Alex Cross 1 - Along Came A Spider Read online

  When Carl Monroe wants something from you, he'll talk you into submission if he has to. I had seen this before and now he started up with me again.

  "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. lbe-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 many 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 I

  “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 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.

  Along Came A Spider

  CHAPTER 9

  TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES PAST TEN, well within 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

  55 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 I 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 playacting 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.

  He took out preloaded one-shot needles called Tubex. This was a closed injection system that came prepackaged, complete with dose and needle. He set out two tourniquets. He had to be very careful. The exact dosage could be tricky with small children.

  Next, he pulled the black Saab forward about two yards. This move exposed a five-by-four-foot plot in the floor of the barn.

  He'd dug the hole during several previous visits to the deserted farm. Inside the open cavity was a homemade wooden compartment, a kind of shelter. It had its own oxygen tank supply. Everything but a color TV for watching reruns. He placed the Goldberg boy inside the wooden compartment first. Michael Goldberg weighed next to nothing in his arms, which was exactly what he felt about him. Nothing. Then came the little princess, the little pride and joy, Maggie Rose Dunne. All the way from La-la-land originally.

  He slid the Tubex needles into each child's arm. He was extra careful to give each dose slowly, over a three minute period.

  The doses were measured by weight,.25 milligrams kilogram of body weight. He checked the breathing each child. Sleep tight, my multimillion-dollar babies.

  Gary Soneji shut the trapdoor with a bang. Then he buried the wooden compartment under half a foot of fresh soil. Inside the deserted storage barn. In the middle of God forsaken Maryland farm country. Just like little 9 Charlie Lindbergh, Jr., had been buried sixty years before.

  No one would find them out here. Not until he wanted them found. If he wanted them found. Big if.

  Gary Soneji trudged back up the dirt road to what remained of the ancient farmhouse. He wanted to wash up. He also wanted to start to enjoy this a little. He'd even brought a Watchman to see himself on TV.

  Along Came A Spider

  CHAPTER 10

  NEWS BULLETINS were flashing on the television screen every fifteen minutes or so. Gary Soneji was right there on the high and mighty tube. He saw photographs of “Mr. Chips” on every news bulletin. The news reports didn't offer a clue about what was really going on, though.

  So this was fame! This was how fame felt. He liked it a lot. This was what he'd been practicing for all these years. “Hi, Mom! Look who's on TV. It's the Bad Boy!”

  There was only one glitch all afternoon, and that was the press con
ference given by the FBI. An agent named Roger Graham had spoken, and Agent Graham obviously thought he was hot shit, He wanted some fame for himself. “You think this is your movie, Graham? Wrong, baby!” Gary Soneji shouted at the TV. “I'm the only star here!”

  Soneji had been prowling around inside the farmhouse for several hours, watching the night slowly fall inside. He felt the different textures of darkness as they ted the farm. It was now seven o'clock and time to get on with his plan.

  “Let's do it.” He pranced around the farmhouse like a prizefighter before a bout. “Let's get it on.”

  For a while, he thought about Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, his all-time favorite couple. That calmed him some. He thought about Baby Charles; and about that poor fool, Bruno Hauptmann, who had obviously been framed for the brilliantly conceived and executed crime. He was convinced that the Lindbergh affair was the century's most elegant crime, not just because it remained unsolved-many, many crimes went unsolved-but because it was important and unsolved.

  Soneji was confident, realistic, and, most of all, pragmatic about his own masterpiece. A “fluke” was always possible. A “lucky accident” by the police could occur. The actual exchange of money would be tricky. It meant contact, and contact was always highly dangerous in life.

  To his knowledge, and his knowledge was encyclopedic, no modern kidnapper had satisfactorily solved the ransom-exchange problem. Not if they wanted to be paid for their labors, and he needed a huge payday for his multimillion-dollar kids.

  Wait until they hear how much money.

  The thought brought a smile to his lips. Of course, the world-beater Dunnes and the all-powerful Goldbergs could, and would, pay. It was no accident he had chosen those two families-with their pampered little snot nosed brats, and their unlimited supply of wealth and power.

  Soneji lit one of the white candles he kept in a side pocket of his jacket. He sniffed a pleasant whiff of beeswax. Then he made his way to the small bathroom off the kitchen.

  He was remembering an old Chambers Brothers song, 'Time." It was time... time... time to pull the rug out from under everybody's feet. Time... time... time for his first little surprise, the first of many. Time... time... time to start to build his own legend. This was his movie.

  The room, the whole house, was freezing cold in late December. Gary Soneji could see his breath wisping out as he set up shop in the bathroom.

  Fortunately, the abandoned house had well water, which was still running in the bathroom. Very cold water indeed. Gary Soneji lit some candles, and began to work. It would take him a full half-hour before he was through.

  First, he removed the dark brown, balding half-wig. He'd purchased it three years before, at a theatrical costume store in New York City. That same night, he'd gone to see Phantom of the Opera. He'd loved the Broadway musical. He identified with the Phantom so much that it frightened him. It sent him off to read the original novel, first in French, then in English.

  “Well, well, what do we have here?” he spoke to the face in the mirror.

  With the glue and other schmutz off, a full head of blond hair was revealed. Long and wavy blond curls.

  “Mr. Soneji? Mr. Chips? Is that you, fella?”

  Not a bad-looking sort, actually. Good prospects? On a roll, maybe? Clearly on a roll, yes. And nothing at all like Chips. Nothing like our Mr. Soneji!

  Away came the thick mustache that Gary Soneji had worn since the day he'd arrived to interview at the Washington Day School. Then the contact lenses were removed. His eyes changed from green back to chestnut brown. Gary Soneji held the dwindling candle up to the dingy, cracked bathroom mirror. He rubbed one corner of the glass clean with the sleeve of his jacket.

  “There. Just look at you. Look at you now. Genius is in the details, right?”

  That insipid nerd from the private school was almost completely eradicated. The wimp and the do-gooder. Mr. Chips was dead and gone forever.

  What a wondrous farce it had been. What a daring plan of action, and how well executed. A shame no one would ever know what had really happened. But whom could he tell?

  Gary Soneji left the farmhouse around 11:30 P.m., fight on his schedule. He walked to a detached garage that was north of the house.

  In a special place in the garage, very special, he hid five thousand dollars from his savings, his secret cache, money he'd stolen over the years. That was part of the plan, too. Long-range thinking.

  Then he headed down to the barn, and his car. Once he was inside the barn, he checked on the kids again. So far, so great.

  No complaints from the kiddies.

  The Saab started right up. He drove out to the main road, using only the dimmers.

  When he finally reached the highway, he flicked on the headlights. He still had work to do tonight. Masterpiece Theatre continued. Cool beans.

  Along Came A Spider

  CHAPTER 11

  BI SPECIAL AGENT ROGER GRAHAM lived in Manassas Park, midway between Washington and the FBI Academy in Quantico. Graham was tall and physically impressive, with short, sandy brown hair. He'd worked on several major kidnappings, but nothing quite as disturbing as this current nightmare.

  At a little past one that morning, Graham finally got home. Home was a sprawling Colonial, on an average street in Manassas Park. Six bedrooms, three baths, a big yard that covered nearly two acres.

  Unfortunately, this had not been a normal day. Graham was drained and beaten up and bone-tired. He often wondered why he didn't just settle down and write another book. Take early retirement from the Bureau. Get to know his three children before they fled from the house.

  The street in Manassas Park was deserted. Porch lights glowed down the line of the road, and they were a comforting, friendly sight. Lights appeared in the rearview mirror of Graham's Ford Bronco.

  A second car had stopped on the street in front of his house, its headlamps gleaming. A man got out, and waved a notepad that was clutched in his hand.

  “Agent Graham? Martin Bayer, New York Times,” the man called out as he walked up the driveway. He flashed a press credential.

  Jesus Christ. Son-of-a-bitching New York Times, Graham thought to himself. The reporter wore a dark suit, pin-striped shirt, rep tie. He was your basic up-and coming New York yuppie on assignment. All these assholes from the Times and the Post looked the same to Graham. Not a real reporter among them anymore.

  “You've come a long way at this hour for a 'no comment,' Mr. Bayer. I'm sorry, ” Roger Graham said. “I can't give you anything on the kidnapping. Frankly, there isn't anything to give. ”

  He wasn't sorry, but who needed enemies at the New York Times. Those bastards could stick their poison pens in one of your ears and out the other.

  "One question, and one question only. I understand that you don't have to answer, but it's that important to me-for me. For me to be here at one in the morning.

  “Okay. Let's have it. What's your question?” Graham shut the door of his Bronco. He locked up for the night, flipped the car keys, and caught them.

  “Are all of you this incredibly insipid and stupid?” Gary Soneji asked him. “That's my question, Grahamcracker. ”

  A long, sharp knife flashed forward once. Then flashed again. The blade sliced back and forth across Roger Graham's throat.

  The first slashing motion pinned him back against his

  Ford Bronco. The second slashed his carotid artery. Graham dropped dead in his driveway. There had been no time to duck, run, or even say a prayer.

  “You're supposed to be a freaking star, Roger. You wanted to be the star, right? I see no evidence of that. None, zero,” Soneji said. “ You're supposed to be way better than this. I need to be challenged by the best and the brightest. ”

  Soneji bent low and slid a single index card into the breast pocket of Agent Graham's white shirt. He patted the dead man's chest. “Now, would a New York Times reporter really be here at one in the morning, you arrogant fuck? Just to talk to your sorry ass?”<
br />
  Then Soneji drove away from the murder scene. The death of Agent Graham wasn't a big deal to him. Not really. He'd killed over two hundred people before this one. Practice makes perfect. It wouldn't be the last time, either.

  This one would wake everybody up, though. He just hoped they had somebody better waiting in the wings.

  Otherwise, where was the fun? The challenge? How could this get bigger than the Lindbergh kidnapping?

  Along Came A Spider

  CHAPTER 12

  WAS ALREADY BECOMING emotionally involved with the kidnapped children. My sleep was restless and agitated that first night. In my dreams, I replayed several bad scenes at the school. I saw Mustaf Sanders again and again. His sad eyes stared out at m@ e, asking for help, getting none from me.

  I woke to find both my kids in bed with me. At some time during the early morning, they must have snuck aboard. It's one of their favorite tricks, their little jokes on “Big Daddy.”

  Damon and Janelle were fast asleep on top of a patchwork quilt. I'd been too wasted to pull it off the bed the night before. We must have looked like two resting angels-and a fallen plow horse.

  Damon is a beautiful little boy of six who always reminds me of how special his mother was. He has Maria's eyes. Jannie is the other apple of my eye. She's four, going on fifteen. She likes to call me “Big Daddy,” which sounds like some black slang she's

  67 managed to invent. Maybe she knew the foothall star “Big Daddy” Lipscomb in some other life.

  Also on the bed was a copy of William Styron's book on his depression, Darkness Visible, which I'd been reading. I was hoping it might give me some clue to help me get over my own depression-which had plagued me ever since Maria's murder. Three years now, felt like twenty.

  What actually woke me that morning were headlights fanning across the window blinds. I heard a car door bang and the fast crunch of feet on gravel in the driveway. Careful not to wake the kids, I slipped over to the bedroom window.