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  “Great,” I muttered. “Just who I don’t want to see right now.”

  I glanced at Detective Sampson. He looked like a bad storm about to happen. I didn’t want to be here, Didn’t want or need any of this.

  Kyle patted my shoulder. “We need you on this one. Soneji promised this would happen,” he suddenly told me. “He predicted it.”

  I stared at Kyle Craig. He’d delivered his stunning thunderbolt of news in his usual deadpan, understated way, sort of like Sam Shepard on Quaalude.

  “Say again? What was that last bit?”

  “Gary Soneji warned Alex that he’d get him, even if he died Soneji said he couldn’t be stopped. It looks like he made good on his promise. I want you to tell me how. Tell me how Soneji did it. That’s why you’re here, Thomas.”

  Chapter 74

  MY NERVES were already on edge. My awareness was heightened to a level I found almost painful. I couldn’t believe I was here in Washington, involved in this case. Tell me how Gary Soneji did this? Tell me how it could have happened. That’s all I had to do.

  The press had one thing right. It’s fair to say that I am the FBI’s current hotshot profiler. I should be used to graphic, violent crime scenes, but I’m not. It stirs up too much white noise, too many memories of Isabella. Of Isabella and myself. Of another time and place, another life.

  I have a sixth sense, which is nothing paranormal, nothing like that at all. It’s just that I can process raw information and data better than most people, better than most policemen anyway. I feel things very powerfully, and sometimes my “felt” hunches have been useful not only to the FBI but also to Interpol and Scotland Yard.

  My methods differ radically from the Federal Bureau’s famed investigative process, however. In spite of what they say, the Bureau’s Behavioral Science Unit believes in formalistic investigation with much less room for surprising hunches. I subscribe to a belief in the widest possible array of hunches and instincts, followed by the most exacting science.

  The FBI and I are polar opposites, yet to their credit they continue to use me. Until I screw up badly, which I could do at any moment. Like right now.

  I had been working hard at Quantico, reporting in on the gruesome and complex “Mr. Smith” investigation, when the news arrived about the attack on Cross. Actually, I had been in Quantico for less than a day, having just returned from England, where “Smith” was blazing his killer trail and I was in lukewarm pursuit.

  Now I was in Washington, at the center of a raging storm over the Cross family attack. I looked at my watch, a TAG Heuer 6000 given to me by Isabella, the only material possession I really care about. It was a few minutes past eight when I entered the Cross front yard. I noted the time. Something about it bothered me, but I wasn’t sure what it was yet.

  I stopped beside a battered and rusting EMS truck. The roof lights were flashing, the rear doors thrown open. I looked inside and saw a boy—it had to be Damon Cross.

  The boy had been badly beaten. His face and arms were bloody, but he was alert and talking in a soft voice to the medics, who tried to be gentle and comforting.

  “Why wouldn’t he have killed the children? Why just thrash out at them?” Kyle said. We had the same mind-set on that question.

  “His heart wasn’t in it.” I said the first thing that came into my head, the first feeling I had. “He was compelled to make a symbolic gesture toward the Cross children, but no more than that.”

  I turned to look at Kyle. “I don’t know, Kyle. Maybe he was frightened. Or in a hurry. Maybe he was afraid of waking Cross.” All of those thoughts invaded my mind, almost in an instant. I felt as if I had briefly met the attacker.

  I looked up at the old house, the Cross house. “Okay, let’s go to the bedroom, if you don’t mind. I want to see it before the techies do their number in there. I need to see Alex Cross’s room. I don’t know, but I think something is seriously fucked up here. This certainly wasn’t done by Gary Soneji or his ghost.”

  “How do you know that?” Kyle grabbed his arm and made eye contact. “How can you know for sure?”

  “Soneji would have killed the two kids and the grandmother.”

  Chapter 75

  ALEX CROSS’S blood was spattered everywhere in the corner bedroom. I could see where a bullet had exited through the window directly behind Cross’s bed. The glass fracture was clean and the radial lines even: The shooter had fired from a standing position, directly across the bed. I made my first notes, and also a quick sketch of the small, unadorned bedroom.

  There was other “evidence.” A shoe print had been discovered near the cellar. The Metro police were working on a “walking picture” of the assailant. A white male had been spotted around midnight in the mostly black neighborhood. For a moment, I was almost glad I’d been rushed up here from Virginia. There was so much raw data to take in and process, almost too much. The mussed bed, where Cross had apparently slept on top of a hand-sewn quilt. Photos of his children on the walls.

  Alex Cross had been moved to St. Anthony’s Hospital, but his bedroom was intact, just the way the mysterious assailant had left it.

  Had he left the room like this on purpose? Was this his first message to us?

  Of course it was.

  I looked at the papers still out on Cross’s small work desk. They were notes on Gary Soneji. They had been left undisturbed by the assailant. Was that important?

  Someone had taped a short poem to the wall over the desk. Wealth covers sins—the poor/Are naked as a pin.

  Cross had been reading a book called Push, a novel. A piece of lined yellow paper was stuck inside, so I read it: Write the talented author about her wonderful book!

  The time I spent in the room passed like a snap of the fingers, almost a mind fugue. I drank several cups of coffee. I remembered a line from the offbeat TV show Twin Peaks, “Damn fine cup of coffee, and hot!”

  I had been inside Cross’s bedroom for almost an hour and a half, lost in forensic detail, hooked on the case in spite of myself. It was a nasty and disturbing puzzle, but a very intriguing one. Everything about the case was intense, and highly unusual.

  I heard footsteps thumping outside in the hallway and looked up, my concentration interrupted. The bedroom door suddenly swung open and thudded against the wall.

  Kyle Craig popped his head inside. He looked concerned. His face was white as chalk. Something had happened. “I have to go right now. Alex has gone into cardiac arrest!”

  Chapter 76

  “I’LL GO with you,” I said to Kyle. I could tell that Kyle badly needed company. I wanted to see Alex Cross before he died, if that was what it had come to, and it sounded like it, felt like it to me.

  On the ride over to St. Anthony’s I gently questioned Kyle about the extent of Dr. Cross’s injuries and the tenor of concern at the hospital. I also made a guess about the cause of the cardiac arrest.

  “It sounds like it’s due to blood loss. There’s a lot of blood in the bedroom. It’s all over the sheets, the floor, the walls. Soneji was obsessed with blood, right? I heard that at Quantico before I left this morning.”

  Kyle was quiet for a moment in the car, and then he asked the question I expected. I’m sometimes a step or two ahead in conversations.

  “Do you ever miss it, not being a doctor anymore?”

  I shook my head, frowned a little. “I really don’t. Something delicate and essential broke inside me when Isabella died. It will never be repaired, Kyle, at least I don’t think so. I couldn’t be a doctor now. I find it hard to believe in healing anymore.”

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered solemnly.

  “And I’m sorry about your friend. I’m sorry about Alex Cross,” I said to him.

  In the spring of 1993, I had just graduated from Harvard Medical School. My life seemed to be spiraling upward at dizzying speed, when the woman I loved more than life itself was murdered in our apartment in Cambridge. Isabella Calais was my lover, and she was my best friend. She was one
of the first victims of “Mr. Smith.”

  After the murder, I never showed up at Massachusetts General, where I’d been accepted as an intern. I didn’t even contact them. I knew I would never practice medicine. In an odd way, my life had ended with Isabella’s, at least that was how I saw it.

  Eighteen months after the murder, I was accepted into the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, what some wags call the “b.s. group.” It was what I wanted to do, what I needed to do. Once I had proven myself in the BSU, I asked to be put on the Mr. Smith case. My superiors fought the move at first, but finally they gave in.

  “Maybe you’ll change your mind one day,” Kyle said. I had a feeling that he personally believed I would. Kyle likes to believe that everyone thinks as he does: with perfectly clear logic and a minimum of emotional baggage.

  “I don’t think so,” I told him, without sounding argumentative, or even too firm on the point. “Who knows, though?”

  “Maybe after you finally catch Smith,” he persisted with his point.

  “Yes, maybe then,” I said.

  “You don’t think Smith—” he started to say, but then backed off from the absurd notion that Mr. Smith could be involved with the attack here in Washington.

  “No,” I said, “I do not Smith couldn’t have made this attack. They would all be dead and mutilated if he had.”

  Chapter 77

  AT ST. Anthony’s Hospital, I left Kyle and roamed about playing “Doc.” It didn’t feel too bad to be working in a hospital, contemplating what it might have been like. I tried to find out as much as I could about Alex Cross’s condition, and his chances of surviving his wounds.

  The staff nurses and doctors were surprised that I understood so much about trauma and gunshot wounds, but no one pressed me as to how or why. They were too busy trying to save Alex Cross’s life. He had done pro bono work at the hospital for years and no one there could bear to let him die. Even the porters liked and respected Cross, calling him a “regular brother.”

  I learned that the cardiac arrest had been caused by the loss of blood, as I had guessed. According to the doctor in charge, Alex Cross had gone into massive arrest minutes after he arrived at the ER. His blood pressure had dipped dangerously low: 60 over 0.

  The staff’s prognosis was that he could probably die during the surgery necessary to repair his massive internal injuries, but that he would definitely die without the surgery. The more I heard, the more I was certain they were right. An old saying of my mother’s ran through my head, “May his body rise to heaven, before the devil finds out he’s dead.”

  Kyle caught up with me in the busy and chaotic hallway on the fourth floor at St. Anthony’s. A lot of people working there knew Cross personally. They were all visibly upset and helpless to do anything about it. The hospital scene was raw and emotional, and I couldn’t help being swept up in the tragedy, even more so than I had been at the Cross house.

  Kyle was still pale, his brow furrowed and punctuated by blisters of sweat. His eyes had a distant look as he gazed down the hospital corridor. “What did you find out? I know you’ve been poking around.” he said. He rightly suspected that I would have already conducted my own mini-investigation. He knew my style even my motto: Assume nothing, question everything.

  “He’s in surgery now. He’s not expected to make it,” I gave him the bad news. Unsentimentally, the way I knew he wanted it. “That’s what the doctors believe. But what the hell do doctors know?” I added.

  “Is that what you think?” Kyle asked.

  The pupils of his eyes were the tiniest, darkest points. He was taking this as badly as I’d seen him react to anything since I’d known him. He was being very emotional for Kyle. I understood how close he and Cross had been.

  I sighed and shut my eyes. I wondered if I should tell him what I really thought. Finally, I opened them. I said, “It might be better if he doesn’t make it, Kyle.”

  Chapter 78

  “C’MON WITH me,” he said, pulling me along. “I want you to meet someone. C’mon.”

  I followed Kyle down one floor to a room on three. The patient in the room was an elderly black woman.

  Her head was swathed in Webril, a stretchy woven bandage. The head bandage resembled a turban. A few wisps of gray hair hung loose from the dressing. Telfa bandages covered the abrasions on her face.

  There were two IV lines, “cut downs,” one for blood and one for fluids and antibiotics. She was hooked to a cardiac monitor.

  She looked up at us as if we were intruders, but then she recognized Kyle.

  “How is Alex? Tell me the truth,” She said in a hoarse, nearly whispering voice that still managed to be firm. “No one here will tell me the truth. Will you, Kyle?”

  “He’s in surgery now, Nana. We won’t know anything until he comes out,’ Kyle said, “and maybe not even then.”

  The elderly woman’s eyes narrowed. She shook her head sadly.

  “I asked you for the truth. I deserve at least that much. Now, how is Alex? Kyle, is Alex still alive?”

  Kyle sighed loudly. It was weary sound, and a sad one. He and Alex Cross had been working together for years.

  “Alex’s condition is extremely grave,” I said, as gently as I could. “That means—”

  “I know what grave means.” she said. “I taught school for forty-seven years. English, History, Boolean algebra.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “I didn’t mean to sound over-bearing.” I paused for a second or two, then continued to answer her question.

  “The internal injuries involve a kind of ‘ripping,’ probably with a high degree of contamination to the wounds. The most serious wound is to his abdomen. The shot passed through the liver and apparently nicked the common hepatic artery. That’s what I was told. The bullet lodged in the rear of the stomach, where it’s now pressing onto the spinal column.”

  She winced, but she was listening intently, waiting for me to finish. I was thinking that if Alex Cross was anything near as strong as this woman, as willful, then he must be something special as a detective.

  I went on.

  “Because of the nick to the artery there was considerable blood loss. The contents of the stomach itself and the small bowel can be sources of E. coli infection. There’s danger of inflammation of the abdominal cavity—peritonitis, and possibly pancreatitis, all of which can be fatal. The gunshot wound is the injury, the injection is the complication. The second shot went through his left wrist, without shattering bone, but missed the radial artery. That’s what we know so far. That’s the truth.”

  I stopped at that point. My eyes never left those of the elderly woman, and hers never left mine.

  “Thank you,” she said in a resigned whisper. “I appreciate that you didn’t condescend to me. Are you a doctor here at the hospital? You speak as if you were.”

  I shook my head. “No, I’m not. I’m with the FBI. I studied to be a doctor.”

  Her eyes widened and seemed even more alert than when we had come in. I sensed that she had tremendous reserves of strength. “Alex is a doctor and a detective.”

  “I’m a detective, too,” I said.

  “I’m Nana Mama. I’m Alex’s grandmother. What’s your name?”

  “Thomas,” I told her. “My name is Thomas Pierce.”

  “Well, thank you for speaking the truth.”

  Chapter 79

  Paris, France

  THE POLICE would never admit it, but Mr. Smith had control of Paris now. He had taken the city by storm and only he knew why. The news of his fearsome presence spread along boulevard Saint-Michel, and then rue de Vaugirard. This sort of thing wasn’t supposed to happen in the “très luxe” sixth arrondissement.

  The seductively chic shops along boulevard Saint-Michel lured tourists and Parisians alike. The panthéon and beautiful Jardins du Luxembourg were nearby. Lurid murders weren’t supposed to happen here.

  Clerks from the expensive shops were the first to leave their posts and hurriedly wa
lk or run toward No. 11 rue de Vaugirard. They wanted to see Smith, or at least his handiwork. They wanted to see the so-called Alien with their own eyes.

  Shoppers and even owners left the fashionable clothing shops and cafis. If they didn’t walk up rue de Vaugirard, they at least looked down to where several police black-and-whites and also an army bus were parked. High above the eerie scene, pigeons fluttered and squawked. They seemed to want to see the famous criminal as well.

  Across Saint-Michel stood the Sorbonne, with its foreboding chapel, its huge clock, its open cobblestone terrace. A second bus filled with soldiers was parked in the plaza. Students tentatively wandered up rue Champollion to have a look-see. The tiny street had been named after Jean-Francois Champollion, the French Egyptologist who had discovered the key to Egyptian hieroglyphics while deciphering the Rosetta stone.

  A police inspector named Rene Faulks shook his head as he pulled onto rue Champollion and saw the crowd. Faulks understood the common man’s sick fascination with “Mr. Smith.” It was the fear of the unknown, especially fear of sudden, horrible death, that drew people’s interest to these bizarre murders. Mr. Smith had gained a reputation because his actions were so completely incomprehensible. He actually did seem to be an “alien.” Few people could conceive of another human acting as Smith routinely did.

  The inspector let his eyes wander. He took in the electronic sign hanging at the Lycée St. Louis corner. Today it advertised “Tour de France Femina” and also something called “Formation d’artistes.” More madness, he thought. He coughed out a cynical laugh.

  He noticed a sidewalk artist contemplating his sidewalk chalk masterpiece. The man was oblivious to the police emergency. The same could be said of a homeless woman blithely washing her breakfast dishes in the public fountain.