Jack & Jill

couldn’t help adding, “Please be careful until this case is over.”
    She stood just inside the heavy wooden door. She looked so wise, and she
was
attractive, in my way of viewing the world. “It’s ‘Christine,’” she said, “and I will be careful. I promise. Thank you for stopping by.”
    Christine!
Jesus! It was the same name I’d made up for her. Probably I’d heard it somewhere before, from Damon or Nana, but it seemed so strange. Kind of magical, actually. Would have made James Redfield happy as hell.
    I went home that evening thinking about the two child murders, and Jack and Jill, but also about the principal of the Sojourner Truth School. She was wise, funny, and pretty, too. She could take care of herself—even handle a gun.
    Mrs. Johnson.
    Christine.
    Shoop. Shoop. Shoop. Shoop.

CHAPTER
28

    IN THIS DANGEROUS AGE, everybody needs to think,
It won’t happen to me. Not to me. What are the odds of it actually happening tome?
    The motion picture actor Michael Robinson thought it was absurd and more than a little self-absorbed for him to be concerned or afraid of the maniac killers on the loose in Washington. What did the malicious Jack and Jill threats have to do with him, anyway? The answer, it seemed clear to him, was nothing at all.
    Still, he was a trifle skittish and jumpy, so he tried to enjoy the adrenaline rush, to go with the nasty flow of the moment, of the times we live in.
    A little before midnight, the Hollywood star finally got up his nerve and called for a date from the VIP escort service. A “snack” before bedtime. He had used the service many times before while visiting D.C. The Discreet, toney, very expensive sex-for-hire service had his requirements down pat M.R. was in its file, compliments of the star’s full-service business agent in Los Angeles.
    After he made the phone call, the forty-nine-year old actor tried to read an expensive adventure-romance script he’d commissioned, but then got up and walked to the window of his penthouse suite at the Willard Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. He knew his fans would find it scandalous that he was paying for a lover, but that was their hang-up, not his.
    The truth was, he found it far less complicated, and far easier on the psyche, to pay a thousand or fifteen hundred than to get involved in wooing, and then painfully separating from, lovers while on the road.
    Actually, he was in a good mood tonight, feeling very level and grounded, he thought as he stared out on the street. He just needed some company, a little TLC, and some uncomplicated sex. All three of his requirements would be met shortly, he hoped.
    In a way, he was still time-warped back in his hometown of Wichita, circa 1963, when he was a high school senior. The fantasies and desires he’d had then were still unresolved and operating full-tilt boogie inside him. There was one difference: he knew what he wanted tonight and he would get it without much trouble, guilt or the gnashing of teeth.
    He glanced around the hotel suite and decided to tidy it up before the escort arrived. The neurotic tidying-up made him smile. How incredibly bourgeois he still was.
You can take the boy out of Kansas,
Michael Robinson thought.
    He heard two quick raps on the door, and the noise caught him by surprise. The service had said the escort would be there within the hour, which usually meant at least that long, sometimes longer.
    “Just a minute,” he called out “Be right there. One minute.”
    Michael Robinson glanced at his watch. The “date” had arrived in about thirty minutes. Well, fine. He was ready for some quick nookie and then a night of blessed sleep. He was having breakfast with the chairman of the Democratic National Committee early the next morning. He’d been asked to do a fund-raiser for the Democrats. The chairman was a star-fucker of another variety. They all were, really. Everybody wanted what he thought he couldn’t have, and everybody couldn’t have Michael Robinson. Well,
almost
everybody.
    He peeked through the hotel-door spyhole. Well, well, well. He definitely liked what he saw in the hallway; even through a fish-eye lens, the escort looked good. He felt a spike of adrenaline kick in. He opened the door and his fifteen-million-dollar-per-picture smile was automatically engaged.
    “Hi, I’m Jasper,” the handsome escort said. “It’s very nice to meet you, sir.”
    Michael Robinson doubted that the escort was “Jasper.” He thought that a name