Cat & Mouse

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 stu

“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.”