She appeared very confused, wounded, and afraid. She would take a step forward, then a step backward, then took back at her “family.”
I wondered if Maggie Rose knew what was happening. She had been severely traumatized. I wondered if she could feel anything at all. I was glad I could be there to help.
I thought of Jezzie again, and I shook my head involuntarily. The storm inside wouldn't stop. How could she have done this to the little girl? For a couple of million dollars? For all the money in the known uni verse? Katherine Rose was the first one out of the minivan. At that very moment, Maggie Rose opened her arms. “Mommy!” she cried out. Then, hesitating for only a split second, she seemed to leap forward. Maggie Rose ran toward her mother. They ran into each other's arms.
For the next minute, I couldn't see much of anything through my tears. I looked at Sampson and saw a tear seeping from under his dark glasses.
“Two tough detectives,” he said and grinned at me. It was that lone wolfs smile I love.
“Yeah, we sure are Washington, D.C.'s finest,” I said.
Maggie Rose was finally going home. Her name was an incantation in my head-Maggie Rose, Maggie Rose. It was worth everything, just to see that moment.
“The End,” Sampson pronounced. ar ix
The Cross House
Along Came A Spider
CHAPTER 87
HE CROSS HOUSE was right there across the street.
There it was, in all of its humble glory.
The Bad Boy was mesmerized by the glittering orangish house lights. His eyes roamed from window to window. A couple of times, he caught sight of a black woman shuffling past one of the windows downstairs. Alex Cross's grandmother, no doubt. He knew her name, Nana Mama. He knew Alex had named her that as a boy. In the last few weeks, he'd learned everything there was to know about the Cross family. He had a plan for them now. A neat little fantasy Sometimes the boy liked to be afraid like this. Afraid for himself-, afraid for the people in the house. He enjoyed this feeling as long as he could control it, and turn it on and off at will.
He finally urged himself to leave his biding place, to go even closer to the Cross house. To be thefear.
His senses were much sharper when the fear was with
477 him. He could concentrate and maintain focus for very long stretches of time. As lie crossed 5th Street, there was nothing in his consciousness other than the house and the people inside.
The boy disappeared into the bushes that ran alongside the front of the house. His heart was beating strongly now. His breathing was fast and shallow.
He took one deep breath, then slowly let it out through his mouth. Slow down, enjoy this, he thought.
He turned so that he faced away from the house. He could actually feel warmth from the walls on his back. He watched the inner-city street through the tangle of branches. It was always darker in Southeast. Streetlights were never replaced.
He was careful. He took his sweet time. He watched the street for ten minutes or more. No one had seen him. No one was spying on him this time.
"One last touch, and then on to other bigger and better things.
He thought the words, or spoke them under his breath. Sometimes he couldn't tell which was which anymore. A lot of things were coming together now, becoming one: his thoughts, his words, his actions, his stories to himself.
Each detail had been thought through hundreds of times before this particular night. Once they were all sound asleep, probably between two and three in the morning, he would take the two children, Damon and Janelle.
He would drug them, right there in their bedroom on the second floor. He would let Doctor/Detective Alex Cross sleep through everything.
He had to do that. The famous Dr. Cross needed to suffer a great deal now. Cross had to be part of the new search. That was the way it had to be. It was the only worthy solution. He would be the victor.
Not that Cross would need any extra motivation, but he'd get it, anyway. First, the boy would murder the old woman, Cross's grandmother. Then he would go to the children's bedroom.
None of it would ever be solved, of course. The Cross children would never ever be found. No ransom would be asked for. Then, finally, he could go on to other things.
He'd forget about Detective Cross. But Alex Cross would never, ever forget about him. Or about his own missing children.
Gary Soneji/Murphy turned toward the house.
Along Came A Spider
CHAPTER 88
LEX, THERE'S SOMEONE- inside the house. Alex, someone's in here with us," Nana whispered close to my ear.
I was up and out of bed before she finished speaking the words. Years on Washington's streets had taught me to move quickly.
I heard the softest thump somewhere. Yes, someone was definitely in the house. The noise hadn't been manufactured by our ancient heating system.
“Nana, you stay here. Don't come out until I call you,” I whispered to my grandmother. “I'll yell when it's okay.” “I'll call the police, Alex.” “No, you stay right here. I am the police. Stay here. ”The children, Alex.“ ”I'll get them. You stay here. Please obey me this one time. Please obey me." There was no one in the darkened hallway upstairs.
No one I could see, anyway. My heart raced uncontrollably as I hurried to the children's room.
I listened for another sound in the house. It was too still now. I thought about the horrible violation: someone's inside our house. I chased the thought away.
I had to concentrate on him. I knew who it was. I'd kept my guard up for weeks after Sampson and I had returned with Maggie Rose. Finally, I'd let it down just a little. And he'd come.
I hurried to the children's room. I started to run down the upstairs hallway.
I opened the creaking door. Damon and Janelle were still asleep in their beds. I would wake them quickly, then carry them both back to Nana. I never kept my gun upstairs because of the children. It was downstairs in &-he den. I switched on the lamp beside-the bed. Nothing! The light didn't come on.
.1 remembered the Sanders and Turner murders. Soneji had loved darkness. The darkness had been his calling card, his signature. He had always turned the electricity off. The Thing was here. Suddenly, I was struck very hard, with terrifying force.
Something had hit me like a speeding runaway truck. I knew it was Soneji. He'd sprung on me! He nearly took me out with one blow.
He was brutally strong. His body, his muscles, had been tensing and untensing for his entire life. He'd been doing isometrics since he'd been locked away in the basement of his father's house. He'd been wound tight for almost thirty years: plotting to get even with the world, plotting to get the fame he thought he deserved.
I Want to Be Somebody!
He came again. We went down with a loud crash. The air was crushed from my stomach.
The side of my head struck a sharp edge of the children's bureau. My vision was clouded. My ears rang. I saw bright dancing stars everywhere.
“Dr. Cross! Is that you? Did youforget whose show this is?”
I could barely see Gary Soneji's face when he screamed out my name. He tried to physically hurt me with the ear-splitting scream, the sheer force of his voice.
“You can't touch me!” he screamed again. “You can't touch me, Doctor! Do you get it? Do you get it yet? I'm the star. Not you!”
Blood was smeared all over his hands and anus. Blood was everywhere. I could see it now. Who had he hurt? What had he done in our house? I cou ' Id see shapes in the shifting darkness of the children's room. He had a knife raised high in one hand, canted in my direction.
“I'm the star here! I'm Soneji! Murphy! Whoever I want to be!”
I realized whose blood was swabbed all over his hands and arms. My blood. He'd stabbed me when he hit me the first time.
He raised the knife to strike a second time and growled like an animal. The children were awake now. Damon screamed, “Daddy!” and Jannie started to cry.
“Get out of here, kids
!” I shouted. But they were too terrified to leave their beds. He feinted with the knife once, then the blade slashed at me again. I moved, and the knife cut a glancing blow across my shoulder.
This time the pain was there, and I knew exactly what it was. Soneji's knife had sliced into my upper shoulder.
I yelled loudly at Soneji/Murphy. The children were crying. I wanted to kill him now. My mind was going to burst. There was nothing left in me but rage at this monster inside my house.
Soneji/Murphy raised his knife again. The lethal blade was long, and so sharp I hadn't even felt the first wound. It had cut right through.
I heard another scream-a fierce shriek. Soneji stood frozen for the eeriest split second. Then he whirled around with another growl.
A figure came sweeping at him from the doorway. Nana Mama had distracted him.
“This is our house!” she shouted with all her fury. “Get out of our house!”
A glint of light caught my eye on the bureau. I reached out and grabbed the scissors on top of Jannie's book of paper dolls. A pair of Nana's shearing scissors.
Soneji/Murphy slashed out with his knife again. The same knife he'd used in his murders around the projects? The knife he'd used on Vivian Kim?
I swung the scissors at him and felt tearing flesh. The shearing scissors slashed down across his cheeks. His cry echoed through the bedroom. “Motherfucker!”
“Something to remember me by,” I taunted him. “Who's bleeding now? Soneji or Murphy?”
He screamed something I didn't understand. Then he rushed at me again. The scissors caught him somewhere on the side of his neck. He jumped back, pulling them right from my hand.
“C'mon, you bastard!” I yelled.
Suddenly he reeled and staggered out of the children's bedroom. He never struck out at Nana, the mother figure. Maybe he was too badly wounded to strike back ' He held his face in both hands. His voice rose in a high, piercing scream as he ran from the room. Could he be in another fugue state? Was he lost inside one of his fantasies?
I had gone down on one knee and wanted to stay there. The noise was a loud roar in my head. I managed to get up. Blood was splattered everywhere, on my shirt, all over my shorts, my bare legs. My blood, and his.
A rush of adrenaline kept me going. I grabbed some clothes and went after Soneji. He couldn't escape this time. I wouldn't let him.
Along Came A Spider
CHAPTER 89
RAN TO THE DEN and grabbed my revolver. I knew he had a plan-in case he had to escape. Every step lwould have been thought through a hundred times. He lived in his fantasies, not in the real world.
I thought that he would probably leave our house. Escape, so he could fight again. Was I beginning to think like him? I thought that I was. Scary.
The front door was wide open. I was on track. So far. Blood was smeared all over the carpet. Had he left a trail for me?
Where would Gary Soneji/Murphy go if something went wrong at our house? He would always have a backup plan. Where was the perfect place? The completely unexpected move? I was finding it hard to think with blood dripping from my side and left shoulder.
I reeled outside and into the early morning darkness and biting cold. Our street was as silent as it ever got. It was 4 A.M. I had only one idea where he might have gone.
I wondered if he thought I'd try to follow him. Was
485 he already expecting me? Was Soneji/Murphy still two jumps ahead of me again? So far, he always had been. I had to get ahead of him-just this once.
The Metro underground ran a block from our house on 5th Street. The tunnel was still being built, but a few neighborhood kids went down there to walk the four blocks over to Capitol Hill... underground.
I hobbled, and half ran, to the subway entrance. I was hurting, but I didn't care. He'd come inside my house. He'd gone after my children.
I went downstairs into the tunnel. I drew my revolver from the shoulder holster I'd slung over my shirt. Every step I took put a ragged stitch in my side. Painfully, I began to walk the length of the tunnel in a low shooter's crouch.
He could be watching me. Had he expected me to come here? I walked forward in the tunnel. It could be a trap. There were plenty of places for him to hide.
I made it all the way to the end. There was no sign of blood, anywhere. Soneji/Murphy wasn't in the underground. He'd escaped some other way. He'd gotten away again.
As the adrenaline rush slowed, I felt weak and weary and disoriented. I climbed the stone stairs out of the underground.
Night people were coming and going from the Metro paper store and from Fox's all-night diner. I must have been a sorry sight. Blood was spattered all over me. No one stopped, though. Not a single person. They had all seen too much of this ghoulish stuff in the nation's capital. I finally stepped in front of a truck driver dropping off a bundle of Washington Posts. I told him I was a police officer. I was feeling a little high with the loss of blood. Slightly giddy now. “I didn't do nothin' wrong,” he said to me.
“You didn't shoot me, motherfucker?”
“No, sir. What're you, crazy? You really a cop?”
I made him take me home in his paper-delivery truck. For the whole six-block ride, the man swore he'd sue the city.
“Sue Mayor Monroe,” I told him. “Sue Monroe's ass bad.”
“You really a cop?” he asked me again. “You ain't a cop.”
“Yeah, I'm a cop.”
Squad cars and EMS ambulances were already gathered at my house. This was my recurring nightmarethis very scene. Never before had the police and medics actually come to my house.
I Sampson was already there. He had a black leather jacket over a ratty old Baltimore Orioles sweatshirt. He wore a cap from the Hoodoo Gurus tour.
He looked at me as if I were crazy. Crimson and blue emergency lights twirled behind him. “Wuz up? You don't look so good. You all right, man?” “Been stabbed twice with a hunting knife. Not as bad as the time we got shot over in Garfield.”
“Uh huh. Must look worse than it is. I want you to lie down here on the lawn. Lie down now, Alex.”
I nodded, and walked away from Sampson. I had to finish this. Somehow, it had to be over with.
The EMS people were trying to get me down on the lawn. Our tiny lawn. Or get me on their stretcher.
1 had another idea. The front door had been left wide open. He'd left the door to the house open. Why had he done that?
“Be right with you,” I said to the medics as I walked past them. "Hold that stretcher, though. II
People were yelling at me, but I pushed forward, anyway.
I moved silently and purposefully through the living room and into the kitchen. I opened the door that's catty-cornered to our back door, and hurried downstairs.
I didn't see anything in the basement. No movement. Nothing out of order. The cellar was my last good idea.
I walked over to a bin near the furnace where Nana dumps all the dirty laundry for the next washload. It's the farthest corner of the basement from the stairs. No Soneji/Murphy in the dark basement.
S ampson came running down the cellar stairs. “He's not here! Someone saw him downtown. He's down around Dupont Circle.”
“He wants to make one more big play,” I muttered. “Son-of-a-bitch.” Son of Lindbergh.
Sampson didn't try to stop me from going with him. He could see in my eyes that he couldn't, anyway. The two of us hurried to his car. I figured I was all right. I'd drop if I wasn't.
A young punk from the neighborhood looked at the sticky blood down the front of my shirt. “You dying, Cross? That be good.” He gave me my eulogy.
It took us ten minutes or so to get down to Dupont Circle. Police squad cars were parked everywhereflashing eerie red and blue in the dawn's earliest light.
It was late in the night shift for most of these boys.
Nobody needed a madman on the loose in downtown Washington.
One more big play.
I Want to Be Somebody.
During the next hour or so nothing happened-except that it got light out. Pedestrians began to appear around the circle. The traffic thickened as Washington opened up for business.
The early risers were curious and stopped to ask the police questions. None of us would tell them anything, except to “please keep moving along. Just keep walking, please. There's nothing to see. ” Thank God.
An EMS doctor treated my wounds. There was more blood than actual damage. He wanted me to go straight to the hospital, of course. That could wait. One more big play. Dupont Circle? Downtown Washington, D.C.? Gary SonejilMurphy loved to play in the capital.
I told the EMS doc to back off, and he did. I hit him up for a couple of Percodan. They did the trick for the moment.
Sampson stood by my side, sucking on a cigarette. “You're gonna just fall over,” he said to me. “You'll just collapse. Like some big African elephant had a sudden heart attack. I was savoring my Percodan buzz. ”Wasn't a sudden heart attack,“ I said to him. ”Big African elephant got knifed a couple of times. Wasn't an elephant, either. It was an African antelope. Graceful, beautiful, powerful beast.
I eventually started to walk back toward Sampson's car.
“You got an idea?” he called after me. “Alex?”
“Yeah. Let's ride, no good standing around here at Dupont Circle. He's not going to start shooting up rushhour traffic.”
“You sure about that, Alex?” “I'm sure about it.”
We rode around downtown Washington until just before eight. It was getting hopeless. I was starting to get real sleepy in the car.
This big African antelope was about ready to fall over. Beads of sweat slipped across my eyebrows, dripping down my nose. I was trying to think like Gary Soneji/Murphy. Was he downtown now? Or had he already escaped from Washington?
A call came over the car radio at 7:58.
“Suspect spotted on Pennsylvania Avenue, near Lafayette Park. Suspect has an automatic weapon in his possession. Suspect is approaching the White House. All cars move in!”
Alex Cross 1 - Along Came A Spider Page 32
