Return of the Spider, page 7
part #33 of Alex Cross Series
John shrugged. “That distinction might be lost on some of the guys. But so what? And everyone gets carried away when they come up with a theory like that.”
“You think I got carried away?”
“Maybe a little. I wouldn’t have said anything to anyone until I had it nailed.”
“Anyone except me.”
“I’ll tell you when you don’t have it nailed, and I expect the same of you.”
I sighed. “Guess I do need some checks and balances.”
“We all do, brother. There’s no going it alone in modern policing. The cowboy, lone-wolf, Dirty Harry detective is in the past. We’re part of a system now.”
I nodded. “Learning.”
“Every day,” he said. “Are we ever going to find a cab?”
“Seems like a message,” I said. “Think I’ll skip the beer, take the Metro, and go home.”
“Don’t take that trip to the principal’s office too hard.”
“I’ll try not to.”
But try as I might, I was still chewing on Chief Pittman’s comments long after I’d gotten home and while I was cooking dinner: baked salmon, green beans, and egg noodles with garlic and oil, which pushed the boundaries of my culinary expertise. Maria got home from work after picking Damon up from day care.
He fast-waddled to me, and I scooped him up in my arms.
“I missed you, Daddy,” Damon whispered into my neck.
“I missed you too, little buddy,” I said, kissing the top of his head, my eyes misting. Maria took off her coat, somehow looking as fresh as she had when she’d left for work that morning.
Maria and I kissed hello, then we both kissed Damon on opposite cheeks at the same time, which got him laughing.
I asked Maria about her day. “Not bad,” she said. “Baby was kicking a lot. I took care of some follow-up calls I’d been putting off. Thanks for cooking.”
“Pretty straightforward meal.”
“I still appreciate it,” she said. “Come talk to me while I change.”
I shifted Damon to my other arm, checked the timers, saw I still had twenty minutes before dinner was done, and carried him with me down the hall.
Maria was in our closet, putting on sweatpants.
“What’s up with you?” she asked. “Lot of weight on those shoulders.”
“Is it that obvious?”
“Yeah. I saw the hound-dog look on your face before Damon toddled over.”
“I got a private spanking from Chief Pittman because I came up with a theory I was excited about, called the entire team into his office to tell them about it, and then realized how many holes there were in my argument.”
“Daddy spanked?” Damon said, lifting his head off my shoulder.
“Sort of,” I said.
Maria said, “Pittman will get over it. Enthusiasm never hurts.”
“In the future, I think I’ll be more, I don’t know, disciplined about who I tell things to.”
“You can be enthusiastic and disciplined. That’s not hard.”
As we went back out to the kitchen, I told Maria about the resentment toward me among many of the junior officers.
“I can see that,” she said.
“I can too. Doesn’t make it easier to deal with people watching you and wanting you to fail.”
“Well, you won’t fail.”
“You have more belief in me than I do.”
“Of course I do. I’m your wife. That’s what I’m here for. You’re the same way about me. Damon? Do you want some noodles?”
“Yes, please, Mommy,” he said as I lowered him into his high chair. He threw both hands up and crowed, “Noodles!”
Any kind of pasta was his favorite food, and when he cheered, I realized just how right my life was.
CHAPTER 20
Newark, Delaware
IN A CARREL DEEP in the stacks on the second floor of the University of Delaware library, Gary Soneji was engrossed in Practical Homicide Investigation: Tactics, Procedures, and Forensic Techniques by Vernon J. Geberth.
He’d read the book during his undergraduate years but had returned to study so-called equivocal-death investigations, specifically ones where detectives believed they were dealing with staged murder scenes. He wanted to know what they took into consideration beyond fetishistic posing. He wanted to know what would make them suspect that the victim had been killed elsewhere and then moved.
He found what he was looking for. One tip-off was the location of internal blood pooling in the body being contradictory to a corpse’s position at discovery. Another was fibers on the body suggesting that the victim had been wrapped in a rug or a blanket. A third was an injury on the body at odds with the manner of death.
Too many things could go wrong if you moved them, Soneji decided. You didn’t leave them to be found. You didn’t move them anywhere but to their graves. This is pleasure. But it must be done so the pleasure can last longer.
He shut the book on homicide investigations and turned his attention to an FBI manual he’d found in the stacks that focused on kidnapping investigations and included a detailed narrative about the Lindbergh-baby kidnapping case, which he read with great interest.
He’d grown up in Princeton, near where the crime had occurred, so he’d always been fascinated with that case. The idea of kidnapping—and killing—a celebrity’s child held a particular thrill for him.
Death was intensely interesting to him, and it gave him immense pleasure to see people die at his hands. He felt a fierce adrenaline rush, an exhilarating explosion of power.
Murder was fun, Soneji allowed. And strangely fulfilling. Like a glimpse into the unknown, he thought, and felt a chill go through him.
Yet there was something about an abduction that moved Soneji equally if not more. As he devoured information on the Lindbergh case, his mind flashed back to scenes from his first take.
Joyce Adams. Very pretty. Very arrogant.
That had changed quickly, hadn’t it? She’d been begging for mercy by the end.
Joyce had left the Princeton University campus to go to a local county park for an early-morning run in the woods, a fairly routine habit for the freshman co-ed. She had never emerged from those trees.
Dressed in camouflage, Soneji had ambushed her, knocked her out with injectable animal tranquilizer he’d stolen from a vet hospital he volunteered at, and bundled her into his old VW van. He’d taken her to a small house in the Pine Barrens that he’d inherited from an uncle on his mother’s side. It had a basement that suited his secret purposes perfectly, allowing him to toy and play with Joyce for several days before ending her life.
At the memory, Soneji felt warm and fuzzy inside. But also hungry for more, wanting that buzzing sense of power that had surged through him while holding Joyce against her will. He wanted it again and he wanted it soon.
The more efficient side of him, however—the side that thrived on the order and rigor of math and computer science—kept him in check. Soneji had promised himself he would finish what he’d set out to do: to study all the masters, teach himself every possible way a crime could go wrong, then resolve all the issues before he acted.
But he had to admit he’d already made two mistakes. He hadn’t stayed to put a second shot in Abby, and she’d lived, and he hadn’t finished off the guy on the bike, though he was evidently critically injured. On a positive note, Soneji had been reading the newspaper stories about the shooting closely and had seen no mention of a white van.
Soneji told himself he was okay. Abby and the bicyclist were alive, but he was okay. This was no time to quit. He would just have to do better next time.
He closed the FBI manual on kidnap investigations and realized that it had been more than a week since he’d taken the shot at Conrad Talbot—almost ten days, actually. It was time to practice becoming David Berkowitz once again.
CHAPTER 21
SONEJI CHECKED HIS WATCH. Three thirty p.m. He’d gotten to the library around eleven a.m.
He did some calculations in his head and decided to visit his secret little cabin in the Pine Barrens, making some important client visits on the way. He could check the place, take a few shots with the Bulldog, and be hunting for targets by sundown.
He picked up his briefcase, left the library, and headed to the parking lot and his black Saab. As he got in, his big Motorola car phone started ringing. Marty Kasajian, his boss and brother-in-law, had bought the insanely expensive device for him.
Soneji answered, figuring it was Marty, but instead he heard Meredith Kasajian Murphy’s voice say coldly, “Hello, Gary. It’s your wife.”
“Missy?” he said, frowning. “You know this phone is only for work and emergencies.”
“You didn’t call last night, Gary,” Missy said.
“I’m sorry. I was beat after a long day making cold calls and just crashed when I hit the motel. I know I should have called, but the pay phone there was out.”
“You could have used the car phone.”
“And have Marty explode about the charges? Do you know how much this thing costs a minute?”
Missy said, “Marty can afford it for my peace of mind.”
“I hope you’ll be the one telling him that.”
There was a silence, then his wife said, “I’ll do that. When are you coming home? Roni and I want to know.”
Roni was their two-year-old daughter. Wanting to pound the heel of his hand against the side of his head, he replied, “As soon as I make monthly quota on new business, probably dinnertime on Friday.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
“I’m going to tell Marty I want you home Friday whether you make quota or not.”
“Good luck with that,” Soneji said and hung up, kind of wishing Missy and Marty were in front of him right now so he could slap his bitch wife silly and kick his dickhead brother-in-law in the nuts.
Marty Kasajian was the kind of guy who’d been born on third base and believed he’d hit a triple. He’d inherited his family’s booming heating oil and propane company but acted like he was the big entrepreneur who’d built the place. He’d given Soneji a job, not in computers, but as a traveling salesman, drumming up business along the middle Atlantic Seaboard.
As jobs went, it wasn’t bad. The pay was more than decent. And it allowed him chunks of time to play hooky and try out this private-school-teacher identity. He could spend his days around elite kids, studying them and fantasizing about kidnapping them.
But at the moment, he had more important things to think about. Like where to hunt his next victims.
CHAPTER 22
THE MORNING AFTER MY ill-fated meeting with Pittman, Kurtz, and Diehl, John Sampson and I were called to a homicide in Fort Circle Park in Southeast Washington, DC.
A jogger had come upon a dead male on one of the park’s interior paths.
We found the body beside the path, arms circling the trunk of an oak tree, wrists tied together with wire that had cut deeply into the skin.
It had rained overnight. The skies were still threatening. We stood back while patrol officers erected canopies over the scene, then moved closer.
“No prints in the mud except the runner’s,” Sampson said.
“Rained hard last night,” I said, moving around the tree so I could see the victim more clearly.
The left side of his face showed him to be young, in his mid-teens, and of mixed race. Hispanic and Black would be my guess.
I kept moving and saw that the right side of his face, against the tree trunk, was battered and grossly swollen. A rag had been stuffed in his mouth.
I took a few more steps and saw that his back had been struck repeatedly with something long and narrow and with such force that his bloody T-shirt had ripped, showing livid welts and torn flesh beneath.
“Jesus,” I said, turning away, nauseated.
“Take a few breaths,” Sampson said. “I’ll check his pockets.”
I walked several yards away and leaned against a tree, swallowing at the aluminum taste building at the back of my throat.
“Nothing,” Sampson said a minute later. “Looks like he was cleaned out.”
Emily Chin, the chief medical examiner, showed up shortly after I’d gotten my gut under control enough to return to the scene.
“You’re taking field calls now, Doc?” Sampson said.
“Two deputies are on vacation, and we’re understaffed, so here I am,” Chin said.
I said, “Looks like the right side of his head was beaten against the tree after his back was slashed by something.”
Chin took multiple photographs of the scene before the criminology team showed up. Then she moved to examine the body, Dictaphone in hand. She spoke into the recorder loud enough for us to hear.
“Victim is male, mixed race, appears to be fifteen or sixteen, with facial skin split raggedly in several places, probably from being hit against the tree trunk,” Chin said. She got out a flashlight and bent over to look at his back. “Posterior torso has been lashed in multiple places.”
I waited until Chin had clicked off her recorder. “Can you tell what was used?” I asked.
“Not leather,” she said. “More like a long thin rod or a dowel of some kind.”
Sampson said, “Like something you’d use to cane someone?”
Chin pocketed the flashlight. “I’ll have to look at the tissue under a magnifying glass, but yes, it looks like a caning to me.”
“He die from the head trauma?” I asked.
“We’ll know more after the autopsy, but I’d say he was rendered unconscious from the head blows. When he collapsed, his weight caused the wires to slice into his wrists. Rain washed the blood down the trunk and into the leaves.”
From his body temperature, she determined he’d died about five hours before the jogger found him, so around one in the morning.
At this point, a very attractive young Black woman in jeans, hiking boots, and a black windbreaker came trotting down the path toward us.
Sampson said, “Stop right there, ma’am.”
She stopped, breathing hard, and held up a badge. “I’m Officer Nancy Donovan, Metro PD. I work gangs undercover, and when I heard there was a kid found in the park, I—” Donovan saw the body hanging off the tree trunk. “Can I take a look at him?”
I said, “He’s pretty beat up, but have at it.”
Donovan gave me a wan smile, walked past us in an arc around the crime scene, and stopped to gaze at the good side of the victim’s face. She shook her head.
“I know him,” she said. “Shay Mansion. Lives in Grant Park. Dropped out of Woodson last year after two trips to juvie. I’ve seen him multiple times in the past six months with members of Los Lobos Rojos—the Red Wolves. He was a recruit.”
CHAPTER 23
SAMPSON KNEW ALL ABOUT the Red Wolves, but I was not up to speed on the nuances of gang activity in the nation’s capital beyond what I’d learned in the case of Tony Miller, the boy who’d been found in the Potomac.
While John continued to take notes on the scene, Nancy Donovan, the undercover officer, and I went to a nearby coffee shop, where we took a back table and she gave me a primer on the situation.
“At the moment there are six or seven gangs in and around the edges of the District,” Donovan said. “But the ones that matter these days are Los Lobos Rojos, a Latin gang, and LMC Fifty-One, who are mostly Haitian refugees.”
“Rivals?”
“Bitter.”
“Are LMC members capable of this kind of murder?” I asked.
“They didn’t used to be, but lately their leader, Patrice Prince, has gotten bolder and more ruthless. Now I think he or his captains could do something this violent.”
Prince, she said, was the son and grandson of members of the notorious Tonton Macoute, the brutal death squad feared by generations of Haitians. He was orphaned at fourteen and had come to the United States as a refugee when he was sixteen.
He soon joined La Main Cachée—the Hidden Hand—an organized-crime group in Miami. He’d been investigated and jailed briefly twice, suspected of involvement in several killings during a gang war there, but he was never convicted.
“The heat got too much, so about six years ago Prince convinced his LMC brothers to let him come north and set up a second operation.”
“So the Fifty-One refers to the District of Columbia, the so-called fifty-first state.”
“And the surrounding counties in Maryland and Virginia.” When Prince first came north, she said, he had used proxies instead of appearing as the front man in the emerging gang. He functioned behind the scenes, building a growing network of disgruntled youth, his organization’s hands reaching into narcotics, armed robbery, illegal gambling, and human trafficking.
“But about eighteen months ago,” Donovan said, “the Red Wolves started feeling like their turf was being stepped on, and it got ugly from there. Los Lobos killed the two proxy front men of LMC Fifty-One about nine months ago, and Prince had no choice but to step out. Yeah, I could see Prince ordering this to make a statement.”
“Any idea where we can find Mr. Prince?”
Donovan chewed at the inside of her lip before meeting my eyes. “Look, I know who you are, Detective Cross, and I have no grudge against you. I think they were right to bring someone like you onto major cases like this.”
I smiled. “Thank you, Officer Donovan. I appreciate that.”
“But at the same time, I’ve been undercover almost fourteen months. I do know where Prince is, but if I tell you, suspicion will fall on a specific circle of people as the leak.”
“Including you?”
She shrugged. “I’d be considered on the perimeter of it, but Prince is not stupid.”
“I understand your situation, but this is a homicide investigation.”
Donovan held up her hands. “I get it. Tell you what—Prince moves around a lot. The second I have a line on him out in a public place, which happens often enough, I’ll notify you.”
