Alex Cross 1 - Along Came A Spider

by Patterson, James

  Gary Murphy smiled and he shook his head. Finally nodded. “Actually, I'd like to talk with him myself,” he said. "If I could, I'd kill him. I would kill Soneji. Like I'm supposed to have killed all those other people.

  That evening I went to see former Secret Service Agent Mike Devine. Devine was one of the two agents who had been assigned to Secretary Goldberg and his family. I wanted to ask him about the “accomplice” theory.

  Mike Devine had taken voluntary retirement about a month after the kidnapping. Because he was still in his mid-forties, I assumed he'd been pushed out of his job. We talked for a couple of hours out on his stone terrace overlooking the Potomac. it was a tasteful, well-appointed apartment for a nowsingle man. Devine was tan and looked rested. He was one of the better advertisements I'd seen for getting out of police work while you can. He reminded me a little of Travis McGee in the John MacDonald novels. He was well built, with lots of character in his face. He'd do well in early-retirement-land, I thought: movie-hero good looks, lots of curly brown hair, an easy smile, stories galore.

  “My partner and I were pushed out, you know,” Devine confessed over a couple of Corona beers. “One fuck-up that happened to turn into World War Three, and we were both history at the Service. We didn't get a lot of support from our boss, either.”

  “It was a public case. I guess there had to be heroes and villains. ” I could be as philosophical as the next guy over a cold beer.

  “Maybe it's all for I the best,” Mike Devine mused. “You ever think about starting over, doing something else while you still have the energy? Before the Alzheimer's sets in?”

  “I've thought about private practice,” I said to Devine. “I'm a psychologist. I still do some pro bono work in the projects.”

  “But you love The Job too much to leave it?” Mike Devine grinned and squinted into late afternoon sunlight coming off the water. Gray seabirds with white chests flew right by the terrace. Nice. Everything about the layout was nice.

  “Listen, Mike, I wanted to go over, once more, those last couple of days before the kidnapping,” I said to him.

  “You are goddamn hooked, Alex. I've been over every square inch of that territory myself. Believe me, there's nothing there. It's fallow ground. Nothing grows. I've tried and tried, and finally I gave up the ghost. ”

  “I believe you. But I'm still curious about a latemodel sedan that might have been seen out in Potomac. Possibly a Dodge, ” I said. It was the car that Nina Cerisier remembered parked on Langley Terrace. “You ever notice a blue or black sedan parked on Sorrell Avenue? Or anywhere around the Day School?”

  "Like I said, I've been over and over all of our daily logs. There wasn't any mystery car. You can look at the logs yourself.

  “I have, ” I told him and laughed at the seeming hopelessness of my case.

  Mike Devine and I talked for a while more. He couldn't come up with anything new. In the end, I listened to him praise the beach life, bonefishing on the Keys, “hitting the little white ball.” His new life was just starting. He'd gotten over the Dunne-Goldberg kidnapping a lot better than I had. Something still bothered me, though. The whole “accomplice” thing. Or “the watcher” thing. More than that, I had a gut feeling about Devine and his partner. A bad feeling. Something told me they knew more than they were willing to tell anybody.

  While I was still as hot as a ten-dollar pistol, I decided to contact Devine's ex-partner, Charles Chakely, later that same night. After his dismissal, Chakely and his family had settled in Tempe, Arizona.

  It was midnight my time; ten o'clock in Tempe. Not too late, I figured. “Charles Chakely? This is Detective Alex Cross calling from Washington,” I said when he got on the phone.

  There was a pause, an uncomfortable silence, before he answered. Then Chakely got hostile-real strange, it seemed to me. His reaction only served to fuel my instincts about him and his partner.

  “What the hell do you want?” he bristled. “Why are you calling me here? I'm retired from the Service now. I'm trying to put what happened behind me. Leave me the hell alone. Stay away from me and my family.” “Listen, I'm sorry to bother you-” I started to apologize.

  He cut me off. “Then don't. That's an easy fix, Cross. Butt out of my life.”

  I could just about picture Charles Chakely as I spoke to him. I remembered him from the days right after the kidnapping. He was only fifty-one, but he looked over sixty. Beer belly. Most of his hair gone. Sad, kind of withdrawn eyes. Chakely was physical evidence of the harm The Job could do to you, if you let it.

  “Unfortunately, I'm still assigned to a couple of murders, ” I said to him, hoping he'd understand. “They involved Gary Soneji/Murphy, too. He came back to kill one of the teachers at the school. Vivian Kim?”

  “I thought you didn't want to bother me. Why don't you pretend you never called, huh? Then I'll pretend I never picked up the phone. I'm getting good at playing 'let's -pretend' out here on the painted desert.”

  “Listen, I could get a subpoena. You know I can do that. We could have this conversation in Washington. Or I could fly out there and come over to your house in Tempe. Show up for a barbecue some night. II 'Hey, what the fuck's the matter with you? %at's with you, Cross? The goddamn case is over. Leave it alone, and leave me the fuck alone. ”

  There was something very strange in Chakely's tone. He sounded ready to explode.

  “I talked to your partner tonight,” I said. That kept him on the line.

  "So. You talked to Mickey Devine. I talk to him myself now and then.'

  “I'm happy for both of you. I'll even get out of your hair in a minute. Just answer a question or two.”

  “One question. That's it,” Chakely finally said.

  “Do you remember seeing a dark late-model sedan Parked on Sorrell Avenue? Anywhere around the Goldberg or Dunne house? Maybe a week or so prior to the kidnapping?”

  "Hell, no; Christ, no. Anything out of the ordinar

  ,y would have gone in our log. The kidnapping case is closed. It's over in my book. So are you, Detective Cross.

  Chakely hung up on me.

  The tone of the conversation had been too weird. The unsolved “watcher” angle was driving me a little crazy. It was a big loose end. Too important to ignore if you were any kind of detective. I had to talk to Jezzie about Mike Devine and Charlie Chakely, and the logs they had kept. Something wasn't checking out about the two of them. They were definitely holding back.

  Along Came A Spider

  CHAPTER 72

  EZZIE AND I spent the day at her lake cottage. She needed to talk. She needed to tell me how she had changed, what she'd found out about herself on her sabbatical. Two very, very strange things happened down there In the Middle of Nowhere, North Carolina.

  We left Washington at five in the morning and got to the lake just before eight-thirty. It was the third of December, but it could have been the first of October. The temperature was in the seventies all afternoon, and there was a sweet mountain breeze. The chirp and warble of dozens of different birds filled the air.

  The summer people were gone for the season, so we had the lake to ourselves. A single speedboat swooped around the lake for an hour or so, its big engine sounding like a race car from Nascar. Otherwise, it was just the two of us.

  By mutual agreement, we didn't push into any heavy subjects too quickly. Not about Jezzie, or Devine and Chakely, or my latest theories on the kidnapping.

  Late in the afternoon, Jezzie and I went for a long trek into the surrounding pine forests. We followed the spoor of a perfectly crystalline stream that climbed into the surrounding mountain range. Jezzie wore no makeup and her hair was loose and wild. She was in jean cutoffs, and a University of Virginia sweatshirt missing the sleeves. Her eyes were a beautiful blue that rivaled the color of the sky “I told you that I found out a lot about myself down here, Alex,” Jezzie said as we hiked deeper and deeper into the forest. She was talking softly. She seemed almost childlike. I listened carefully
to every word. I wanted to know all about Jezzie.

  “I want to tell you about me. I'm ready to talk now,” she said. “I need to tell you why, and how, and everything else.” I nodded, and let her go on.

  “My father... my father was a failure. In his eyes. He was street-smart. He could get along so beautifully socially-when he wanted to. But he came from the shanty side, and he let it put a huge chip on his shoulder. My father's negative attitude got him in trouble all the time. He didn't care how it affected my mother or me. He got to be a heavy drinker in his forties and fifues. At the end of his life, he didn't have one friend. Or really any family. I imagine that's why he killed himself.... Myfather killed himself, Alex. He did it in his unmarked car. There wasn't any heart attack in Union Station. That's a lie I've been telling ever since my college days.”

  We were both silent as we walked on. Jezzie had only talked about her mother and father once or twice. I'd known about their drinking problem, but I wouldn't push her-especially because I couldn't be Jezzie's doctor. When she was ready, I'd thought that she would talk about it. “I didn't want to be a failure like my father or my mother. That's the way they saw themselves, Alex. That's how they talked all the time. Not low esteemno esteem. I couldn't let myself be like that.”

  “How do you see them?”

  “As failures, I guess.” A tiny smile came with the admission. A painfully honest smile.

  “They were both so unbelievably smart, Alex. They knew everything about everything. They read every book in the universe. They could talk to you about any subject. Have you ever been to Ireland?”

  “I've been to England once, on police business. That's the one and only time I've been to Europe. Never had the money to spare.”

  “Some villages you go to in Ireland-the people are so articulate, but they live in such poverty. You see these 'white ghettos.' Every third storefront seems to be a pub. There are so many educated failures in that country. I didn't want to be another smart failure. I've told you about that fear of mine. That would be hell on earth to me.... I pushed myself so hard in school. I needed to be number one, no matter what the cost. Then in the Treasury Department. I got ahead, comfortably ahead. Alex, for whatever reasons, I was becoming happy with my career, with my life in general.”

  “But it disintegrated after the Goldberg-Dunne kidnapping. You were the scapegoat. You weren't the olden girl anymore.”

  “Just like that, I was finished. Agents were talking hind my back. Eventually, I quit, left the Service. I didn't have a choice. It was total bullshit and unfair. I came down here. To figure out who the hell I was. I needed to do it all by myself.”

  Jezzie reached out, and she put her arms around me in the heart of the woods. She began to sob very quietly. I had never seen her cry before. I held Jezzie tightly in my arms. I'd never felt so close to her before. I knew she was telling me some hard truths. I owed her some hard truth in return.

  We were down in a secluded knoll, talking quietly, when I became aware of someone watching us in the woods. I kept my head rock-steady, but my eyes darted to the right. Somebody else was in the woods. Someone was watching us.

  Another watcher.

  “Somebody's up there, Jezzie. Just beyond that hill to our right,” I whispered to her. She didn't look in that direction. She was still a cop.

  “Are you sure, Alex?” she asked.

  “I'm sure. Trust me on this one. Let's split up,” I said. “If whoever it is starts to take off, we run them down. ” We separated, and walked so that we'd flank the hill where I'd seen the watcher. That probably confused whoever it was.

  He took off!

  The watcher was a man. He had on sneakers and a dark, hooded jumpsuit that blended in with the woods. I couldn't tell about his height or build. Not yet, anyway.

  Jezzie and I raced behind him for a good quarter of a mile. Both of us were barefoot, so we didn't gain any distance on the watcher. We probably lost a few yards during our all-out sprint. Branches and thorns tore at our faces and arms. We finally burst out of the pine woods, and found ourselves at a blacktop country road. We were just in time to hear a car accelerating around a nearby curve. We never saw the car, not even a glimpse of the license plate.

  “Now that's really goddamn weird!” Jezzie said as we stood by the roadside, trying to catch our breath. Sweat was rolling down our faces, and our hearts pounded in synch.

  “Who knows you're down here? Anyone?” I asked her. “No one. That's why it's so weird. Who the hell was that? This is scary, Alex. You got any ideas?”

  I had jotted down at least a dozen theories on the watcher whom Nina Cerisier had seen. The most promising theory I had was the simplest. The police had been watching Gary Soneji. But which police? Could it have been anyone in my own department? Or Jezzie's?

  It certainly was scary.

  We made it back to Jezzie's cabin just before it turned dark. A wintry chill was entering the air.

  We built a big fire inside and cooked a fine meal that would have fed four.

  There was sweet white corn, a huge salad, a twentyounce steak for each of us, a dry white wine with Chassagne-Montrachet, Premier Cru, Marquis de Laguiche etched on the label.

  After we ate we got around to talking about Mike Devine and Charlie Chakely, and the watcher. Jezzie

  Idn't help too much. She told me I was probably ng in the wrong place with the Secret Service agents. She said that Chakely was an excitable type who just might blow up over a call to Arizona. She told me he was bitter on the job, so he'd probably be bitter off it. In her opinion, Mike Devine and Chakely were both good, but not great, agents. If something was worth noting during the Goldberg family surveillance, they would have seen it. Their logs would have been accurate. Neither of them was clever enough to pull off a cover-up. Jezzie was sure of that.

  She didn't doubt that Nina Cerisier had seen a car parked on her street the night before the Sanders murder, but she didn't believe that somebody had been watching Soneji/Murphy. Or even that Soneji had been down near the projects himself.

  “I'm not on the case anymore,” Jezzie finally said to me. “I don't represent the interests of Treasury or anybody else. Here's my honest opinion, Alex. Why don't you just give it up? It's over. Let it go.”

  “I can't do that,” I told Jezzie. “That isn't how we do things at King Arthur's Round Table. I can't give up on this case. Every time I try, something pops up and changes my mind.” t

  That night we went to bed fairly early. Nine, ninefifteen. The Chassagne-Montrachet, Premier Cru did its job. There was still passion, but there was also warmth and tenderness between us.

  We cuddled, and we laughed, and we didn't go to sleep early. Jezzie dubbed me “Sir Alex, the Black Knight of the Round Table.” I called her “Lady of the Lake.” We finally fell asleep whispering like that, peaceful in each other's arms.

  I don't know what time it was when I woke up. I was on top of ruffled bed covers and comforter, and it was very cold.

  There was still an orangish glow from the fire, a quiet crackling noise. I wondered how it could be so cold in the bedroom with the fire still going.

  What my eyes saw, what my body was feeling, didn't add up. I mulled on that for a few seconds. I crawled under the covers and pulled them up to my chin. The glow reflected against the windowpane looked strange.

  I thought about how odd it was to be there with Jezzie again. In the Middle of Nowhere. I couldn't imagine ever not being with her now.

  I was tempted to wake her. Tell her that. Talk to her about anything and everything. The Lady of the Lake. And the Black Knight. Sounded like Geoffrey Chaucer for the 1990s.

  Suddenly I realized it wasn't a glow from the fireplace that was flickering against the window.

  I jumped out of bed and ran to take a look. I was witnessing something I had heard about all of my life, but had never expected to see.

  A cross was burning very brightly on Jezzie's lawn.

  Along Came A Spider

 
CHAPTER 73

  MISSING LITTLE GIRL named Maggie Rose.

  Murders in the projects. The thrill-killing of Viv ian Kim. A psychopath. Gary SonejilMurphy. An “accomplice.” A mystery watcher. A fiery cross in North Carolina.

  When would the pieces finally fit together? Would the pieces ever fit? From that moment in Jezzie's cottage until the end of everything, my head was filled with powerful, disturbing images. I couldn't give up the case, as Jezzie had suggested. Events the following week added to my paranoia.

  I came home late from work on Monday. Damon and Janelle swarmed all over me as I stomped the dozen paces from the front door to the kitchen.

  “Phone! Phone! Phone!” Damon chanted as he romped along at my side.

  Nana was holding the phone out to me from the

  400 kitchen. She said it was Wallace Hart calling from Fallston Prison.

  “Alex, I'm sony to bother you at home,” Wallace said. “Could you swing by here? It might be important. ”

  I was trying to peel my jacket off. I stopped-one arm in, one out. The kids were helping me. Sort of helping me; sort of trying to get me to throw out my back.

  “What is it, Wallace? I've kind of got my hands full tonight.” I stuck my tongue out at Damon and Jannie. “Couple of little problems around the house. Nothing I can't handle, though.”

  “He's asking for you. He wants to talk to you, and only you. Says it's very important.”

  “Can't it hold until morning?” I asked Wallace. I'd already put in a long day. Besides, I couldn't imagine anything new Gary Murphy could tell me. I “He's Soneji,” Wallace Hart said over the phone. “Soneji wants to talk to you now.”

  I was speechless. Then I managed, “I'm on my way, Wallace. ”

  I arrived at Fallston in under an hour. Gary was being housed on the prison,building's top floor. High-profile patients like Squeaky Fromme and John Hinckley had spent time up there. It was the high-rent district, just the way Gary wanted it. When I arrived at his cell, Gary was lying face up on a narrow cot without sheets or a blanket. A guard watched him continuously. He was on “specials,” as one-to-one surveillance is called.