James Patterson - Cat & Mouse

“He could be hostile at times, I’ll admit. His tongue was sharp, double-barbed. Gary had an air of superiority that ruffled some tail feathers.”

I kept at Walter Murphy, didn’t give him space to breathe. “But not when he was around you?” I asked. “He didn’t ruffle your feathers?”

The old man’s clear blue eyes returned from their trip into the woods. “No, we were always close. I know we were, even if the expensive shrinks say it wasn’t possible for Gary to feel love, to feel anything for anybody. I was never the target for any of his temper explosions.”

That was a fascinating revelation, but I sensed it was a lie. I glanced at Sampson. He was looking at me in a new way.

“These explosions at other people, were they ever premeditated?” I asked.

“Well, you know damn well he burned down his father and stepmother’s house. They were in it. So were his stepbrother and stepsister. He was supposed to be away at school. He was an honor student at the Peddie School in Hightstown. He was making friends there.”

“Did you ever meet any of the friends from Peddie?” The quickening tempo of my questions made Walter Murphy uneasy. Did he have his grandson’s temper?

A spark flared in the old man’s eyes. Unmistakable anger was there now. Maybe the real Walter Murphy was appearing.

“No, he never brought his friends from school around here. I suppose you’re suggesting that he didn’t have friends, that he just wanted to seem more normal than he was. Is that your two-bit analysis? Are you a forensic psychologist, by the way? Is that your game?”

“Trains?” I said.

I wanted to see where Walter Murphy would go with it. This was important, a test, a moment of truth and reckoning.

C’mon, old man. Trains?

He looked off into the woods again, still serene and beautiful. “Mmm. I’d forgotten, hadn’t thought of the trains in a while. Fiona’s son, her real son, had an expensive set of Lionel trains. Gary wasn’t allowed to even be in the same room with them. When he was ten or eleven, the train set disappeared. The whole damn set, gone.”

“What happened to the train set?”

Walter Murphy almost smiled. “They all knew Gary had taken it. Destroyed it, or maybe buried it somewhere. They spent an entire summer questioning him as to the train set’s whereabouts, but he never told them squat. They grounded him for the summer and he still never told.”

“It was his secret, his power over them,” I said, offering a little more “two-bit analysis.”

I was beginning to feel certain disturbing things about Gary and his grandfather. I was starting to know Soneji and, maybe in the process, getting closer to whoever had attacked the Cross house in Washington. Quantico was researching possible copycat theories. I liked the partner angle-except for the fact that Soneji had never had one before.

Who had crept into Cross’s house? And how?

“I was reading some of Dr. Cross’s detective logs on the way here,” I told the grandfather. “ Gary had a recurring nightmare. It took place here on your farm. Are you aware of it? Gary ’s nightmare at your farm?”

Walter Murphy shook his head. He was blinking his eyes, twitching. He knew something.

“I’d like your permission to do something here,” I finally said. “I’ll need two shovels. Picks, if you have them.”

“And if I say no?” he raised his voice suddenly. It was the first time he’d been openly uncooperative.

And then it struck me. The old man is acting, too. That’s why he understood so much about Gary. He looks off into the trees to set his mind and gain control for the next few lines he has to deliver. The grandfather is an actor! Just not as good as Gary.

“Then we’ll get a search warrant,” I told him. “Make no mistake. We will do the search anyway.”

“WHAT THE hell is this all about?” Sampson asked as we trudged from the ramshackle barn to a gray fieldstone fireplace that stood in an open clearing. “You think this is how we catch the Bug-Eyed Monster? Beating up on this old man?”

Both of us carried old metal shovels, and I had a rusted pickax also.

“I told you-data. I’m a scientist by training. Trust me for about half an hour. The old man is tougher than he looks.”

The stone fireplace had been built for family cookouts a long time ago, but apparently had not been used in recent years. Sumac and other vines were creeping over the fireplace, as if to make it disappear.

Just beyond the fireplace was a rotting, wooden-plank picnic table with splintered benches on either side. Pines, oaks, and sugar maples were everywhere.

“ Gary had a recurring dream. That’s what brought me here. This is where the dream takes place. Near the fireplace and the picnic table at Grandpa Walter’s farm. It’s quite horrible. The dream comes up several times in the notes Alex made on Soneji when he was inside Lorton Prison.”

“Where Gary should have been cooked, until he was crispy on the outside, slightly pink toward the center,” Sampson said.

I laughed at his dark humor. It was the first light moment I’d had in a long time and it felt good to share it with someone.

I picked out a spot midway between the old fireplace and a towering oak tree that canted toward the farmhouse. I drove the pickax into the ground, drove it hard and deep. Gary Soneji. His aura, his profound evil. His paternal granddaddy. More data.

“In his bizarre dreams,” I told Sampson, “ Gary committed a gruesome murder when he was a young boy. He may have buried the victim out here. He wasn’t sure himself. He felt he couldn’t separate dreams from reality sometimes. Let’s spend a little time searching for Soneji’s ancient burial ground. Maybe we’re about to enter Gary ’s earliest nightmare.”

“Maybe I don’t want to enter Gary Soneji’s earliest nightmare,” Sampson said laughing again. The tension between us was definitely breaking some. This was better.

I lifted the pickax high and swung down with great force. I repeated the action again and again, until I found a smooth, comfortable, working rhythm.

Sampson looked surprised as he watched me handle the pick. “You’re done this kind of fieldwork before, boy,” he said, and began to dig at my side.

“Yes, I lived on a farm in El Toro, California. My father, his father, and my grandfather’s were all small-town doctors. But they continued to live on our family horse farm. I was supposed to go back there to set up practice, but then I never finished my medical training.”

The two of us were hard at work now. Good, honest work: looking for old bodies, searching for ghosts from Gary Soneji’s past. Trying to goad Grandfather Murphy.

We took off our shirts, and soon both of us were covered with sweat and dust.

“This was like a gentleman’s farm? Back in California? The one you lived on as a boy?”

I snorted out a laugh as I pictured the gentleman’s farm. “It was a very small farm. We had to struggle to keep it going. My family didn’t believe a doctor should get rich taking care of other people. ‘You shouldn’t take a profit from other people’s misery,’ my father said. He still believes that.”

“Huh. So your whole family’s weird?”

“That’s reasonably accurate portrait.”

AS I continued to dig in Walter Murphy’s yard, I thought back to our farm in Southern California. I could still vividly see the large red barn and two small corrals.

When I lived there we owned six horses. Two were breeding stallions, Fadl and Rithsar. Every morning I took rake, pitchfork, and wheelbarrow, and I cleared the stalls; and then made my trip to the manure pile. I put down lime and straw, washed out and refilled the water buckets, made minor repairs. Every single morning of my youth. So yes, I knew how to handle a shovel and pickax.