Jack & Jill

to the wall. Every single clue leads to a dead end.
    Why was that? What were we getting all wrong here? What were they messing up on?
Not just him. Alex and the rest of the posse, too.
    Sampson went looking for the commandant at the school, The Man In Charge. The detective had served four years in the Army, two of them in Vietnam, and the pristine school brought to mind ROTC lieutenants in the war. Most of them had been white. Several had died needlessly, in his opinion— a couple of them, his friends.
    The Theodore Roosevelt School consisted of four extremely well-kept, red-brick buildings with steep, slate-shingle roofs. Two of the roofs had chimneys spouting soft curls of gray smoke. Everything about the place shouted “structure,” “order,” and “dead, white louies” to him.
    Imagine something like Ms school, only in Southeast around the projects,
he thought as he continued his solitary walk around the school. The image made him smile. He could almost see
five hundred or so homies resplendent in their royal blue dress uniforms, their spit-shined boots, their plumed dress hats. Really something to contemplate. Might even do some good.
    “Sir, can I help you?” A scrawny towheaded cadet came up to him as he started down what looked to be an academic hall in one of the buildings.
    “You on guard here?” Sampson asked in a soft drawl that was the last vestige of a mother who’d grown up in Alabama.
    The toy soldier shook his head. “No, sir. But can I help you anyway?”
    “Washington police,” Sampson said. “I need to speak with whoever’s in charge. You arrange that, soldier?”
    “Yes,
sir!”
    The cadet saluted him, of all people, and Sampson had to fight back the day’s first, and maybe only, smile.

CHAPTER
52

    MORE THAN THREE HUNDRED scrubbed and steam-pressed cadets from the middle school and the academy’s high school were crammed into Lee Hall at nine o’clock in the morning. The cadets wore their regular school uniform: loose-fitting gray pants, black shirt and tie, gray waist-jacket.
    From his stiff wooden seat in the school auditorium, the Sojourner Truth School killer saw the towering black man entering Lee Hall. He recognized him instantly. That sucker was Detective John Sampson. He was Alex Cross’s friend and partner.
    This was not a good thing. This was very bad, in fact.
The killer immediately began to panic, to experience the outer edges of fear. He wondered if the Metro police were coming for him right now.
Did they know who he was?
    He wanted to run—but there was no way out of here now. He had to sit this one out, to gut it out.
    The killer’s initial reaction was to feel shame. He thought he was going to be sick. Throw up or something. He wanted to put his head between his legs. He felt like such a chump to get caught like this.
    He was seated about twenty yards from where that stuffed shirt Colonel Wilson and the detective were standing around as if something incredibly fucking important were about to happen. Every passing cadet saluted the adults, like the robotic morons that they were. A buzz of apprehension began to fill the room.
    Was something earth-shattering going to happen?
The thought screaming inside the killer’s head.
Were the police about to arrest him in front of the entire school? Had he been caught?
    How could they have traced anything to him, though?
It didn’t make sense. That thought calmed him somewhat.
    A false calm? A false sense of security?
he wondered and lowered himself slightly in the stiff wooden seat, wishing that somehow he could disappear.
    Then he sat straight up in his seat again.
Oh, shit. Here we go!
He watched closely as the homicide detective slowly walked toward the podium with Colonel Wilson. His heartbeat was like the rhythm section in a White Zombie song.
    The assembly began with the usual, dumb cadet resolutions, “honesty, integrity in thought and deed,” all that crap. Then Colonel Wilson began to talk about the “cowardly murders of two children in Garfield Park.” Wilson went on: “The Metro police are canvassing the park and surrounding environs. Maybe a cadet at Theodore Roosevelt has unwittingly seen something that might help the police with their investigation. Maybe one of you can help the police in some way,”
    So that was why the imposing homicide detective was here. A goddamn fishing expedition. The ongoing frigging investigation of the two murders.
    The killer was still holding his breath, though. His