Every evening afterward, I escalated, some of it acting drunk, but most of it real as I tapped into every fear I had about the situation and threw it out there in long drunken monologues.
It had taken six nights of personal humiliation and liver damage before one of Mahoney’s men picked up the infrared image of an individual entering the Morses’ house at three a.m. and crawling across the scaffolding into my attic office an hour later.
That same agent put up the pink surveyor’s tape as a signal that I had a visitor waiting.
When I entered my office, Rawlins tapped into the wireless feed. He, Mahoney, and Bree were watching in a surveillance van around the block. With M’s focus on me, Sampson was able to slide out on the porch roof and get a clear shot.
He came onto the front porch as the EMTs were taking M out.
“Where’s my son?” I demanded as he went by on a stretcher.
“Deep,” he said.
I could tell that, even shot and paralyzed, he was enjoying my misery.
Chapter 102
For almost fourteen maddening hours, we could not talk to M, much less ask him where he’d taken my son. He underwent immediate surgery for the chest wound and spent a long time in recovery after having an adverse reaction to the anesthesia.
CT scans of his spine found that the bullet had glanced off the right side of his fourth thoracic vertebra, then passed through three inches of his right lung before exiting the rib cage. The energy of the bullet’s passing had broken ribs, cracked vertebrae, and severely bruised the spinal cord.
“He told me he couldn’t feel a thing,” I told the surgeon.
“With that kind of swelling, he probably won’t feel from mid-sternum down for a long time, if ever,” the doctor said.
“When can I see him?”
We got the go-ahead to interview him around ten that night, shortly after M was brought into the ICU and shortly after an evidence tech reported that the suspect had no fingerprints. It looked like they’d been burned off with chemicals decades ago.
“I want to go in alone,” I told Bree, Mahoney, and Sampson in the hallway outside his guarded room. “I think he’ll try to play us if there’s more than one of us there.”
“I had a camera put in before he was transferred,” Mahoney said. “We’ll watch from down the hall.”
Sampson said, “Good luck.”
“Thanks, brother.”
The two of them walked away.
I took a deep breath and gazed at Bree. “This feels daunting.”
Her eyes were glassy as she squeezed my hand and smiled. “You were born for this, Alex Cross. Go get your boy.”
She kissed me and then followed Ned and John. Nodding at the officer standing guard, I prayed for the right words to come and then went through the door.
M, or whatever his real name was, lay semi-upright in his hospital bed, a bank of monitors and medical devices cheeping and whirring around him.
He opened red, watery eyes. He tracked me as I came to the foot of his bed.
“Can you tell me where you took my son now?”
“Told you,” he said, his voice thick and his words slurred due to the pain meds. “I buried him deep underground.”
“Then tell me where I can dig him up and give him a proper burial.”
“You’re bright. You’ll find him eventually.”
“Look — you win. I concede. You outplayed me. You’re still outplaying me.” I said that last with as much sincerity as I could muster.
“And yet I’m the one who might never walk again and will spend my life behind bars.”
Maybe the drugs had loosened his tongue, because that felt like an honest comment, and an open one, and I decided to radically change tactics.
“So when did you stop listening to your heart?” I asked.
“Don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do. There had to be a time in your long-ago past when you knew right from wrong instinctively. Do you remember that time?”
He swallowed, shrugged. “One set of foster parents brought me to church when I was a kid. Read scripture and other such nonsense.”
“But apart from that, there was a time when you felt in your heart what was right and wrong. Do you remember that time?”
M’s eyes narrowed. “What does this have to do with your son?”
“Do you remember?”
He closed his eyes. “Yeah, sure, I guess.”
“Of course you remember. Of course you do. It was there when you were born. It was there before you were born. Did you know that the heart has its own nervous system? It’s true. The heart is alive and alert long before the brain develops. It’s a deeper organ of thinking, another way of knowing.”
M’s eyes opened. “So?”
“When did you stop listening to your heart?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re—”
“Yes, you do,” I said. “You stopped listening to your heart because you thought it was broken. And that’s when you started listening to the angry voices in your head. Were you thirteen? Fourteen?”
Chapter 103
I had not asked these questions idly.
A remarkable number of suicidal or homicidal adults endured some traumatic event in their late tweens to early teens, when their hormones were surging and going haywire and their emotions were swinging wildly.
In essence, the experience of that trauma is magnified by the hormones and amplified by the mood swings. I believe such a brutal event in those years wounds the brain, causes short circuits, and etches in hatred, self-loathing, and neuroses.
When I asked M about his early teen years, a shadow came over his face, and he shut his eyes.
For almost five minutes, I waited for an answer. The only sounds were our breathing and the monitors.
“I was fourteen,” M said at last, opening his eyes. “My sister was raped and murdered. I found the man who did it and beat him to death with a chain.”
“That’s when you stopped listening to your heart? Before you killed him?”
“Afterward,” he said. “When I realized I’d liked beating that son of a bitch to death, and I wanted to do it over and over and over again.”
I nodded. “That would do it.”
“Do what?”
“Silence your heart. Divorce you from your soul.”
I stayed in eye contact with him, saw the twitching of his cheek muscles.
“I don’t have a soul or a heart.”
“Of course you do,” I said. “The bullet missed it completely, and it’s still there. You can listen to it if you dare. You might find hope.”
“Of what?”
“Redemption.”
He laughed softly. “There is no redemption for a man like me.”
“Yes, there is. Close your eyes.”
I had a moment of doubt when I thought he might shut me down. But then his eyelids closed.
“Listen to your heart,” I said quietly. “It’s still there. It will tell you what to do.”
He breathed, swallowed, shifted uncomfortably, and then opened his eyes. “I’ve done too much.”
“You can still listen. Just like you did when you were a young boy, like my son.”
M’s jaw stiffened. His lower lip curled against his teeth.
I gazed at him steadily, trying not to show how desperate I was. Every minute that passed was worse for Ali.
“I’m sorry, Cross,” he said. “I went deaf to this kind of crap a long time ago.”
“No, you didn’t. You just unplugged the receiver.”
“Does it matter now? It won’t change things.”
“Maybe not, but it will change you.”
I could tell that caught him off guard, and I wanted to keep him that way. “You must have liked Ali. You can’t meet my son and not be swept up in his enthusiasm.”