Jack & Jill

recognized the boy from the photos at her office. Jeanne Sterling had a boy and a little girl. Just like me. She brought her casework home, just like me. Scary.
    Andrew Klauk was a whale of a man who looked as if he could move very well, anyway. A whale who dreamed of dancing. He was probably about forty-five years old. He was calm and extremely self-assured. Piercing brown eyes that grabbed and wouldn’t let go. Penetrated deeply. He wore a shapeless gray suit with an open-neck white shirt that was wrinkled and dingy. Brown Italian leather shoes.
Another kind of killer, but a killer all the same,
I was thinking.
    Jeanne Sterling had raised a very provocative question for me on our drive: What was the difference between the serial killers I had pursued in the past and the contract killers used by the CIA and Army? Did I think one of these sanctioned killers could actually
be Jack
of Jack and Jill?
    She did. She was certain that it was a possibility that needed to be checked out, and not just by her own people.
    I studied Klauk as the two of us talked in a casual, sometimes even lighthearted, manner. It wasn’t the first time I’d conversed like that with a man who murdered for a living, with a mass murderer, so to speak. This killer, however, was allowed to go home nights to his family in Falls Church, and lead what he described as a “normal, rather guilt-free life.”
    As Andrew Klauk told me at one point: “I’ve never committed a crime in my life, Dr. Cross. Never got a speeding ticket.” Then he laughed—a bit inappropriately, I thought. He laughed a little too hard.
    “What’s so funny?” I asked him. “Did I miss something?”
    “You’re what, two hundred pounds, six foot four? That about right?”
    “Pretty close,” I told him. “Six three. A little under two hundred. But who’s counting?”
    “Obviously, I am, Detective. I’m grossly overweight and look out of shape, but I could take you out right here on the patio,” he informed me. It was a disturbing observation on his part, provocatively stated.
    Whether or not he could do it, he needed to tell me. That was the way his mind worked. Good to know. He’d succeeded in shaking me up a little just the same, in making me extra cautious.
    “You might be surprised,” I said to him, “but I’m not sure if I get the point you’re trying to make.”
    He laughed again, a tiny, unpleasant nose snort Scary guy to drink lemonade with. “That’s the point. I could and I
would,
if it was asked of me by our country. That’s what you don’t get about the Agency, and especially about men and women in my position,” he said.
    “Help me to get it,” I said. “I don’t mean you should try to kill me here in the Sterlings’ backyard, but keep talking.”
    His tight smile turned to a wide-open grin. “Not try. Trust me on that one.”
    He was a truly scary man. He reminded me a little of a psychopathic killer named Gary Soneji. I had talked to Soneji just like this. Neither of them had much affect in their faces. Just this cold fixed glare that wouldn’t go away. Then sudden bursts of laughter. My skin was crawling. I wanted to get up from the table and leave.
    Klauk stared at me for a long moment before he went on. I could hear Jeanne Sterling’s kids inside the house. The refrigerator door opening and closing. Ice tinkling against glass. Birds whooping and twittering in background trees. It was a strange, strange scene. Indescribably eerie for me.
    “There is one basic proposition in covert action. In subversion, sabotage, being better at it than the other guy.
We can do anything we want.”
Klauk said it very, very slowly, word by word.
    “And we often do. You’re a psychologist and a homicide detective, right? What’s your objective take on this? What are you hearing from me?”
    “No rules,” I said to him. “That’s what you’re telling me. You live, you work, in a closed world that virtually isn’t governed. You could say that your world is completely antisocial.”
    He snorted a laugh again. I was a decent student, I guess. “Not a fucking one of them. Once we’re commissioned for a job—
there are no rules.
Not a one. Think about it.”
    I definitely would think about it. I started right then and there. I considered the idea of Klauk trying to kill me—if our country asked him to.
No rules. A world peopled by ghosts.
And even scarier was that I could sense he believed every word he’d said.
    After I finished with