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Epub ISBN: 9781786530592
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Published by BookShots 2016
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All titles: copyright © James Patterson 2016
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This is a work of fiction. All characters and descriptions of events are the products of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons is entirely coincidental
First published by BookShots in 2016
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A LATE WINTER storm bore down on Washington, DC, that March morning, and more folks than usual were waiting in the cafeteria of St. Anthony of Padua Catholic School on Monroe Avenue in the northeast quadrant.
“If you need a jolt before you eat, coffee’s in those urns over there,” I called to the cafeteria line.
From behind a serving counter, my partner, John Sampson, said, “You want pancakes or eggs and sausage, you come see me first. Dry cereal, oatmeal, and toast at the end. Fruit, too.”
It was early, a quarter to seven, and we’d already seen twenty-five people come through the kitchen, mostly moms and kids from the surrounding neighborhood. By my count, another forty were waiting in the hallway, with more coming in from outside where the first flakes were falling.
It was all my ninety-something grandmother’s idea. She’d hit the DC Lottery Powerball the year before and wanted to make sure the unfortunate received some of her good fortune. She’d partnered with the church to see the hot-breakfast program started.
“Are there any doughnuts?” asked a little boy, who put me in mind of my younger son, Ali.
He was holding on to his mother, a devastatingly thin woman with rheumy eyes and a habit of scratching at her neck.
“No doughnuts today,” I said.
“What am I gonna eat?” he complained.
“Something that’s good for you for once,” his mom said. “Eggs, bacon, and toast. Not all that Cocoa Puffs sugar crap.”
I nodded. Mom looked like she was high on something, but she did know her nutrition.
“This sucks,” her son said. “I want a doughnut. I want two doughnuts!”
“Go on, there,” his mom said, and pushed him toward Sampson.
“Kind of overkill for a church cafeteria,” said the man who followed her. He was in his late twenties, and dressed in baggy jeans, Timberland boots, and a big gray snorkel jacket.
I realized he was talking to me and looked at him, puzzled.
“Bulletproof vest?” he said.
“Oh,” I said, and shrugged at the body armor beneath my shirt.
Sampson and I are major case detectives with the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department. Immediately after our shift in the soup kitchen, we were joining a team taking down a drug gang operating in the streets around St. Anthony’s. Members of the gang had been known to take free breakfasts at the school from time to time, so we’d decided to armor up. Just in case.
I wasn’t telling him that, though. I couldn’t identify him as a known gangster, but he looked the part.
“I’m up for a PT test end of next week,” I said. “Got to get used to the weight since I’ll be running three miles with it on.”
“That vest make you hotter or colder today?”
“Warmer. Always.”
“I need one of them,” he said, and shivered. “I’m from Miami, you know? I must have been crazy to want to come on up here.”
“Why did you come up here?” I asked.
“School. I’m a freshman at Howard.”
“You’re not on the meal program?”
“Barely making my tuition.”
I saw him in a whole new light then, and was about to say so when gunshots rang out and people began to scream.
DRAWING MY SERVICE pistol, I pushed against the fleeing crowd, hearing two more shots, and realizing they were coming from inside the kitchen behind Sampson. My partner had figured it out as well.
Sampson spun away from the eggs and bacon, drew his gun as I vaulted over the counter. We split and went to either side of the pair of swinging industrial kitchen doors. There were small portholes in both.
Ignoring the people still bolting from the cafeteria, I leaned forward and took a quick peek. Mixing bowls had spilled off the stainless-steel counters, throwing flour and eggs across the cement floor. Nothing moved, and I could detect no one inside.
Sampson took a longer look from the opposite angle. His face almost immediately screwed up.
“Two wounded,” he hissed. “The cook, Theresa, and a nun I’ve never seen before.”
“How bad?”
“There’s blood all over Theresa’s white apron. Looks like the nun’s hit in the leg. She’s sitting up against the stove with a big pool below her.”
“Femoral?”
Sampson took another look and said, “It’s a lot of blood.”
“Cover me,” I said. “I’m going in low to get them.”
Sampson nodded. I squatted down and threw my shoulder into the door, which swung away. Half expecting some unseen gunman to open fire, I rolled inside. I slid through the slurry of two dozen eggs and came to a stop on the floor between two prep counters.
Sampson came in with his weapon high, searching for a target.
But no one shot. No one moved. And there was no sound except the labored breathing of the cook and the nun who were to our left, on the other side of a counter, by a big industrial stove.
The nun’s eyes were open and bewildered. The cook’s head slumped but she was breathing.
I scrambled under the prep counter to the women and started tugging off my belt. The nun shrank from me when I reached for her.
“I’m a cop, Sister,” I said. “My name is Alex Cross. I need to put a tourniquet on your leg or you could die.”
She blinked, but then nodded.
“John?” I said, observing a serious gunshot wound to her lower thigh. A needle-thin jet of blood erupted with every heartbeat.
“Right here,” Sampson said behind me. “Just seeing what’s what.”
“Call it in,” I said, as I wrapped the belt around her upper thigh, cinching it tight. “We need two ambulances. Fast.”
The blood stopped squirting. I could hear my partner making the radio call.
The nun’s eyes fluttered and drifted toward shut.
“Sister,” I said. “What happened? Who shot you?”
Her eyes blinked open. She gaped at me, disoriented for a moment, before her attention strayed past me. Her eyes widened, and the skin of her cheek went taut with terror.
I snatched up my gun and spun around, raising the pistol. I saw Sampson with his back to me, radio to his ear, gun lowered, and then a door at the back of the kitchen. It had swung open, revealing a large pantry.
A man crouched in a fighting stance in the pantry doorway.
In his crossed arms he held two nickel-plated pistols, one aimed at Sampson and the other at me.
With all the training I’ve been lucky enough to receive over the years, you’d think I would have done the instinctual thing for a veteran cop facing an armed assailant, that I would have registered Man with gun! in my brain, and I would have shot him immediately.
But for a split second I didn’t listen to Man with a gun! because I was too stunned by the fact that I knew him, and that he was long, long dead.
IN THAT SAME instant, he fired both pistols. Traveling less than thirty feet, the bullet hit me so hard it slammed me backward. My head cracked off the concrete and everything went just this side of midnight, like I was swirling and draining down a black pipe, before I heard a third shot and then a fourth.
Something crashed close to me, and I fought my way toward the sound, toward consciousness, seeing the blackness give way, disjointed and incomplete, like a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces.
Five, maybe six seconds passed before I found more pieces and I knew who I was and what had happened. Two more seconds passed before I realized I’d taken the bullet square in the Kevlar that covered my chest. It felt like I’d taken a sledgehammer to my ribs and a swift kick to my head.
In the next instant, I grabbed my gun and looked for …
John Sampson sprawled on the floor by the sinks, his massive frame looking crumpled until he started twitching electrically, and I saw the head wound.
“No!” I shouted, becoming fully alert and stumbling over to his side.
Sampson’s eyes were rolled up in his head and quivering. I grabbed the radio on the floor beyond him, hit the transmitter, and said, “This is Detective Alex Cross. Ten-Zero-Zero. Repeat. Officer down. Monroe Avenue and 12th, Northeast. St. Anthony’s Catholic School kitchen. Multiple shots fired. Ten-Fifty-Twos needed immediately. Repeat. Multiple ambulances needed, and a Life Flight for officer with head wound!”
“We have ambulances and patrols on their way, Detective,” the dispatcher came back. “ETA twenty seconds. I’ll call Life Flight. Do you have the shooter?”
“No, damn it. Make the Life Flight call.”
The line went dead. I lowered the radio. Only then did I look back at the best friend I’ve ever had, the first kid I met after Nana Mama brought me up from South Carolina, the man I’d grown up with, the partner I’d relied on more times than I could count. The spasms subsided and Sampson’s eyes glazed over and he gasped.
“John,” I said, kneeling beside him and taking his hand. “Hold on now. Cavalry’s coming.”
He seemed not to hear, just stared vacantly past me toward the wall.
I started to cry. I couldn’t stop. I shook from head to toe, and then I wanted to shoot the man who’d done this. I wanted to shoot him twenty times, completely destroy the creature that had risen from the dead.
Sirens closed in on the school from six directions. I wiped at my tears, and then squeezed Sampson’s hand, before forcing myself to my feet and back out into the cafeteria, where the first patrol officers were charging in, followed by a pair of EMTs whose shoulders were flecked with melting snowflakes.
They got Sampson’s head immobilized, then put him on a board and then a gurney. He was under blankets and moving in less than six minutes. It was snowing hard outside. They waited inside the front door to the school for the helicopter to come, and put IV lines into his wrists.
Sampson went into another convulsion. The parish priest, Father Fred Close, came and gave my partner the last rites.
But my man was still hanging on when the helicopter came. In a daze I followed them out into a driving snowstorm. We had to shield our eyes to duck under the blinding propeller wash and get Sampson aboard.
“We’ll take it from here!” one EMT shouted at me.
“There’s not a chance I’m leaving his side,” I said, climbed in beside the pilot, and pulled on the extra helmet. “Let’s go.”
The pilot waited until they had the rear doors shut and the gurney strapped down before throttling up the helicopter. We began to rise, and it was only then that I saw through the swirling snow that crowds were forming beyond the barricades set up in a perimeter around the school and church complex.
We pivoted in the air and flew back up over 12th Street, rising above the crowd. I looked down through the spiraling snow and saw everyone ducking their heads from the helicopter wash. Everyone except for a single male face looking directly up at the Life Flight, not caring about the battering, stinging snow.
“That’s him!” I said.
“Detective?” the pilot said, his voice crackling over the radio in my helmet.
I tugged down the microphone, and said, “How do I talk to dispatch?”
The pilot leaned over, and flipped a switch.
“This is Detective Alex Cross,” I said. “Who’s the supervising detective heading to St. Anthony’s?”
“Your wife. Chief Stone.”
“Patch me through to her.”
Five seconds passed as we built speed and hurtled toward the hospital.
“Alex?” Bree said. “What’s happened?”
“John’s hit bad, Bree,” I said. “I’m with him. Close off that school from four blocks in every direction. Order a door-to-door search. I just saw the shooter on 12th, a block west of the school.”
“Description?”
“It’s Gary Soneji, Bree,” I said. “Get his picture off Google and send it to every cop in the area.”
There was silence on the line before Bree said sympathetically, “Alex, are you okay? Gary Soneji’s been dead for years.”
“If he’s dead, then I just saw a ghost.”
WE WERE BUFFETED by winds and faced near-whiteout conditions trying to land on the helipad atop George Washington Medical Center. In the end we put down in the parking lot by the ER entrance, where a team of nurses and doctors met us.
They hustled Sampson inside and got him attached to monitors while Dr. Christopher Kalhorn, a neurosurgeon, swabbed aside some of the blood and examined the head wounds.
The bullet had entered Sampson’s skull at a shallow angle about two inches above the bridge of his nose. It exited forward of his left temple. That second wound was about the size of a marble, but gaping and ragged, as if the bullet had been a hollow point that broke up and shattered going through bone.
“Let’s get him intubated, on Propofol, and into an ice bath and cooling helmet,” Kalhorn said. “Take his temp down to ninety-two, get him into a CT scanner, and then the OR. I’ll have a team waiting for him.”
The ER doctors and nurses sprang into action. In short order, they had a breathing tube down Sampson’s throat and were racing him away. Kalhorn turned to leave. I showed my badge and stopped him.
“That’s my brother,” I said. “What do I tell his wife?”
Dr. Kalhorn turned grim. “You tell her we’ll do everything possible to save him. And you tell her to pray. You, too, Detective.”
“What are his chances?”
“Pray,” he said, took off in a trot, and disappeared.
I was left standing in an empty treatment slot in the ER, looking down at the dark blood that stained the gauze pads they’d used to clean Sampson’s head.
“You can’t stay in here, Detective,” one of the nurses said sympathetically. “We need the space. Traffic accidents all over the city with this storm.”
I nodded, turned, and wandered away, wondering where to go, what to do.
I went out in the ER waiting area and saw twenty people in the seats. They stared at my pistol, at the blood on my shirt, and at the black hole where Soneji’s bullet had hit me. I didn’t care what they thought. I didn’t—
I heard the automatic doors whoosh open behind me.
A fearful voice cried out, “Alex?”
I swung around. Billie Sampson was standing there in pink hospital scrub pants and a down coat, shaking from head to toe from the cold and the threat of something far more bitter. “How bad is it?”
Billie’s a surgical nurse, so there was no point in being vague. I described the wound. Her hand flew to her mouth at first, but then she shook her head. “It’s bad. He’s lucky to be alive.”
I hugged her and said, “He’s a strong man. But he’s going to need your prayers. He’s going to need all our prayers.”
Billie’s strength gave way. She began to moan and sob into my chest, and I held her tighter. When I raised my head, the people in the waiting room were looking on in concern.
“Let’s get out of here,” I muttered, and led Billie out into the hallway and to the chapel.
We went inside, and thankfully it was empty. I got Billie calmed down enough to tell her what had happened at the school and afterward.
“They’ve put him into a chemical coma and are supercooling his body.”
“To reduce swelling and bleeding,” she said, nodding.
“And the neurosurgeons here are the best. He’s in their hands now.”
“And God’s,” Billie said, staring at the cross on the wall in the chapel before pulling away from me to go down on her knees.
I joined her and we held hands and begged our savior for mercy.
HOURS PASSED LIKE days as we waited outside the surgical unit. Bree showed up before noon.
“Anything?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“Billie,” Bree said, hugging her. “We’re going to find who did this to John. I promise you that.”
“You didn’t find Soneji?” I asked in disbelief. “How could he have gotten away if you’d cordoned off the area?”
My wife looked over at me, studied me. “Soneji’s dead, Alex. You all but killed him yourself.”
My mouth hung open, and I blinked several times. “You mean you didn’t send his picture out? You didn’t look for him?”
“We looked for someone who looked like Soneji,” Bree said defensively.
“No,” I said. “He was less than thirty feet from me, light shining down on his face. It was him.”
“Then explain how a man who all but disintegrated right before your eyes can surface more than a decade later,” Bree said.
“I can’t explain it,” I said. “I … maybe I need some coffee. Want some?”
They shook their heads, and I got up, heading toward the hospital cafeteria, seeing flashbacks from long ago.
I put Gary Soneji in prison after he went on a kidnapping and murder spree that threatened my family. Soneji escaped several years later, and turned to bomb building. He detonated several, killing multiple people before we spotted him in New York City. We chased Soneji into Grand Central Station, where we feared he’d explode another bomb. Instead he grabbed a baby.
At one point, Soneji held the baby up and screamed at me, “This doesn’t end here, Cross. I’m coming for you, even from the grave if I have to.”
Then he threw the infant at us. Someone caught her, but Soneji escaped into the vast abandoned tunnel system below Manhattan. We tracked him in there. Soneji attacked me in the darkness, and knocked me down and almost killed me before I was able to shoot him. The bullet shattered his jaw, ripped apart his tongue, and blew out the side of one cheek.
Soneji staggered away from me, was swallowed by the darkness. He must have pitched forward then and sprawled on the rocky tunnel floor. The impact set off a small bomb in his pocket. The tunnel exploded into white-hot flames.
When I got to him, Soneji was engulfed, curled up, and screaming. It lasted several seconds before he stopped. I stood there and watched Soneji burn. I saw him shrivel up and turn coal black.
But as sure as I was of that memory, I was also sure I’d seen Gary Soneji that morning, a split second before he tried to shoot me in the heart and blow Sampson’s head off.
I’m coming for you, even from the grave if I have to.
Soneji’s taunt echoed back to me after I’d gotten my coffee.
After several sips, I decided I had to assume Soneji was still dead. So I’d seen, what, a double? An impostor?
I supposed it was possible with plastic surgery, but the likeness had been so dead-on, from the thin reddish mustache to the wispy hair to the crazed, amused expression.
It was him, I thought. But how?
This doesn’t end here, Cross.
I saw Soneji so clearly then that I feared for my sanity.
This doesn’t end here, Cross.
I’m coming for you, even from the grave if I have to.
“ALEX?”
I startled, almost dropped my coffee, and saw Bree trotting down the hall toward me with a wary expression.
“He made it through the operation,” she said. “He’s in intensive care, and the doctor’s going to talk to Billie in a few moments.”
We both held Billie’s hands when Dr. Kalhorn finally emerged. He looked drained.
“How is he?” Billie asked, after introducing herself.
“Your husband’s a remarkable fighter,” Kalhorn said. “He died once on the table, but rallied. Besides the trauma of the bullet, there were bone and bullet fragments we had to deal with. Three quarters of an inch left and one of those fragments would have caught a major artery, and we’d be having a different conversation.”
“So he’s going to live?” Billie asked.
“I can’t promise you that,” Kalhorn said. “The next forty-eight to seventy-two hours will be the most critical time for him. He’s sustained a massive head injury, severe trauma to his upper-left temporal lobe. For now, we’re keeping him in a medically induced coma, and we will keep him that way until we see a significant drop in brain swelling.”
“If he comes out, what’s the prognosis, given the extent of the injury you saw?” I asked.
“I can’t tell you who he’ll be if and when he wakes up,” the neurosurgeon said. “That’s up to God.”
“Can we see him?” Bree asked.
“Give it a half hour,” Kalhorn said. “There’s a whirlwind around him at the moment. Lots of good people supporting him.”
“Thank you, Doctor,” Billie said, trying not to cry again. “For saving him.”
“It was an honor,” Kalhorn said, patted her on the arm, and smiled at Bree and me before returning to the ICU.
“Damage to his upper-left temporal lobe,” Billie said.
“He’s alive,” I said. “Let’s keep focused on that. Anything else, we’ll deal with down the road.”
Bree held her hand and said, “Alex is right. We’ve prayed him through surgery, and now we’ll pray he wakes up.”
But Billie still appeared uncertain forty minutes later when we donned surgical masks, gloves, and smocks and entered the room where Sampson lay.
You could barely see the slits of his eyes for the swelling. His head was wrapped in a turban of gauze, and there were so many tubes going into him, and so many monitors and devices beeping and clicking around him, that from the waist up he looked more machine than man.
“Oh, Jesus, John,” Billie said when she got to his side. “What have they done to you?”
Bree rubbed Billie’s back as tears wracked her again. I stayed only a few minutes, until I couldn’t take seeing Sampson like that anymore.
“I’ll be back,” I told them. “Tonight before I go home to sleep.”
“Where are you going?” Bree asked.
“To hunt Soneji,” I said. “It’s what John would want.”
“There’s a blizzard outside,” Bree said. “And Internal Affairs is going to want to hear your report on the shooting.”
“I don’t give a damn about IA right now,” I said, walking toward the door. “And a blizzard’s exactly the kind of chaotic situation that Gary Soneji lives for.”
Bree wasn’t happy, but sighed and gestured to a shopping bag she’d brought with her. “You’ll need your coat, hat, and gloves if you’re going Soneji-hunting.”
OUTSIDE A BLIZZARD wailed, a classic nor’easter with driving wet snow that was already eight inches deep. It takes only four inches to snarl Washington, DC, so completely that there’s talk of bringing in the National Guard.
Georgetown was a parking lot. I trudged to the Foggy Bottom Metro station, ignoring my freezing-cold feet, and reliving old times with big John Sampson. I met him within days of moving up to DC with my brothers after my mother died and my father, her killer, disappeared, presumed dead.
John lived with his mother and sister. His father had died in Vietnam. We were in the same fifth-grade class. He was ten years old and big, even then. But so was I.
It made for a natural rivalry, and we didn’t much care for each other at first. I was faster than him, which he did not like. He was stronger than me, which I did not like. The inevitable fight we had was a draw.
We were suspended for three days for fighting. Nana Mama marched me down to Sampson’s house to apologize to him and to his mother for throwing the first punch.
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.
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.
“What’s this all about?” Virginia Winslow asked, studying me now.
“There was a cop shooting in DC,” I said. “A man who fit Gary’s description was the shooter.”
I expected Soneji’s widow to respond with total skepticism. But instead she looked frightened and appalled again.
“Gary’s dead,” she said. “You killed him, didn’t you?”
“He killed himself,” I said. “Detonated the bomb he was carrying.”
Her attention flitted to the boards. “That’s not what the internet is saying.”
“What’s the internet saying?”
“That Gary’s alive,” she said. “Our son, Dylan, said he’s seen it online. Gary’s dead, isn’t he? Please tell me that.”