Alex Cross 1 - Along Came A Spider Read online

  McGoey nodded at whatever Scorse had told him, then stepped forward. He was a solemn-looking fat man with big teeth and a short white crewcut. He looked like an old military man who was close to retirement.

  “The local police out here found a child floating in the river around one o'clock today,” McGoey announced. “They have no way of knowing if it's one of the two kidnapped children or not.”

  Agent McGoey then walked -all of us about seventy yards farther down the muddy riverbank. We stopped past a hump covered with moss and cattails. There wasn't a sound from anyone, just the bitter wind whistling over the water.

  We finally knew why we had been brought here. A small body had been covered over with gray wool blankets from one of the EMS wagons. It was the tiniest, loneliest bundle in the universe.

  One of the local policemen was asked to give us the necessary details. When he began to speak, his voice was thick and unsteady.

  “I'm Lieutenant Edward Mahoney. I'm with the force here in Salisbury. About an hour and twenty minutes ago, a security guard with Raser/Becton discovered the body of a child down here.”

  We walked closer to the spread of blankets. The body was laid on a mound of grass that sloped into the brackish water. Beyond the grass, and to the left, was a black looking tamarack swamp.

  Lieutenant Mahoney knelt down beside the tiny body. His gray uniformed knee sank into the wet mud. Flecks of snow floated around his face, sticking to his hair and cheeks.

  Almost reverently, he pulled back the wool blankets. It seemed as if he were a father, gently waking a child for some early-morning fishing trip.

  Just a few hours ago, I had been looking at a photo of the two kidnapped children. I was the first to speak over the murdered child's body.

  “It's Michael Goldberg,” I said in a soft but clear voice. "I'm sorry to say that it's Michael. It's poor little Shrimpie.

  Along Came A Spider

  CHAPTER 18

  ZZIE FLANAGAN didn't get home until early Christmas morning. Her head was spinning, bursting with many ideas about the kidnapping.

  She had to stop the obsessive images for a while. She had to shut down her engines, or the plant would explode. She had to stop being a cop. The difference between her and some other cops, she knew, was that she could stop.

  Jezzie was living in Arlington with her mother. They shared a small, cramped condo apartment near the Crystal City Underground. Jezzie thought of it as the “Suicide flat.” The living arrangement was supposed to be temporary, except that she had been there close to a year now, ever since her divorce from Dennis Kelleher.

  Dennis the Menace was up in northern Jersey these days, still trying to make it to the New York Times. He was never going to accomplish that feat, Jezzie knew in her heart. The only thing Dennis had ever been good at was trying to make Jezzie doubt herself. Dennis had

  98 been a real standout in that department. But in the end, she wouldn't let him beat her down.

  She had been working too hard at the Service to find time to move out of her mother's condo. At least that was what she kept telling herself. There'd been no time to have a life. She was saving up-for something big, some kind of significant life change. She'd been calculating her net worth at least a couple of times a week, every week. She had all of twenty-four thousand dollars. That was everything. She was thirty-two now. She knew she was good-looking, almost beautiful-the way Dennis Kelleher was almost a good writer.

  Jezzie could have been a contender, she often thought to herself. She almost had it made. All she needed was one decent break, and she'd finally realized she had to make that break for herself. She was committed to it. She drank a Smithwich, really fine ale from the Old Sod. Smitty's had been her father's favorite brand of poison in the world. She nibbled a slice of fresh cheddar. Then she had a second ale in the shower, down dreary Hallway Number One at her mother's. Michael Goldberg's little face flashed at her again.

  She wouldn't allow any more flash images of the Goldberg boy to come. She wouldn't feel any guilt, even if she was bursting at the seams with it....

  The two children had been abducted during her watch. That was how everything had started... Stop the images! Stop everything for now. Irene Flanagan was coughing in her sleep. Her mother had worked thirty-nine years for C&P Telephone. She owned the condo in Crystal City. She was a killer bridge player. That was it for Irene.

  Jezzie's father had been a cop in D.C. for twenty years. The end game came for Terry Flanagan, on his beloved ob-a heart attack in crowded Union Station-with hundreds of complete strangers watching him die, nobody really caring. Anyway, that was the

  I way Jezzie always told the story I Jezzie decided, again, for the thousandth time, that she had to move out of her mother's place. No matter I what. No more larne excuses. Move it or lose it, girl. Move on, move on, move on with your life. She had completely lost track of how long she'd been drowning in the shower, holding the empty beer bottle at her side, rubbing the cool glass against her thigh ' 4 6 Despair junkie,“ she muttered to herself. ” That's really pitiful." She'd been in the shower long enough to finish the Smithwich, anyway, and get thirsty for another one. Thirsty for something. She'd successfully avoided thinking about the Goldberg boy for a while. But not really. How could she? Little Michael Goldberg. Jezzie Flanagan had gotten good at forgetting over the past few years, though-avoiding pain at all costs. It was dumb to be in pain, if you could avoid it. Of course, that also meant avoiding close relationships, avoiding even the proximity of love, avoiding most of the natural range of human emotions. Fair enough. It might be an acceptable trade-off. She'd found that she could survive without love in her life. It sounded terrible, but it was the truth. Yes, for the moment, especially the present moment, the trade-off was well worth it, Jezzie thought. It helped get her through each day and night of the crisis. It got her through until the cocktail hour, anyway.

  She coped okay. She had all the right tools for survival. If she could make it as a woman cop, she could make it at anything. The other agents in the Service said she had cojones. It was their idea of a compliment, so Jezzie took it as one. Besides, they were spot on-she did have brass cojones. And the times that she didn't, she was smart enough to fake it.

  At one o'clock in the morning, Jezzie Flanagan had to take the BMW bike for a ride; she had to get out of the suffocating, tiny apartment in Arlington.

  Had to,'had to, had to.

  Her mother must have heard the door opening out to the hallway. She called to Jezzie from her bedroom, maybe right out of her sleep.

  “Jezzie, where are you going so late? Jezzie? Jezzie, is that you?” “Just out, Mother. ” Christmas shopping at the mall, a cynical line bounced against the walls of her head. As usual, she kept it inside. She wished Christmas would go away. She dreaded the next day.

  Then she was gone into the night on the BMW K-1 -either escaping from, or chasing after, her personal nightmares, her devils.

  It was Christmas. Had Michael Goldberg died for our sins? Was that what this was about? she thought.

  She refused to let herself feel all the guilt. It was Christmas, and Christ had already died for.everyone's sins. Even Jezzie Flanagan's sins. She was feeling a little crazy. No, she was feeling a lot crazy, but she could take control. Always take control. That's what she would do now.

  She sang “Winter Wonderland”-at a hundred and ten miles an hour on the open highway heading out of Washington. She wasn't afraid of very much, but this time she was afraid.

  Along Came A Spider

  CHAPTER 19

  N SOME PARTS of Washington and the nearby suburbs of Maryland and Virginia, house-by-house searches were conducted on Christmas morning. Police blue and-whites toured the streets downtown. They loudly broadcasted over their PA systems:

  “We are looking for Maggie Rose Dunne. Maggie is nine years old. Maggie has long blond hair. Maggie is four feet three inches tall and weighs seventy-two pounds. A substantial reward is offered for any information leading
to Maggie's safe return. ”

  Inside the house, a half-dozen FBI agents worked more closely than ever with the Dunnes. Both Katherine

  Rose and Tom Dunne were terribly shaken by Michael's death. Katherine suddenly looked ten years older. We all waited for the next call from Soneji.

  It had occurred to me that Gary Soneji was going to call the Dunnes on Christmas Day. I was beginning to feel as if I knew him a little. I wanted him to call, wanted

  103 him to start moving, to make the first big mistake. I wanted to get him.

  At around eleven on Christmas morning, the Hostage Rescue Team was hurriedly called together in the Dunnes' formal sitting room - There were close to twenty of us now, all at the mercy of the FBI for vital information. The house was buzzing. What had the Son of Lindbergh done?

  We hadn't been given much information yet. We did know that a telegram had been delivered to the Dunne house. It wasn't being treated like any of the previous crank messages. It had to be Soneji.

  FBI agents had monopolized the house phones for the past fifteen minutes or so. Special Agent Scorse arrived back at the house just before eleven-thirty, probably coming from his own family's Christmas. Chief Pittman swept in five minutes later. The police commissioner had been called.

  “This is getting to be a real bad deal. Being left in the dark all the time.” Sampson slouched against the roorn's mantel. When Sampson slouches, he's only around six feet seven. “The Fibbers don't trust us. We trust them even less than we did at the get-go. ”

  “We didn't trust the FBI in the beginning,” I reminded him.

  “ You're right about that.” Sampson grinned. I could see myself reflected in his Wayfarers and I looked small. I wondered if the whole world looked tiny from Sampson's vantage point. “Our boy send the Western Union?” he asked me.

  “That's what the FBI thinks. It's probably just his way of saying Merry Christmas. Maybe he wants to be part of a family.”

  Sampson peered at me over the tops of his dark glasses. “Thank you, Dr. Freud.”

  Agent Scorse was working his way to the front of the room. Along the way, he picked up Chief Pittman. They shook hands. Good community relations at work.

  “We received another message that appears to be from Gary Soneji,” Scorse announced as soon as he was in front of us. He had an odd way of stretching his neck and twisting his head from side to side when he was nervous. He did that a few times as he began to speak.

  “I'll read it to you. It's addressed to the Dunnes.... 'Dear Katherine and Tom... How about ten million dollars? Two in cash. Rest in negotiable securities and diamonds. IN MIAMI BEACH!... M.R. doing fine so far. Trust me. TOMORROW'S big day... Have a merry... Son of L.' ”

  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.

  Along Came A Spider

  CHAPTER 20

  HE 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 Fountain bleu 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

  106 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 yannulke 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 lay the

  Miami Heat. p

  “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.” “Good luck,” I called to him. "It's Christmas. I hope you get a present

  I got into a bathing suit, and wandered out to the hotel pool. I've come to believe that the key to health is exercising, so I exercise every day, no matter where I am. I also do a lot of stretching, which can be done anytime, anywhere.

  The big swimming pool on the ocean side was closed, but that didn't stop me. Policemen are notorious for jaywalking, double-parking, rule-breaking in general. It's our only perk. Someone else had the same idea. Somebody was swimming laps so smoothly and quietly that I hadn't noticed until I was walking among the deck chairs, feeling the cool wetness under my feet.

  The swimmer was a woman, in a black or dark blue swimsuit. She was slender and athletic, with long arms and longer legs. She was a pretty sight on a not-so-pretty day. Her stroke looked effortless, and it was strong and rhythmic. It seemed her private place, and I didn't want to disturb it.

  When she made her turn, I saw that it was Jezzie Flanagan. That surprised me. It seemed out of character for the Secret Service supervisor.

  I finally climbed down very quietly into the opposite end of the pool and started my own laps. It was nothing beautiful or rhythmic, but my stroke gets the job done, and I can usually swim for a long time.

  I did thirty-five laps easily. I felt as if I was loosened up for the first time in a few days. The cobwebs were beginning to go away. Maybe I'd do another twenty, then call it a night. Or maybe have a Christmas beer with Sampson.

  When I stopped for a quick blow, Jezzie Flanagan was sitting right there on the edge of a lounger.

  A fluffy white hotel towel was thrown casually over her bare shoulders. She was pretty in the moonlight over Miami. Willowy, very blond, bright blue eyes staring at me.