Return of the Spider, page 25
part #33 of Alex Cross Series
“Merry Christmas to you! Dinner in half an hour,” I said.
My little boy popped to his feet as Sampson entered with several wrapped gifts.
“Presents?” Damon said.
“He’s addicted,” I explained.
“Isn’t every kid on Christmas?” Sampson laughed and handed him a gift. “They’re for you, Damon.”
My son tore off the paper and looked puzzled for a second when the contents fell out. They looked like two large wool socks, but when he turned them over, he saw the faces of Big Bird and Cookie Monster and started giggling. “Puppets,” he said.
“That’s right,” Sampson said. He knelt down to put Damon’s hand into Cookie Monster’s body. The puppet was a little big for his arm, and the head flopped, but my son did not care.
“Nana!” he yelled and headed off toward the kitchen. “Look! I Cookie!”
I started laughing. “I Cookie.”
Sampson chuckled. “Where’s the new baby?”
“Upstairs with Maria,” I said. “They’ll be down soon. By the way, what happened after I left you with Fazio? He was saying something about some guy his stepbrother was afraid of?”
John’s eyebrows rose. “That’s correct. He remembered the guy being Irish, not Italian. A few minutes later, no prompting from me, he came up with a name, Sullivan, and said the guy owned a meat shop.”
“Like a butcher,” I said.
“Exactly,” Sampson said.
“You tell the NYPD detective?”
“Called Slattery on the spot. He was pretty happy, said he knew it had to be the Butcher of Sligo’s work.”
CHAPTER 93
BEFORE I COULD RESPOND to John, Maria came down the stairs with Jannie swaddled in her arms. All thoughts of work went by the wayside. And Sampson got to hold his goddaughter for the first time.
As long a body as Janelle had for being a two-day-old, she looked like a peanut in the big man’s arms.
“She’s gorgeous,” Sampson said. “Just a miracle, isn’t she?”
Maria smiled. “She is.”
“How you feeling?”
“Like my stomach got beaten by a two-by-four and I’m a whole lot tired,” Maria said, yawning. “She didn’t sleep well last night.”
Nana Mama called us to dinner. Big Bird and Cookie Monster were not allowed on Damon’s high chair, but my grandmother stopped his crying by propping up the puppets on the counter beside him.
She had used a Creole recipe on the Virginia ham that made it both sweet and a little fiery. Her potato and red onion pancakes came out perfectly crispy on the outside and savory on the inside. The green beans roasted with slab bacon chips were a vegan’s nightmare and a carnivore’s dream.
“That’s the best Christmas dinner I’ve ever had,” Sampson said, putting his napkin down after consuming a gargantuan quantity of food.
Nana Mama grinned. “Same thing you said last year and the year before that and the year before that.”
“What can I say? You keep outdoing yourself.”
“You do,” Maria said.
I said, “Absolutely, Nana.”
That pleased my grandmother even more.
“I have an announcement,” Maria said as I helped serve pie and ice cream.
“You’re not pregnant again already, are you?” Sampson said.
“Ha-ha,” Maria said and gently punched his arm before looking at me. “I’m going to leave St. Anthony’s when I’m ready to go back to work.”
That was a big surprise to me, since she’d been working at the hospital since we’d met and always said she loved it.
“And go where?” I asked.
“There’s a social work position open where I grew up, in Potomac Gardens.”
Nana Mama winced. “That’s a tougher place than you remember.”
“Which is exactly why I’m needed there,” Maria said, gazing at me. “I think I can do more good in Potomac Gardens than I can at St. Anthony’s.”
I could see the conviction in her eyes and hear the passion in her voice. Feeling concern as much as pride over her decision, I said, “As long as there’s ample security for you, I’m all for it.”
Maria beamed at me. “The position doesn’t start for another three months, and I’ll make sure about the security.”
“Perfect,” I said, though again, there was hesitation in my thoughts. Potomac Gardens was one of the roughest projects in the District of Columbia.
After the dishes were cleared, we retreated to the front room and finished the football game. We watched A Christmas Story until Sampson had to leave.
Nana Mama went upstairs cackling after Santa told Ralphie that he’d shoot his eye out and then put his boot in the kid’s face, her favorite scene.
Damon fell asleep in my lap during the scene about the Scott Farkus affair, Maria’s favorite. She fell asleep on my shoulder with Jannie in her lap before Ralphie actually got his BB gun.
After watching all the way to the scene of the beheading of the roast duck during the Christmas dinner at the Chinese restaurant, I clicked off the TV with the remote. I sat and looked at the lights on the tree, feeling Damon shift in my lap and hearing Maria breathe with her mouth open. Jannie made fussy little newborn noises.
I felt tears come to my eyes as I gazed up at the angel ornament that always sat atop Nana Mama’s Christmas tree.
“Thank you for my family,” I whispered. “Keep them safe in the coming year.”
CHAPTER 94
BY TEN A.M. ON New Year’s Eve day, snow was falling steadily in the Pine Barrens. A couple of inches of it already coated the pines and the ground when Soneji drove his brother-in-law Marty’s Dodge Ram pickup up the steep two-track to his house.
He stopped shy of the gate and the multiple NO TRESPASSING signs, looking ahead into the yard. Seeing no tracks and nothing out of place since his visit with Bunny Maddox, Soneji got out, unlocked the gate, and pushed it open, noticing that the length of rope he’d practiced with was still hanging around the post there and was clad in snow.
He got in the truck, pulled into the yard, backed up to the porch, and turned the engine off. He lowered the window. The gentle tapping of the snowflakes deadened all other sound.
Soneji closed his eyes a second, thankful for this peace and quiet after the wedding and their three-day honeymoon at Missy’s cousin’s condo in the Poconos. The sex aside, Missy had yammered so much about all the changes to be put into effect after their marriage restart that he’d thought about hitting her over the head with a hammer at one point and cutting her vocal cords at several more.
In the end, he said he had to help an old friend do some carpentry work on his lake house to satisfy a real estate agent who wanted to list the place. Marty offered him the truck, saying he could use his Cadillac in the meantime. And Soneji told Missy not to worry, that he’d be back long before the start of Trish’s annual New Year’s Eve party.
At the back of the pickup, he lifted the window on the cap and lowered the tailgate so he could get at the eight-foot lengths of two-by-four pine studs stacked on top of drywall sheets. Soneji got the lumber into the basement in four trips.
The drywall was trickier to handle and demanded a difficult negotiation of the steep staircase. But once he had the method down, he quickly got two more sheets into position and stepped out onto his porch for the final one.
“Halloo the house!”
Soneji stopped short, looked over the truck cap, and saw a woman puffing and trudging toward him in the snow. She was in her late forties, doughy, dowdy, and wore an old navy pea jacket over a peasant dress and boots.
A bright, multicolored knit wool cap sat on her head at an angle. A matching scarf hung loosely around her shoulders.
Holding up mittens in another riot of color, the perimenopausal hippie stopped about forty feet from his truck and said, “So sorry to intrude, but I got myself stuck in the ditch a good way up from the bottom of your steep driveway.”
“Why were you coming up my steep driveway?” Soneji asked. “There’s a No Trespassing sign on each side.”
CHAPTER 95
“MY MISTAKE! MY MISTAKE!” the woman said and then chuckled. “Had directions to my sister-in-law’s place somewhere out here and I got turned around and saw your fresh tracks and started after them to ask directions. Do you know her? Lainey Dodge?”
“Can’t say I do.”
“Too bad. Anyway, I was wondering if you might help me get out of the ditch? Or let me use your phone to call a tow truck?”
“I don’t have a phone yet,” Soneji said, seeing new possibilities in this previously unwanted visit. “Let’s go take a look at your predicament and I’ll see if I can get you out.”
He came down off the porch, strode up to her, grinning, and stuck out his gloved hand. “Gary Murphy.”
She pushed back her hat, revealing sweaty hair, and shook his hand. “Cynthia Owens. My friends call me Cyn-Cyn.”
“Okay, Cyn-Cyn, lead on.”
Owens started back. “I’m clueless with maps and compasses and such. You?”
“Also terrible with navigation,” he said, though that was far from true.
“Didn’t help myself coming out here without better tires,” Owens said, almost to the gate with Soneji a few yards behind now. “But I’m one of those folks just likes to dive right in once I decide. Lainey said at Christmas she had a place rented in the Pine Barrens for New Year’s Eve, and I woke up early this morning, fed the cats, and thought, Why not go? Make it a surprise for my cousin that I actually showed up for once.”
She chuckled and shook her head. Soneji sniffed something familiar floating off her and tried not to scowl. He hated cats. He hated the smell of cat people.
She passed through the gate and she shook her right rainbow mitten. “Typical Cyn-Cyn Owens move. If I’d been born a hundred fifty years ago, I’d have just jumped on a wagon train and headed west. Oregon trail, you know?”
Soneji couldn’t believe it. He’d come in search of a little quiet time away from Missy, and here he’d traded one chatty Cathy for another.
Then he saw the practice rope there, looped over the gate post. He reached out and snagged the rope as he walked through the opening in the fence.
With all the newly fallen and still falling snow, it was almost too easy for him to move up quick and silent behind the woman as she jabbered on about people who were supposed to be at her sister-in-law’s party.
Soneji no longer cared. He was set on sating a sudden and overwhelming need.
For the second time, Soneji felt the rush, the adrenaline, as he flipped the rope over the woman’s foolish cap, nose, and chin. He felt it settle at her throat and yanked back viciously.
Owens made a gargling cry of alarm as her boots slid out from under her on the slippery drive. As she crashed down, her full weight came against the rope, choking her even more.
“Nnnnn-aaa!” she grunted. “Nnnnn-aaa!”
Soneji wrenched the rope tighter, smelling the feline stench all over her now.
“Nnnn-aa,” she grunted again, weaker this time.
“What’s that, Cyn-Cyn?” Soneji said. “Cat got your tongue?”
Her mittens flailed at her throat, and she made guttural noises in her windpipe for almost fifteen seconds. Then the sounds stopped. The mittens slowly sagged, followed by her shoulders, and finally her head.
Despite the cat smell, Soneji felt the thrill of strangulation, so close, so intimate, exploding through him as strong as it had when he’d throttled the real estate agent. He let loose his hold on the rope and allowed the cat lady’s corpse to collapse into the snow.
Soneji stood there, chest heaving, as happy as he’d ever been.
Then he caught the scent of something fouler than cat and realized the woman had shit herself dying. That completely destroyed the mood, the elation, the celebration.
He needed to get rid of the body and its … stenches. He thought about going to get the truck, then decided to just drag her carcass by the rope already around her neck. He’d leave drag marks, but the snow was intensifying. The drag marks would be gone within the hour.
Once he had her inside the shed, he’d get the truck and pull her car out of the ditch, bring it up, and put it under tarps until he could move her vehicle where it would never be linked to the house.
“Ground’s going to be tough to crack today, Cyn-Cyn,” Soneji said, pulling hard on the rope, squeezing her neck, causing her head to loll and her damn hat to fall off.
He cursed and grabbed the hat, which reeked of cat and made him want to dry-heave, and stuck it back on her head. He took up the rope once more and slid the body across the snow, up the drive. “I’m probably going to need to use a pickax first.”
That meant no progress on his secret room. Not today. He felt frustrated.
Then again, he had managed to get all the remaining building supplies for the room into the basement. That counted.
The cat woman walking into his life also counted. She had confirmed his love of strangulation. The feline and crap odors aside, he thought that choking her had almost felt better than the first time with the real estate agent.
As he dragged Owens’s body through the gate and up the slight rise toward the shed and the house, he told himself that these kinds of one-off events, crimes of opportunity, just might be enough to check his hunger, his need to kill, while he took his sweet time learning about Cheryl Lynn Wise and the heavy security around her so he could execute the perfect kidnapping.
After all, Soneji was his own monster now.
He would no longer study and role-play the homicidal greats of yore.
“Let them study me,” Soneji said and chortled. “Let them all study me now.”
Epilogue
A Reckoning
Present Day
CHAPTER 96
I HEARD FOOTSTEPS COMING down the stairs, shaking me from the trance I’d been in, reading Soneji’s kill diary inside his secret room in the Pine Barrens cabin.
I looked at the last line I’d read: Let them all study me now.
“Alex? You still in there?” Sampson called. “We’ve been outside three hours.”
I shook my head, set Profiles in Homicidal Genius aside with a quarter of the pages still unread, and stood up. “Felt like weeks to me.”
“The dogs have located more bodies,” John said. “Going to be a chore identifying them.”
I shook my head. “Probably not. In his book, he names several of the victims and describes where he buried them. There’s probably more in the pages I didn’t get to. One will be a woman named Cynthia Owens. And you don’t want to know the names of two of them.”
Sampson frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
I gazed around at the bins. “These are murder kits, John. Specific kits assembled so Soneji could practice the methods of serial killers he admired. TBS is the Boston Strangler. NS is the Night Stalker. ZK is the Zodiac Killer, GRK is the Green River Killer, JWG is John Wayne Gacy, and SOS—”
Mahoney came pounding down the stairs. “We’ve got another one, and I need all hands on deck.”
Realizing I desperately needed fresh air, I took a last look at the bins, the macabre treasures, and Soneji’s memoir. When I ducked out of the room, Mahoney and Sampson studied me.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Ned said.
“I have, in a way. Quite a few, in fact,” I said, jabbing my thumb over my shoulder. “It’s all in there.”
“All what?”
Sampson said, “The names and burial locations of Soneji’s victims.”
“And all the evidence against Soneji—and us,” I said, feeling gutted again. I wanted to cry or rage at everything that had changed so completely inside the spider’s nest.
“Evidence against us? Who is us?” Sampson demanded.
I gazed at John, then Ned. “A long time ago, Soneji duped the FBI, the Virginia state police, the Maryland state police, and the Pennsylvania state police. But most of all, he duped DC Metro’s Homicide team, specifically me and John, when we were junior detectives on our earliest cases.”
Sampson’s expression turned hard. “I do not know what you’re talking about, Alex.”
“I’ll explain it in full on the drive back to DC, but for now, Ned, I don’t think John and I should have anything further to do with this investigation.”
Mahoney rubbed his jaw. “What? Why? Stop talking in opaque loops.”
“We can’t be a part of this because we are compromised,” I said. I felt closed in and pushed past them, heading toward the stairs. “Like it or not, culpable or not, Sampson and I had a role in a lot of what happened in this cabin.”
John came after me as I climbed up from the basement. “What in God’s name are you talking about, Alex?” he yelled.
I ignored him, wanting cold air in my lungs and something in my stomach before I explained it all. He stayed right behind me, and Mahoney followed him. When we were all out on the front porch, I gazed across Soneji’s yard with new and stunned eyes.
“We could have stopped him,” I said. “A long time ago.”
My anguish must have shown on my face because when Sampson spoke again, it was in a lower voice and with more empathy. “What did you mean when you said I didn’t want to know the names of two of the people buried here? Please, brother, you’re upsetting me.”
“And me,” Mahoney said.
“A nineteen-year-old named Joyce Adams was evidently the first to be tortured, killed, and buried here,” I said.
“Joyce Adams?” Sampson said, squinting. “I have no idea who—”
“She was a freshman who disappeared from Princeton University a long time ago, more than a decade before Maggie Rose Dunne was kidnapped from the Washington Day School,” I said. “Bunny Maddox is buried here too.”
Sampson blinked and shook his head slowly as he turned from me. “No.”
