Cross Kill: An Alex Cross Story Read online

  At one point, Soneji held the baby up and screamed at me, “This doesn’t end here, Cross. I’m coming for you, even from the grave if I have to.”

  Then he threw the infant at us. Someone caught her, but Soneji escaped into the vast abandoned tunnel system below Manhattan. We tracked him in there. Soneji attacked me in the darkness, and knocked me down and almost killed me before I was able to shoot him. The bullet shattered his jaw, ripped apart his tongue, and blew out the side of one cheek.

  Soneji staggered away from me, was swallowed by the darkness. He must have pitched forward then and sprawled on the rocky tunnel floor. The impact set off a small bomb in his pocket. The tunnel exploded into white-hot flames.

  When I got to him, Soneji was engulfed, curled up, and screaming. It lasted several seconds before he stopped. I stood there and watched Soneji burn. I saw him shrivel up and turn coal black.

  But as sure as I was of that memory, I was also sure I’d seen Gary Soneji that morning, a split second before he tried to shoot me in the heart and blow Sampson’s head off.

  I’m coming for you, even from the grave if I have to.

  Soneji’s taunt echoed back to me after I’d gotten my coffee.

  After several sips, I decided I had to assume Soneji was still dead. So I’d seen, what, a double? An impostor?

  I supposed it was possible with plastic surgery, but the likeness had been so dead-on, from the thin reddish mustache to the wispy hair to the crazed, amused expression.

  It was him, I thought. But how?

  This doesn’t end here, Cross.

  I saw Soneji so clearly then that I feared for my sanity.

  This doesn’t end here, Cross.

  I’m coming for you, even from the grave if I have to.

  Chapter 6

  “Alex?”

  I startled, almost dropped my coffee, and saw Bree trotting down the hall toward me with a wary expression.

  “He made it through the operation,” she said. “He’s in intensive care, and the doctor’s going to talk to Billie in a few moments.”

  We both held Billie’s hands when Dr. Kalhorn finally emerged. He looked drained.

  “How is he?” Billie asked, after introducing herself.

  “Your husband’s a remarkable fighter,” Kalhorn said. “He died once on the table, but rallied. Besides the trauma of the bullet, there were bone and bullet fragments we had to deal with. Three quarters of an inch left and one of those fragments would have caught a major artery, and we’d be having a different conversation.”

  “So he’s going to live?” Billie asked.

  “I can’t promise you that,” Kalhorn said. “The next forty-eight to seventy-two hours will be the most critical time for him. He’s sustained a massive head injury, severe trauma to his upper-left temporal lobe. For now, we’re keeping him in a medically induced coma, and we will keep him that way until we see a significant drop in brain swelling.”

  “If he comes out, what’s the prognosis, given the extent of the injury you saw?” I asked.

  “I can’t tell you who he’ll be if and when he wakes up,” the neurosurgeon said. “That’s up to God.”

  “Can we see him?” Bree asked.

  “Give it a half hour,” Kalhorn said. “There’s a whirlwind around him at the moment. Lots of good people supporting him.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” Billie said, trying not to cry again. “For saving him.”

  “It was an honor,” Kalhorn said, patted her on the arm, and smiled at Bree and me before returning to the ICU.

  “Damage to his upper-left temporal lobe,” Billie said.

  “He’s alive,” I said. “Let’s keep focused on that. Anything else, we’ll deal with down the road.”

  Bree held her hand and said, “Alex is right. We’ve prayed him through surgery, and now we’ll pray he wakes up.”

  But Billie still appeared uncertain forty minutes later when we donned surgical masks, gloves, and smocks and entered the room where Sampson lay.

  You could barely see the slits of his eyes for the swelling. His head was wrapped in a turban of gauze, and there were so many tubes going into him, and so many monitors and devices beeping and clicking around him, that from the waist up he looked more machine than man.

  “Oh, Jesus, John,” Billie said when she got to his side. “What have they done to you?”

  Bree rubbed Billie’s back as tears wracked her again. I stayed only a few minutes, until I couldn’t take seeing Sampson like that anymore.

  “I’ll be back,” I told them. “Tonight before I go home to sleep.”

  “Where are you going?” Bree asked.

  “To hunt Soneji,” I said. “It’s what John would want.”

  “There’s a blizzard outside,” Bree said. “And Internal Affairs is going to want to hear your report on the shooting.”

  “I don’t give a damn about IA right now,” I said, walking toward the door. “And a blizzard’s exactly the kind of chaotic situation that Gary Soneji lives for.”

  Bree wasn’t happy, but sighed and gestured to a shopping bag she’d brought with her. “You’ll need your coat, hat, and gloves if you’re going Soneji-hunting.”

  Chapter 7

  Outside a blizzard wailed, a classic nor’easter with driving wet snow that was already eight inches deep. It takes only four inches to snarl Washington, DC, so completely that there’s talk of bringing in the National Guard.

  Georgetown was a parking lot. I trudged to the Foggy Bottom Metro station, ignoring my freezing-cold feet, and reliving old times with big John Sampson. I met him within days of moving up to DC with my brothers after my mother died and my father, her killer, disappeared, presumed dead.

  John lived with his mother and sister. His father had died in Vietnam. We were in the same fifth-grade class. He was ten years old and big, even then. But so was I.

  It made for a natural rivalry, and we didn’t much care for each other at first. I was faster than him, which he did not like. He was stronger than me, which I did not like. The inevitable fight we had was a draw.

  We were suspended for three days for fighting. Nana Mama marched me down to Sampson’s house to apologize to him and to his mother for throwing the first punch.

  I went unhappily. When Sampson came to the door equally annoyed, I saw the split lip and bruising around his right cheek and smiled. He saw the swelling around both of my eyes and smiled back.

  We’d both inflicted damage. We both had won. And that was that. End of the war, and start of the longest friendship of my life.

  I took the Metro across town, and walked back to St. Anthony’s in the snow, trying to will myself not to remember Sampson in the ICU, more machine than man. But the image kept returning, and every time it did, I felt weaker, as if a part of me were dying.

  There were still Metro police cars parked in front of the school, and two television trucks. I pulled the wool hat down and turned up the collar of my jacket. I didn’t want to talk to any reporters about this case. Ever.

  I showed my badge to the patrolman standing inside the front door, and started back toward the cafeteria and kitchen.

  Father Close appeared at his office door. He recognized me.

  “Your partner?”

  “There’s brain damage, but he’s alive,” I said.

  “Another miracle, then,” Father Close said. “Sister Mary Elliott and Theresa Ball, the cook, they’re still alive as well. You saved them, Dr. Cross. If you hadn’t been there, I fear all three of them would be dead.”

  “I don’t think that’s true,” I said. “But thank you for saying so.”

  “Any idea when I can have my cafeteria and kitchen back?”

  “I’ll ask the crime-scene specialists, but figure tomorrow your students bring a bag lunch and eat in their homerooms. When it’s a cop-involved shooting, the forensics folks are sticklers for detail.”

  “As they should be,” Father Close said, thanked me again, and returned to his office.
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br />   I returned to the cafeteria and stood there a moment in the empty space, hearing voices in the kitchen, but recalling the first shots and how I’d reacted.

  I went to the swinging industrial doors and did the same. We’d done it by the book, I decided, and pushed through them again.

  I glanced at where the cook and nun had lain wounded, and then over where Sampson had lain dying before turning my attention to the pantry. This was where the book had been thrown out. In retrospect, we should have cleared the rest of the building before tending to the wounded. But it looked like femoral blood and…

  Three crime-scene techs were still at work in the kitchen. Barbara Hatfield, an old friend, was in the pantry. She spotted me and came right over.

  “How’s John, Alex?”

  “Hanging on,” I said.

  “Everyone’s shaken up,” Hatfield said. “And there’s something you should see, something I was going to call you about later.”

  She led me into the pantry, floor-to-ceiling shelves loaded with foodstuffs and kitchen supplies, and a big shiny commercial freezer at the far end.

  The words spray-painted in two lines across the face of the fridge stopped me dead in my tracks.

  “Right?” Hatfield said. “I did the same thing.”

  Chapter 8

  I was up at four o’clock the following morning, snuck out of bed without waking Bree, and on three hours of sleep went back to doing what I’d been doing. I got a cup of coffee and went up to the third floor, to my home office, where I had been going through my files on Gary Soneji.

  I keep files on all the bad ones, but Soneji had the thickest file, six of them, in fact, all bulging. I’d left off at one in the morning with notes taken midway through the kidnapping of the US secretary of the treasury’s son, and the daughter of a famous actress.

  I tried to focus, tried to re-master the details. But I yawned after two paragraphs, drank coffee, and thought of John Sampson.

  But only briefly. I decided that sitting by his side helped him little. I was better off looking for the man who put a bullet through John’s head. So I read and reread, and noted dangling threads, abandoned lines of inquiry that Sampson and I had followed over the years but which had led nowhere.

  After an hour, I found an old genealogy chart we and the US marshals put together on Soneji’s family after he escaped prison. Scanning it, I realized we’d let the marshals handle the pure fugitive hunt. I saw several names and relations I’d never talked to before, and wrote them down.

  I ran their names through Google, and saw that two of them were still living at the addresses noted on the chart. How long had it been? Thirteen, fourteen years?

  Then again, Nana Mama and I had lived in our house on 5th for more than thirty years. Americans do put down roots once in a while.

  I glanced at my watch, saw it was past five, and wondered when I could try to make a few calls. No, I thought then, this kind of thing is best done in person. But the storm. I went to the window in the dormer of the office, pushed it up, and looked outside.

  To my surprise, it was pouring rain and considerably warmer. Most of the snow was gone. That sealed it. I was going for a drive as soon as it was light enough to see.

  Returning to my desk, I thought about going back downstairs to take a shower, but feared waking Bree. Her job as Metro’s chief of detectives was stressful enough without dealing with the additional pressure of a cop shooting.

  I tried to go back to the Soneji files, but instead called up a picture on my computer. I’d taken it the afternoon before. It showed the fridge and the spray-painted words the shooter had left behind.

  CROSS KILL

  Long Live Soneji!

  I had obviously been the target. And why not? Soneji hated me as much as I hated him.

  Had Soneji expected Sampson to be with me? The two pistols he’d fired said yes. I closed my eyes and saw him there in the doorway, arms crossed, left gun aimed at me, right gun at Sampson.

  Something bothered me. I turned back to the file, rummaged around until I confirmed my memory. Soneji was left-handed, which explained why he’d crossed his arms to shoot. He was aiming at me with his better hand. He’d wanted me dead no matter what happened to John.

  It was why Soneji shot for center of mass, I decided, and wondered whether his shot at Sampson was misaimed, if he’d clipped John’s head in error.

  Left-handed. It had to be Soneji. But it couldn’t be Soneji.

  In frustration, I shut the computer off, grabbed my notes, and snuck back into the bedroom. I shut the bathroom door without making a peep. After showering and dressing, I tried to get out light-footed, but made a floorboard squeak.

  “I’m up, quiet as a mouse,” Bree said.

  “I’m going to New Jersey,” I said.

  “What?” she said, sitting up in bed and turning on the light. “Why?”

  “To talk to some of Soneji’s relatives, see if he’s been in touch.”

  Bree shook her head. “He’s dead, Alex.”

  “But what if the explosion I saw in the tunnel was caused by Soneji as he went by some bum living down there?” I said. “What if I didn’t see Soneji burn?”

  “You never did DNA on the remains?”

  “There was no need. I saw him die. I identified him, so no one checked.”

  “Jesus, Alex,” Bree said. “Is that possible? What did the shooter’s face look like?”

  “Like Soneji’s,” I said, frustrated.

  “Well, did his jaw look like Soneji’s? His tongue? Did he say anything?”

  “He didn’t say a word, but his face?” I frowned and thought about that. “I don’t know.”

  “You said the light was good. You said you saw him clearly.”

  Was the light that good? Feeling a little wobbly, I nevertheless closed my eyes, trying to bring more of the memory back and into sharper focus.

  I saw Soneji standing there in the pantry doorway, arms crossed, chin tucked, and…looking directly at me. He shot at Sampson without even aiming. It was me he’d wanted to kill.

  What about his jaw? I replayed memory again and again before I saw it.

  “There was something there,” I said, running my fingers along my left jawline.

  “A shadow?” Bree said.

  I shook my head. “More like a scar.”

  Chapter 9

  Three hours later, I’d left I-95 for Route 29, which parallels the Delaware River. Heading upstream, I soon realized that I was not far from East Amwell Township, where the aviator Charles Lindbergh’s baby was kidnapped in 1932.

  Gary Soneji had been obsessed with the Lindbergh case. He’d studied it in preparing for the kidnappings of the treasury secretary’s son, the late Michael Goldberg, and Maggie Rose Dunne, the daughter of a famous actress.

  I’d noticed before on a map the proximity of East Amwell to Rosemont, where Soneji grew up. But it wasn’t until I pulled through the tiny unincorporated settlement that I realized Soneji had spent his early life less than five miles from the Lindbergh kidnapping site.

  Rosemont itself was quaint and leafy, with rock walls giving way to sopping green fields.

  I tried to imagine Soneji as a boy in this rural setting, tried to see him discovering the crime of the century. He wouldn’t have cared much for the police detectives who’d worked the Lindbergh case. No, Soneji would have obsessed on the information surrounding Bruno Hauptmann, the career criminal convicted and executed for taking the toddler and caving in his skull.

  My mind was flooded with memories of going into Soneji’s apartment for the first time, seeing what was essentially a shrine to Hauptmann and the Lindbergh case. In writings we found back then, Soneji had fantasized about being Hauptmann in the days just before the killer was caught, when the whole world was fixated and speculating on the mystery he’d set in motion.

  “Audacious criminals change history,” Soneji wrote. “Audacious criminals are remembered long after they’re gone, which is more than can be
said of the detectives who chase them.”

  I found the address on the Rosemont Ringoes Road, and pulled over on the shoulder beyond the drive. The storm had ebbed to sprinkles when I climbed out in front of a gray-and-white clapboard cottage set back in pines.

  The yard was sparse and littered with wet pine needles. The front stoop was cracked and listed to one side, so I had to hold on to the iron railing in order to ring the bell.

  A few moments later, one of the curtains fluttered. A few moments after that, the door swung open, revealing a bald man in his seventies. He leaned over a walker and had an oxygen line running into his nose.

  “Peter Soneji?”

  “What do you want?”

  “I’m Alex Cross. I’m a—”

  “I know who you are,” Gary Soneji’s father snapped icily. “My son’s killer.”

  “He blew himself up.”

  “So you’ve said.”

  “Can I talk to you, sir?”

  “Sir?” Peter Soneji said and laughed caustically. “Now it’s ‘sir’?”

  “Far as I know, you never had anything to do with your son’s criminal career,” I said.

  “Tell that to the reporters who’ve shown up at my door over the years,” Soneji’s father said. “The things they’ve accused me of. Father to a monster.”

  “I’m not accusing you of anything, Mr. Soneji,” I said. “I’m simply looking for your take on a few loose ends.”

  “With everything on the internet about Gary, you’d think there’d be no loose ends.”

  “These are questions from my personal files,” I said.

  Soneji’s father gave me a long, considered look before saying, “Leave it alone, Detective. Gary’s long dead. Far as I’m concerned, good riddance.”

  He tried to shut the door in my face, but I stopped him.

  “I can call the sheriff,” Peter Soneji protested.

  “Just one question and then I’ll leave,” I said. “How did Gary become obsessed with the Lindbergh kidnapping?”