Jack & Jill

Shanelle’s eyes was missing.
Her face is like a two-sided, two-faced mast
Two sides to a child? Two faces? What did that mean?
    There was another fiend on the loose in Washington.
    A child killer this time.

CHAPTER
4

    A TALL, THIN MAN in a black raincoat and black floppy rain hat slowly, cautiously approached the door of Senator Daniel Fitzpatrick’s apartment a little before six o’clock Tuesday morning. He examined the outer hallway for signs of a break-in, a struggle of some sort, but didn’t find any.
    He was thinking that he didn’t want to be outside this apartment or anywhere near it. He wasn’t sure what he expected to find inside, but he had the feeling it would be bad. Powerfully, overwhelmingly bad.
This was so unreal.
    It was so odd for him to be here, a mystery inside a mystery. But here he was.
    The man noticed everything about the hallway. Sprinkles of fallen plaster on the rug. Eight other doorways in sight. He had once been reasonably good at this routine. Being an investigator was like riding a bicycle, right? Sure it was.
    He jimmied open the door to 4J with a square of plastic very much like a credit card, only thinner, slicker to the touch. He guessed that breaking and entering was like riding a bike, too. You never forgot how.
    “I’m inside 4J,” he spoke softly into a compact hand radio.
    Sweat had begun to form all over his body. His legs quivered slightly. He was disgusted and he was afraid and he was definitely someplace that he shouldn’t be.
Unrealville,
he called it in his mind.
    He quickly walked through the foyer and into the small living room with photos of Senator Fitzpatrick on every wall. Still no sign of a break-in or any trouble.
    “This could be a very nasty hoax,” he reported into the radio. “I hope that’s what it is.” He paused. “Uh-oh. We have a problem.”
    Everything
had happened in the bedroom, and whoever had done
everything
had left a terrible mess. It was worse than anything he could have imagined it might be.
    “This is real bad. Senator Fitzpatrick is dead. Daniel Fitzpatrick
has been
murdered. This is not a hoax. The body appears to be fully rigorous. Flesh has a waxy tone. There’s a lot of blood. Jesus, there’s a lot of blood.”
    He bent over the senator’s corpse. He could smell cordite, almost taste it on his tongue. Most likely from the gun that killed Fitzpatrick. Unfortunately, there was much more to the brutal murder scene. Too much for him to handle. He fought to keep his cool.
Riding a bike, right?
    “Two shots to the head. Close-in. Execution-style,” he said into the handset. “Entry wounds about an inch apart.”
    He sighed heavily. Waited a moment, then began again. They didn’t need to know everything he was seeing and feeling right now.
    “The senator is handcuffed to his bedposts. Look like police cuffs to me. His body is nude and not a pretty sight Penis and scrotum appear to have been gouged out of the body. There’s
a lot
of blood all over the bed, a humongous stain. Big stain on the rug, too, where it soaked through.”
    He forced his face even closer to the senator’s silver-haired chest. He didn’t like it, being this close to a dead man—or any man, for that matter. Fitzpatrick was wearing some kind of religious medal. Probably real silver. He smelled of a woman’s perfume. The tall man,
the investigator,
was almost certain of it. “The D.C. police are going to be guessing jealous lover. Some kind of crime of high passion,” he said. “Wait—there’s something else here. Okay. Hold on. I’ve got to check this out.”
    He didn’t know how he’d missed it at first, but he sure as hell saw the note now. It was right next to the cordless telephone on the bed stand. Impossible to miss, right? But he’d missed it. He picked it up in his gloved hand.
    The note was typewritten on thick, expensive bond. He read it quickly. Then he read it again, just to be sure … that the note was for
real.

Ah Dannyboy, we knew ya all too well
One useless, thieving, rich bastard down
So many more to go.
Jack and Jill came to The Hill
To hose down all the slime
Most imperiled
Was poor Fitzpatrick
Right schmuck, wrong place, wrong time.
Truly,
Jack and Jill

    He read the note over the hand phone. He took one more look around, then left the senator’s apartment as it was:
in a state of bedlam and horror and death.
When he was safely down on Q Street, he called in the homicide to the Washington police.
    He made the call