I typed: Could Gary Soneji possibly still be alive? Don’t rule anything out yet, not even the most absurd possibility.
Exhume Soneji’s body if necessary.
Read Cross’s book-Along Came a Spider.
Visit Lorton Prison, where Soneji was held.
I pushed aside my computer after an hour’s work. It was nearly two in the morning. My head felt stuffed, as if I had a terrible, nagging cold. I still couldn’t sleep. I was thirty-three years old; I was already beginning to feel like an old man.
I kept seeing the bloody bedroom at the Cross house. No one can imagine what it’s like to live with such imagery day and night. I saw Alex Cross-the way he looked at St. Anthony’s Hospital. Then I was remembering victims of Mr. Smith, his “studies,” as he called them.
The terrifying scenes play on and on and on in my head. Always leading to the same place, the same conclusion.
I can see another bedroom. It is the apartment Isabella and I shared in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
With total clarity, I remembered running down the narrow hallway that terrible night. I remember my heart pushing into my throat, its feeling larger than a clenched fist. I remember every pounding step that I took, everything I saw along the way.
I finally saw Isabella, and I thought it must be a dream, a terrible nightmare.
Isabella was in our bed, and I knew that she was dead. No one could have survived the butchery I witnessed there. No one did survive-neither of us.
Isabella had been savagely murdered at twenty-three, in the prime of her life, before she could be a mother, a wife, the anthropologist she’d dreamed of becoming. I couldn’t help myself, couldn’t stop. I bent and held what was left of Isabella, what was left.
How can I ever forget any of it? How can I turn that sight off in my mind?
The simple answer is, I cannot.
Chapter 82
I WAS ON the hunt again, the loneliest road on this earth. Truthfully, there wasn’t much else that had sustained me during the past four years, not since Isabella’s death.
The moment I awoke in the morning, I called St. Anthony’s Hospital. Alex Cross was alive, but in a coma. His condition was listed as grave. I wondered if John Sampson had remained at his bedside. I suspected he had.
By nine in the morning, I was back at the Cross house. I needed to study the scene in much greater depth, to gather every fact, every splinter and fragment. I tried to organize everything I knew, or thought I knew at this early stage of the investigation. I was reminded of a maxim that was frequently used at Quantico -All truths are half-truths and possibly not even that.
A fiendish “ghoul” had supposedly struck back from the grave and attacked a well-known policeman and his family in their home. The ghoul had warned Dr. Cross that he would come. There was no way to stop it from happening. It was the ultimate in cruel and effective revenge.
For some reason, though, the assailant had failed to execute. None of the family members, or even Alex Cross, had been killed. That was the perplexing and most baffling part of the puzzle for me. That was the key!
I arrived at the cellar in the Cross house just before eleven in the morning. I had asked the Metro police and FBI technicians not to mess around down there until I was finished with my survey of the other floors. My data gathering, my science, was a methodical, step-by-step process.
The attacker had hidden himself (herself?) in the basement while a party had been in progress upstairs and in the backyard. There was a partial footprint near the entryway to the cellar. It was a size nine. It wasn’t much to go on, not unless the perpetrator had wanted us to find the print.
One thing struck me right away. Gary Soneji had been locked in a cellar as a child. He’d been excluded from family activities in the rest of the house. He’d been physically abused in the cellar. Just like the one in the Cross house.
The attacker had definitely hidden in the cellar. That couldn’t be a coincidence.
Had he known about Gary Soneji’s explicit warning to Cross? That possibility was disturbing as hell. I didn’t want to settle on any theories or premature conclusions yet. I just needed to collect as much raw data and information as I could. Possibly because I’d been to medical school, I approached cases as a clinical scientist would.
Collect all the data first. Always the data.
It was quiet in the cellar, and I could focus and concentrate all my attention on my surroundings. I tried to imagine the attacker lurking here during the party, and then afterward, as the house grew quiet, until Alex Cross finally went to bed.
The attacker was a coward.
He wasn’t in a rage state. He was methodical.
It was not a crime of passion.
The intruder had struck out at each of the children first, but not fatally. He had beaten Alex Cross’s grandmother, but had spared her. Why? Only Alex Cross was meant to die, and so far even that hadn’t happened.
Had the attacker failed? Where was the intruder now?
Was he still in Washington? Checking out the Cross house right now? Or at St. Anthony’s Hospital, where the Metro police were guarding Alex Cross.
As I passed an ancient coal stove, I noticed the metal door was slightly ajar. I poked it open with my handkerchief and peered inside. I couldn’t see very well and took out a penlight. There were inches of ash that were light gray in color. Someone had burned a flammable substance recently, possibly newspapers or magazines.
Why start a fire in the middle of summer? I wondered.
A small hand shovel was on a worktable near the stove. I used the shovel to sift through the ashes.
I carefully scraped along the stove’s bottom.
I heard a clink. A metal-against-metal noise.
I scooped out a shovelful of ash. Something came with the ash. It was hard, heavier. My expectations weren’t high. I was still just collecting data, anything and everything, even the contents of an old stove. I emptied the ashes onto the worktable in a pile, then smoothed it out.
I saw what the small shovel had struck. I flipped over the new evidence with the tip of the shovel. Yes, I said to myself. I finally had something, the first bit of evidence.
It was Alex Cross’s detective shield, and it was burned and charred.
Someone wanted us to find the shield.
The intruder wants to play! I thought. This is cat and mouse.
Chapter 83
Ile-de-France
DR. ABEL SANTE was normally a calm and collected man. He was widely known in the medical community to be erudite, but surprisingly down-to-earth. He was a nice man, too, a gentle physician.
Now he desperately tried to put his mind somewhere other than where his body was. Just about anywhere else in the universe would do just fine.
He had already spent several hours remembering minute details from his pleasant, almost idyllic, boyhood in Rennes; then his university years at the Sorbonne and L’Ecole Pratique de Médecine; he had replayed tennis and golf sporting events; he had relived his seven-year love affair with Regina Becker-dear, sweet Regina.
He needed to be somewhere else, to exist anywhere else but where he actually was. He needed to exist in the past, or even in the future, but not in the present. He was reminded of The English Patient-both the book and the movie. He was Count Almasy now, wasn’t he? Only his torture was even worse than Almasy’s horribly burned flesh. He was in the grasp of Mr. Smith.
He thought about Regina constantly now, and he realized that he loved her fiercely, and what a fool he’d been not to marry her years ago. What an arrogant bastard, and what a huge fool!
How dearly he wanted to live now, and to see Regina again. Life seemed so damned precious to him at this moment, in this terrible place, under these monstrous conditions.