Along Came a Spider (Alex Cross #1)(24)

Within fifteen minutes of its arrival, the telegram had been traced to a Western Union office on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach. FBI agents immediately descended on the office to interview the manager and clerks. They didn’t learn a thing—exactly the way the rest of the investigation had been going so far.

We had no choice but to leave for Miami immediately.





CHAPTER 20


THE HOSTAGE RESCUE TEAM arrived at Tamiami Airport in Florida at four-thirty on Christmas afternoon. Secretary Jerrold Goldberg had arranged for us to fly down in a private jet supplied by the Air Force.

A Miami police escort rushed us to the FBI office on Collins Avenue, near the Fountainbleu and other Gold Coast hotels. The Bureau office was only six blocks from the Western Union office where Soneji had sent the telegram.

Had he known that? Probably he had. That was how his mind seemed to work. Soneji was a control freak. I kept jotting down observations on him. There were already twenty pages in a notepad I kept in my jacket. I wasn’t ready to write a profile of Soneji since I had no information about his past yet. My notes were filled with all the right buzzwords, though: organized, sadistic, methodical, controlling, perhaps hypomanic.

Was he watching us scurry around Miami now? Quite possibly he was. Maybe in another disguise. Was he remorseful about Michael Goldberg’s death? Or was he entering a state of rage?

Private lines of emergency switchboard operators had already been set up at the FBI office. We didn’t know how Soneji would communicate from here on. Several Miami police officers were added to the team now. So were another two hundred agents from the Bureau’s large force in southern Florida. Suddenly, everything was rush, rush, rush. Hurry up and wait.

I wondered if Gary Soneji had any real idea about the state of chaos he was creating as his deadline approached. Was that part of his plan, too? Was Maggie Rose Dunne really okay? Was she still alive?

We would need some proof before the final exchange would be approved. At least we would ask Soneji for physical proof. M.R. fine so far. Trust me, he’d said. Sure thing, Gary.

Bad news followed us down to Miami Beach.

The preliminary autopsy report on Michael Goldberg had been faxed to the Miami Bureau office. A briefing was held immediately after we arrived, in the FBI’s crisis room. We sat in a crescent arrangement of desks, each desk with its own video monitor and word processor. The room was unusually quiet. None of us really wanted to hear details about the little boy’s death.

A Bureau technical officer named Harold Friedman was chosen to explain the medical findings to the group. Friedman was unusual for the Bureau, to say the least. He was an Orthodox Jew, but with the build and look of a Miami beachboy. He wore a multicolored yarmulke to the autopsy briefing.

“We’re reasonably certain the Goldberg boy’s death was accidental,” he began in a deep, articulate voice. “It appears that he was knocked out with a chloroform spray first. There were traces of chloroform in his nasal passages and throat. Then he was injected with secobarbital sodium, probably about two hours later. Secobarbital is a strong anesthetic. It also has properties which can inhibit breathing.

“That seems to be what happened in this case. The boy’s breathing probably became irregular, then his heart and breathing stopped altogether. It wasn’t painful if he remained asleep. I suspect that he did, and that he died in his sleep.

“There were also several broken bones,” Harold Friedman went on. In spite of the beachboy appearance, he was somber and seemed intelligent in his reporting. “We believe that the little boy was kicked and punched, probably dozens of times. This had nothing to do with his death, though. The broken bones and ‘dents’ on the skin were inflicted after the boy was dead. You should know that he was also sexually abused after the time of death. He was sodomized, and ripped during the act. This Soneji character is a very sick puppy,” Friedman offered as his first bit of editorializing.

This was also one of the few real specifics we had about Gary Soneji’s pathology. Evidently, he had flown into an angry rage when he discovered that Michael Goldberg was dead. Or that something about his perfect plan wasn’t so perfect after all.

Agents and policemen shifted from buttock to buttock in their seats. I wondered if the frenzy with Michael Goldberg had a calming or inciteful effect on Soneji. More than ever, I worried about the chances Maggie Rose had to survive.

The hotel we were staying at was directly across the street from the Bureau branch office. It wasn’t much by Miami Beach gold standards, but it did have a large terraced pool on the ocean side.

Around eleven, most of us had knocked off for the night. The temperature was still in the eighties. The sky was full of bright stars, and an occasional jetliner arriving from the North.

Sampson and I strolled across Collins Avenue. People must have thought the Lakers were in town to play the Miami Heat.

“Want to eat first? Or just drink ourselves numb?” he asked me midway across the avenue.

“I’m already pretty numb,” I told Sampson. “I was thinking about a swim. When in Miami Beach?”

“You can’t get a Miami Beach tan tonight.” He was rolling an unlit cigarette between his lips.

“That’s another reason for a night swim.”

“I’ll be operating in the lounge,” Sampson said as we branched off in the lobby. “I’ll be the one drawing the pretty women.”