PART 1
TOMORROW AGAIN
OH NO, it's tomorrow again.
It seemed as if I had no sooner fallen asleep than I heard banging in the house. It was loud, as disturbing as a car alarm.
Persistent. Trouble too close to home?
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"Shit. Dammit," I whispered into the soft, deep folds of my pillow. "Leave me alone. Let me sleep through the night like a normal person. Go away from here."
I reached for the lamp and knocked over a couple of books on the table. The Generalk Daughter and My American Journey and Snow Falling on Cedars. The mishap jolted me fully awake.
I grabbed my service revolver from a drawer and hurried downstairs, passing the kids' room on the way.
I heard, or thought that I could hear, the sound of their soft breathing inside. I had been reading them Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit the night before. Don't go into Mr. McGregork garden: Your father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor.
I clutched the Glock even more tightly in my right hand. The banging stopped. Then started up again.
Downstairs.
I glanced at my wristwatch. It was three-thirty in the morning.
Jesus, mercy The witching hour again. The hour I often woke up without any help from outside forces, from things that go BANG, BANG, BANG in the middle of the night.
I continued down the steep, treacherous stairs. Cautious, suspicious.
Suddenly, it was quiet all around me.
I made no sound myself. My skin felt electrified in the darkness.
This was not the recommended way to start the day, or even the middle of The night. Don't go into Mr.
McGregor garden: Your father had an accident....
I continued into the kitchen -- my gun drawn -- where I suddenly saw the source of the banging. The day's first mystery was solved.
My friend and partner was lurking at the back door like some high-octane version of a neighborhood hugger-mugger.
John Sampson was the noisemaker; he was the trouble in my life; the day's first disturbance, anyway. All six foot nine, two hundred forty pounds of him. Two-John as he's sometimes called.
Man Mountain.
"There's been a murder," he said as I unlocked, unchained, and opened up for him. "This one is a honey, Alex."
"OH, JESUS, JOHN. You know what time it is? You have any concept of time? Please get the hell away from my house. Go home to your own house. Bang on your own door in the middle of the night."
I groaned and slowly shook my head back and forth, working nasty sleep-kinks out of my neck and shoulders. I wasn't quite awake yet. Maybe this was all a bad dream that I was having.
Maybe Sampson wasn't on the back porch. Maybe I was still in bed with my pillow-lover. And maybe not.
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"It can wait," I said. "Whatever the hell it is."
"Oh, but it can't," he answered, shaking his head. "Believe me, Sugar, it can't."
I heard a creaking noise behind me in the house. I swung around quickly, still a little spooked and jumpy My little girl was standing there in the kitchen. Jannie was in her electric-blue-butterfly pajamas, in her bare feet, with a frightened look on her face. The latest addition to our family, a beautiful Abyssinian cat named Rosie, trailedJannie by a step or two. Rosie had heard the noise downstairs, too.
"What's the matter?"Jannie asked in a sleepy whisper, rubbing her eyes. "Why are you up so early? It's something bad, isn't it, Daddy?"
"Go back to sleep, sweetheart," I told Jannie in the softest voice I could manage. "It's nothing," I had to lie to my little girl.
My work had followed me home again. "We'll go upstairs now, so you can get your beauty sleep."
I carried her up the stairs, softly nuzzling her cheek on the way, whispering sweet nonsense, dream talk. I tucked her in and checked on my son, Damon. Soon the two of them would be heading off to their respective schools -- Damon at Sojourner Truth, Jannie at Union Street. Rosie the cat continually crisscrossed between my legs as I performed my ministrations.
Then I got dressed, and Sampson and I hurried to the early-morning crime scene in his car. We didn't have far to go.
This one is a honey, Alex.
Just four blocks from our house on Fifth Street.
"I'm awake now, whether I like it or not, and I don't like it. Tell me about it," I said to Sampson as I watched the glittering red and blue lights of police cars and EMS trucks come into focus up ahead.
Four blocks from our house.
A lot of blue-and-whites were clustered at the end of a tunnel of leafless oak trees and red-brick project buildings. The disturbance appeared to be at my son Damon's school. (Jannie's school is a dozen blocks in the opposite direction.) My body tensed all over. There was a roaring, wintry shitstorm inside my head.
"It's a little girl, Alex," Sampson said in an unusually soft voice for him. "Six years old. She was last seen at the Sojourner Truth School this afternoon."
It was Damon's school. We both sighed. Sampson is almost as close to Damon and Jannie as I am. They feel the same way about him.
A lot of people were already gathered outside the Federal-style two-story building that was the Sojourner Truth Elementary School. Half the neighborhood seemed to be up at four in the morning. I saw angry and shocked faces everywhere in the crowd. Some folks were in bathrobes, others wrapped in blankets.
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Their frosty breath poured out like car exhaust all over the school yard. The Washington Post had reported that more than five hundred children under the age of fourteen had died in D.C.
during the past year alone. But the people here knew that. They didn't have to read it in the newspaper.
A little six-year-old girl. Murdered at or near Damon school, the Truth School. I couldn't have imagined a worse nightmare to wake up to.
"Sorry about this, Sugar," Sampson said as we climbed out of his car. "I figured you had to see this, though, to be here yourself."
MY HEART was hammering and felt as if it were suddenly too big for my chest. My wife, Maria, had been shot down and killed not far from this place. Memories of the neighborhood, memories of a lifetime.
I'll always love you, Maria.
I saw a dented and rusting truck from the morgue in the school yard, and it was an unbelievably disturbing sight for me and everybody else. Rap music with a lot of bass was playing from somewhere on the edge of the bright police lights.
Sampson and I pushed and angled our way through the frightened and uneasy crowd. Some wiseass muttered, "What's up, Chief?" and risked finding out. There was yellow crime-scene tape everywhere on the school grounds.
At six three, I'm not as large as Man Mountain, but we are both big men. We make quite the pair when we arrive at a crime scene: Sampson with his huge shaved skull and black leather car Coat; me usually in a gray warm-up jacket from Georgetown. Shoulder holster under the coat. Dressed for the game that I play, a game called sudden death.
"Dr. Cross is here," I heard a few low rumbles in the crowd.
My name uttered in vain. I tried to ignore the voices as best I could. Block them out of my consciousness. Officially, I was a deputy chief of detectives, but I was mostly working as a street detective these days. It was the way I wanted it for now. The way it had to be. This was definitely an
"interesting" time for me. I had seen enough homicide and violence for one lifetime. I was considering going into private practice as a shrink again. I was considering a lot of things.
Sampson lightly touched my shoulder. He sensed this was bad for me. He saw it was maybe too close to the bone. "You okay, Alex?"
"I'm fine," I lied for the second time that morning.
"Sure you are, 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 Alu. ALWAYS
LOVE YOU, 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 Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/ab*.html
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 ieans, and flat shoes. Behind her, I could see a blue sedan. A Mercedes.
Shek the one. That's her. She 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 nitted 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. "kirtle girl's name is Shanelie reen. 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, Shanelie 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.
kooked completely devastated and heartbroken. I knew they would never be the same after this horrifying night. Nobody could be.
"Neither of them suspects?" I had to ask.
Rakeera shook his head and said, "I don't think so, Alex.
Shanelie was their life."
"Please check them, Rakecm. Check both parents. How did she get here in the school yard?" 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 Shanelie that she had been dumped here, probably murdered someplace else. We were right at the beginning of this terrible case. kots of work to do. My case now.
"You know how she was killed?" I asked Rakeera.
The homicide detective frowned. "Take a look for yourself.
Tell me what you think."
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I didn't want to look, but I had to. I bent down close to Shanelie. 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 andJannie, 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. Shanelie 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 Shanelie 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 Shanelie. 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 Shanelle's eyes was missing. Her face is like a two-sided, two-faced mask. 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.
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.
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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.
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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, 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 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.
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 school yard was the saddest, most desolate place in the world.
The chatter of portable police 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.
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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 Shanelie," 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 KoreanAmerican 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 motherf*cker 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," UncleJimmie 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 ever hear anything more specific about Chucky? Where he's been seen? Who saw him?" I asked.
"Help us out if you can, Jimmie."
"Oh, I gladly do that." He nodded his head and bunched his thick brown lips, his triple chin, his bulging throat. Jimmie habitually wore a chocolate brown suit with a tan fedora that bobbed as he spoke. "You meditating yet, Alex, getting in touch with chi energy?" he asked me.
"I'm thinking about it, thinking about my chi Jimmie. Maybe my chi is running a little low right now. Tell us about Chucky."
"I know lots bad stories about Chop-It-Off-Chucky. Scare kids all the time. Even the gangbangers scared of him. Young mothers, grandmothers, put up handbills in playgrounds. In my stores, too. Sad stories of missing children. I always permit it, Detectives.
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Man who harms children is the worst. You agree, Alex? You see it differently?"
"No. I agree with you. That's why Sampson and I are out here today."
I knew a lot about the child molester who had been nicknamed Chop-It-Off-Chucky. The unsubstantiated rumor was that he sliced off the genitalia of young kids who lived in the projects. Little boys and girls. No gender preference. Whether or not it was true, it seemed undeniable that someone had molested several children from the Northfield and Southv'ew Terrace projects, not far from here.
Other children had simply disappeared.
The police in the area didn't have the resources to create an effective crisis team to find Chucky, if Chucky existed. I had gone to the wall about it several times with the chief of detectives, but nothing had happened. Extra detectives never seemed available for duty in Southeast. The unfairness of the situation put me in a rage, made me as crazy as anything I can think of.
"Sounds like another Mission: Impossible," Sampson said as we walked up G Street, in the general direction of the Marine barracks. "We're on our own. We're supposed to catch a chimera."
"Nice image," I said, and had to smile at Man Mountain, his wild imagination, his mind.
"Thought you'd like it, man of culture and refinement that you are."
We were sipping steaming herb tea from Jimmie's restaurant.
Patrolling the street. We looked like detectives, with our collars up and all. Big bad detectives. I wanted people to see us out working the neighborhood.
"No real leads, no clues, no support," I said, agreeing with Sampson's judgment of the current state of affairs. "We take the assignment, anyway?"
"We always do," he said. His eyes were suddenly hard and dull and almost scary to me. "Watch out, Chucky, watch your back. We're right on your sorry mythical ass."
"Your chimera ass."
"Exactly so, Sugar. Exactly so."
IT WAS REAL GOOD to be working the streets of Southeast with Sampson again. It always is, even on a horror-show murder case that can make my blood boil over. Our last big case had taken place in North Carolina and California, but Sampson had been around only for the beginning and end of it. The two of us have been fast friends since we were nine or ten, and growing up in this same neighborhood.
We get closer every year it seems. No, we do get closer.
"What's our primary goal here, Sugar?" Sampson asked as we walked along G Street. He had on the black leather car coat, nasty Wayfarer sunglasses, a slick black bandanna. It worked for him.
"How do we know that we did good today?" he asked.
"We get the word out that we're personally looking for the Truth School killer," I said. "We show our pretty faces around.
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Make the families here feel as safe as we can."
"Yeah, and then we catch Chop-It-Off-Chucky and chop his off," Sampson said and grinned like the big bad wolf that he can be. "I'm not kidding."
I didn't doubt it for a minute.
When I finally got home that night, it was past ten. Nana Mama was waiting up for me. She had already put Damon and Jannie to bed. The concerned look on her face told me that she couldn't get to sleep, which is unusual for her. Nana could sleep in the eye of a hurricane. Sometimes, she is the eye of a hurricane.
"Hello, sweetheart," she said to me. "Bad day for you? I can see that it was." Sometimes she can be unbelievably sympathetic and kind and sweet, too. I like that she goes both ways equally well, and I can never predict which way is coming at me next.
As we sat together on the living room couch, my eighty-one-year-old grandmother held my hand in both of hers. I told her what I knew so far. She was shaking slightly and that wasn't like her, either. She is not a weak person, not in any way She rarely shows her fear to anyone, even me. Nana Mama does not seem to be losing anything of herself; instead, she is becoming more luminous and concentrated.
"I feel so bad about this killing at the Sojourner Truth School," Nana said, and her head lowered.
"I know. It's all I've thought about today I'm working every angle I can."
"You know much about Sojourner Truth, Alex?"
"I know she was a powerful abolitionist, an ex-slave."
"Sojourner Truth should be talked about when they mention Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alex. She couldn't read, so she memorized most of the Bible for her teaching. She actually helped stop segregation of the transportation system here in Washington. And now we have this abomination at the school named in her honor.
"Catch him, Alex," Nana suddenly whispered in a low, almost desperate, voice. "Please catch this terrible man. I can't even say the name they call him -- this Chucky. He's real, Alex. He's not a made-up bogeyman."
I would definitely try my damnedest. I was on the murder case.
I was chasing down the chimera as best I could.
My mind was working overtime already. A child molester? Boys and girls. Now a child killer?
Chop-It-Off-Chucky? Was he real, or had he been made up by frightened children ? Was he a chimera
? Had he murdered Shanelle Green ?
I needed to pound the piano on our porch for a little while after Nana went up to bed. I played "Jazz Baby" and "The Man I Love," but the piano wasn't the ticket that night.
Just before I fell off to sleep, I remembered something. Senator Daniel Fitzpatrick had been murdered in Georgetown. What a day it had been. What a nightmare.
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Two of them.
Sam and Sara.
Whoever they really were, the two of them lay on their stomachs on a tasteful, knock-off Persian rug in the small living room of her Washington pied-hid-terre. It was a kind of safe house. A fire blazed and crackled; fragrant apple logs were being crisped. They were playing a board game on the rug, which covered a hatched parquet floor. It was a special game. Unique in every way. The game of life and death, they called it.
"I feel like a damn Washington, D.C., Georgetown University white liberal yuppie," Sam Harrison said and smiled at the unlikely image created in his mind.
"Hey, I resemble that remark." Sara Rosen made a pouting face. She was kidding. She and Sam weren't yuppies. Sam certainly wasn't.
And yet a guinea hen was roasting in the kitchen, the aroma sweetening the air. They were playing a parlor game on the living room rug.
The game wasn't anything like Monopoly or Risk, though.
Actually, they were playing a game to choose their next murder target. In turn, they calmly rolled the dice, then moved a marker around a rectangle of photos. The photos were of very famous people.
The board game was important to Jack and Jill. It was a game of chance. It made it impossible for the police or FBI to predict their movements or their motive.
If there was a motive. But of course there was a motive.
Sam rolled the dice again. Then he moved the marker. Sara watched him in the warm, flickering glow of the fire. Her eyes glazed over slightly She was remembering their very first meeting, the initial contact between them. The beginning of every thing that was happening now.
This was how the complex and beautiful and very mysterious game had begun. They had agreed to meet at a coffee shop inside a bookstore in downtown D.C. Sara had arrived first, her heart trapped in her throat. Everything about the meeting was insane, maybe dangerously insane, and insanely irresistible to her. She couldn't pass up this chance, this opportunity, or especially this cause. The cause was everything to her.
At the time of their first meeting, she had no idea what Sam Harrison would look like, and she was surprised and delighted when he sat at her table. He excited her.
She had seen him enter the coffeehouse area, watched him order espresso and a scone. She hadn't imagined that the dreamy-looking man at the counter would turn out to be Harrison, though.
So this was The Soldier. This was her potential partner. He kind of fit in at the bookstore. He would fit in anywhere. He didn't look like a killer, but then again, neither did she. He looks a little like an airline pilot, Sara thought as she sized him up. A successful Washington lawyer? He was over six feet tall, trim and fit.
He had a strong, confident face. And he also had the brightest, clearest blue eyes. He had a sensitive, Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/ab*.html
gentle look about him.
Not at all what she had expected. She liked him immediately She knew that they agreed on the important things in life, that they shared a vision.
"You're looking at me as if I'm supposed to be a bad person, and you're surprised that I'm not," he'd said as he sat across from her at the cafe "I'm not a bad person, Sara. You can call me Sam, by the way I'm a pretty good guy, actually"
No, Sam was much better than that. He was amazing -- extremely smart, strong, and yet always considerate of her feelings, and committed to their cause. Sara Rosen had fallen in love with him within a week of their meeting. She knew that she shouldn't, but she had; and now here they were. Living this secret life.
Playing the game of life and death as a guinea hen slowly spun on the spit. Sitting before a cozy fire.
Thinking about making love -- at least, she was. She thought about being with Sam, with Jack, all the time. She loved it when he was inside her.
"This roll should do it," Sam said, and he handed her the dice.
"Your turn. Six rolls for each of us. You do the honors, Sara."
"Here we go, huh?"
"Yes, here we go again."
Sara Rosen's heart began to thunder. She could feel it thump, thump under her blouse. She had the paralyzing thought that this single roll of the dice was like the murder itself. It was almost as if she were pulling the trigger right now.