan. Nana's hot breakfast had brought me back to the real world at least. I was feeling partially revived. Physically, if not emotionally.

I was already highly intrigued about visiting Jill's home. I wanted to see her office at the White House, too, but figured that could wait a day or two. But her house. That was irresistible for the detective, and for the psychologist.

Sara Rosen lived in a ten-story building on Twenty-fourth and K. The building had an officious front-desk “captain” who studied our police IDs and then reluctantly let us proceed. The lobby was cheery otherwise. Carpeted, lots of large potted plants.

Not the kind of building where anyone would expect to find an assassin.

But Jill had lived right here, hadn't she?

Actually, the apartment fit the profile we had of Sara Rosen.