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

"A lot of what he's told us so far suggests a severe dissociative reaction. He appears to have suffered a pretty horrible childhood. There was physical abuse, maybe sexual abuse as well. He may have begun to split off his psyche to avoid pain and fear back then. I'm not saying that he's a multiple, but it's a possibility. He had the kind of childhood that could produce such a rare psychosis.

Dr. Campbell picked up. “Dr. Cross and I have talked about the possibility that Soneji/Murphy undergoes 'fugue states.' Psychotic episodes that relate to both amnesia and hysteria. He talks about 'lost days,' 'lost weekends,' even 'lost weeks.' In such a fugue state, a patient can wake in a strange place and have no idea how he got there, or what he had been doing for a prolonged period. In some cases, the patients have two separate personalities, often antithetical personalities. This can also happen in temporal lobe epilepsy.”

“What are you guys, a tag team?” Walsh grumped from his seat. “Lobe epilepsy. Give me a break, Marion. The more youfool around like this, the better his chance of getting off in a courtroom,” Walsh warned.

“I'm not fooling around,” I said to Walsh. “Not my style. ”

The D.A. spoke up, intervening between Walsh and me. James Dowd was a serious man in his late thirties or early forties. If Dowd got to try the case of Soneji/ Murphy, he would soon be an extremely famous attorney.

“Isn't there a possibility that he's created this apparently psychotic condition for our benefit?” Dowd asked. “That he's a psychopath, and nothing more than that?”

I glanced around the table before answering his questions. Dowd clearly wanted to hear our answers; he wanted to learn the truth. The representative from the governor's office seemed skeptical and unconvinced, but open-minded. The attorney general's group was neutral so far. Dr. Walsh had already heard enough from me and Campbell.

“That's a definite possibility,” I said. “It's one of the reasons I'd like to try the regressive hypnosis. For one thing, we can see if his stories remain consistent.”

“If he's susceptible to hypnosis,” Walsh interjected.

“And if you can tell whether or not he'd been hypnotized. ”

“I suspect that he is susceptible, ” I answered quickly.

.,And I have my doubts that he is. Frankly, I have MY doubts about you, Cross. I don.'t care that he likes to talk to you. Ps chiatry isn't about liking your doctor."

“What he likes is that I listen.” I glared across the table at Walsh. It took a lot of self-control not to jump on the officious bastard.

“What are the other reasons for hypnotizing the prisoner?” the govemor's representative spoke up.

“Frankly, we don't know enough about what he's done during these fugue states,” Dr. Campbell said.

Neither does he. Neither do his wife and family, whom I've interviewed several times now."

I added, “We're also not sure how many personalities might be operating.... The other reason for hypnosis”-l paused to let what I was about to say sink in“-is that I do want to ask him about Maggie Rose Dunne. I want to try and find out what he did with Maggie Rose.”

“Well, we've heard your arguments, Dr. Cross. Thank you for your time and efforts here, ” James Dowd said at the end of the presentation. “We'll have to let you know.”

I decided to take things into my own hands that evening.

I called a reporter I knew and trusted at the Post. I asked him to meet me at Pappy's Diner on the edge of Southeast. Pappy's was one place where we would ver be spotted, and I didn't want anyone to know

'd met. For both our sakes.

Lee Kovel was a graying yuppie, and kind of an asshole, but I liked him. Lee wore his emotions on his sleeve: his petty jealousies, his bitterness about the sad state of journalism, his bleeding-heart tendencies, his occasional arch-conservative traits. It was all out there for the world to see and react to.

Lee plopped down next to me at the counter. He was wearing a gray suit and light blue running shoes. Pappy's draws a real nice cross-section: black, Hispanic, Korean, working-class whites who service Southeast in some way or other. But no one anything like Lee.

“I stick out like a sore thumb in here,” he complained. “I'm way too cool for this place.” “Now who's going to see you here? Bob Woodward? Evans and Novak?”

“Very funny, Alex. What's on your mind? Why didn't you call me when this story was hot? Before this sucker got caught?”

“Would you give this man some hot, very black coffee,” I said to the counterman. “I need to wake him up. I turned back to Lee. ” I'm going to hypnotize Soneji inside the prison. I'm going looking for Maggie Rose Dunne in his subconscious. You can have the exclusive. But you owe me one," I told Lee.

Lee Kovel almost spit out his reaction. "Bullshit! Let's hear it all, Alex. I think you left out some parts.

“Right. I'm working to get permission to hypnotize Soneji. There are a lot of petty politics involved. If you leak the story in the Post, I think it will happen. The theory of self-fulfilling prophecies. I'll get permission. Then you get an exclusive.”

The coffee came in a beautiful old diner cup. Light brown with a thin blue line under the rim. Lee slurped the java, thoughtful as hell. He seemed amused that I was trying to manipulate the established order in D.C. It appealed to his bleeding heart. “And if you do hear something from Gary Soneji, I'll be the second to know. After yourself, Alex.”

“You drive a hard bargain, but yeah. That'll be our deal. Think about it, Lee. It's for a worthy cause. Finding out about Maggie Rose, not to mention your ca reer. ”

I left Kovel to finish his Pappy's coffee and begin to shape his story. Apparently, that's what he did. It appeared in the morning edition of the Post.

Nana Mama is the first one up at our house every day. Probably, she's the fitst one up in the entire universe. That's what Sampson and I used to believe when we were ten or eleven, and she was the assistant principal of the Garfield North Junior High School.

Whether I wake up at seven, or six, or five, I always come down to the kitchen to find a kght blazing and Nana already eating breakfast, or firing it up over her stove. Most mornings, it is the very same breakfast. A single poached egg; one corn muffin, buttered; weak tea with cream and double sugar.

She will also have begun to make breakfast for the rest of us, and she recognizes the variety of our palates. The house menu might include pancakes and either pork sausage or bacon; melon in season; grits, or oatmeal, or farina, with a thick pat of butter and a generous mound of sugar on top; eggs in every shape and form.

Occasionally a grape jelly omelet appears, the only dish of hers that I don't care for. Nana does the omelet too brown on the outside, and, as I've told her, eggs and jelly make about as much sense to me as pancakes and ketchup. Nana disagrees, though she never eats the jelly omelets herself. The kids love them.

Nana sat at the kitchen table on that morning in March. She was reading the Washington Post, which happens to be delivered by a man named Washington. Mr. Washington eats breakfast with Nana every Monday morning. This was a Wednesday, and an important day for the investigation.

Everything about the breakfast scene was so familiar, and yet I was startled as I entered the kitchen. One more time, I was made aware of how much the kidnapping had entered into our private lives, the lives of my family members.

The headline of the Washington Post read:

SONEJI/MURPHY

TO BE HYPNOTIZED

Attached to the story I could see photographs of both Soneji/Murphy and me. I'd heard the news late the night before. I had called Lee Kovel to give him his exclusive because of our deal.