James Patterson - Cat & Mouse

I was almost sure that Gary Soneji was the Penn Station killer. I personally contacted Boston, Philly, and Baltimore and suggested tactfully that they pay attention to the train terminals. I passed on the same advice to Kyle Craig and the FBI.

“We’re going to head back to Washington,” I finally told Goldman and Groza. “Thanks for calling us in on this. This helps a lot.”

“I’ll call if there’s anything. You do the same, hey?” Manning Goldman put out his hand, and we shook. “I’m pretty sure we haven’t heard the last of Gary Soneji.”

I nodded. I was sure of it, too.

IN HIS mind, Gary Soneji lay down beside Charles Joseph Whitman on the roof of the University of Texas tower, circa 1966.

All in his goddamn incredible mind!!

He had been up there with Charlie Whitman many, many times before-ever since 1966, when the spree killer had become one of his boyhood idols. Over the years, other killers had captured his imagination, but none were like Charlie Whitman. Whitman was an American original, and there weren’t many of those left.

Let’s see now, Soneji ran down the names of his favorites: James Herberty, who had opened fire without warning inside the McDonald’s in San Ysidro, California. He had killed twenty-one, killed them at an even faster clip than they could dish out greasy hamburgers. Soneji had actually copycatted the McDonald’s shootings a few years earlier. That was when he’d first met Cross face to face.

Another of his personal favorites was postman Patrick Sherill, who’d blown away fourteen coworkers in Edmond, Oklahoma, and also probably started the postman-as-madman paranoia. More recently, he had admired the handiwork of Martin Bryant at the Port Arthur penal colony in Tasmania. Then there was Thomas Watt Hamilton, who invaded the mind space of virtually everyone on the planet after his shooting spree at a primary school in Dunblane, Scotland.

Gary Soneji desperately wanted to invade everybody’s mind space, to become a large, disturbing icon on the world’s Internet. He was going to do it, too. He had everything figured out.

Charlie Whitman was still his sentimental favorite, though. Whitman was the original, the “madman in the tower.” A Bad Boy down there in Texas.

God, how many times had he lain on that same tower, in the blazing August sun, along with Bad Boy Charlie?

All in his incredible mind!

Whitman had been a twenty-five-year-old student of architectural engineering at the University of Texas when he’d gone tapioca pudding. He’d brought an arsenal up onto the observation deck of the limestone tower that soared three hundred feet above the campus, and where he must have felt like God.

Just before he’d gone up in the clock tower, he had murdered his wife and mother. Whitman had made Charlie Starkweather look like a piker and a real chump that afternoon in Texas. The same could be said for Dickie Hickock and Perry Smith, the white-trash punks Truman Capote immortalized in his book In Cold Blood. Charles Whitman made those two look like crap, too.

Soneji never forgot the actual passage from the Time magazine story on the Texas tower shootings. He knew it word for word: “Like many mass murderers, Charles Whitman had been an exemplary boy, the kind that neighborhood mothers hold up as a model to their own recalcitrant youngsters. He was a Roman Catholic altar boy, and a newspaper delivery boy.”

Cool goddamn beans.

Another master of disguise, right. Nobody had known what Charlie was thinking, or what he was ultimately going to pull off.

He had carefully positioned himself under the “VI” numeral of the tower’s clock. Then Charles Whitman opened fire at 11:48 in the morning. Beside him on the six-foot runway that went around the tower were a machete, a Bowie knife, a 6mm Remington bolt-action rifle, a 35mm Remington, a Luger pistol, and a.357 Smith amp; Wesson revolver.

The local and state police fired thousands of rounds up onto the tower, almost shooting out the entire face of the clock-but it took over an hour and a half to bring an end to Charlie Whitman. The whole world marveled at his audacity, his unique outlook and perspective. The whole goddamn world took notice.

Someone was pounding on the door of Soneji’s hotel room! The sound brought him back to the here and now. He suddenly remembered where he was.

He was in New York City, in Room 419 of the Plaza, which he always used to read about as a kid. He had always fantasized about coming by train to New York and staying at the Plaza. Well, here he was.

“Who’s out there?” he called from the bed. He pulled a semi-automatic from under the covers. Aimed it at the peephole in the door.

“Maid service,” an accented Spanish female voice said. “Would you like your bed turned down?”

“No, I’m comfortable as is,” Soneji said and smiled to himself. Well actually, senorita, I’m preparing to make the NYPD look like the amateurs that cops usually are. You can forget the bed turndown and keep your chocolate mints, too. It’s too late to try and make up to me now.

On second thought-“Hey! You can bring me some of those chocolate mints. I like those little mints. I need a little sweet treat.”

Gary Soneji sat back against the headboard and continued to smile as the maid unlocked the door and entered. He thought about doing her, boffing the scaggy hotel maid, but he figured that wasn’t such a good idea. He wanted to spend one night at the Plaza. He’d been looking forward to it for years. It was worth the risk.

The thing that he loved the most, what made it so perfect, was that nobody had any idea where this was going.

Nobody would guess the end to this one.

Not Alex Cross, not anybody.

I VOWED I would not let Soneji wear me down this time. I wouldn’t let Soneji take possession of my soul again.

I managed to get home from New York in time for a late dinner with Nana and the kids. Damon, Jannie, and I cleaned up downstairs and then we set the table in the dining room. Keith Jarrett was playing ever so sweetly in the background. This was nice. This was the way it was supposed to be and there was a message in that for me.

“I’m so impressed, Daddy,” Jannie commented as we circled the table, putting out the “good” silverware, and also glasses and dinner plates I’d picked out years ago with my wife, Maria. “You went all the way to New York. You came all the way back again. You’re here for dinner. Very good, Daddy.”

She beamed and giggled and patted me on my arm as we worked. I was a good father tonight. Jannie approved. She bought my act completely.

I took a small formal bow. “Thank you, my darling daughter. Now this trip to New York I was on, about how far would you say that might be?”

“Kilometers or miles?” Damon broke in from the other side of the table, where he was folding napkins like fans, the way they do in fancy restaurants. Damon can be quite the little scene stealer.

“Either measurement would be fine,” I told him.

“Approximately two hundred forty-eight miles, one way,” Jannie answered. “Howzat?”

I opened my eyes as wide as I could, made a funny face, and let my eyes roll up into my forehead. I can still steal a scene or two myself. “Now, I’m impressed. Very good, Jannie.”

She took a little bow and then did a mock curtsy. “I asked Nana how far it was this morning,” she confessed. “Is that okay?”

“That’s cool,” Damon offered his thought on his sister’s moral code. “It’s call research, Velcro.”

“Yeah, that’s cool, Baby,” I said and we all laughed at her cleverness and sense of fun.

“Round-trip, it’s four hundred ninety-six miles,” Damon said.