Patterson, James - Alex Cross 1 - Along Came A Spider

At a little past eight, the Hostage Rescue Team was finally gathered together in a large, exquisitely decorated sitting room. Right away I sensed something was wrong. Something-was up for sure.

Jezzie Flanagan from the Secret Service had taken the floor. I remembered her from the morning before at the Day School. She stood in front of a working fireplace.

The mantel was strung with holly boughs, tiny white lights, and Christmas cards. Several nontraditional cards were obviously from friends of the Dunnes in California-photographs of decorated palm trees, of Santa's sleigh in the sky over Malibu. The Dunnes had recently moved to Washington, after Thomas Dunne took a job as director of the Red Cross.

Jezzie Flanagan looked more formal than she had at the school. She wore a loose gray skirt, with a black turtleneck sweater, and small gold earrings. She looked like a Washington lawyer, an attractive and very successful one.

“Soneji contacted us at midnight, last night. Then again around one o'clock. We didn't expect him to contact us so soon. None of us did,” she started things off.

“The initial phone call was made from the Arlington area. Soneji made it clear he had nothing to say about the children, except that both Maggie Dunne and Michael Goldberg are doing well. What else would he say? He wouldn't allow us to speak to either of the children, so we don't know that for sure. He sounded lucid and very much in control.”

“Has the voice tape been analyzed yet?” Pittman asked from his seat near the front. If Sampson and I had to be on the outside looking in, it was good to know Pittman was right there with us. Apparently, nobody was talking to him, either.

“It's being done,” Flanagan answered the question politely. She gave it just about the attention it deserved, I thought, but she avoided any condescension. She was real good at keeping control.

“How long was he actually on the line?” the Justice lawyer, Richard Galletta, asked next.

“Not very long, unfortunately. Thirty-four seconds to be exact,” Flanagan answered him with the same efficient courtesy. Cool, but pleasant enough. Smart.

I studied her. She was obviously comfortable being up in front of people. I'd heard that she'd gotten credit for some strong moves at Service in the past few years which meant that she took a lot of credit.

“He was long gone when we got to the pay phone in Arlington. We couldn't get that lucky so soon,” she said. She offered the hint of a smile, and I noticed that several of the men in the room smiled back at her.

“Why do you think he made the call?” the U.S. marshal asked from the back of the room. He was balding and paunchy, and smoking a pipe.

Flanagan sighed. “Please, let me go on. Unfortunately, there's more to it than the phone call. Soneji murdered FBI agent Roger Graham last night. It happened right outside Graham's house in Virginia, in the driveway. ”

It's difficult to shake up an experienced group like the one gathered at the Dunnes'. The news of Roger

Graham's murder did it: I know that it buckled my knees. Roger ' and I had shared some tight spaces together over the past few years. Whenever I worked with him, I'd always known my back would be covered. Not that I needed another reason to want to get Gary Soneji, but he'd given me a good one.

I wondered if Soneji had known that. And what it meant if he did. As a psychologist, the murder filled me with a sense of dread. It told me that Soneji was organized, confident enough to play with us, and willing to kill. It did not bode well for Maggie Rose Dunne and Michael Goldberg.

“He left a very explicit message for us,” Flanagan went on. “The message was typed on an index card, or what looked like a little library card. The message was for all of us. It said, 'Roger Grahamcracker thought he was a big deal. Well, he obviously wasn't. If you work on this case, you're in grave danger!'... The message was signed. He calls himself the Son of Lindbergh.”

Along Came A Spider

CHAPTER 15

HE PRESS COVERAGE of the kidnapping case got down and very dirty right away. A front-page headline in one of the morning papers said: SECRET SERVICE BODYGUARDS OUT FOR COFFEE. The press hadn't gotten the news about FBI agent Roger Graham yet. We were trying to sit on it.

The news gossip that morning was about how Secret Service agents Charles Chakely and Michael Devine had left their posts at the private school. Actually, they had gone out for breakfast during classes. It was pretty standard for this kind of duty. The coffee break, however, would be expensive. It would probably cost Chakely and Devine their jobs, possibly their careers. On another front, Pittman wasn't making much use of Sampson and me so far. This went on for two days. Left on our own, Sampson and I concentrated on the thin trail left by Gary Soneji. I followed up at area stores where someone might buy makeup and special effects. Sampson went to the Georgetown library, but no one

82 there had seen Soneji. They weren't even aware of the book thefts from their stacks.

Soneii had successfully disappeared. More disturbing, he seemed to have never existed before taking the job at Washington Day School.

Not surprisingly, he had falsified his employment records and faked several recommendations. He'd completed each step as expertly as any of us had seen in fraud or bunco cases. He'd left no trail.

Soneji had been brazen and supremely confident about getting his job at the school. A supposed previous employer (fictitious) had contacted Washington Day School and highly recommended Soneji, who was moving into the Washington area. More recommendations came via faxes from the University of Pennsylvania, both the undergraduate and graduate school programs. After two impressive interviews, the school wanted the personable and eager teacher so badly (and had been led to believe they were in competition with other D.C. private schools), they had simply hired him.

“And we never regretted hiring him-until now, of course,” the assistant headmaster admitted to me. “He was even better than advertised. If he wasn't really a math teacher before he came here, I'd be totally amazed. That would make him a superb actor indeed.”

Late afternoon on the third day, I got an assignment from Don Manning, one of Pittman's lieutenants. I was asked to size up and do an evaluation of Katherine Rose Dunne and her husband. I had tried to get some time with the Dunnes on my own, but had been denied.

1 met with Katherine and Thomas Dunne in the back T84 / Jarnes Pattergon yard of their house. A ten-foot-high graystone wall effectively kept out the outside world. So did a row of huge linden trees. Actually, the backyard consisted of several gardens separated by stone walls and a wandering stream. The gardens had their own plantsmen, a young couple from Potomac who apparently made a very nice living tending gardens around town. The plantsmen definitely made more money than I did.

Katherine Rose had thrown an old camel's hair steamer over eans and a V-necked sweater. She could probably get away with wearing anything she wanted, I thought as we all walked outside.

I'd read somewhere, recently, that Katherine Rose was still considered among the most beautiful women in the world. She had made only a handful of movies since she'd had Maggie Rose, but she'd lost none of her beauty, not so far as I could see. Not even in her time of terrible anxiety.

Her husband, Thomas Dunne, had been a prominent entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles when they met. He'd been involved with Greenpeace and Save the Earth out there. The family had moved to Washington after he became director of the American Red Cross.

“Have you been involved with other kidnappings, Detective?” Thomas Dunne wanted to know. He was trying to figure out where I fit in. Was I important? Could I help their little girl in any way? He was a little rude, but I guess I couldn't blame him under the circumstances.