Two hours later as I drove through the outskirts of Crumpton, Maryland, I was still wrestling with the answer Soneji’s father had given me. It seemed to offer new insight into his son, but I still couldn’t explain how or why yet.
I found the second address. The farmhouse had once been a cheery yellow, but the paint was peeling and streaked with dark mold. Every window was encased in the kind of iron barring you see in big cities.
As I walked across the front yard toward the porch, I stirred up several pigeons, flushing them from the dead weeds. I heard a weird voice talking somewhere behind the house.
The porch was dominated by several old machine tools, lathes and such, that I had to step around in order to knock at a steel door with triple dead bolts.
I knocked a second time, and was thinking I should go around the house where I’d heard the odd voice. But then the dead bolts were thrown one by one.
The door opened, revealing a dark-haired woman in her forties, with a sharp nose and dull brown eyes. She wore a grease-stained one-piece Carhartt canvas coverall, and carried at port arms an AR-style rifle with a big banana clip.
“Salesman, you are standing on my property uninvited,” she said. “I have ample cause to shoot you where you stand.”
I showed her my badge and ID, said, “I’m not a salesman. I’m a cop. I should have called ahead, but I didn’t have a number.”
Instead of calming her down, that only got her more agitated. “What are the police doing at sweet Ginny Winslow’s door? Looking to persecute a gun lover?”
“I just want to ask you a few questions, Mrs. Soneji,” I said.
Soneji’s widow flinched at the name, and turned spitting mad. “My name’s been legally changed to Virginia Winslow going on seven years now, and I still can’t get the stench of Gary off my skin. What’s your name? Who are you with?”
“Alex Cross,” I said. “With DC…”
She hardened, said, “I know you now. I remember you from TV.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You never came to talk with me. Just them US marshals. Like I didn’t even exist.”
“I’m here to talk now,” I said.
“Ten years too late. Get the hell off my property before I embrace my Second Amendment rights and—”
“I saw Gary’s father this morning,” I said. “He told me how Gary’s obsession with the Lindbergh kidnapping began.”
She knitted her brows. “How’s that?”
“Gary’s dad said when Gary was eight they were in a used book store, and while his father was wandering in the stacks, his son found a tattered copy of True Detective Mysteries, a crime magazine from the 1930s, and sat down to read it.”
Finger still on the trigger of her semiautomatic rifle, Virginia Winslow shrugged. “So what?”
“When Mr. Soneji found Gary, his son was sitting on the floor in the bookstore, the magazine in his lap, and staring in fascination at a picture from the Lindbergh baby’s autopsy that showed the head wound in lurid detail.”
She stared at me with her jaw slack, as if remembering something that frightened and appalled her.
“What is it?” I asked.
Soneji’s widow hardened again. “Nothing. Doesn’t surprise me. I used to catch him looking at autopsy pictures. He was always saying he was going to write a book and needed to look at them for research.”
“You didn’t believe him?”
“I believed him until my brother Charles noticed that Gary was always volunteering to gut deer they killed,” she said. “Charles told me Gary liked to put his hands in the warm innards, said he liked the feeling, and told me how Gary’d get all bright and glowing when he was doing it.”
Chapter 11
“I didn’t know that about Gary, either,” I said.
“What’s this all about?” Virginia Winslow asked, studying me now.
“There was a cop shooting in DC,” I said. “A man who fit Gary’s description was the shooter.”
I expected Soneji’s widow to respond with total skepticism. But instead she looked frightened and appalled again.
“Gary’s dead,” she said. “You killed him, didn’t you?”
“He killed himself,” I said. “Detonated the bomb he was carrying.”
Her attention flitted to the boards. “That’s not what the internet is saying.”
“What’s the internet saying?”
“That Gary’s alive,” she said. “Our son, Dylan, said he’s seen it online. Gary’s dead, isn’t he? Please tell me that.”
The way she clenched the rifle told me she needed to hear it, so I said, “As far as I know, Gary Soneji’s dead and has been dead for more than ten years. But someone who looked an awful lot like him shot my partner yesterday.”
“What?” she said. “No.”
“It’s not him,” I said. “I’m almost certain.”
“Almost?” she said before a phone started ringing back in the house.
“I…I have to get that,” she said. “Work.”
“What kind of work?”
“I’m a machinist and gunsmith,” she said. “My father taught me the trade.”
She shut the door before I could comment. The bolts were thrown one by one.
I almost left, but then, remembering that voice I’d heard on my way in, I went around the farmhouse, seeing a small, neglected barn around which dozens of pigeons were flying.
I heard someone talking in the barn, and walked over.
Click-a-t-clack. Click-a-t-clack.
Pigeons started and whirled out the barn door.
There was a grimy window. I went to it, and peeked inside, seeing through the dirt sixteen-year-old Dylan Winslow standing there by a large pigeon coop, gazing off into space.
Dylan looked nothing like his father. He had his mother’s naturally dark hair, sharp nose, and the same dull brown eyes. He was borderline obese, with hardly a chin, more a draping of his cheeks that joined a wattle above his Adam’s apple.
“You need to learn your place,” he said to no one. “You need to learn to be quiet. Emotional control. It’s the key to a happy life.”
Then he turned and walked by the pigeon coop, running a hoop of keys across the metal mesh.
Click-a-t-clack. Click-a-t-clack.
The sound rattled the pigeons and they battered themselves against their cages.
“Be quiet now,” Dylan said firmly. “You got to learn some control.”
Then he pivoted and started toward me, raking the cages again.
Click-a-t-clack. Click-a-t-clack.
A disturbing little smile showed on the teen’s face, and there was even more upsetting delight in his eyes. I have a PhD in criminal psychology and have studied serial killers in depth. Many of them grew up torturing animals for sport.
Had Dylan’s father?
I stepped inside the barn. Gary Soneji’s son had his back to me again, walking away while raking the front of the cages.
Click-a-t-clack. Click-a-t-clack.
I took another two steps and noticed a large piece of cardboard nailed to one of the barn’s support posts.
There was a well-used paper target taped to the cardboard and six darts sticking out of it. The target featured a bull’s-eye superimposed over a man’s face. It had been used so many times that at first I didn’t know who the man was.
Then I did.
“Who the hell are you?” Dylan said, and then gaped when I faced him.
“From the looks of it,” I said, “I’m your dartboard.”
Chapter 12
Dylan Winslow pursed his lips in long-simmering anger, said, “If Mama would let me, I’d use one of her shotguns on it instead of darts.”
What do you say to the disturbed son of the disturbed criminal you shot in the face and watched burn?
“I can understand your feelings,” I said.
“No, you can’t,” he said, sneering. “This an official visit, Detective Alex Cross?”
“As a matter of fact,” I
said. “A man fitting your dead father’s description shot my partner in the head last night.”
Dylan’s sneer disappeared, replaced by widening eyes and that disturbing, delighted grin I’d seen earlier. “It’s true, then, what they’re saying.”
“What are they saying?”
“That you didn’t get my dad,” Dylan said. “That he escaped the tunnels, badly wounded, but alive, and is still alive. Is that what you’re telling me, too?”
There seemed so much hope in his face that, whether he was in need of psychological help or not, I didn’t want to destroy it.
“If it wasn’t your father who shot my partner, it was his twin.”
Dylan started to laugh. He laughed so hard there were tears in his eyes.
Thumping his chest, he said, “I knew it! I felt it right here.”
When he stopped, I said, “What do you think is going to happen? That he’s going to suddenly appear to rescue you?”
Dylan acted as if I’d read his thoughts, but then shot back, “He will. You watch. And there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s like they say—Dad was always smarter than you. More patient and cunning than you.”
Rather than defend myself, I said, “You’re right. Your father was smarter than me, and more patient, and more cunning.”
“He still is. They say so on the internet.”
“What site?” I asked.
Dylan gave me that disturbing smile again before saying, “One you can’t get at in a million years, Cross.” He laughed. “Never in a million years.”
“Really?” I said. “How about I march back up to your mother and tell her I’m coming back with a search warrant for every computer in your house?”
Dylan’s grin stretched wider. “Go ahead. We don’t have one.”
“How about every computer in your school, in the local library, in every place your mother says you get online?”
I thought that would rock him, but it didn’t.
“Knock yourself out,” he said. “But unless I have a lawyer present, I am done answering your questions, and I have pigeons to feed.”
Or torture, I almost said.
But I bit back the urge, and turned to leave, calling over my shoulder, “Nice to meet you, Dylan. Wonderful getting to know the son of an old enemy.”
Chapter 13
It was past six when I finally reached the ICU at GW Medical Center. The nurse at the station said Sampson’s vitals had been irregular most of the day, and there’d been little if any reduction in brain swelling.
“You sick in any way?” the nurse asked.
“Not that I’m aware of. Why?”
“Protocol. The shunt draining the wound is an open track straight to the inside of your friend’s healing skull. Any kind of infection could be catastrophic.”
“I feel fine,” I said, and put on the gown, mask, and gloves.
When I pushed open the door, Billie stirred awake in her reclining chair.
“Alex? That you?”
“The man behind the mask.”
“Tell me about it,” she said, getting up to hug me. “I’ve been wearing one the past forty hours and I’m getting rubbed raw.”
“His vitals?”
Billie scanned the monitors attached to her husband and said, “Not bad at the moment, but his blood pressure took a short, scary dive about four hours ago. I was thinking stroke until he just kind of came up out of it.”
“They say talking to people in comas helps,” I said.
“Stimulates the brain,” she said, nodding. “But that’s usually with a non-induced coma, when there aren’t drugs involved.”
“All the same,” I said, and went to Sampson’s side.
“I’ll be a few minutes,” Billie said.
“Be right here until you get back,” I said.
When she’d gone out, I held Sampson’s giant hand and gave him an account of the day’s investigation, sparing him no detail. It felt good and familiar, and right, to talk it out with him, as if Sampson were not drugged down to the reptilian part of his brain, but acute and thoughtful and funny as hell.
“That’s it,” I said. “And, yes, I want another crack at Soneji’s widow and kid before long.”
The door opened. Billie stepped back inside, and then several of the monitors around Sampson began to squawk in alarm.
A team burst in. I was pushed to the corner with Billie.
“It’s his blood pressure again,” Billie said in a wavering voice. “Jesus, I don’t know if his heart can take this much longer.”
Ninety seconds later, the crisis passed and his vitals improved.
“I don’t know what happened,” I said, bewildered. “I was telling him about the investigation and…”
“What?” Billie said. “Why did you do that?”
“Because he’d want to know.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “That’s done. That’s over, Alex.”
“What’s over?”
“His career as a cop,” Billie said. “No matter how he recovers, that part of John’s life is over if he wants to continue to be my husband.”
“John loves being a cop,” I said.
“I know he does…did…but that’s over,” Billie said sharply. “I will care for him, and defend John until the day one of us dies, but between now and then, his days carrying a gun and a badge are behind him.”
Chapter 14
“She’s got the right to demand that,” Bree said later in the hospital cafeteria. “John took a bullet to the head, Alex.”
“I know,” I said, frustrated and heartsick.
It felt like part of John had died and was never coming back. And it would never be the same between us, as partners anyway. That was dead, too.
I explained this to Bree, and she put her hands on mine and said, “You’ll never have a better friend than John Sampson. That friendship, that fierce bond you two have, will never be broken, even if he’s no longer a cop, even if he’s no longer your partner. Okay?”
“No,” I said, pushing my plate away. “But I’ll have to learn to live with it.”
“You haven’t eaten three bites,” Bree said, gesturing at the plate.
“No appetite,” I said.
“Then force yourself,” Bree said. “Especially the protein. Your brain has to be tip-top if you’re going to find Soneji.”
I laughed softly. “You’re always looking out for me.”
“Every moment I can, baby.”
I ate quite a bit more, and washed it down with three full glasses of water.
“Not quite Nana Mama’s cooking,” I said.
“I’m sure there’ll be leftovers,” Bree said.
“You trying to get me fat?” I said.
“I like a little cushion.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, and we both burst out laughing. Then I looked over and saw Billie standing in the doorway, watching us with bitterness and longing in her expression. She turned and left.
“Should I go after her?” I asked.
“No,” Bree said. “I’ll talk to her tomorrow.”
“Home?”
“Home.”
We left the hospital and were crossing a triangular plaza to the Foggy Bottom Metro station when the first shot rang out.
I heard the flat crack of the muzzle blast. I felt the bullet rip past my left ear, grabbed Bree, and yanked her to the ground by two newspaper boxes. People were screaming and scattering.
“Where is he?” Bree said.
“I don’t know,” I said, before the second and third shots shattered the glass of one newspaper rack and pinged off another.
Then I heard squealing tires, and jumped up in time to see a white panel van roar north on 23rd Street, Northwest, heading toward Washington Circle, and a dozen different escape routes. As the van flashed past us, I caught a glimpse of the driver.
Gary Soneji was looking my way as if posing for a mental picture, grinning like a lunatic and holding his rig
ht-hand thumb up, index finger extended, like a gun he was aiming right at me.
I was so shocked that another instant passed before I started running across the plaza to 23rd, trying to get a look at his license plates. But his plate lights were dark, and the van soon disappeared into evening traffic, headed in the direction of whatever hellhole Gary Soneji was calling home these days.
“Did you see him?” I asked Bree, who was shaken, but calling in the shots to dispatch.
She shook her head after she’d finished. “You did?”
“It was him, Bree. Gary Soneji in the flesh. As if he hadn’t been blown up and burned, as if he hadn’t spent the past decade in a box under six feet of dirt.”
Chapter 15
The next morning, I called GW to check on Sampson. His vitals had destabilized again.
Part of me said, Go to the hospital, but instead I drove out to Quantico, Virginia, and the FBI Lab.
For almost seven years, I worked for the Bureau in the behavioral science department as a full-time consultant and left on good terms. I have many friends who still work at Quantico, including my old partner, Ned Mahoney.
I called ahead, and he met me at the gate, made sure I got the VIP treatment clearing security.
“What are friends in high places for?” Mahoney asked when I thanked him. “How’s John?”
I gave him a brief update on Sampson and my investigation.
“How could Soneji be alive?” Mahoney said. “I was there, remember? I saw him burning, too. It was him. ”
“Then who was the guy who shot Sampson and tried to shoot me last night?” I said. “Because both times I’ve seen him, my brain has screamed Soneji! Both times.”
“Hey, hey, Alex,” Mahoney said, patting me on the shoulder out of concern. “Take a big breath. If it’s him, we’ll help you find him.”
I took several deep, long breaths, trying to keep my thoughts from whirling, and said, “Let’s start with the cybercrime unit.”
Ten minutes later, we went through an unmarked door into a large space filled with low-walled cubicles that were in a soft blue light Mahoney said was supposed to increase productivity. There were three, sometimes four computer screens at every workstation.