Джеймс Паттерсон - Cross Kill

What about his jaw? I replayed memory again and again before I saw it.

“There was something there,” I said, running my fingers along my left jawline.

“A shadow?” Bree said.

I shook my head. “More like a scar.”

Three hours later, I’d left I-95 for Route 29, which parallels the Delaware River. Heading upstream, I soon realized that I was not far from East Amwell Township, where the aviator Charles Lindbergh’s baby was kidnapped in 1932.

Gary Soneji had been obsessed with the Lindbergh case. He’d studied it in preparing for the kidnappings of the treasury secretary’s son, the late Michael Goldberg, and Maggie Rose Dunne, the daughter of a famous actress.

I’d noticed before on a map the proximity of East Amwell to Rosemont, where Soneji grew up. But it wasn’t until I pulled through the tiny unincorporated settlement that I realized Soneji had spent his early life less than five miles from the Lindbergh kidnapping site.

Rosemont itself was quaint and leafy, with rock walls giving way to sopping green fields.

I tried to imagine Soneji as a boy in this rural setting, tried to see him discovering the crime of the century. He wouldn’t have cared much for the police detectives who’d worked the Lindbergh case. No, Soneji would have obsessed on the information surrounding Bruno Hauptmann, the career criminal convicted and executed for taking the toddler and caving in his skull.

My mind was flooded with memories of going into Soneji’s apartment for the first time, seeing what was essentially a shrine to Hauptmann and the Lindbergh case. In writings we found back then, Soneji had fantasized about being Hauptmann in the days just before the killer was caught, when the whole world was fixated and speculating on the mystery he’d set in motion.

“Audacious criminals change history,” Soneji wrote. “Audacious criminals are remembered long after they’re gone, which is more than can be said of the detectives who chase them.”

I found the address on the Rosemont Ringoes Road, and pulled over on the shoulder beyond the drive. The storm had ebbed to sprinkles when I climbed out in front of a gray-and-white clapboard cottage set back in pines.

The yard was sparse and littered with wet pine needles. The front stoop was cracked and listed to one side, so I had to hold on to the iron railing in order to ring the bell.

A few moments later, one of the curtains fluttered. A few moments after that, the door swung open, revealing a bald man in his seventies. He leaned over a walker and had an oxygen line running into his nose.

“Peter Soneji?”

“What do you want?”

“I’m Alex Cross. I’m a—”

“I know who you are,” Gary Soneji’s father snapped icily. “My son’s killer.”

“He blew himself up.”

“So you’ve said.”

“Can I talk to you, sir?”

“Sir?” Peter Soneji said and laughed caustically. “Now it’s ‘sir’?”

“Far as I know, you never had anything to do with your son’s criminal career,” I said.

“Tell that to the reporters who’ve shown up at my door over the years,” Soneji’s father said. “The things they’ve accused me of. Father to a monster.”

“I’m not accusing you of anything, Mr. Soneji, ” I said. “I’m simply looking for your take on a few loose ends.”

“With everything on the internet about Gary, you’d think there’d be no loose ends.”

“These are questions from my personal files,” I said.

Soneji’s father gave me a long, considered look before saying, “Leave it alone, Detective. Gary’s long dead. Far as I’m concerned, good riddance.”

He tried to shut the door in my face, but I stopped him.

“I can call the sheriff,” Peter Soneji protested.

“Just one question and then I’ll leave,” I said. “How did Gary become obsessed with the Lindbergh kidnapping?”

Two hours later as I drove through the outskirts of Crumpton, Maryland, I was still wrestling with the answer Soneji’s father had given me. It seemed to offer new insight into his son, but I still couldn’t explain how or why yet.

I found the second address. The farmhouse had once been a cheery yellow, but the paint was peeling and streaked with dark mold. Every window was encased in the kind of iron barring you see in big cities.

As I walked across the front yard toward the porch, I stirred up several pigeons, flushing them from the dead weeds. I heard a weird voice talking somewhere behind the house.

The porch was dominated by several old machine tools, lathes and such, that I had to step around in order to knock at a steel door with triple dead bolts.

I knocked a second time, and was thinking I should go around the house where I’d heard the odd voice. But then the dead bolts were thrown one by one.

The door opened, revealing a dark-haired woman in her forties, with a sharp nose and dull brown eyes. She wore a grease-stained one-piece Carhartt canvas coverall, and carried at port arms an AR-style rifle with a big banana clip.

“Salesman, you are standing on my property uninvited,” she said. “I have ample cause to shoot you where you stand.”

I showed her my badge and ID, said, “I’m not a salesman. I’m a cop. I should have called ahead, but I didn’t have a number.”

Instead of calming her down, that only got her more agitated. “What are the police doing at sweet Ginny Winslow’s door? Looking to persecute a gun lover?”

“I just want to ask you a few questions, Mrs. Soneji,” I said.

Soneji’s widow flinched at the name, and turned spitting mad. “My name’s been legally changed to Virginia Winslow going on seven years now, and I still can’t get the stench of Gary off my skin. What’s your name? Who are you with?”

“Alex Cross,” I said. “With DC...”

She hardened, said, “I know you now. I remember you from TV.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You never came to talk with me. Just them US marshals. Like I didn’t even exist.”

“I’m here to talk now,” I said.

“Ten years too late. Get the hell off my property before I embrace my Second Amendment rights and—”

“I saw Gary’s father this morning,” I said. “He told me how Gary’s obsession with the Lindbergh kidnapping began.”

She knitted her brows. “How’s that?”

“Gary’s dad said when Gary was eight they were in a used book store, and while his father was wandering in the stacks, his son found a tattered copy of True Detective Mysteries, a crime magazine from the 1930s, and sat down to read it.”

Finger still on the trigger of her semiautomatic rifle, Virginia Winslow shrugged. “So what?”

“When Mr. Soneji found Gary, his son was sitting on the floor in the bookstore, the magazine in his lap, and staring in fascination at a picture from the Lindbergh baby’s autopsy that showed the head wound in lurid detail.”

She stared at me with her jaw slack, as if remembering something that frightened and appalled her.

“What is it?” I asked.

Soneji’s widow hardened again. “Nothing. Doesn’t surprise me. I used to catch him looking at autopsy pictures. He was always saying he was going to write a book and needed to look at them for research.”

“You didn’t believe him?”

“I believed him until my brother Charles noticed that Gary was always volunteering to gut deer they killed,” she said. “Charles told me Gary liked to put his hands in the warm innards, said he liked the feeling, and told me how Gary’d get all bright and glowing when he was doing it.”

“I didn’t know that about Gary, either,” I said.