Cross Kill Read online

  “I said I didn’t want some big mansion to get lost in,” she snapped. “Or tooling around in some ridiculous car. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have some nice things in this house, and still do some good for people. Which reminds me, when is my hot-breakfast program going to be able to start up again?”

  I held up my hands. “I’ll find out tonight.”

  “I’m not getting any younger, and I want to see that ongoing,” she said. “Endowed. And that reading program for kids.”

  “Yes, ma’am, and you’re sure you’re not getting younger? Isn’t there a painting of you in some attic that shows your real age?”

  She tried to fight it, but that brought on a smile. “Aren’t you just the smoothest talker in—?”

  “Dad?” Ali cried, running into the kitchen.

  He looked petrified, on the verge of crying.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Someone’s taken over my computer,” he said.

  “What?” Nana Mama said.

  “There’s this crazy man on the screen now, not The Walking Dead, and he won’t turn off. He’s holding a baby and saying, like, over and over that he’s going to come for you, Dad, even from the grave.”

  Chapter 24

  In the video clip, Gary Soneji was just as I remembered him: out on one of Grand Central Station’s train platforms, holding the infant, and taunting me.

  I’d never seen the video. Never knew it existed, but it was definitely legitimate. After viewing the clip six or seven times, I could see my own shadow stretched in the space between me and Gary Soneji. The camera operator all those years ago had to have been right off my left shoulder.

  Was the cameraman a fluke? A random passerby? Or someone working with Soneji?

  The clip started again. It appeared on endless loop.

  “Dad, this is giving me the creeps,” Jannie said. “Turn it off.”

  “Gimme the remote and the computer, Ali,” I said.

  “I’ve got homework on this computer,” he said.

  “I’ll transfer your homework to the one in the kitchen,” I said, and gave him a gimme motion.

  He groaned and handed it to me.

  Bree came in the front door. I hit the Power button on the remote, but the screen did not turn off. Instead, it broke from that endless loop to Kelly green.

  I tried to turn the screen off again, but it jumped to black, slashed diagonally with a golden beam of light. The camera zoomed closer to that light and you could see a silhouette of a person there.

  Closer, it was a man.

  Closer still, and it was Soneji.

  He was giving the lens the same quarter profile we’d seen in the still image that Gary’s Girl posted on the website forum, the one where his eye and the corner of his mouth conspired to leer right at me.

  But this time Soneji spoke.

  In that cracking, hoarse voice I’d heard earlier that day in the pine barrens, Soneji said, “You’re not safe in the trees, Cross. You’re not safe in your own home. The Soneji are everywhere!”

  Then he threw his head back, and barked and brayed his laughter before the screen froze. A title appeared below: www.thesoneji.net.

  “What’s that, Dad?” Ali asked, upset.

  I stormed to the screen, followed the cord to its power source, and tore it violently out of the wall.

  “Alex?” Bree said. “What’s going on?”

  I looked at Ali. “Was that Walking Dead episode streaming from Netflix?”

  “Yes.”

  Yanking out my cell phone, I looked to Bree and said, “Soneji hacked into our internet feed.”

  “I’ll shut the router down,” Bree said.

  “No, don’t,” I said. I scrolled through my recent calls and hit Call. “I have a feeling it will be better if the link’s still active.”

  The phone picked up. “Yes?”

  “This is Alex Cross,” I said. “How fast can you get to my house?”

  Forty minutes later, as we were finishing up Nana Mama’s roast chicken masterpiece, and fighting over who was going to get the last wing and who the last sweet potato fries, there was a sharp knock at our side door.

  “I’ll get it,” I said, put my napkin down, and went out into the great room and unlocked the door that led to the side yard and the alley behind our place.

  I did not turn on the light, just opened it quickly and let our visitors inside. The first was Ned Mahoney, my former partner at the FBI. The second was Special Agent Henna Batra of the Bureau’s cybercrime unit.

  “Who’s making sure you’re safe in your own home?” Mahoney asked once I’d closed the door.

  “Metro in unmarked cars, both ends of the block,” I said.

  “Soneji’s still the type to try.”

  “I know,” I said. “But I think we’re good.”

  “I’m still unclear why you wanted me here, Dr. Cross,” Agent Batra said.

  “I think Soneji or The Soneji may have made a mistake,” I said. “If I’m right, they left a digital trail inside my house, or on our network, anyway.”

  Chapter 25

  I got to GW Medical Center early the following morning with my children’s howls ringing in my head. Special Agent Batra had taken every computer and phone in the house to Quantico. She’d promised to work as fast as she could, but it was like they’d lost their right hands when the phones were taken away.

  I kind of felt the same way walking to Sampson’s room, and decided to buy a cheap phone afterward. I was happy to find John sitting up and drinking through a straw.

  Billie hadn’t arrived yet, so I’d gotten to sit with him awhile, and brought him up to date on all that had occurred the prior day. Though his eyes tended to drift off me, he seemed to understand much of what I was saying.

  “If anyone can find this guy, it’s Batra,” I said. “I’ve never seen anyone like her before.”

  John’s eyes softened and he smiled. He tried to say something and couldn’t. You could see how frustrating it was.

  I put my hand on his shoulder and said, “You’re in for a long haul, buddy, recovering from this. But if there’s any man alive who can do it, you can.”

  Sampson’s lazy, sad gaze came and dwelled around me for several seconds. Then he started struggling, as he got more and more upset.

  “Hey,” I said. “It’s okay. We’ll—”

  Garbled sounds came out of his mouth.

  He tried again. And again.

  The sixth time, I thought he said, “Evan-widda.”

  “Evan-widda?” I said.

  “Evan-widda…b…bag,” he said, and then smiled and lifted his right hand to point to the surgical bandage. “Ho-ho…n…ed.”

  I frowned, but got it then, and smiled. “Even with a big hole in your head?”

  Sampson smiled, dropped his hand, and winked at me before nodding off to sleep again, as if that had taken every bit of his strength.

  But he’d spoken! Sort of. Definitely communicated. And the doctors had said his sense of humor could be gone with a wound to that part of his brain, but here he was making a joke about his situation.

  If that wasn’t a miracle, I don’t know what is.

  Billie arrived shortly before eight and beamed when I told her what had happened.

  She kissed John, and said, “You spoke?”

  He shook his head. “Alack vent…r…wrist…crist.”

  “What?”

  “He said, ‘Alex is a ventriloquist.’ I think.”

  John grinned again and said, “Whips do no move.”

  Billie had tears in her eyes. “Lips don’t move.”

  Sampson made a wheezing sound of delight that stayed with me on the way to work and buying a burner phone.

  I went to Bree’s office, and I knocked on her doorjamb.

  “Long time no see,” I said.

  Bree glanced at the clock, said, “Are you getting obsessive about me?”

  “I’ve always been obsessive about you, from the very
first,” I said.

  “Liar,” Bree said, but she was pleased.

  “The truth,” I said. “You had me the first time you glanced my way.”

  That pleased her even more. “Why are you buttering me up?”

  “I’m not buttering you up,” I said. “I was just flirting with my wife before I told her that Sampson spoke this morning.”

  “No?” she gasped. “He did?”

  “It took a little interpretation, but he was telling jokes.”

  Bree got tears in her eyes, stood up, came around the desk, and hugged me. I got tears, too.

  “Thanks,” she said. “What a perfect thing to hear.”

  “I know,” I said, before the cheap phone I’d bought on the way to work buzzed. Who knew the number? I’d just gotten the damn thing. Just activated it.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “It’s Special Agent Batra.”

  “How’d you get this number?”

  “By being good at my job,” Agent Batra said, sounding annoyed. “I thought you’d be happy to hear from me so soon.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, though I was beginning to think there wasn’t a box in the virtual universe that Henna Batra couldn’t find and unlock if she set her mind to it. “You found something?”

  “You were compromised in a troubling fashion.”

  I wanted to say that I could have told her that, but asked, “How so?”

  “They got a bug into your son’s computer operating system, piggybacked to a game app he downloaded at school.”

  “At his school?” I said, feeling queasy.

  Soneji or The Soneji were not only threatening me in my house, they were targeting my youngest child.

  “What else?” I demanded.

  “Your daughter, Jannie, had the same bug in her system,” Batra said. “It was uploaded to her computer without her knowledge when she was using her phone as a mobile hotspot at a coffee shop not far from your house.”

  This was worse. Both my children were being targeted.

  “What about my phone? My wife’s?” I asked, and turned on the speaker on the burner phone so Bree could hear.

  “Clean,” Batra said. “I’ll have them messengered over in the next hour.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Is that it?”

  “No, as a matter of fact,” the FBI cyber expert said. “There was a similarity in the signature of the bug coder and the coder who created www.thesoneji.net.”

  I looked at Bree, who shrugged in confusion.

  “You want to run that by us again?” I said.

  The cybercrimes expert sounded irritated when she said, “Coders are artists in their own way, Detective. Just as classical painters had recognizable brushstrokes, great computer coders have a recognizable way of writing. Their signature, if you will.”

  “Makes sense,” I said. “So who coded the website?”

  Batra said, “It took me much, much longer than I expected to break through the firewalls that surrounded the identity of the creator and curator, but I did just a few minutes ago.”

  “Have you been up all night?” I asked.

  “You said it was important.”

  Bree leaned forward, said, “Thank you, Agent Batra. It’s Chief Stone here. Do you know who he is? The website creator?”

  “She, and I’ve learned quite a bit about her in the past hour or so, thanks to a friend of mine at the NSA,” Agent Batra said. “Especially the boyfriend she’s fronting for. In fact, I know about him going right back to what his first-grade teacher said about him the day she recommended he be expelled from school.”

  I felt fear in the pit of my stomach. “And what was that?”

  “She said she thought he was kind of a monster, Dr. Cross. Even then.”

  Chapter 26

  An hour later, I set in to wait on a bench in a hallway by the door to a loft space on the fourth floor of an older building off Dupont Circle.

  I’d gotten into the building by showing my badge to a woman entering with groceries. I told her who I was looking for.

  “Out running, that one,” she’d replied. “Every lunch hour. Quite a sight.”

  I’d knocked on the door just in case, but there was no answer. I had a search warrant. I could have called for patrol to break the door down, but I hoped I could get more information by going patient and gentle.

  Twenty minutes later, a fit Asian American woman in her late twenties came huffing up the staircase. Her black hair was cut short and her exposed arms were buff and sleeved in brilliantly colored tattoos.

  Sweat poured down her face when she reached the landing and saw me getting off the bench. She didn’t startle or try to escape as I’d expected.

  Instead she hardened, said, “Took you a while, Dr. Cross. The intrusion was almost six hours ago. But here you are. At last. In the flesh.”

  “Kimiko Binx?” I said, holding up my badge and ID.

  “Correct,” Binx replied, walking toward me, palms held open at her sides, and studying me with great interest.

  The closer she got, I noticed a device of some sort, orange, and strapped to her upper right arm. When I saw it blink, I thought bomb, and went for my gun.

  “What’s that on your arm?” I demanded, the pistol out, pointed her way.

  Binx threw her hands up, said, “Whoa, whoa, Detective. It’s a SPOT.”

  “What?”

  “A GPS transmitter. It sends my position every thirty seconds to a satellite and to a website,” she said. “I use it to track my running routes.”

  She turned sideways and held up her arm so I could examine the device. It was smaller than a smartphone, commercially made, heavy-duty plastic, with the SPOT logo emblazoned across the front of it and buttons with various icons. One said SOS and another was a shoe tread. The light blinked beside the shoe.

  “So it tracks you?” I said.

  “Correct,” Binx said. “What do you want, Dr. Cross?”

  I held the search warrant up and said, “If you could open the door.”

  Binx read the warrant without comment, fished out a key, and opened the loft. It was an airy work-and-living space with a view of an alley, a hodgepodge of used furniture, and a computer workstation that featured four large screens.

  She moved toward the station.

  “Do not go near your computer, Ms. Binx. Do not go near anything.”

  Binx got aggravated and took off the SPOT device. “You want this, too?”

  “Please. Turn it off. Put it on the table there, and your phone if you’ve got it. I’d like to ask you some questions before I call for my evidence team.”

  “What do you want to know?” she asked, using her thumbs to play at the buttons on the transmitter.

  “Why do you worship Gary Soneji?”

  Binx didn’t answer, hit one last button, and looked up at me before setting the SPOT on the table with the light no longer blinking.

  “I don’t worship Gary Soneji,” she said finally. “I find Gary Soneji interesting. I find you interesting, for that matter.”

  “That why you built a high-security website about Soneji and me?”

  “Yes,” she said, sitting down calmly. “Other people find you two interesting also. Lots of them. It was a safe way to handle our common passion.”

  “Your members cheered when they found out my partner, John Sampson, was shot,” I said.

  “It’s a private forum of free expression. I didn’t approve of that.”

  “Didn’t you?” I said angrily. “You provided space for sickos to plot terror in the name of a man who committed utterly heinous acts and died ten years ago.”

  “He’s not dead,” Binx said flatly. “Gary Soneji will never die.”

  I remembered the coffin coming up out of the ground in New Jersey, wondered how much longer the FBI’s DNA testing would take, but said nothing of the exhumation of her idol.

  Instead I said, “I don’t get this, smart woman like you. Virginia Tech graduate. Write code for a liv
ing. Paid handsomely. Yet you get involved in something like this.”

  “Different strokes,” she replied. “And it’s my personal business.”

  “Not when it involves the shooting of a police officer. Nothing’s personal.”

  “I had nothing to do with that, either,” Binx said evenly. “Nothing. I’ll take a lie detector.”

  “Who did, then?” I asked.

  “Gary Soneji.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe Claude Watkins?”

  Binx shifted her eyes ever so slightly to look just over my right shoulder before shaking her head.

  I said, “Watkins’s name is on your company’s incorporation documents.”

  “Claude’s a limited partner. He lent me some start-up money.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “You know his background?”

  “He had problems when he was younger,” she said.

  “He is a sadist, Ms. Binx. He was convicted of carving the skin off a little girl’s fingers.”

  “He was chemically imbalanced back then,” she said defiantly. “That was the diagnosis of both the state and his personal psychiatrists. He took the drugs they recommended, paid his dues, and moved on. Claude’s a painter and performance artist now. He’s brilliant.”

  “I’m sure he is,” I said.

  “No,” Binx insisted. “He really is. I can take you to his studio. Show you. We’ve got nothing to hide. It’s not far. He rents space in an old factory down by the Anacostia River, west bank.”

  “Address?”

  She shrugged. “I just know how to get there.”

  I thought for a moment, said, “After my team gets here, you’ll take me?”

  She nodded. “Be glad to. Can I take a shower in the meantime? You can search the bathroom if you need to. I assure you it’s nothing but the usual.”

  I stared at her for several beats, and then said, “Make it quick.”

  Chapter 27

  The criminalists arrived ten minutes later. I was giving them instructions to call if they turned up anything when Kimiko Binx emerged from her bedroom in jeans, Nike running shoes, and a short-sleeved green blouse.