Jack & Jill

funny. I suspect that I still want to please my mother and father, and it
can’t
be done. I can’t get over the feeling of abandonment. Can’t intellectualize it. Sometimes I feel that both my parents died of a kind of terminal sadness, and that my brothers and I were part of their sorrow. I’m afraid that I have it, too. I think that my mother and father were probably as smart as I am, and that they must have suffered because of it.” My mother and father had died in North Carolina, at a very young age. My father had killed himself with liquor, and I hadn’t really gotten over it. My mom died of lung cancer the year before my father. Nana Mama had taken me in when I was nine years old.
    “You think sadness can be in the genes, Alex? I don’t know what to think about that myself. Did you see that
New Yorker
piece on twins by any chance? There’s some evidence for the genes theory. Scary note for our profession.”
    “Detective work?” I asked her.
    Adele didn’t comment on my little joke.
    “Sorry,” I said. “Sorry, sorry.”
    “You don’t have to be sorry. You know how happy it makes me when you get any of your anger out.”
    She laughed. We both did. I like talking to her because our sessions can bounce around like that, laughter to tears, serious to absurd, truth to lies, just about anything and everything that’s bothering me. Adele Finaly is three years younger than I am, but she’s wise beyond her years, and maybe my years as well. Seeing her for a skull session works even better than playing the blues on my front porch.
    I talked some more, let my tongue wag, let my mind run free, and it felt pretty good. It’s a wonderful thing to have somebody in your life whom you can say absolutely anything to. Not to have that is almost unthinkable to me.
    “Here’s a connection I’ve made recently,” I told Adele. “Maria is murdered. I grieve and grieve, but I never come close to getting over the loss. Just like I’ve never gotten past the loss of my mother and father.”
    Adele nods. “It’s incredibly hard to find a soul mate.” She knows. She’s never been able to find one herself, which is sad.
    “And it’s hard to lose one—a soul mate. So, of course, now I’m petrified about losing anyone else whom I care deeply for. I shy away from relationships—
because they might end in loss.
I don’t leave my job with the police—
because that would be a kind of loss, too.”
    “But you’re thinking about these things a lot now.”
    “All the time, Adele. Something’s going to happen.”
    “Something has. We’ve run way over our time,” Adele finally said.
    “Good,” I said and laughed again. Some people turn on Comedy Central for a good laugh. I go to my shrink.
    “Lots
of hostility. How nice for you. I don’t think you’re regressing, Alex. I think you’re doing beautifully.”
    “God, I love talking to you,” I told her. “Let’s do this in a month or so, when I’m really screwed up again.”
    “I can’t wait,” Adele said and rubbed her small, thin hands together greedily. “In the meantime, as Bart Simpson has said many times, ‘Don’t have a cow, man.’”

CHAPTER
51

    DETECTIVE JOHN SAMPSON couldn’t remember working so many brutal, absolutely shitty days in a row. He couldn’t remember it ever being so godawful, goddamn bad. He had an overload of really bad homicides
and
he had the Sojourner Truth School killer case, which didn’t seem to be going anywhere.
    On the morning after the Kennedy Center killing, Sampson worked the upscale side of Garfield Park, the “west bank.” He was keeping his eyes out for Alex’s
homeless suspect,
who’d been spotted the afternoon of Shanelle Green’s murder, though not since, so even that lead was growing cold. Alex had a simple formula for thinking about complex cases like this one. First, you had to answer the question that everybody had:
What kind of person would do something like this? What kind of nutcase?
    He had decided to visit the Theodore Roosevelt School on his street canvass. The exclusive military academy useds Garfield Park for its athletics and some paramilitary maneuvers. There was a slim possibility that a sharp-eyed cadet had seen something.
    A white-haired homeless motherfucker,
Sampson thought as he climbed the military school’s front graystone steps.
A sloppy and disorganized thrill killer who left fingerprints and other clues at both crime scenes, and still nobody could nail his candyass