Jack & Jill

Sugar. You’re always fine, even when you’re not. You’re the dragonslayer, right?” Sampson said and shook his head.
    Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a young woman wearing a black sweatshirt with I’LL ALWAYS LOVE YOU, TYSHEIKA in white letters. Another dead child.
Tysheika.
People in the neighborhood sometimes wore the dark shirts to funerals of murdered kids. My grandmother, Nana Mama, had quite a collection of them.
    Something else caught my eye. A woman standing back from the crowd, under the spectral branches of a withering elm. She didn’t seem to quite fit with the rest of the neighborhood group. She was tall and nice-looking. She wore a belted raincoat over jeans, and flat shoes. Behind her, I could see a blue sedan. A Mercedes.
    She’s the one. That’s her. She’s the one for you.
The crazy thought just came out of nowhere. Filled my head with sudden, inappropriate joy.
    I made a mental note to find out who she was.
    I stopped to talk with a young, intense homicide detective wearing a red Kangol hat with a brown sport jacket and brown knitted tie. I was beginning to take control.
    “Bad way to start the day, Alex,” Rakeem Powell said as I came up to him. “Or to end one, in my case.”
    I nodded at Rakeem. “Can’t imagine a worse way.” I felt sick in the well of my stomach. “What do you know about this so far, Rakeem? Anything juicy for us to go on? I need to hear it all.”
    The detective glanced at his small black notepad. He flipped a few pages. “Little girl’s name is Shanelle Green. Popular girl. A sweetheart, from what I hear so far. She was in the first grade here at the Truth School. Lives two blocks from school in the Northfield Village projects. Parents both work. They let her walk home by herself. Not too goddamn smart, but what can you do, you know? They came home tonight, Shanelle wasn’t there. They reported her missing around eight. That’s the parents over there.”
    I glanced around. They were just a couple of kids themselves. Looked completely devastated and heartbroken. I knew they would never be the same after this horrifying night. Nobody could be.
    “Either of them suspects?” I had to ask.
    Rakeem shook his head and said, “I don’t think so, Alex. Shanelle was their life.”
    “Please check them, Rakeem. Check both parents. How did she get here in the schoolyard?” I asked him.
    Powell sighed. “That’s the
first
thing we don’t know.
Where
she was killed is the second.
Who
did it is strike three for the Mod Squad.”
    It was obvious from looking at Shanelle that she had been dumped here, probably murdered someplace else. We were right at the beginning of this terrible case. Lots of work to do. My case now.
    “You know how she was killed?” I asked Rakeem.
    The homicide detective frowned. “Take a look for yourself. Tell me what you think.”
    I didn’t want to look, but I had to. I bent down close to Shanelle. I could smell the little girl’s blood:
copper, like a lot of pennies had been thrown on the ground.
I couldn’t help thinking of Damon and Jannie, my own kids. I couldn’t stop the overwhelming sadness I felt. It ate at me, like acid splashed all over my body.
    I knelt on the cracked and broken concrete to examine the body of the six-year-old girl. Shanelle lay in a fetal position. All she had on was a pair of flowered pink-and-blue underpants. A red bow was impossibly tangled up in her braids, and she had tiny gold earrings in her ears.
    The rest of her clothes were missing. The killer had apparently taken the little girl’s school clothes with him.
    She was such a little beauty, such a sweetheart, I could see. Even after what someone had done to her. I was looking at the
how;
the manner in which the six-year-old girl had been brutally murdered sometime earlier that night, her whole life silenced in an instant of madness and horror.
    I gently turned the girl’s body a few inches. Her head lolled to one side, the neck probably broken. She weighed next to nothing. Just a baby. The right side of her little face was partly gone.
Obliterated
was a better description. The murderer had struck Shanelle so many times, and so violently, that little on the right side of the face was recognizable.
    “How could he do this to such a beautiful little girl?” I muttered under my breath. “Poor Shanelle. Poor baby,” I whispered to no one but myself. A tear formed in my eye. I blinked it away. There was no place for that here.
    One of