I ran upstairs, taking the creaking wooden steps two at a time. Sampson was close behind me, a shadow. It usually doesn’t show on his face, but he gets as upset as I do. Neither of us is jaded yet.
I could hear it in his voice, in the shallow way he was breathing. “Roni! Are you up here? Are you hiding somewhere?” he called out.
“Roni! It’s the police. You’re safe now, Roni! You can come out.”
Someone had ransacked the master bedroom. Someone had invaded this space, desecrated it, broken every piece of furniture, overturned beds and bureaus.
“You remember her, John?” I asked as we checked the rest of the bedrooms.
“I remember her pretty good,” Sampson said in a soft voice. “Cute little girl.”
“Oh, no-nooo-”
Suddenly I was running down the hallway, back down the stairs. I raced through the kitchen and pulled open a hollow-core door between the refrigerator and a four-burner stove.
We both hurried down into the basement, into the cellar of the house.
My heart was out of control, beating, banging, thuding loudly inside my chest. I didn’t want to be here, to see any more of Soneji’s handiwork, his nasty surprises.
The cellar of his house.
The symbolic place of all Gary ’s childhood nightmares.
The cellar.
Blood.
Trains.
The cellar in the Murphy house was small and neat. I looked around. The trains were gone! There had been a train set down here the first time we came to the house.
I didn’t see any signs of the girl, though. Nothing looked out of place. We threw open work cabinets. Sampson yanked open the washer, then the clothes dryer.
There was an unpainted wooden door to one side of the water heater and a fiberglass laundry sink. There was no sign of blood in the sink, no bloodstained clothes. Was there a way outside? Had the little girl run away when her father came to the house?
The closet! I yanked open the door.
Roni Murphy was bound with rope and gagged with old rags. Her blue eyes were large with fear. She was alive!
She was shaking badly. He didn’t kill her, but he had killed her childhood, just as his had been killed. A few years before, he had done the same thing with a girl called Maggie Rose.
“Oh, sweet girl,” I whispered as I untied her and took out the cloth gag her father had stuffed into her mouth. “Everything is all right now. Everything is okay, Roni. You’re okay now.”
What I didn’t say was, Your father loved you enough not to kill you-but he wants to kill everything and everyone else.
“You’re okay, you’re okay, baby. Everything is okay,” I lied to the poor little girl. “Everything is okay now.”
Sure it is.
Chapter 36
ONCE UPON a long time ago, Nana Mama had been the one who had taught me to play the piano.
In those days, the old upright sat like a constant invitation to make music in our family room. One afternoon after school, she heard me trying to play a little boogie-woogie. I was eleven years old at the time. I remember it well, as if it were yesterday. Nana swept in like a soft breeze and sat next to me on the piano bench, just the way I do now with Jannie and Damon.
“I think you’re a little ahead of yourself with that cool jazz stuff, Alex. Let me show you something beautiful. Let me show you where you might start your music career.”
She made me practice my Czerny finger exercises every day until I was ready to play and appreciate Mozart, Beethoven, Handel, Haydn-all from Nana Mama. She taught me to play from age eleven until I was eighteen, when I left for school at Georgetown and then Johns Hopkins. By that time, I was ready to play that cool jazz stuff, and to know what I was playing, and even know why I liked what I liked.
When I came home from Delaware, very late, I found Nana on the porch and she was playing the piano. I hadn’t heard her play like that in many years.
She didn’t hear me come in, so I stood in the door way and watched her for several minutes. She was playing Mozart and she still had a feeling for the music that she loved. She’d once told me how sad it was that no one knew where Mozart was buried.
When she finished, I whispered, “Bravo. Bravo. That’s just beautiful.”
Nana turned to me. “Silly old woman,” she said and wiped away a tear I hadn’t been able to see from where I was standing.
“Not silly at all,” I said. I sat down and held her in my arms on the piano bench. “Old yes, really old and cranky, but never silly.”
“I was just thinking,” she said, “about that third movement in Mozart’s Concerto No. 21, and then I had a memory of how I used to be able to play it, a long, long time ago.” She sighed. “So I had myself a nice cry. Felt real good, too.”
“Sorry to intrude,” I said as I continued to hold her close.
“I love you, Alex,” my grandmother whispered. “Can you still play ‘Clair de Lune’? Play Debussy for me.”
And so with Nana Mama close beside me, I played.
Chapter 37
THE GROAN-and-grunt work continued the following morning.
First thing, Kyle faxed me several stories about his agent, Thomas Pierce. The stories came from cities where Mr. Smith had committed murders: Atlanta, St. Louis, Seattle, San Francisco, London, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Rome. Pierce had helped to capture a murderer in Fort Lauderdale in the spring, unrelated to Smith.
Other headlines:
FOR THOMAS PIERCE, THE CRIME SCENE IS IN THE MIND
MURDER EXPERT HERE IN ST. LOUIS
THOMAS PIERCE-GETTING INTO KILLERS’ HEADS
NOT ALL PATTERN KILLERS ARE BRILLIANT-BUT AGENT
THOMAS PIERCE IS
MURDERS OF THE MIND, THE MOST CHILLING
MURDERS OF ALL.
If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought Kyle was trying to make me jealous of Pierce. I wasn’t jealous. I didn’t have the time for it right now.
A little before noon, I drove out to Lorton Prison, one of my least favorite places in the charted universe.
Everything moves slowly inside a high-security federal prison. It is like being held underwater, like being drowned by unseen human hands. It happens over days, over years, sometimes over decades.
At an administrative max facility, prisoners are kept in their cells twenty-two to twenty-three hours a day. The boredom is incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t served time. It is not imaginable. Gary Soneji told me that, created the drowning metaphor when I interviewed him years back at Lorton.
He also thanked me for giving him the experience of being in prison, and he said that one day he would reciprocate if he possibly could. More and more, I had the sense that my time had come, and I had to guess what the excruciating payback might be.
It was not imaginable.
I could almost feel myself drowning as I paced inside a small administrative room near the warden’s office on the fifth floor at Lorton.
I was waiting for a double murderer named Jamal Autry. Autry claimed to have important information about Soneji. He was known inside Lorton as the Real Deal. He was a predator, a three-hundred-pound pimp who had murdered two teenage prostitutes in Baltimore.
The Real Deal was brought to me in restraints. He was escorted into the small, tidy office by two armed guards with billy clubs.
“You Alex Cross? Gah-damn. Now ain’t that somethin’,” Jamal Autry said with a middle-South twang.
He smiled crookedly when he spoke. The lower half of his face sagged like the mouth and jaw of a bottom feeder. He had strange, uneven piggy eyes that were hard to look at. He continued to smile as if he were about to be paroled today, or had just won the inmates’ lottery.
I told the two guards that I wanted to talk to Autry alone. Even though he was in restraints, they departed reluctantly. I wasn’t afraid of this big load, though. I wasn’t a helpless teenage girl he could beat up on.