Jezzie downshifted into third as she approached the lake cottage. All the lights were on. Otherwise, everything around the lake seemed at peace. The water was a sleek black table that seemed to merge with the mountains. But the lights were on. She hadn't left them on.
Jezzie got off the bike and quickly went inside. The front door was unlocked. No one was in the living room.
“Hello?” she called out.
Jezzie checked the kitchen, then both bedrooms. No one there. There was no sign that anyone had been in either room. Except for the lights.
“Hey, who's here?”
The kitchen screen door was unlatched. She walked outside and down toward the dock.
Nothing. Nobody.
The sudden burr of a wing beat sounded off to the left. Blurred wings flapped just over the surface of the water.
Jezzie stood at the edge of the dock and let out a long sigh. The Billy Joel song still played in her head. Selfmocking and taunting. “Pressure. Pressure. ” She could feel it in every inch of her body.
Someone grabbed her. Extremely strong arms like a vise were around Jezzie. She held back a scream.
Then something was being put into her mouth.
Jezzie inhaled. She recognized Colombian Gold.
I Very good dope. She inhaled a second time. Relaxed a little in the strong arms that held her.
“I've missed you,” she heard a voice say.
Billy Joel screamed inside her head. “What are you doing here?” she finally asked.
Part Five i
The Second i i Investigation i t@
Along Came A Spider
CHAPTER 68
A-GGIE ROSE DUNNE was in darkness again.
She could see shapes all around her. She knew what they were, and where she was, even why she was there.
She was thinking about escaping again. But the warning jumped into her head. Always the warning.
If you try to escape, you won't be killed, Maggie. That would be too easy. You'll be put under the ground again. You'll go back in your little grave. So don't ever try to escape, Maggie Rose. Don't even think about it.
She was starting to forget so much now. Sometimes she couldn't even remember who she was. It all seemed like a bad dream, like lots of nightmares, one after the other.
Maggie Rose wondered if her mother and father were still looking for her. Why would they be? It was so long ago that she'd been kidnapped. Maggie understood that. Mr. Soneji had taken her from the Day School. But then she never saw him again. There was only the warning.
Sometimes, she felt as if she were only a story character she'd made up.
Tears filled her eyes. It wasn't so dark now. Morning was coming. She wouldn't try to escape again. She hated this, but she never wanted to go under the ground again.
Maggie Rose knew what all the shapes were.
They were children.
All in just one room of the house.
From which there was no escape.
Along Came A Spider
CHAPTER 69
EZZIE CAME BACK to Washington the week after the trial ended. It seemed like a good time for beginnings. I was ready. God Almighty, was I ready to move on with life.
We'd talked over the phone some, but not too much, about her state of mind. Jezzie did tell me one thing. She said it was really bizarre that she had invested so much in her career, and now she didn't care about it at all.
I had missed Jezzie even more than I thought I could. My mind was on her while I investigated the murder of two thirteen-year-olds over a pair of Pump sneakers. Sampson and I caught the killer, a fifteen-year-old from “Black Hole.” That same week, I was offered a job in Washington as VICAP coordinator between the D.C. police department and the FBI. It was a bigger, higher- paying job than the one I had, but I turned it down flat. It was m buyout from Carl Monroe. No thanks. y
I couldn't sleep at night. The storm that had begun
375 side my head the very first day of the kidnapping was 11 there. I couldn't get Maggie Rose Dunne completely out of my head. I couldn't give up on the case. I wouldn't let myself. I watched anything and everything on ESPN, sometimes at three and four in the morning. I played Alex the Shrink in the old prefab 1 trailer over at St. A's. Sampson and I drank a few cases of beer together. Then we tried to work it off at the gym. In between, we spent long hours at work.
I drove to Jezzie's apartment the day she came back. On the way over there, I listened to Derek McGinty on WAMU again. My talk-show brother. His voice calmed my nervous stomach. One time, I'd actually called in to his night show. Disguised my voice. Talked about Maria, the kids, being on the edge for too long.
When Jezzie opened the door, I was startled by the way she looked. She'd let her hair grow and fan out so that it looked like a sunburst. She was tan, and looked as healthy as a California lifeguard in August. She looked as if nothing could ever be wrong in her life.
“You look rested and all,” I told her. I was feeling a little resentful, actually. She had taken off before the trial had ended. No good-byes. No explanations. What did that tell me about who she was?
Jezzie had always been trim, but she was leaner and tighter now. The circles that had been under her eyes so man times during the kidnapping investigation were
I y gone. She had on denim shorts and an old T-shirt that said IF YOU CAN'T DAZZLE THEM WITH BRILLIANCE, BAFFLE THEM WITH BULLSHIT. She was dazzling in all ways.
She smiled gently. “I'm a lot better, Alex. I think I'm almost healed.”
She came out on the porch and into my arms, and I felt a little healed myself. I held her and thought that I had been on this strange planet, all alone for a while. I could see myself on this barren moonscape. It had been up to me to find someone new to be with, someone to love again.
“Tell me everything that's been happening. What's it like to fall off the earth?” I asked. Her hair smelled so fresh and clean. Everything about her seemed new and refreshed.
“It's pretty good, actually, falling off the earth. I haven't not worked since I was sixteen years old. It was scary the first few days. Then it was fine,” she said with her head still buried in my chest. “There was only one thing I missed,” she whispered. “I wanted you there with me. If that sounds comy, too bad.”
That was one of the things I wanted to hear. “I would have come,” I said.
“I needed to do it the way I did. I had to think everything through one time. I didn't call anybody else, Alex. Not one other person. I found out a lot about myself. Maybe I even found out who Jezzie Flanagan really is.”
I raised her chin up, and looked into her eyes. “Tell me what you found out. Tell me who Jezzie is.” Arm in arm, we went inside the house.
But Jezzie didn't talk very much about who she was, or what she'd found out about herself down at her lake cottage. We fell into old habits, and ones that, I must admit, I had missed. I wondered if she still cared for me, and just how much she'd wanted to come back to D.C. I needed a sign from her.
Jezzie began to unbutton my shirt, and there was no way I was going to stop her. “I did miss you so much, ” she whispered against my chest. “Did you miss me, Alex?”
I had to smile. My physical condition at that moment was the obvious answer to her question. “Now what do you think? Take a guess.”
Jezzie and I got a little wild that afternoon. I couldn't help remembering the night the National Star showed up outside our motel room. She was definitely leaner and tighter, and she'd been in playing shape before she'd gone away. Jezzie was also tan all over.
“Who's darker?” I asked her and grinned.
“I definitely am. Brown as a berry, as they say around the lake.”
“You're just dazzling me with your brilliance,” I told her.
“Uh huh. How long can we keep this up? Talking and looking, not touching. Will you unbutton the rest of your shirt buttons? Please.” “Does that excite you?” I asked. My voice caught in my throat a little.
Uh h
uh. Actually, you can take the shirt off."
4,You were going to tell me something about who you are, what you learned on your retreat, " I reminded her. Confessor and lover. A sexy concept in itself.
“You can kiss me now. If you want to, Alex. Can you kiss me without anything but our lips touching?”
“Uhm, I'm not sure about that. Let me turn a little this way. And that way. Are you trying to shut me up, by the way?”
“Why would I want to do that? Doctor Detective?”
Along Came A Spider
CHAPTER 70
THREW MYSELF into work again. I had promised myself that I'd solve the kidnapping case somehow. The Black Knight would not be vanquished.
One miserable, cold, rainy night I trudged out by myself to see Nina Cen'sier again. The Cerisier girl was still the only person who'd actually seen Gary Soneji's 1 4accomplice." I was in the neighborhood, anyway. Right.
Why was I in the Langley Terrace projects, at night, in a cold, drizzling rain? Because I had become a nut case who couldn't get enough information about an eighteen-month-old kidnapping. Because I was a perfectionist who had been that way for at least thirty years of my life. Because I needed to know what had really happened to Maggie Rose Dunne. Because I couldn't escape the gaze of Mustaf Sanders. Because I wanted the truth about Soneji/Murphy. Or so I kept telling myself.
Glory Cerisier wasn't real happy to see me camped on her front doorstep. I'd been standing on the porch
380 for ten minutes before she finally opened the door. I'd knocked on the dented aluminum door a half-dozen times.
“Detective Cross, it's late, you know. Can't we be allowed to move on with our lives?” she asked as she finally swung open the door. “It's hard for us to forget the Sanderses. We don't need you to remind us over and over.”
“I know you don't,” I agreed with the tall, latefortyish woman eyeballing me. Almond-shaped eyes. Pretty eyes on a not-very-pretty face. “These are murder cases, though, Mrs. Cerisier, terrible murders. ”
“The killer has been caught,” she said to me. “Do you know that, Detective Cross? Have you heard? Do you read newspapers?”
I felt like crap being out there again. I believe she suspected I was crazy. She was a smart lady.
“Oh, Jesus Christ.” I shook my head and laughed out loud. “You know, you're absolutely right. I'm just fucked up. I'm sorry, I really am.”
That caught her off guard, and Glory Cerisier smiled back at me. It was a kindly, crooked-toothed grin that you see sometimes in the projects.
“Invite this poor nigger in for some coffee,” I said.
"I'm crazy, but at least I know, it. Open the door for me.It
“All right, all right. Why don't you come in then, Detective. We can talk one more time. That's it, though. ” “That's it,” I agreed with her. I had broken through by simply telling her the truth about myself.
We drank bad instant coffee in her tiny kitchen. Actu y, she loved to talk. Glory Cerisier asked me all sorts questions about the trial.
She wanted to know what it was like being on TV. Like many people, she was curious about the actress Katherine Rose. Glory Cerisier even had her own private theory about the kidnapping.
“That man didn't do it. That Gary Soneji, or Murphy, or whoever he is. Somebody set him up, you see,” she said and laughed. I suppose she thought it funny that she was, sharing her crazy ideas with a crazy D.C. policeman.
“Humor me one last time,” I said, finally getting around to what I really wanted to talk to her about. “Run me through what Nina said she saw that night. Tell me what Nina told you. As close as you remember it. ”
“Why you doin' this to yourseIP” Glory wanted to know from me first. “Why you here, ten o'clock at night?”
“I don't know why, Glory I shrugged and sipped the truly bad-tasting coffee. ”Maybe it's because I need to know why I was chosen down in Miami. I don't know for sure, but here I am."
“It's made you crazy, hasn't it? The kidnapping of those children.”
"Yes. It's made me crazy. Tell me again what Nina saw. Tell me about the man in the car with Gary Soneji.11.
“Nina, ever since she been little, she love the window seat on our stairway,” Glory began the story again. "That's Nina's window on the world, always has been.
She curl up there and read a book or just pet one of her cats. Sometimes, she just stare out at nothing. She was at the window seat when she saw that white man, Gary Soneji. We get few white men in the neighborhood. Black, some Hispanic, sometimes. So he caught her eye. The more she watched, the stranger it seemed to her. Like she told you. He was watching the Sanderses' house. Like he was spying on the house or something. And the other man, the one in the car, he was watching him watch the house."
Bingo. My tired, overloaded mind somehow managed to catch the key phrase in what she'd just said.
Glory Cerisier was all set to go on, but I stopped her. “You just said the man in the car was watching Gary Soneji. You said he was watching him.”
“I did say that, didn't I? I forgot all about it. Nina been saying the men was together. Like a salesman team or something. You know, the way they come stake out a street, sometimes. But way back, she told me the man in the car was watching the other one. I believe that what she said. I'm almost sure. Let me get Nina. I'm not so sure anymore.”
Soon, the three of us were sitting together and talking. Mrs. Cerisier helped me with Nina, and Nina finally cooperated. Yes, she was sure the man in the car had been watching Gary Soneji. The man wasn't there with Soneji. Nina Cerisier definitely remembered the man in the car watching the other man.
She didn't know whether it had been a white or a black man watching. She hadn't mentioned it before because it didn't seem important, and the police would asked even more questions. Like most kids in theast, Nina hated the police and was afraid of them. The man in the car had been watching Gary Soneji. Maybe there hadn't been an “accomplice” after all, but someone watching Gary Soneji/Murphy as he staked out potential murder victims? Who could it have been?
Along Came A Spider
CHAPTER 71
WAS ALLOWED to visit Soneji/Murphy, but only in connection with the Sanders and Turner murder in vestigations. I could see him about crimes that would probably never go to trial, but not about one that could possibly remain unsolved. So goes the tale of the red tape.
I had a friend out at Fallston, where Gary was impris oned. I'd known Wallace Hart, the chief of psychiatry at Fallston, since I'd joined the D.C. police force. Wal lace was waiting for me in the lobby of the ancient facility. “I like this kind of personal attention,” I said as
I shook his hand. "First time I've ever got any, of course.
“You're a celebrity now, Alex. I saw you on the tube. ”
Wallace is a small scholarly looking black man who wears round bottle glasses and baggy blue business suits. He reminds people of George Washington Carver,
385 aybe crossed with Woody Allen. He looks as if he black and Jewish.
“What do you think about Gary so far?” I asked Wallace as we took a prison elevator up to the maximumsecurity floor. “Model prisoner?”
“I've always had a soft spot for psychopaths, Alex. They keep shit interesting. Imagine life without the real bad guys. Very boring.”
“You're not buying the possibility of multiple personalities, I take it?”
“I think it's a possibility, but very slim. Either way, the bad boy in him is really bad. I'm surprised he got his ass in a sling, though. I'm surprised he got caught. ”
I said, “Want to hear one off-the-wall theory? Gary Murphy caught Soneji. Gary Murphy couldn't handle Soneji, so he turned him in.”
Wallace grinned at me. He had a big toothy smile for such a little face. “Alex, I do like your crazy mind. But do you really buy that? One side turning in the other?”
“Nope. I just wanted to see if you would. I'm beginning to think he's a psycho all the way. I just need to know how far
all the way is. I observed a definite paranoid personality disorder when I was seeing him.”
“I agree with that. He's mistrustful, demanding, arrogant, driven. Like I say, I love the guy.”
I was a little shocked when I finally saw Gary this time. His eyes appeared to be sunken into his skull. The orbs were red-rimmed, as if he were suffering from conjunctivitis. The skin was pulled tight all around his face. He'd lost a lot of weight, maybe thirty pounds, and he'd been fit and trim to begin with. “So I'm a little depressed. Hello, Doctor.” He looked up from his cot and spoke to me. He was Gary Murphy again. At least he seemed to be.
“Hello, Gary,” I said. “I couldn't stay away.”
“Long time no visits. You must want - something. Let me guess-you're doing a book about me. You want to be the next Anne Rule?”
I shook my head. "I wanted to come and see you long before this. I had to get a court order first. I'm here to talk about the Sanders and Turner murders, actually.
“Really?” He seemed resigned and his affect was indifferent and passive. I didn't like the way he looked. It struck me that his personality could be on the verge of complete disintegration.
“I'm only allowed to talk to you about the Sanders and Turner murders, in fact. That's my purview. But Ould talk about Vivian Kim, if you like.”
“Then we don't have a lot to talk about. I don't know anything about those killings. I haven't even read the newspapers. I swear on my daughter's life I haven't. Maybe our friend Soneji knows. Not me, Alex.” He seemed real comfortable calling me Alex by now. Nice to know you can make friends, anywhere.
“Your lawyer must have explained the murder cases to you. There could be another trial this year.”
“I won't see any more lawyers. It's got nothing to do with me. Besides, those cases won't get to trial. Too expensive. ”
“Gary. ” I talked to him as if he were a patient of mine. “I'd like to put you under hypnosis again. Will you sign the papers if I can get all the bullshit arranged? It's important for me to talk to Soneji. Let me try to talk to him.”
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