What was the whole story? What was the real story? What secret still hadn't been unlocked?
I started in on the massive collection of books that dominated every room in the apartment, even the kitchen. Sara had been a voracious reader. Mostly literature and history, nearly all of it American. Sara the intellectual; Sara the real smart cookie.
Diplomacy by Henry Kissinger. Special Trust by Robert McFarland. Caveat by Alexander Haig. Kissinger by Walter Isaacson. On and on and on. Fiction by Anne Tyler, Robertson Davies, Annie Proulx, but also Robert Ludlum and John Grisham. Poetry by Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton.
A volume entitled Woman Alone.
I opened each book, then carefully shook it out. There were well over a thousand volumes in the apartment. Maybe a couple of thousand. Lots of books to look through.
There were handwritten pages of notes stuffed into some of the books. Jottings Sara had made. I read every loose scrap. The hours went by. Meals were skipped. I didn't much care.
Inside a biography of Napoleon and Josephine, Sara Rosen had written “N. considered high intelligence an aberration in women. Stroked J.”s breasts in public. Cur. But J. got her just deserts. Cunt.'
Jill the poet. Jill the book lover. The mystery, the fantasy woman, the enigma. The killer.
There were several videotapes of movies in the den, and I began to open each of the containers.
Sara Rosen's film collection featured well-known romances, mystery thrillers, and romantic thrillers. The Prince of Tides, No Way Out, Disclosure, The Godfather trilogy, Gone With the Wind, An Officer and a Gentleman.
She also seemed to like older movies, especially noir mysteries: Raymond Chandler, James Cain, Hitchcock.
I opened every single cassette, row by row, every box. I thought it was important, especially with someone as orderly as Sara. If Sampson had been around, I wouldn't have heard the end of it. He would have called me crazier than Jack or Jill.
I opened a cassette box for Hitchcock's Notorious. I didn't remember ever seeing the film myself, but one of Hitchcock's favorite male leads, Cary Grant, was featured on the box cover.
I found an unmarked cassette inside the box. It didn't look like a movie. Curious, I popped the cassette into the VCR. It was the fourth or fifth unmarked cassette that I had viewed so far.
The film wasn't Notorious.
I found myself looking at footage of the murder of Senator Daniel Fitzpatrick.
This was apparently the uncut version, which ran considerably longer than the film that had been sent to CNN.
The extra footage was even more disturbing and graphic than what had been viewed on the TV news network. The fear in Senator Fitzpatrick's voice was terrible to hear. He begged the killers for his life, then he began to cry, to sob loudly That part had been carefully edited from the CNN tape. It was too strong. It was brutal beyond belief. It put Jack and Jill in the worst possible light.
They were merciless killers. No pity, no passion, no humanity I jabbed at the PAUSE button. Jackpot! The next shot in the film had started tight on Senator Fitzpatrick, then pulled out to a wide angle, maybe wider than intended.
The tape showed Jack as he fired the second shot.
The killer wasn't Kevin Hawkins!
I suddenly wondered if Jill had left the tape here for someone to find. Had she suspected that she might be betrayed? Was this Jill's payback? I thought that maybe it was: Jill had fucked Jack, straight from hell.
I studied the frozen frame revealing the real Jack. He had short, sandy-blond hair. He was a handsome-looking man in his late thirties. There was no emotion on his face as he pulled the trigger.
“Jack,” I whispered. “We've finally found you, Jack.”
THE FBI, Secret Service, and Washington police cooperated and worked closely together on a massive and important manhunt.
They all badly wanted a piece of this one. It was the ultimate homicide case: a president had been murdered. The real killer was still out there. Jack was still alive; at least, I hoped that he was.
And he was!
Early on the morning of December 20, I watched Jack through a pair of binoculars. I couldn't take my eyes off the killer and mastermind.
I wanted to take him down. I wanted him for myself. We had to wait, though. This was Jay Grayer's plan. It was his day, his show, his plan of action.
Jack was just walking out of a three-story Colonial house. He went to a bright red Ford Bronco that sat in a circular driveway.
By then, we knew who he was, where he lived, nearly everything about him. Now we understood a lot more about Jack and Jill.
Our eyes had been opened very, very wide.
“There's Jack. There's our boy,” Jay Grayer said to me.
“Doesn't look like a killer, does he?” I said. “But he got the job done. He did it. He's the executioner of all those people, including Jill.”
Jack was herding along a small boy and a girl. Very cute kids. I knew that their names were Alix and Artie. Also coming along for the ride were the two family dogs: Shepherd and Wise Man, a ten-year-old black retriever and
