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

'Okay, Alex.“ She kept her smile turned on. ”Just 't let this newspaper nonsense get you down. Nobody believes the funny pages, anyway. I've got to go. I'll take a rain check on the coffee." Jezzie Flanagan opened the front door and started to leave. She waved to the kids as the door was closing behind her.

“So long, Big Daddy,” she said to me and grinned.

Along Came A Spider

CHAPTER 31

FRER JEZZIE FLANAGAN had finished her business in Southeast, she drove out to the farm where Gary Soneji had buried the two children. She had been there twice before, but a lot of things still bothered her about the farm in Maryland. She was obsessive as hell, anyway. She figured that nobody wanted to catch Soneji any more than she did.

Jezzie ignored the crime scene signage and sped down the rutted dirt road to a cluster of buildings in disrepair. She distinctly remembered everything about the place. There was the main farmhouse, a garage for machinery, and the barn where the kids had been kept.

Why this place? she asked herself. Why here, Soneji? What should it tell her about who he really is?

Jezzie Flanagan had been a whiz-kid investigator since the day she'd first entered the Secret Service. She'd come there with an honors law degree from the University of Virginia, and Treasury had tried to steer her toward the FBI, where nearly half the agents had

173 law degrees. But Jezzie had surveyed the situation and chosen the Service, anyway, where the law degree would make her stand out more. She'd worked eightyand hundred-hour weeks from the beginning, right up to the present. She'd been a shooting star for one reason: she was smarter and tougher than any of the men she worked with, or the ones she worked for. She was more driven. But Jezzie had known from the beginning that, if she ever made a big mistake., her starship would crash. She'd known it. There was only one solution. She had to find Gary Soneji, somehow. She had to be the one.

She walked the farmhouse grounds until darkness fell. Then she walked them again with a flashlight. Jezzie scribbled down notes, trying to find some missing connection. Maybe it did have something to do with the old Lindbergh case, the so-called crime of the century from the 1930s.

Son of Lindbergh?

The Lindbergh place in Hopewell, New Jersey, had been a farmhouse, too.

Baby Lindbergh had been buried not far from the kidnap site.

Bruno Hauptmann, the Lindbergh kidnapper, had beenfrom New York City. Could the kidnapper in Washington be some kind of distant relative? Could he be from somewhere near Hopewell? Maybe Princeton? How could nothing have turned up on Soneji so far:'

Before she left the farm, Jezzie sat in her town car. She turned on the engine, the heat, and just sat there. Obsessing. Lost in her thoughts.

Where was Gary Soneji? How had he disappeared?

Nobody can just disappear nowadays. No one is that smart.

Then she thought about Maggie Rose Dunne and “Shrimpie” Goldberg, and tears began to roll down her cheeks. She couldn't stop sobbing. That was the real reason she'd come out to the farmhouse, she knew. Jezzie Flanagan had to let herself cry.

Along Came A Spider

CHAPTER 32

MAGGIE ROSE was in complete darkness.

She didn't know how long she had been there.

A long, long time, though. She couldn't remember when she'd eaten last. Or when she'd seen or talked to anybody, except the voices inside her head.

She wished somebody would come right now. She held that thought in her head-for hours. She even wished the old woman would come back and scream at her. She'd begun to wonder why she was being punished; what she'd done that was so wrong. Had she been bad, and deserved all this to happen to her? She was starting to think that she must have been a bad person for all these terrible things to be happening.

She couldn't cry again. Not even if she wanted to. She couldn't cry anymore.

A lot of the time, she thought she must be dead. Maggie Rose almost didn't feel things now. Then she would pinch herself really hard. Even bite herself. One time she bit her finger until it bled. She tasted her own

176 warm blood and it was weirdly wonderful. Her time in the dark seemed to go on forever. The darkness was a tiny room like a closet. She Suddenly, Maggie Rose heard voices outside. She couldn't hear well enough to understand what was being said, but there were definitely voices. The old woman? Must be. Maggie Rose wanted to call out, but she was frightened of the old woman. Her awful screaming, her threats, her scratchy voice that was worse than horror movies her mother didn't even like her to watch. Worse than Freddy Krueger by miles. The voices stopped. She couldn't hear anything, not even when she pressed her ear against the closet door. They had gone away. They were leaving her in there forever.

She tried to cry, but no tears would come. Then Maggie Rose started to scream. The door suddenly burst open and she was blinded by the most beautiful light.

Along Came A Spider

CHAPTER 33

N THE NIGHT OF JANUARY I 1, Gary Murphy was cozy and safe in his basement. Nobody knew that he was down there, but if snoopy Missy happened to open the basement door, he'd just flick on the lamp at his workbench. He was thinking everything through. One more time for good measure.

He was becoming nicely obsessed with murdering Missy and Roni, but he thought that he wouldn't do it just yet. Still, the fantasy was rich. To murder your own family had a certain homespun style to it It wasn't very imaginative, but the effect would be neat: the icy chill racing through the serene, dippity-doo suburban community. All the other families doing the most ironic thing-locking their doors, locking themselves in together.

Around midnight he realized that his little family had gone to bed without him. No one had even bothered to call down to him. They didn't care. A hollow roar was

178 starting inside his head. He needed about a half-dozen Nuprins to stop the white noise for a while.

Maybe he would torch the perfect little house on Central Avenue. Torching houses was good for the soul. He'd done it before; he'd do it again. God, his whole skull ached as if somebody'd been hitting it with a ball peen hammer. Was something physically the matter with him? Was it possible he was going mad this time?

He tried to think about the Lone Eagle@arles Lindbergh. That didn't work, either. In his mind, he revisited the farmhouse in Hopewell Junction. No good. That mind-trip was getting old, too.

He was world famous himself, for Chrissakes. He was famous now. Everybody in the world knew about him. He was a media star all over Planet Dearth.

. He finally left the cellar, and then the house in Wilmington. It was just past five-thirty in the morning. As he walked outside to the car, he felt like an animal, suddenly on the loose.

He drove back to D.C. There was more work to do there. He didn't want his public to be disappointed, did he?

He thought he had a treat for everyone now. Don't get comfortable with me!

Around eleven that morning, Tuesday, Gary Murphy lightly tapped the front doorbell of a well-kept brick townhouse on the edge of Capitol Hill. Bing-bong went a polite door chime inside.

The sheer danger of the situation, of his being in Washington again, gave him a nice chill. This was a lot better than being in hiding. He felt alive again, he could breathe, he had his own space.

Vivian Kim kept the lock chain on, but she opened the door about a foot. She'd seen the familiar uniform of Washington's PEPCO public utilities service through the peephole.

Pretty lady, Gary remembered from the Washington Day School. Long black braids. Cute little upturned nose. She clearly didn't recognize him as a blond. No mustache. Little flesh off the cheeks and chin.