Jack & Jill

“If you’re thinking about editing it down, tell me
right now”
    I felt a chill after hearing the rhyme, even though the viewing room was warm. No one had left yet. The CNN people were talking among themselves, discussing the film, as if the rest of us weren’t even there. The talk-show host was looking pensive and troubled. Maybe he understood where mass communications was heading, and realized it couldn’t be stopped.
    “We’re live in
eight minutes,”
a producer announced to his crew. “We need this room, people. We’re going to make dupes for all of you.”
    “Souvenirs,” someone in the crowd quipped. “I saw Jack and Jill on CNN.”
    “They’re not serial killers,” I said in a soft mumble, more for myself than anyone else. I wanted to
hear
what the thought, the hunch, sounded like out loud.
    I was in the minority, but my belief was strong.
They’re not pattern killers, not in the ordinary scene.
They were extremely organized and careful, though. They were clever or personable enough to get close to a couple of famous people. They had a hang-up with kinky sex, or maybe they just wanted us to think so. They had some kind of overarching cause.
    I could still hear their words, their eerie voices on the tape:
“On a grave and somber mission.”
    Maybe this wasn’t a game to them.
It was a war.

CHAPTER
24

    IT WAS the worst of times; it was the worst of times. On Wednesday morning, just two days after Shanelle Green’s murder, a second murdered child was found in Garfield Park, not far from the Sojourner Truth School. This time the victim was a seven-year-old boy. The crime was similar. The child’s face had been crushed, possibly with a metal club or pipe.
    I could walk from my house on Fifth Street to the horrifying murder scene.
I did just that, but I dragged my feet. It was the fourth of December and children were already thinking of Christmas. This shouldn’t have been happening. Not ever, but especially not then.
    I felt bad for another reason, besides the murder of another innocent child.
Unless someone was copycatting the first murder, and that seemed highly unlikely to me, the killer couldn’t have been Emmanuel Perez, couldn’t have been Chop-It-Off-Chucky.
Sampson and I had made a mistake. We had run down the wrong child molester. We were partly responsible for his death.
    The wind swirled and howled across the small park as I entered across from the bodega. It was a miserable morning, terribly cold and darkly overcast. Two ambulances and a half-dozen police cruisers were parked on the grounds inside the rim of the park. There were at least a hundred people from the neighborhood at the crime scene. It was eerie, ghastly, completely unreal. Police and ambulance sirens screamed in the background, a terrifying dirge for the dead. I shivered miserably, and it wasn’t only from the cold.
    The horrifying crime scene reminded me of a bad time a few years back when we had found a little boy’s body the day before Christmas. The image was everlasting in my mind. The, boy’s name was Michael Goldberg, but everybody had called him Shrimpie. He was only nine years old. The murderer’s name was Gary Soneji, and he had escaped from prison after I caught him. He had escaped, and he had disappeared off the face of the earth. I’d come to think of Soneji as my Dr. Mori-arty, evil incarnate, if there was such a thing, and I had begun to believe that there was.
    I couldn’t help thinking and wondering about Soneji. Gary Soneji had a perfect reason to commit murders near my home. He had vowed to pay me back for his time spent in prison:
every day, every hour, every minute.
Payback time, Dr. Cross.
    As I ducked under the crisscrossing yellow crime-scene tapes, a woman in a white rain poncho yelled out to me, “You’re supposed to be a policeman, right? So why the hell won’t you do something! Do
something
about this maniac killing our children! Oh yeah, and have a happy, goddamn holiday!”
    What could I possibly say to the angry woman? That real police work wasn’t like
N.Y.P.D. Blue
on television? We had no leads on the two child killings so far. We had no Chop-It-Off-Chucky to blame anymore. There was no getting around a simple fact: Sampson and I had made a mistake. A bad hombre was dead, but probably for the wrong reason.
    The news coverage continued to be very limited, but I recognized a few reporters at the tragic scene: Inez Gomez from
El Diario
and Fern Galperin from CNN. They