Along Came a Spider (Alex Cross #1)(92)

“Do you feel omnipotent now? Since you’re older and wiser?” I asked Soneji. He was being ironic. I assumed I could be, too.

“I’m the closest thing to it you’ll ever see. I’m a way to understand the concept, no?”

He smiled that blank killer smile of his again. I wanted to hit him. Gary Murphy was a tragic and almost likable sort of man. Soneji was hateful, pure evil. The human monster; the human beast.

“When you scouted the Goldberg and Dunne houses, were you at the height of your powers?” Were you omnipotent then, shithead?

“No, no, no. As you know, Doctor, I was already becoming sloppy. I’d read too many news accounts of my ‘perfect’ killing in Condon Terrace. ‘No traces, no clues, the perfect killer!’ Even I was impressed.”

“What went wrong out in Potomac?” I thought I knew the answer. I needed him to confirm it.

He shrugged. “I was being followed, of course.”

Here we go, I thought to myself. The “watcher.”

“You didn’t know it at the time?” I asked Soneji.

“Of course not.” He frowned at the question. “I realized I was being followed much later. Then it was confirmed at the trial.”

“How was that? How did you find out you were being followed?”

Soneji stared into my eyes. He seemed to be staring straight through to the back of my skull. He considered me beneath him. I was just a vessel for his outpouring. But he found me more interesting than the others to talk to. I didn’t know whether to feel honored or defiled. He was also curious about what I knew, or what I didn’t know.

“Let me stop to make a point,” he said. “This one is important to me. I have secrets to tell you. Lots of big and little secrets. Dirty secrets, juicy secrets. I’m going to give you one secret now. Do you know why?”

“Elementary, my dear Gary,” I told him. “It’s hell for you to be under the control of others. You need to be in charge.”

“That’s very good, Doctor Detective. But I do have some neat things to trade. Crimes that go all the way back to when I was twelve and thirteen years old. There are major unsolved crimes that go back that far. Believe me. I have a treasure trove of goodies to share with you.”

“I understand,” I told him. “I can’t wait to hear about them.”

“You always did understand. All you have to do is convince the other zombies to walk and chew Juicy Fruit at the same time.”

“The other zombies?” I smiled at his slip.

“Sorry, sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude. Can you convince the zombies? You know who I mean. You have less respect for them than I do.”

That was true enough. I’d have to convince Chief of Detectives Pittman for one. “You’ll help me out? Give me something concrete? I have to find out what happened to the little girl. Let her parents have some peace at last.”

“All right. I will do that,” Soneji said. It was so simple in the end.

You wait. And you wait. That’s the way it goes in almost every police investigation. You ask thousands of questions, literally thousands. You fill entire file cabinets with unnecessary paperwork. Then you ask more questions. You follow countless leads that go nowhere. Then something goes right for a change. It happens every once in a while. It was happening now. A payout for thousands of hours of work. A reward for coming to see Gary again and again.

“I didn’t notice any surveillance back then,” Gary Soneji continued. “And none of what I’m going to tell you about happened near the Sanders house. It occurred on Sorrell Avenue in Potomac. In front of the Goldberg house, in fact.”

Suddenly I was tired of his chest-beating games. I had to know what he knew. I was getting close. Talk to me, you little fucker.

“Go on,” I said. “What happened out in Potomac? What did you see at the Goldbergs’? Who did you see?”

“I drove by there one of those nights before the kidnapping. A man was walking on the sidewalk. I thought nothing of him. It never registered until I saw the same man at the trial.”

Soneji stopped talking for a moment. Was he playing again? I didn’t think so. He stared at me as if he were looking right into my soul. He knows who I am. He knows me, perhaps better than I know myself.

What did he want from me? Was I a substitute for something missing from his childhood? Why had I been chosen for this horrific job?

“Who was the man you recognized at the trial?” I asked Gary Soneji.

“It was the Secret Service agent. It was Devine. He and his pal Chakely must have seen me watching the Goldberg and Dunne houses. They were the ones who followed me. They took precious Maggie Rose! They got the ransom in Florida. You should have been looking for cops all this time. Two cops murdered the little girl.”





CHAPTER 75


MY HUNCH about Devine and Chakely had been right after all. Soneji/Murphy was the only eyewitness, and he’d confirmed it. Now we had to move.

I had to personally reopen the Dunne-Goldberg case—and with news that no one in Washington would want to hear.

I decided to talk to the FBI first. … Two cops had murdered Maggie Rose. The investigation had to be opened up again. The kidnapping hadn’t been solved the first time. Now the whole mess was going to blow up once more.