Along Came a Spider (Alex Cross #1)(12)

“As the legend of Alex Cross has it, you’re broke now.”

“I’m doing fine,” I said. “Roof over our heads. Food on the table.”

“You stayed in Southeast, when you could easily have gotten out,” he continued with this broken record I’d heard before. “You still working over at St. A’s?”

“Yeah. Soup brigade. Some free therapy sessions. The Black Samaritan.”

“You know, I saw you in a play once at St. A’s. You can act, too. You have real presence.”

“Athol Fugard’s The Blood Knot.” I remembered the time. Maria had lured me into her theater group. “The play is powerful. It can make anybody look all right.”

“You follow what I’m saying? You listening to me at all?”

“You want to marry me.” I laughed out loud at Monroe. “You want to go out on a date with me first, though.”

“Something like that,” Monroe roared back.

“You’re doing it just the right way, Carl. I like to be sweet-talked before I get fucked.”

Monroe laughed some more, a little harder than he should have. He could be buddies with you, then stare right through you the next time you met. Some people called him “Coconut” around the department. I was one of them. “Brown on the outside, white inside.” I had the feeling that he was actually a lonely man. I still wondered exactly what he wanted from me.

Monroe was quiet for a moment. He spoke again as we turned onto the Whitehurst Freeway. Traffic was heavy, and slushy streets didn’t help.

“This is a tragic, tragic situation we’re facing. This kidnapping is also important for us. Whoever solves it will be important. I want you to help solve it, to be a player. I want you to establish a reputation with this case.”

“I don’t want a reputation,” I said flat out to Monroe. “Don’t want to be a fucking player.”

“I know you don’t. And that’s one of the reasons you should be. I’ll tell you something that is the truth. You’re smarter than us, and you are going to be a big deal in this city. Stop being such a stubborn bastard about it. Let the walls come down now.”

“I don’t agree. Not if I can help it. Not if I can get in the way of it. Your idea of being a success isn’t mine.”

“Well, I know what’s right here. For both of us,” he said. This time Carl Monroe didn’t smile one bit. “You keep me up to date on the progress of this case. You and I are in this one together, Alex. This is a career-making case.”

I nodded at Monroe. Sure thing, I thought. “Whose career, Carl?”

I had stopped in front of the District Building with all its fancy trimmings. Monroe slid out of his seat. He looked down at me from outside the car. “This case is going to be enormously important, Alex. It’s yours.”

“No, thanks,” I said.

But Monroe was already gone.





CHAPTER 9


AT TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES PAST TEN, well within the range he’d set during his dry runs from Washington, Gary Soneji turned his van onto an unmarked drive. The side road was badly potholed and densely overgrown with weeds. A blackberry bramble was on either shoulder.

Less than fifty yards in from the main highway, he couldn’t see anything but the dirt road and a mess of overhanging bushes. No one could see his van from the highway.

The van bumped along past a ramshackle, faded white farmhouse. The building looked as if it were shrinking, collapsing right back into its foundation. No more than forty yards past the house was what remained of an equally run-down storage barn.

Soneji drove the van inside. He’d done it; he’d pulled it off.

A black 1985 Saab was parked in the barn. Unlike the rest of the deserted farm, the barn had a lived-in feel.

It had a dirt floor. Cheesecloth was taped over three broken windows in the hayloft. There were no rusting tractors or other farm machinery. The barn had the smell of damp earth and gasoline.

Gary Soneji pulled two Cokes from a cooler on the passenger seat. He polished off both sodas, letting out a satisfied belch after downing the second cold one.

“Either of you guys want a Coke?” he called out to the drugged, comatose children. “No? Okay then, but you’re going to be real thirsty soon.”

There were no sure things in life, he was thinking, but he couldn’t imagine how any policeman could get him now. Was it foolish and dangerous to be this confident? he wondered. Not really, because he was also being realistic. There was no way to trace him now. There wasn’t a single clue for them to follow.

He had been planning to kidnap somebody famous since—well, since forever. Who that someone was had changed, and changed again, but never the clear, main objective in his mind. He’d been working at Washington Day School for months. This moment, right now, proved it had been worth every sucky minute.

“Mr. Chips.” He thought of his nickname at the school. Mr. Chips! What a lovely, lovely bit of play-acting he’d done. Real Academy Award stuff. As good as anything he’d seen since Robert De Niro in The King of Comedy. And that performance was a classic. De Niro himself had to be a psychopath in real life.

Gary Soneji finally pulled open the van’s sliding door. Back to work, work, work his fingers to the bone.

One body at a time, he hauled the children out into the barn. First came Maggie Rose Dunne. Then little boy Goldberg. He laid the unconscious boy and girl beside each other on the dirt floor. He undressed each child, leaving them in their underwear. He carefully prepared doses of secobarbital sodium. Just your friendly local pharmacist hard at work. The dose was somewhere between a sleeping pill and a hospital anesthetic. It would last for about twelve hours.