Jack & Jill

anonymously. No one could know that he’d been inside the senator’s apartment, or especially,
how it came to happen, and who he was.
If anybody found out, all hell would really break loose—as if it hadn’t started already.
    Everything was unreal, and it promised to get much worse. Jack and Jill had promised it.

One useless, thieving, rich bastard down
So many more to go.

CHAPTER
5

    AT EVERY HUMAN TRAGEDY like this one, there is always someone who points. A man stood outside the crime-scene tape and pointed at the murdered child and also at me. I was remembering Jannie’s prophetic words to me earlier that morning:
It’s something bad, isn’t it, Daddy?
    Yes, it was. The baddest of the bad. The murder scene at the Sojourner Truth School was heartbreaking to me, and, I was sure, to everyone else. The schoolyard was the saddest, most desolate place in the world.
    The chatter of portable radios violated the air and made it hard to breathe. I could still smell the little girl’s blood. It was thick in my nostrils and my throat, but mostly inside my head.
    Shanelle Green’s parents were weeping nearby, but so were other people from the neighborhood, even complete strangers to the little girl. In most cities, in most civilized countries, a child murdered so young would be a catastrophe, but not in Washington, where hundreds of children die violent deaths every single year.
    “I want as large a street canvass as we can manage on this one,” I told Rakeem Powell. “Sampson and I will be part of the canvass ourselves.”
    “I hear you. We’re on it in a
big
way. Sleep is overrated, anyway.”
    “Let’s go, John. We’ve got to move on this now,” I finally said to Sampson.
    He didn’t argue or object. A murder like this is usually solved in the first twenty-four hours, or it isn’t solved. We both knew that.
    From 6:00 A.M. on, Sampson and I canvassed the neighborhood with the other detectives and patrolmen that cold, miserable morning. We had to do it our way, house by house, street by street, mostly on foot. We needed to be involved in this case, to do something, to solve the heinous murder quickly.
    About ten in the morning, we heard about another shocking homicide in Washington. Senator Daniel Fitzpatrick had been murdered the night before. It had been a real bad night, hadn’t it?
    “Not our job,” Sampson said with cold, flat eyes. “Not our problem. Somebody else’s.”
    I didn’t disagree.
    No one Sampson or I spoke to that morning had seen anything out of the ordinary around the Sojourner Truth School. We heard the usual complaints about the drug pushers, the zombielike crackheads, the prossies who work on Eighth Street, the growing number of gangbangers.
    But nothing out of the usual.
    “People loved that little sweetheart Shanelle,” the ageless Hispanic lady who seemed to have run the corner grocery near the school forever told Sampson and me. “She always buy her Gummi Bears. She have such a pretty smile, you know?”
    No, I had never seen Shanelle Green smile, but I found that I could almost picture it. I also had a fixed image of the battered right side of the little girl’s face. I carried it around like a bizarre wallet photo inside my head.
    Uncle Jimmie Kee, a successful and influential Korean American who owned several neighborhood businesses, was glad to talk with us. Jimmie is a good friend of ours. Occasionally, he comes along with us to a Redskins or Bullets game. He supplied a name that we already had on our shortlist of suspects.
    “What about this bad actor, Chop-It-Off-Chucky?” Uncle Jimmie volunteered as we spoke in the back of Ho-Woo-Jung, his popular restaurant on Eighth Street. I read the sign behind Jimmie: IMMIGRATION IS THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY.
    “Nobody catch that motherfucker yet. He kill other children before. He the worst man in Washington, D.C. Next to the president,” Jimmie said and chuckled wickedly.
    “No bodies, though. No proof of it,” Sampson said to Jimmie. “We don’t even know if there really is a Chucky.”
    That was true enough. For years there had been rumors about a horrifying child molester who worked the Northfield Village neighborhood, but there was nothing concrete. Nothing had ever been proved.
    “Chucky real,” Uncle Jimmie insisted. His dark eyes narrowed to even thinner slits. “Chucky real as the devil. I see Chop-It-Off-Chucky in my dreams sometimes, Alex. So do the children who live around here.”
    “You