Джеймс Паттерсон: Cross Kill

I went unhappily. When Sampson came to the door equally annoyed, I saw the split lip and bruising around his right cheek and smiled. He saw the swelling around both of my eyes and smiled back.

We’d both inflicted damage. We both had won. And that was that. End of the war, and start of the longest friendship of my life.

I took the Metro across town, and walked back to St. Anthony’s in the snow, trying to will myself not to remember Sampson in the ICU, more machine than man. But the image kept returning, and every time it did, I felt weaker, as if a part of me were dying.

There were still Metro police cars parked in front of the school, and two television trucks. I pulled the wool hat down and turned up the collar of my jacket. I didn’t want to talk to any reporters about this case. Ever.

I showed my badge to the patrolman standing inside the front door, and started back toward the cafeteria and kitchen.

Father Close appeared at his office door. He recognized me.

“Your partner?”

“There’s brain damage, but he’s alive,” I said.

“Another miracle, then,” Father Close said. “Sister Mary Elliott and Theresa Ball, the cook, they’re still alive as well. You saved them, Dr. Cross. If you hadn’t been there, I fear all three of them would be dead.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” I said. “But thank you for saying so.”

“Any idea when I can have my cafeteria and kitchen back?”

“I’ll ask the crime-scene specialists, but figure tomorrow your students bring a bag lunch and eat in their homerooms. When it’s a cop-involved shooting, the forensics folks are sticklers for detail.”

“As they should be,” Father Close said, thanked me again, and returned to his office.

I returned to the cafeteria and stood there a moment in the empty space, hearing voices in the kitchen, but recalling the first shots and how I’d reacted.

I went to the swinging industrial doors and did the same. We’d done it by the book, I decided, and pushed through them again.

I glanced at where the cook and nun had lain wounded, and then over where Sampson had lain dying before turning my attention to the pantry. This was where the book had been thrown out. In retrospect, we should have cleared the rest of the building before tending to the wounded. But it looked like femoral blood and...

Three crime-scene techs were still at work in the kitchen. Barbara Hatfield, an old friend, was in the pantry. She spotted me and came right over.

“How’s John, Alex?”

“Hanging on,” I said.

“Everyone’s shaken up,” Hatfield said. “And there’s something you should see, something I was going to call you about later.”

She led me into the pantry, floor-to-ceiling shelves loaded with foodstuffs and kitchen supplies, and a big shiny commercial freezer at the far end.

The words spray-painted in two lines across the face of the fridge stopped me dead in my tracks.

“Right?” Hatfield said. “I did the same thing.”

I was up at four o’clock the following morning, snuck out of bed without waking Bree, and on three hours of sleep went back to doing what I’d been doing. I got a cup of coffee and went up to the third floor, to my home office, where I had been going through my files on Gary Soneji.

I keep files on all the bad ones, but Soneji had the thickest file, six of them, in fact, all bulging. I’d left off at one in the morning with notes taken midway through the kidnapping of the US secretary of the treasury’s son, and the daughter of a famous actress.

I tried to focus, tried to re-master the details. But I yawned after two paragraphs, drank coffee, and thought of John Sampson.

But only briefly. I decided that sitting by his side helped him little. I was better off looking for the man who put a bullet through John’s head. So I read and reread, and noted dangling threads, abandoned lines of inquiry that Sampson and I had followed over the years but which had led nowhere.

After an hour, I found an old genealogy chart we and the US marshals put together on Soneji’s family after he escaped prison. Scanning it, I realized we’d let the marshals handle the pure fugitive hunt. I saw several names and relations I’d never talked to before, and wrote them down.

I ran their names through Google, and saw that two of them were still living at the addresses noted on the chart. How long had it been? Thirteen, fourteen years?

Then again, Nana Mama and I had lived in our house on 5th for more than thirty years. Americans do put down roots once in a while.

I glanced at my watch, saw it was past five, and wondered when I could try to make a few calls. No, I thought then, this kind of thing is best done in person. But the storm. I went to the window in the dormer of the office, pushed it up, and looked outside.

To my surprise, it was pouring rain and considerably warmer. Most of the snow was gone. That sealed it. I was going for a drive as soon as it was light enough to see.

Returning to my desk, I thought about going back downstairs to take a shower, but feared waking Bree. Her job as Metro’s chief of detectives was stressful enough without dealing with the additional pressure of a cop shooting.

I tried to go back to the Soneji files, but instead called up a picture on my computer. I’d taken it the afternoon before. It showed the fridge and the spray-painted words the shooter had left behind.

CROSS KILL

Long Live Soneji!

I had obviously been the target. And why not? Soneji hated me as much as I hated him.

Had Soneji expected Sampson to be with me? The two pistols he’d fired said yes. I closed my eyes and saw him there in the doorway, arms crossed, left gun aimed at me, right gun at Sampson.

Something bothered me. I turned back to the file, rummaged around until I confirmed my memory. Soneji was left-handed, which explained why he’d crossed his arms to shoot. He was aiming at me with his better hand. He’d wanted me dead no matter what happened to John.

It was why Soneji shot for center of mass, I decided, and wondered whether his shot at Sampson was misaimed, if he’d clipped John’s head in error.

Left-handed. It had to be Soneji. But it couldn’t be Soneji.

In frustration, I shut the computer off, grabbed my notes, and snuck back into the bedroom. I shut the bathroom door without making a peep. After showering and dressing, I tried to get out light-footed, but made a floorboard squeak.

“I’m up, quiet as a mouse,” Bree said.

“I’m going to New Jersey,” I said.

“What?” she said, sitting up in bed and turning on the light. “Why?”

“To talk to some of Soneji’s relatives, see if he’s been in touch.”

Bree shook her head. “He’s dead, Alex.”

“But what if the explosion I saw in the tunnel was caused by Soneji as he went by some bum living down there?” I said. “What if I didn’t see Soneji burn?”

“You never did DNA on the remains?”

“There was no need. I saw him die. I identified him, so no one checked.”

“Jesus, Alex,” Bree said. “Is that possible? What did the shooter’s face look like?”

“Like Soneji’s,” I said, frustrated.

“Well, did his jaw look like Soneji’s? His tongue? Did he say anything?”

“He didn’t say a word, but his face?” I frowned and thought about that. “I don’t know.”

“You said the light was good. You said you saw him clearly.”

Was the light that good? Feeling a little wobbly, I nevertheless closed my eyes, trying to bring more of the memory back and into sharper focus.

I saw Soneji standing there in the pantry doorway, arms crossed, chin tucked, and... looking directly at me. He shot at Sampson without even aiming. It was me he’d wanted to kill.