Along Came a Spider (Alex Cross #1)(64)

“Actually, we’re here to visit the next-door neighbors,” he finally said. “Let’s go to work. Something happened here that I don’t understand yet. It’s important, though, Alex. I need your head on it.”

We went to visit the Sanderses’ next-door neighbors, the Cerisiers. It was important. It got my full attention, immediately.

I already knew that Nina Cerisier had been Suzette Sanders’s best friend since they were little girls. The families had been living next door to each other since 1979. Nina, as well as her mother and father, hadn’t gotten over the murders. If they could have afforded to, they would have moved away.

We were invited in by Mrs. Cerisier, who shouted upstairs for her daughter Nina. We were seated around the Cerisiers’ kitchen table. A picture of a smiling Magic Johnson was on the wall. Cigarette smoke and bacon grease were in the air.

Nina Cerisier was very cool and distant when she finally appeared in the kitchen. She was a plain-looking girl, about fifteen or sixteen. I could tell that she didn’t want to be there.

“Last week,” Sampson said for my benefit, “Nina came forward and told a teacher’s aide at Southeast that she might have seen the killer a couple of nights before the murders. She’d been afraid to talk about it.”

“I understand,” I said. It is almost impossible to get eyewitnesses to talk to police in Condon or Langley, or any of D.C.’s black neighborhoods.

“I saw he been caught,” Nina said in an offhand manner. Beautiful rust-colored eyes stared at me from her plain face. “I wasn’t so scared no more. I’m still some scared, though.”

“How did you recognize him?” I asked Nina.

“Saw him on the TV. He did that big kidnapping thing, too,” she said. “He all over TV.”

“She recognized Gary Murphy,” I said to Sampson. That meant she’d seen him without his schoolteacher disguise.

“You sure it was the same man as on TV?” Sampson asked Nina.

“Yes. He watch my girlfriend Suzette’s house. I thought it real strange. Not many whites ’round here.”

“Did you see him in the daytime, or at night?” I asked the girl.

“Night. But I know it him. Sanderses’ porch light on bright. Missus Sanders afraid of everything, everybody. Poo ’fraid you say boo. That’s what Suzette, me, used to say she like.”

I turned to Sampson. “Puts him at the murder scene.”

Sampson nodded and looked back at Nina. Her pouty mouth was open in a small “o.” Her hands constantly twirled her braided hair.

“Would you tell Detective Cross what else you saw?” he asked.

“Another white man with him,” Nina Cerisier said. “Man wait in his car while the other, he looking at Suzette’s house. Other white man here all the time. Two men.”

Sampson turned the kitchen chair around to face me. “They’re busy rushing him to trial,” he said. “They don’t have a clue what’s really going on. They’re going to finish it, anyway. Bury it. Maybe we have the answer, Alex.”

“So far, we’re the only ones who have a few of the answers,” I said.

Sampson and I left the Cerisier house and drove downtown in separate cars. My mind was racing through everything we knew so far, half-a-dozen possible scenarios culled from thousands. Police work. An inch at a time.

I was thinking about Bruno Hauptmann and the Lindbergh kidnapping. After he’d been caught, and possibly framed, Bruno Hauptmann had been rushed to trial, too. Hauptmann had been convicted, maybe wrongly.

Gary Soneji/Murphy knew all about that. Was it all part of one of his complex game plans? A ten-or twelve-year plan? Who was the other white man? The pilot down in Florida? Or someone like Simon Conklin, Gary’s friend from Princeton?

Could there have been an accomplice right from the beginning?

Later that night, I was with Jezzie. She insisted that I quit work at eight. For over a month, she’d had tickets for a Georgetown basketball game I wanted to see in the worst way. On our ride over there, we did something we rarely do: we talked about nothing but The Job. I dropped the latest bomb, the “accomplice theory,” on her.

“I don’t understand one beguiling aspect of all this,” Jezzie said after she had listened to me tell Nina Cerisier’s story. She was still nearly as hooked on the kidnapping case as I was. She was more subtle about it, but I could tell she was hooked.

“Ask the Shell Answer Man. I understand everything beguiling. I know beguiling up the wazoo.”

“Okay. This girl was friends with Suzette Sanders, right? She was close to the family. And still, she didn’t talk. Because relations with the police are that bad in the neighborhood? I don’t know if I buy it. All of a sudden, now, she comes forward.”

“I buy it,” I told Jezzie. “The Metro police are like rat poison with lots of folks in these neighborhoods. I live there, they know me, and I’m just barely accepted.”

“It’s still strange to me, Alex. It’s just too odd. The girls were supposed to be friends.”

“It sure is strange. The PLO would talk to the Israeli Army before some of the people in Southeast would talk to the police.”

“So what do you think now that you’ve heard the Cerisier girl and her supposed revelation? What do you make of this… accomplice?”