His first totally outrageous idea had been to make it look as if Sumner Moore, the perfect cadet, were the child killer. He’d logged into the Moores’ Prodigy account and led the cops right to their house. What a great frigging prank that had been—the best Then he’d decided to get rid of Sumner. That was the second outrageous idea. He’d enjoyed killing Sumner Moore even more than the little kids.
He wanted to teach Cross a lesson now, too. Cross obviously didn’t think the so-called Sojourner Truth School killer was worth much of his precious time. Danny Boudreaux was no Gary Soneji in the eyes of Alex Cross. He was no Jack and Jill. He was Nobody, right?
Well, we’ll see about that, Dr. Cross. We’ll just see how I stack up against Jack and Jill and the others. Watch Ms one real closely, Doctor Hotshit De-fective. You just might learn something.
In the next hour or so, a lot of people would learn not to underestimate Danny Boudreaux, not to snub him ever again.
Danny Boudreaux crossed Fifth Street careful to keep his body in tree shadows. He walked right into the well-kept yard that bordered the Cross house.
He was thirteen, but small for his age. He was five three and only a hundred and ten pounds. He didn’t look like much. The other cadets called him Mister Softee because he would melt into tears whenever they teased him, which was just about all the time. For Danny Boudreaux hell week had lasted the whole school year. No, it had lasted for his entire life so far. Christ, he had enjoyed killing Sumner Moore! It was like killing his whole goddamn school!
He smeared gray eye shadow over his face, his neck, and his hands as he waited across from the Cross house. He had on dark jeans and a black shirt, and also a dark camo face mask made by Treebark. He had to fit in with the African-American neighborhood, right? Well, no one had paid much attention to him on Sixth Street, or even walking along E Street on his way to Fifth.
Danny Boudreaux touched the butt of the Smith & Wesson semiautomatic in the deep pocket of his poncho. The gun held a dozen shots. He was loaded for bear. The safety was off. He started crying again. Hot tears were streaming down his face. He wiped them away with his sleeve. No more Mr. Softee.
He did perfect murders.
CHAPTER
84
NOTHING IN HEAVEN or on earth could save Alex Cross’s cute little family now. They were next in line to die. It was the move he had to make. The right move at the right time. Hey, hey, what do you say?
Danny Boudreaux inched his way up the back-porch steps of the house. He didn’t make a freaking sound.
He could be a damn good cadet when he needed to be. A fine young soldier. He was on maneuvers tonight, that’s all it was. He was on a nocturnal mission.
Search and destroy.
He didn’t hear any noises coming from inside the house. No late-night TV sounds. No Letterman, Leno, and Beavis and Butt-head, NordicTrack commercials. No piano playing, either. That probably meant Cross was sleeping now, too. So be it. The sleep of the dead, right?
He touched the doorknob and immediately wanted to pull his fingers away. The metal felt like dry ice against his skin. He held on, though. He turned the knob slowly, slowly. Then he pulled it toward him.
The goddamn door was locked! For some crazy reason he’d imagined it wouldn’t be. He could still get in the house through this door, but he might make some noise.
That wouldn’t do.
That wasn’t perfect.
He decided to go around front and check the situation there.
He knew there was a sun porch. A piano on the porch. Cross played the blues out there—but the blues were only just beginning for the good doctor. After tonight, the rest of his life would be nothing but the blues.
Still no sound came from inside the house. He knew Cross hadn’t moved his family out of harm’s way. That showed more disrespect on his part. Cross wasn’t afraid of him. Well, he ought to be afraid. Dammit, Cross ought to be scared shitless of him!
Danny Boudreaux reached out to try the door to the sun porch. The young killer broke out in a sweat. Boudreaux could hardly breathe. He was seeing his worst nightmare, and his nightmares were really bad.
Detective John Sampson was staring right at him! The black giant was there on the porch. Waiting for him. Sitting there, all smug as hell.
He’d been caught! Jesus. They’d set a trap for him. He’d fallen for it like a true chump.
But, hey, wait a damn minute. Waitaminute!
Something was wrong with this picture …or rather something was very right with the picture!
Danny Boudreaux blinked his eyes, then he stared real hard. He concentrated hard. Sampson was sleeping in the big, fluffy armchair next to the piano.
His stockinged feet were propped up on a matching hassock. His holstered gun was on a small side table, maybe twelve inches from his right hand. His holstered gun.
Twelve inches. Hmmm. Just twelve little inches, the killer thought, mulled it over.
Danny Boudreaux held on to the doorknob for dear life. He didn’t move. His chest hurt as if he’d been punched.
What to do? What to do? What in hell to do?… TWELVE MEASLY INCHES…
His mind was going about a million miles a second. There were so many thoughts blasting through his brain that it almost shut down on him.
He wanted to go at Sampson. To rush in and take the big moke out. Then hurry upstairs and do the family. He wanted it so much that the thought burned in him, seared the inside of his brain, fried his thought waves.
He slid in and out of his military mind. The better part of valor and all that shit. Logic conquers all. He knew what he had to do.
Even more slowly than he’d come up the steps, he backed away from the porch door of the Cross house. He couldn’t believe how close he’d come to stumbling right into the huge, menacing detective.
Maybe he could have snuck up on the big moke—blown his brains out. Maybe not, though. The big moke was a really big moke.
No, the Truth School killer wouldn’t take the chance. He had too much fun, too many games, ahead of him to blow it like this.
He was too experienced now. He was getting better and better at this.
He disappeared into the night. He had other choices, other business, he could take care of. Danny Boudreaux was on the loose in D.C., and he loved it. He had a taste for it now. There would be time for Cross and his stupid family later.
He’d already forgotten that just minutes before he had been crying his eyes out. He hadn’t taken his medicine in seven days. The hated, despicable Depakote, his goddamn mood-disorder medicine.
He was wearing his favorite sweatshirt again. Happy, happy. Joy, joy.
CHAPTER
85
I WOKE WITH A START and a trembling shiver. My skin was prickling, my heart racing furiously.
Bad dream? Something unholy, real, or imagined? The room was pitch-black, all the lights out and it took me a second to remember where in the name of God I was.
Then I remembered. I remembered everything. I was part of the team assigned to try and protect the President—except the President had decided to make our job even harder than it had been. The President had decided to travel out of Washington—to show the colors—to demonstrate that he wasn’t afraid of terrorists and crackpots of any kind.
I was in New York City—at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on Park Avenue. Jack and Jill were in New York, too. They were so sure of themselves that they had sent us a calling card.
I groped around for the lamp on the bedside table, then for the damn lamp switch. Finally, I clicked it on. I looked at the night table clock. Two fifty-five.
“That’s just terrific,” I whispered under my breath. “That’s great.”
I thought of calling my kids in Washington. Calling Nana. It wasn’t a real serious idea, but the notion floated across my mind. I thought about Christine Johnson. Calling her at home. Absolutely not! But I did have the thought, and I did like the idea of talking to her on the phone.
I fin
ally pulled on a pair of khakis, stepped into battered Converse sneaks, slipped into an old sweatshirt. I wandered out into the hotel. I needed to be out of my hotel room. I needed to be out of my own skin.
The Waldorf-Astoria was sound asleep. As it should be. Except that very uptight Secret Service agents were posted everywhere, in every hallway where I wandered. The presidential detail was on its night watch. They were mostly athletic-looking men, who reminded me of very fit accountants. Only a couple of women were assigned to the detail in New York.
“You going for a late run through midtown New York, Detective Cross?” one of the Secret Service agents asked as I passed by. It was a woman named Camille Robinson. She was serious and very dedicated, as most of the Secret Service agents seemed to be. They seemed to like President Thomas Byrnes a lot, enough to take a bullet for.
“My mind is up and running, fur sure,” I said and managed a smile. “Probably do a couple of marathons before morning. You okay? Need some coffee or anything?”
Camille shook her head and kept her serious face on. Watchdogs can be female, too. I’d met my share of them. I saluted the diligent agent, then kept on walking.
A few thoughts continued to plague me as I wandered inside the eerily quiet hotel. My mind was running way too hot.
The murder of Charlotte Kinsey was one disturbing puzzle piece. That murder might have been committed by somebody other than Jack and Jill. Could there be a third killer? Why would there be a third killer? How did it fit?
I continued down another long hallway, and down still another track in my mind.
What about larger and more complicated conspiracies? Dallas and JFK? Los Angeles and JFK? Memphis and Dr. King? Where did that insane and depressing line of thinking take me? The list of possible conspirators was impossibly long, and I didn’t have the resources to get at most of the suspects, anyway. The crisis group talked about conspiracies a lot. The Federal Bureau was obsessed with conspiracies. So was the CIA… but a powerful fact remained: thirty years after the Kennedy assassinations, no one was really convinced that either of those murders had been solved.
The more I delved into conspiracy theories, the more I realized that getting to the core was almost impossible. Certainly, no one had yet I’d talked to several people at the Assassination Archives and Research Center in Washington, and they had come to exactly the same conclusion. Or dead end.
I wandered into the hallway on the twenty-first floor, where the President was sleeping. I had a chilling thought that he might be dead in his room; that Jack and Jill had already struck and left a note, another poem for us to discover in the morning.
“Everything okay?” I asked the agents stationed just outside the door of the presidential suite.
They watched me carefully, as if they were asking themselves, Why is he here? “So far,” one of them said stiffly. “No problems here.”
Eventually, I made a full circle back to my room. It was almost four in the morning.
I slipped inside the room. Lay down on the bed. I thought of my conversation with Sampson earlier that night, hearing about the murder of Sumner Moore. Apparently, the Moore boy wasn’t the Truth School killer. I tried not to think about either case anymore.
I finally dozed until six—when the clock radio went off like a fire alarm next to my head.
Rock-and-roll music blared. “K-Rock” in New York. Howard Stern was talking to me. He had worked down in Washington years ago. Howard said, “The prez is in town. Can Jack and Jill be far away?”
Everybody knew about it. The President’s motorcade through Manhattan started at eleven. Stagecoach was ready to roll again.
CHAPTER
86
HISTORY was about to be made in New York City. At the very least, it was white-knuckle time. Definitely that. The game had ceased being a game.
Jack jogged at a strong, steady pace through Central Park. It was a little before six in the morning. He’d been out running since just after five. He had a lot on his mind. D day had finally arrived. New York City was the war zone, and he couldn’t imagine a better one.
He observed the very striking Manhattan skyline from where he was running alongside Fifth Avenue, heading south. Above the tall, uneven line of buildings, the sky was the color of charcoal seen through tissue paper. Huge plumes of smoke billowed up from turn-of-the-century buildings.
It was pretty as hell, actually. Close to glorious. Not the way he usually thought of New York City. It was just a facade, though. Like Jack and Jill, he was thinking.
As he ran alongside a blue city bus charging down Fifth Avenue, he wondered if he might die in the next few hours. He had to be ready for that, to be prepared for anything.
Kamikaze, he thought. The final plan was deadly, and it was as surefire as these things could be. He didn’t believe that the target could possibly survive this attack. No one could. There would be other deaths as well. This was a war, after all, and people died in war.
Jack finally emerged from the park at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-ninth. He continued to run south, picking up his pace.
A few moments later, he entered the formal and attractive lobby of the Peninsula Hotel in the West Fifties. It was ten past six in the morning. The Peninsula was a little more than twenty blocks from Madison Square Garden, where President Byrnes was scheduled to appear at twenty-five past eleven. The New York Times was just being delivered into the hotel lobby. He caught the headline: JACK AND JILL KILLERS FEARED IN NEW YORK AS PRESIDENT VISITS. He was impressed. Even the Times was on top of things.
Then Jack saw Jill. Jill was right on time in the lobby. Always on time. She was at the Peninsula according to plan. Always according to plan.
She had on a silver-and-blue jogging suit, but she didn’t look as if she’d raised a sweat coming up from the Waldorf. He wondered if she had run or walked. Or maybe even caught a Yellow Cab.
He didn’t acknowledge her in any way. He stepped into a waiting elevator and took it to his floor. Sara would take the next elevator.
He let himself into his room and waited for her. A single knock on the door. She was on schedule. Less than sixty seconds behind him.
“I look terrible,” she said. Sara’s first words, it was so typical of her self-effacing tone, her view of herself, her vulnerability. Sara the poor gimp.
“No, you don’t,” he reassured her. “You look beautiful, because you are beautiful.” She didn’t look her best, though. She was showing the terrible strain of these last hours. Her face was a mask of worry and doubt, too much makeup and mascara and bright red lipstick. D day. She’d sprayed her blond hair, and it looked brittle.
“The Waldorf is hopping already,” she reported to him. “They think an assassination attempt definitely will be made today. They’re ready for it, at least they think they are. Five thousand regular New York police, plus the Secret Service, the FBI. They have an army on hand.”
“Let them think they’re ready,” Jack said. “We’ll see soon enough, won’t we? Now come here, you,” he smiled. “You don’t look terrible at all. Never happen. You look ravishing, Sara. May I ravage you?”
“Now?” Sara weakly protested. It was a whisper. So tiny and vulnerable and unsure. But she couldn’t resist his strong, reassuring embrace. She never had been able to, and that was part of the plan as well. Everything had been anticipated, which was why they couldn’t fail.
He slid out of his running shirt, exposing a glistening-wet chest. All the tufts of his hair were damp with sweat. He pressed up against Sara. She arched her body hard against him. Their pulses were racing. Jack and Jill. In New York. So close to the end.
He could feel her heartbeat quickening, like a small hunted animal’s. She couldn’t help it. She was so scared now, legitimately so.
“Please tell me that we’ll see each other again, even if we won’t. Tell me it isn’t over after today, Sam.”
“It won’t be over, Monkey Face. I’m as frightened as you are right now. To feel this way is normal, and
sane. You’re very sane. We both are.”
“In a few hours we’ll be on our way out of New York. All of this Jack and Jill will be behind us,” she whispered. “Oh, I do love you, Sam. I love you so much that it’s scary.”
It was scary. More than Sara could possibly know. More than anybody ought to know, or ever would. History wasn’t for the general public—it never had been.
Slowly and carefully, he slid a Ruger from the rear waistband of his sweatpants. His hands were sweaty. He was holding his breath now. He placed the gun against Sara’s head and fired at a slightly downward angle into her temple. Just one shot.
A professional execution.
Without passion.
Almost without passion.
The Ruger was silenced. The noise in the hotel room was no more than a tiny, insignificant spit. The harsh impact of the 9mm bullet took her out of his arms. He shivered involuntarily as he looked down on the lifeless body on the hotel rug.
“Now it’s over,” he said. “The pain of your life is over, all the bitterness and hurt. I’m sorry, Monkey Face.”
He put the final note in Jill’s right hand. Then he squeezed her fist so that the note crumpled naturally. He held Sara’s hand for the last time.
And Jill came tumbling after. He thought of the words in the children’s rhyme.
But Jack would not fall down.
The day of ultimate madness had begun.
Jack and Jill had finally begun.
Part VI
Nobody Is Safe Anymore—Nobody
CHAPTER
87
THE THICK DOCUMENT in my hands was entitled Visit of the President of the United States. New York City, December 16 and 17. It ran to eighty-nine pages and included virtually every moment from when the President would step off Air Force One at La Guardia until he reboarded at approximately two in the afternoon and traveled back to Washington.
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