Cat & Mouse

The thing that he loved the most, what made it so perfect, was that nobody had any idea where this was going.

Nobody would guess the end to this one.

Not Alex Cross, not anybody.

Chapter 29

I VOWED I would not let Soneji wear me down this time. I wouldn’t let Soneji take possession of my soul again.

I managed to get home from New York in time for a late di

“I’m so impressed, Daddy,” Ja

She beamed and giggled and patted me on my arm as we worked. I was a good father tonight. Ja

I took a small formal bow. “Thank you, my darling daughter. Now this trip to New York I was on, about how far would you say that might be?”

“Kilometers or miles?” Damon broke in from the other side of the table, where he was folding napkins like fans, the way they do in fancy restaurants. Damon can be quite the little scene stealer.

“Either measurement would be fine,” I told him.

“Approximately two hundred forty-eight miles, one way,” Ja

I opened my eyes as wide as I could, made a fu

She took a little bow and then did a mock curtsy. “I asked Nana how far it was this morning,” she confessed. “Is that okay?”

“That’s cool,” Damon offered his thought on his sister’s moral code. “It’s call research, Velcro.”

“Yeah, that’s cool, Baby,” I said and we all laughed at her cleverness and sense of fun.

“Round-trip, it’s four hundred ninety-six miles,” Damon said.

“You two are…smart!” I exclaimed in a loud, playful voice. “You’re both smarty-pants, smartalecks, smarties of the highest order!”

“What’s going on in there? What am I missing out on?” Nana finally called from the kitchen, which was overflowing with good smells from her cooking. She doesn’t like to miss anything. Ever. To my knowledge, she just about never has.

“ G.E. College Bowl,” I called out to her.

“You will lose your shirt, Alex, if you play against those two young scholars,” she warned. “Their hunger for knowledge knows no bounds. Their knowledge is fast becoming encyclopedic.”

“En-cy-clo-pedic!” Ja

“Cakewalk!” she said then, and did the lively old dance that had originated back in plantation times. I’d taught it to her one day at the piano. The cakewalk music form was actually a foreru

Back in plantation days, whoever did the dance best on a given night won a cake. Thus the phrase “that takes the cake.”

All of this Ja

After di

We finally retired to the living room after the Wednesday-night fights. Rosie the cat was curled up on Ja

Of all the killers I had ever gone up against, he was the scariest. Soneji was single-minded, obsessive, but he was also completely whacked-out, and that’s the proper medical term I learned years ago at Johns Hopkins. He had a powerful imagination fueled by anger, and he acted on his fantasies.

Months back, Soneji had called to tell me that he’d left a cat at our house, a little present. He knew that we had adopted her, and loved little Rosie very much. He said that every time I saw Rosie the cat, I should think: Gary ’s in the house, Gary is right there.

I had figured that Gary had seen the stray cat at our house, and just made up a nasty story. Gary loved to lie, especially when his lies hurt people. That night, though, with Soneji ru

Gary is in the house. Gary is right here.

I nearly threw the cat out of the house, but that wasn’t an option, so I waited until morning to do what had to be done with Rosie. Goddamn Soneji. What in hell did he want from me? What did he want from my family?

What could he have done to Rosie before he left her at our house?

Chapter 30

I FELT like a traitor to my kids and also to poor little Rosie. I was feeling subhuman as I drove thirty-six miles to Quantico the next morning. I was betraying the kids’ trust and possibly doing a terrible thing, but I didn’t see that I had any other choice.

At the start of our trip, I had Rosie trapped in one of those despicable, metal-wire pet carriers. The poor thing cried and meowed and scratched so hard at the cage and at me that I finally had to let her out.

“You be good now,” I gave her a mild warning. Then I said, “Oh, go ahead and raise hell if you want to.”

Rosie proceeded to lay a huge guilt trip on me, to make me feel miserable. Obviously, she’d learned this lesson well from Damon and Ja

I was fearful that the beautiful red-and-brown Abyssinian would have to be destroyed, possibly this morning. I didn’t know how I could ever explain it to the kids.

“Don’t scratch up the car seats. And don’t you dare jump on top of my head!” I warned Rosie, but in a pleasant, conciliatory voice.

She meowed a few times, and we had a more or less peaceful and pleasant ride to the FBI quarters in Quantico. I had already spoken to Chet Elliott in the Bureau’s SAS, or Scientific Analysis Section. He was waiting for Rosie and me. I was carrying the cat in one arm, with her cage dangling from the other.

Now things were going to get very hard. To make things worse, Rosie got up on her hind legs and nuzzled my face. I looked into her beautiful green eyes and I could hardly stand it.

Chet was outfitted in protective gear: a white lab coat, white plastic gloves, even gold-tinted goggles. He looked like the king of the geeks. He peered at Rosie, then at me and said, “Weird science.”

“Now what happens?” I asked Chet. My heart had sunk to the floorboards when I’d spotted him in his protective gear. He was taking this seriously.

“You go over to Admin,” he said. “Kyle Craig wants to see you. Says it’s important. Of course, everything with Kyle is important as hell and can’t wait another second. I know he’s crazed about Mr. Smith. We all are. Smith is the craziest fucker yet, Alex.”

“What happens to Rosie?” I asked.

“First step, some X rays. Hopefully, little Red here isn’t a walking bomb, compliments of our friend Soneji. If she isn’t, we’ll pursue toxicology. Examine her for the presence of drugs or poison in the tissues and fluids. You run along. Go see Uncle Kyle. Red and I will be just fine. I’ll try to do right by her, Alex. We’re all cat people in my family. I’m a cat person, can’t you tell? I understand about these things.”