James Patterson - Cat & Mouse

“How do you know that?” Kyle grabbed his arm and made eye contact. “How can you know for sure?”

“Soneji would have killed the two kids and the grandmother.”

ALEX CROSS’S blood was spattered everywhere in the corner bedroom. I could see where a bullet had exited through the window directly behind Cross’s bed. The glass fracture was clean and the radial lines even: The shooter had fired from a standing position, directly across the bed. I made my first notes, and also a quick sketch of the small, unadorned bedroom.

There was other “evidence.” A shoe print had been discovered near the cellar. The Metro police were working on a “walking picture” of the assailant. A white male had been spotted around midnight in the mostly black neighborhood. For a moment, I was almost glad I’d been rushed up here from Virginia. There was so much raw data to take in and process, almost too much. The mussed bed, where Cross had apparently slept on top of a hand-sewn quilt. Photos of his children on the walls.

Alex Cross had been moved to St. Anthony’s Hospital, but his bedroom was intact, just the way the mysterious assailant had left it.

Had he left the room like this on purpose? Was this his first message to us?

Of course it was.

I looked at the papers still out on Cross’s small work desk. They were notes on Gary Soneji. They had been left undisturbed by the assailant. Was that important?

Someone had taped a short poem to the wall over the desk. Wealth covers sins-the poor/Are naked as a pin.

Cross had been reading a book called Push, a novel. A piece of lined yellow paper was stuck inside, so I read it: Write the talented author about her wonderful book!

The time I spent in the room passed like a snap of the fingers, almost a mind fugue. I drank several cups of coffee. I remembered a line from the offbeat TV show Twin Peaks, “Damn fine cup of coffee, and hot!”

I had been inside Cross’s bedroom for almost an hour and a half, lost in forensic detail, hooked on the case in spite of myself. It was a nasty and disturbing puzzle, but a very intriguing one. Everything about the case was intense, and highly unusual.

I heard footsteps thumping outside in the hallway and looked up, my concentration interrupted. The bedroom door suddenly swung open and thudded against the wall.

Kyle Craig popped his head inside. He looked concerned. His face was white as chalk. Something had happened. “I have to go right now. Alex has gone into cardiac arrest!”

“I’LL GO with you,” I said to Kyle. I could tell that Kyle badly needed company. I wanted to see Alex Cross before he died, if that was what it had come to, and it sounded like it, felt like it to me.

On the ride over to St. Anthony’s I gently questioned Kyle about the extent of Dr. Cross’s injuries and the tenor of concern at the hospital. I also made a guess about the cause of the cardiac arrest.

“It sounds like it’s due to blood loss. There’s a lot of blood in the bedroom. It’s all over the sheets, the floor, the walls. Soneji was obsessed with blood, right? I heard that at Quantico before I left this morning.”

Kyle was quiet for a moment in the car, and then he asked the question I expected. I’m sometimes a step or two ahead in conversations.

“Do you ever miss it, not being a doctor anymore?”

I shook my head, frowned a little. “I really don’t. Something delicate and essential broke inside me when Isabella died. It will never be repaired, Kyle, at least I don’t think so. I couldn’t be a doctor now. I find it hard to believe in healing anymore.”

“I’m sorry,” he whispered solemnly.

“And I’m sorry about your friend. I’m sorry about Alex Cross,” I said to him.

In the spring of 1993, I had just graduated from Harvard Medical School. My life seemed to be spiraling upward at dizzying speed, when the woman I loved more than life itself was murdered in our apartment in Cambridge. Isabella Calais was my lover, and she was my best friend. She was one of the first victims of “Mr. Smith.”

After the murder, I never showed up at Massachusetts General, where I’d been accepted as an intern. I didn’t even contact them. I knew I would never practice medicine. In an odd way, my life had ended with Isabella’s, at least that was how I saw it.

Eighteen months after the murder, I was accepted into the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, what some wags call the “b.s. group.” It was what I wanted to do, what I needed to do. Once I had proven myself in the BSU, I asked to be put on the Mr. Smith case. My superiors fought the move at first, but finally they gave in.

“Maybe you’ll change your mind one day,” Kyle said. I had a feeling that he personally believed I would. Kyle likes to believe that everyone thinks as he does: with perfectly clear logic and a minimum of emotional baggage.

“I don’t think so,” I told him, without sounding argumentative, or even too firm on the point. “Who knows, though?”

“Maybe after you finally catch Smith,” he persisted with his point.

“Yes, maybe then,” I said.

“You don’t think Smith-” he started to say, but then backed off from the absurd notion that Mr. Smith could be involved with the attack here in Washington.

“No,” I said, “I do not Smith couldn’t have made this attack. They would all be dead and mutilated if he had.”

AT ST. Anthony ’s Hospital, I left Kyle and roamed about playing “Doc.” It didn’t feel too bad to be working in a hospital, contemplating what it might have been like. I tried to find out as much as I could about Alex Cross’s condition, and his chances of surviving his wounds.

The staff nurses and doctors were surprised that I understood so much about trauma and gunshot wounds, but no one pressed me as to how or why. They were too busy trying to save Alex Cross’s life. He had done pro bono work at the hospital for years and no one there could bear to let him die. Even the porters liked and respected Cross, calling him a “regular brother.”

I learned that the cardiac arrest had been caused by the loss of blood, as I had guessed. According to the doctor in charge, Alex Cross had gone into massive arrest minutes after he arrived at the ER. His blood pressure had dipped dangerously low: 60 over 0.

The staff’s prognosis was that he could probably die during the surgery necessary to repair his massive internal injuries, but that he would definitely die without the surgery. The more I heard, the more I was certain they were right. An old saying of my mother’s ran through my head, “May his body rise to heaven, before the devil finds out he’s dead.”

Kyle caught up with me in the busy and chaotic hallway on the fourth floor at St. Anthony’s. A lot of people working there knew Cross personally. They were all visibly upset and helpless to do anything about it. The hospital scene was raw and emotional, and I couldn’t help being swept up in the tragedy, even more so than I had been at the Cross house.

Kyle was still pale, his brow furrowed and punctuated by blisters of sweat. His eyes had a distant look as he gazed down the hospital corridor. “What did you find out? I know you’ve been poking around.” he said. He rightly suspected that I would have already conducted my own mini-investigation. He knew my style even my motto: Assume nothing, question everything.

“He’s in surgery now. He’s not expected to make it,” I gave him the bad news. Unsentimentally, the way I knew he wanted it. “That’s what the doctors believe. But what the hell do doctors know?” I added.

“Is that what you think?” Kyle asked.