“Why is he mad? Do you know? What is it that gets Soneji angry?”
“I think it's because... things got ruined on him. The police were unbelievably lucky. His plan to be famous got screwed up. Totally messed up. Now he feels like Bruno Richard Hauptmann. Just another loser. ” This was news. He hadn't talked about the actual kidnapping before. I was oblivious to everything in the courtroom. My eyes stayed on Gary Soneji/Murphy.
I tried to sound as casual and nonthreatening as I could. Easy does it. Nice and slow. This was like walking on the edge of a chasm. I could help him, or we could both fall in. “What went wrong with Soneji's plan?”
“Everything that could go wrong,” he said. He was still Gary Murphy. I could see that. He had not transferred into the Soneji personality. But Gary Murphy knew about Gary Soneji's activities; under hypnosis, Gary Murphy knew Soneji's thoughts.
The courtroom remained silent and very still. There wasn't a flicker of motion anywhere in my peripheral vision.
More details about the kidnapping came from Gary“He checked on the Goldberg boy, and the boy was dead. His face was all blue. Must have been too much of the barbiturate.... Soneji couldn't believe that he'd made a mistake. He'd been so thorough and careful. He'd talked to anesthesiologists beforehand.”
I asked a key question: “How did the boy's body get so bruised and beaten? What exactly happened to the Goldberg boy?” “Soneji went a little crazy. He couldn't believe his bad luck. He hit the Goldberg boy's body over and over with a heavy shovel.”
The way he was talking about Soneji was extremely credible so far. It was possible that he was a multiplepersonality victim after all. That would change everything about the trial, and possibly the verdict.
“What shovel was that?” I asked.
He was talking faster and faster now. “The shovel he used to dig them up. They were buried in the barn. They had an air supply for a couple of days. It was like a fallout shelter, you see. The air system worked beautifully; everything did. Soneji invented it himself. lie built it himself.” My pulse was hammering. My throat was very, very dry. “What about the little girl? What about Maggie Rose?” I asked him.
“She was fine. Soneji gave her Valium the second time. To put her back to sleep. She was terrified, screaming-because it was so dark under the ground. Pitch-black. But it wasn't that bad. Soneji had seen worse himself. The basement.”
I proceeded very cautiously at this point. I didn't want to lose him here. What about the basement? I'd try to get back to the basement later.
“Where is Maggie Rose now?” I asked Gary Mur phy “Don't know,” he said without hesitation.
Not, she's dead. Not, she's alive.... Don't know. Why would he block that information? Because he knew I wanted it? Because everyone in that courtroom wanted to know the fate of Maggie Rose Dunne? “Soneji went back to get her,” he said next. “The FBI had agreed to the ten-million ransom. Everything all set. But she was gone! Maggie Rose wasn't when Soneji came back again. She was gone! Somebody else had taken the girl out of there!”
The spectators in the courtroom were no longer quiet. But I still kept my concentration on Gary.
Judge Kaplan was reluctant to bang her gavel and ask for order. She did stand up. She motioned for quiet, but it was a useless gesture. Somebody else had taken the girl out of there. Somebody else had the girl now.
I rushed in a few more questions before the room went completely out of control, and maybe Soneji/Murphy with it. My voice remained soft, surprisingly calm under the circumstances.
“Did you dig her up, Gary? Did you rescue the little girl from Soneii? Do you know where Maggie Rose is now?” I asked him.
He didn't like that line of questioning, He was perspiring heavily. His eyelids flickered. “Of course not. No, I had nothing to do with any of it. It was Soneji all the way. I can't control him. Nobody can. Don't you understand that?”
I leaned way forward in my chair. “Is Soneji here right now? Is he here with us this morning?”
Under any other circumstances, I wouldn't have tried to push him this far. “Can I ask Soneji what happened to Maggie Rose?”
Gary Murphy shook his head repeatedly from side to side. He knew something else was happening to him now.
“ It's too scary now,” he said. His face was dripping with perspiration and his hair was wet. "It's scary.
Soneji's real bad news! I can't talk about him anymore. I won't. Please, help me, Dr. Cross! Please, help me."
“All right, Gary, that's enough.” I brought Gary out of hypnosis immediately. It was the only humane thing to do under the circumstances. I had no choice.
Suddenly, Gary Murphy was back in the courtroom with me. His eyes focused on mine. I saw nothing but fear in them. The courtroom crowd was out of control. TV and print reporters rushed to make calls to their newsrooms. Judge Kaplan slammed her gavel over and over again.
Somebody else had Maggie Rose Dunne.... Was that possible?
“It's all right, Gary,” I said. “I understand why you were afraid. ”
He stared at me, then his eyes very slowly trailed around the loudly buzzing courtroom. “What happened?” he asked. “What just happened in here?”
Along Came A Spider
CHAPTER 63
STILL REMEMBERED some Kafka. In particular, the chilling opening of Kafka's The Trial: “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning. ” That was what Gary Murphy wanted us to believe: that he was trapped in a nightmare. That he was as innocent as Joseph K.
I had my picture taken a couple of dozen times as I left the courthouse. Everybody had a question to ask. I had no comments to make. I never miss a good chance to shut up.
Was Maggie Rose still alive? the press wanted to know. I wouldn't say what I thought, which was that she probably wasn't.
As I was leaving the courthouse, I saw Katherine and Thomas Dunne walking toward me. They were flanked by TV and print newspeople. I wanted to talk to Katherine, but not to Thomas. “Why are you helping him?” Thomas Dunne raised
344 his voice. “Don't you know he's lying? What's wrong with you, Cross?”.
Thomas Dunne was extremely tense and red-faced. Out of control. The veins in his forehead couldn't have been more prominent. Katherine Rose looked miserable, completely desolate.
“I've been called as a hostile witness,” I said to the Dunnes. “I'm doing my job, that's all.”
“Well, you're doing your job badly.” Thomas Dunne continued to attack me. “You lost our daughter in Florida. Now you're trying to free her kidnapper.” I'd had enough from Thomas Dunne finally. He'd made personal attacks on me in the press and on TV. As much as I wanted to get his daughter back, I wasn't about to take any more abuse from him.
“The hell I am!” I shouted back as cameras shushed and whirred around us. “I've had my hands tied. I've been taken off the case, on a whim, then put back on. And I'm the only one who's gotten any results.”
I whirled away from both of the Dunnes and headed down a steep flight of stairs. I understood their anguish, but Thomas Dunne had been badgering me for months. He'd gotten personal, and he was wrong. Nobody seemed to get one simple fact: I was the one still trying to get at the truth about Maggie Rose. I was the only one. As I reached the bottom of the stairs, Katherine Rose came up from behind. She had run after me. Photographers had followed her. They were everywhere, their automatic film-wasters clicking like crazy. The press was elbowing in.
“I'm sorry about all that,” she said before I could manage a word. “Losing Maggie is destroying Tom, destroying our marriage. I know you've done your best. I know what you've gone through. I'm sorry, Alex. I'm sorry for everything. ”
It was a strange, strange moment. I finally reached out and took Katherine Rose Dunne's hand. I thanked her, and promised her I wouldn't stop trying. The photographers continued to snap pictures. Then I quickly left the scene, refusing to answer another questi
on, absolutely refusing to tell them what had just passed between Katherine Rose and myself. Silence is the best revenge with the press jackals.
I headed home. I was still searching for Maggie Rose Dunne-but inside SonejilMurphy's mind now. Could she have been taken from the kidnapping site by somebody else? Why would Gary Murphy tell us that ' she had? As I drove into Southeast, I wondered about what Gary Murphy had said under hypnosis. Was Gary Soneji setting us all up beautifully in the courtroom? That was a scary possibility, and a very real one. Was all this part of one of his terrifying plans? The next morning, I tried to put Soneji/Murphy under hypnosis a second time. The Amazing Detective/Doctor Cross was back on center stage! That's how it sounded in the morning news, anyway.
The hypnosis didn't work this time. Gary Murphy was too frightened, or so his lawyer claimed. There was too much hubbub in the crowded courtroom. The room was cleared once by Judge Kaplan, but that didn't help, either. I was cross-examined by the prosecution that day, but
Mary Warner was more interested in getting me off the stand than in questioning my credentials. My part in the trial was over. Which was just fine by me.
Neither Sampson nor I came to court for the rest of that week, a time of more expert testimony. We went back on the street. We had new cases. We also tried to rework a couple of troubling angles concerning the actual day of the kidnapping. We reanalyzed everything, spending hours in a conference room filled with files. if Maggie Rose had been taken from the site in Maryland, she could still be alive. There was still a slim chance.
Sampson and I returned to Washington Day School one more time to interview some of the school's teachers. To put it mildly, most of them weren't ovedoyed to see us again. We were still testing the “accomplice” theory. It was definitely a possibility that Gary Soneji had been working with someone from the start. Could it be Simon Conklin, his friend from around Princeton? If not Conklin, then who? No one at the school had seen anyone to support the notion of an “accomplice” for Gary Soneji.
We left the private school before noon and had lunch at a Roy Rogers in Georgetown. Roy's chicken is better than the Colonel's, and Roy has those swell “hot wings.” Lots of zing in those babies. Sampson and I settled on five orders of wings and two thirty-two-ounce Cokes. We sat at a tiny picnic table by. Roy's kiddie playground. After lunch maybe we'd go on the see-saw.
We finished our lunch and decided to drive out to Potomac, Maryland. For the rest of the afternoon, we canvassed Sorrell Avenue and the surrounding streets.
We visited a couple of dozen houses, and were about as welcome as Woodward and Bernstein would be. Not that the cold reception stopped us.
No one had noticed any strange cars or people in the neighborhood. Not in the days before or after the kidnapping. No one could remember seeing an unusual delivery truck. Not even the usual kind-utility repairs, flower, and grocery deliveries.
Late that afternoon, I went for a drive by myself. I headed out toward Crisfield, Maryland, where Maggie Rose and Michael Goldberg had been kept underground during the first days of the kidnapping. In a crypt? In a cellar? Gary Soneji/Murphy had mentioned “the basement” under hypnosis. He'd been kept in a dark cellar as a child. He'd been friendless for long stretches of his life. I wanted to see the farm all by myself this time. All the “disconnects” in the case were bothering the hell out of me. Loose fragments were flying around inside my head as disconcerting as shrapnel. Could someone else have taken Maggie Rose from Soneii/Murphy? I couldn't have cared less if Einstein was investigating the case-the possibilities would have made his head spin and maybe straightened his hair.
As I wandered around the grounds of the eerie, deserted farm, I let the facts of the case run freely through my mind. I kept coming back to the Son of Lindbergh and the fact that the Lindbergh baby had been abducted from a “farmhouse.”
Soneji's so-called accomplice. That was one unresolved problem. Soneji had also been “spotted” near the Sanders murder house-if we could believe Nina Cerisier. That was a second loose end.
Was this really a case of split personality? The psychology community remained divided over whether there was such a phenomenon. Multiple-personality cases are rare. Was all of this a Byzantine scheme by Gary Murphy? Could he be acting out both personas?
What had happened to Maggie Rose Dunne? It always came back to her. What had happened to Maggie Rose?
On the battered dashboard of the Porsche, I still kept one of the tiny candles that had been handed out around the courthouse in Washington. I lit it. I drove back to Washington with it burning against the gathering night. Remember Maggie Rose.
Along Came A Spider
CHAPTER 64
HAD A DATE to see Jezzie that night, and it had kept me going with anticipation through most of the day.
We met at an Embassy Suites motel in Arlington. Because of all the press in town for the trial, we were being especially cautious about being seen together.
Jezzie arrived at the room after I did. She looked absolutely alluring and sexy in a low-cut black tunic. She had on black seamed stockings and high-heeled pumps. She wore red lipstick and a scarlet blush. A silver comb was set in her hair. Be still my heart.
“I had a power lunch,” she said by way of explanation. She kicked off her high heels. “Do I make the social register or not?”
“Well, you're definitely having a positive effect on my social register.” “I'll just be a minute, Alex. One minute.” Jezzie disappeared into the bathroom.
She peeked out of the bathroom after a few minutes.
I was on the bed. The tension in my body was draining into the mattress. Life was good again.
Let's take a bath. Okay? Wash away the road dust," Jezzie said.
“That's not dust,” I said to her. “That's just me.”
I got up and went into the bathroom. The tub was square and unusually large. There was a lot of gleaming white and blue tile, all mounted a foot or so higher than the rest of the bathroom. kzzie's fancy clothes were strewn on the floor.
“You in a hurry?” I asked her.
“Yep.”
Jezzie had filled the tub to the brim. A few independentminded soap bubbles floated up and popped against the ceiling. Wisps of steam rose steadily. The room smelled like a country garden.
She stirred the bathwater with her fingertips. Then she came over to me. She still had the silver comb in her hair.
“I'm a little wired,” she said. “I could tell. I can tell about these things.”
“I think it might be time for a little healing.”
We went for it. Jezzie's hands played with the buttons on my trousers, then the zipper. Our mouths came together, lightly at first, then hard.
Suddenly, Jezzie took me inside her as we stood beside the steamy tub. Just two or three quick strokesthen she moved away from me again. Her face, neck, and chest were flushed. For a moment, I thought something was wrong.
I was caught by surprise-shock-pleasure-enter her, then parting so quickly. She was wired. Almost lent.
“What was that all about?” I asked.
“I'm going to have a heart attack, ” Jezzie whispered “Better figure out a story for the police. Whew, Alex.”
She took my hand and pulled me into the tub. The water was wartn, just right. So was everything else.
We started to laugh. I still had my underwear on, but Pete was poking and peeking around. I pulled off the shorts.
We maneuvered in the tub until we were facing each other. Jezzie got on top of me somehow - We were unwilling to give up any contact. Jezzie leaned way back. She braced her hands behind her head. She watched my face with curious fascination. The red on her neck and chest was getting deeper. Her long legs suddenly lifted straight out of the water and hooked around my head, Jezzie jerked forward a couple of times, then both of us exploded. Her body went stiff. We thrashed and moaned a lot. Waves of water splashed from the tub.
Somehow Jezzie got her arms around me-her arms and her legs. I se
ttled back in water just under my nose.
Then I went under. Jezzie was on top of me. The feeling of being close to climax rushed through my body. We were both coming. I was also going to drown. I heard Jezzie yell again, a strange water-muffled sound above the surface.
I climaxed as I was about to run out of air. I swallowed water and coughed.
Jezzie rescued me. She pulled me up, and took my face in both her hands.
Release. Blessed release.
We stayed there holding each other. Spent, as they used to say in gentler times. There was more water on the floor than in the bathtub.
All I knew right then was that I was failing deeper and deeper in love. That much I was sure about. The rest of my life was mystery and chaos, but at least there was a lifeline. There was Jezzie.
Around one o'clock in the morning, I had to leave to go home. That way, I would be there when the kids got up. Jezzie understood. After the trial, we were going to sort everything out a lot better. Jezzie wanted to get to know Jannie and Damon; it had to be done just right, we agreed.
“I miss you already,” she said as I got ready to go. “Damn. Don't go... I know you have to go.”
She took the silver comb out of her hair and pressed it into my hand.
I went out into the night, with her voice still in my head. At first, there was nothing but the pitch-darkness of the parking lot.
Suddenly, two men stepped out in front of me. I automatically reached for my shoulder holster. One of them switched on a glaring light. The other had a camera aimed at my face.
The press had found me and Jezzie. Oh, shit! The kidnapping was so big that everything around it was a story. It had been like that from the start.
A young woman trailed along behind the two men. She had long, hizzy black hair. She looked like part of a movie crew from New York or L.A.
“Detective Alex Cross?” one of the men asked.
Alex Cross 1 - Along Came A Spider Page 23
