Cat & Mouse

Chapter 86

“WHAT THE hell is this all about?” Sampson asked as we trudged from the ramshackle barn to a gray fieldstone fireplace that stood in an open clearing. “You think this is how we catch the Bug-Eyed Monster? Beating up on this old man?”

Both of us carried old metal shovels, and I had a rusted pickax also.

“I told you-data. I’m a scientist by training. Trust me for about half an hour. The old man is tougher than he looks.”

The stone fireplace had been built for family cookouts a long time ago, but apparently had not been used in recent years. Sumac and other vines were creeping over the fireplace, as if to make it disappear.

Just beyond the fireplace was a rotting, wooden-plank picnic table with splintered benches on either side. Pines, oaks, and sugar maples were everywhere.

“ Gary had a recurring dream. That’s what brought me here. This is where the dream takes place. Near the fireplace and the picnic table at Grandpa Walter’s farm. It’s quite horrible. The dream comes up several times in the notes Alex made on Soneji when he was inside Lorton Prison.”

“Where Gary should have been cooked, until he was crispy on the outside, slightly pink toward the center,” Sampson said.

I laughed at his dark humor. It was the first light moment I’d had in a long time and it felt good to share it with someone.

I picked out a spot midway between the old fireplace and a towering oak tree that canted toward the farmhouse. I drove the pickax into the ground, drove it hard and deep. Gary Soneji. His aura, his profound evil. His paternal granddaddy. More data.

“In his bizarre dreams,” I told Sampson, “ Gary committed a gruesome murder when he was a young boy. He may have buried the victim out here. He wasn’t sure himself. He felt he couldn’t separate dreams from reality sometimes. Let’s spend a little time searching for Soneji’s ancient burial ground. Maybe we’re about to enter Gary ’s earliest nightmare.”

“Maybe I don’t want to enter Gary Soneji’s earliest nightmare,” Sampson said laughing again. The tension between us was definitely breaking some. This was better.

I lifted the pickax high and swung down with great force. I repeated the action again and again, until I found a smooth, comfortable, working rhythm.

Sampson looked surprised as he watched me handle the pick. “You’re done this kind of fieldwork before, boy,” he said, and began to dig at my side.

“Yes, I lived on a farm in El Toro, California. My father, his father, and my grandfather’s were all small-town doctors. But they continued to live on our family horse farm. I was supposed to go back there to set up practice, but then I never finished my medical training.”

The two of us were hard at work now. Good, honest work: looking for old bodies, searching for ghosts from Gary Soneji’s past. Trying to goad Grandfather Murphy.

We took off our shirts, and soon both of us were covered with sweat and dust.

“This was like a gentleman’s farm? Back in California? The one you lived on as a boy?”

I snorted out a laugh as I pictured the gentleman’s farm. “It was a very small farm. We had to struggle to keep it going. My family didn’t believe a doctor should get rich taking care of other people. ‘You shouldn’t take a profit from other people’s misery,’ my father said. He still believes that.”

“Huh. So your whole family’s weird?”

“That’s reasonably accurate portrait.”

Chapter 87

AS I continued to dig in Walter Murphy’s yard, I thought back to our farm in Southern California. I could still vividly see the large red barn and two small corrals.

When I lived there we owned six horses. Two were breeding stallions, Fadl and Rithsar. Every morning I took rake, pitchfork, and wheelbarrow, and I cleared the stalls; and then made my trip to the manure pile. I put down lime and straw, washed out and refilled the water buckets, made minor repairs. Every single morning of my youth. So yes, I knew how to handle a shovel and pickax.

It took Sampson and me half an hour before we had a shallow ditch stretching toward the ancient oak tree in the Murphy yard. The sprawling tree had been mentioned several times in Gary ’s recounting of his dreams.

I had almost expected Walter Murphy to call the local police on us, but it didn’t happen. I half expected Soneji to suddenly appear. That didn’t happen either.

“Too bad old Gary didn’t just leave us a map.” Sampson grunted and groaned under the hot, beating sun.

“He was very specific about his dream. I think he wanted Alex to come out here. Alex, or somebody else.”

“Somebody else did. The two of us. Hot shit, there’s something down here. Something under my feet,” Sampson said.

I moved around toward his spot in the trench. The two of us continued to dig, picking up the pace. We worked side by side, sweating profusely. Data, I reminded myself. It’s all just data on the way to an answer. The begi

And then I recognized the fragments we had uncovered in the shallow grave, in Gary ’s hiding place near the fireplace.

“Jesus Christ, I don’t believe it. Oh God, Jesus!” Sampson said.

“Animal bones. Looks like the skull and upper thigh bone of a medium-sized dog,” I said to Sampson.

“Lots of bones!” he added.

We continued to dig even faster. Our breathing was harsh and labored. We had been digging in the summer heat for nearly an hour. It was in the nineties, sticky-hot, and claustrophobic. We were in a hole up to our waists.

“Shit! Here we go again. You recognize this from any of your med-school anatomy classes?” Sampson asked.

We were looking down at fragments from a human skeleton. “It’s the scapula and mandible. It could be a young boy or girl,” I told him.

“So this is the handiwork of young Gary? This Gary ’s first kill? Another kid?”

“I don’t know for sure. Let’s not forget about Grandpa Walter. Let’s keep looking. If it is Gary, maybe he left a sign. These would be his earliest souvenirs. They would have been precious to him.”

We kept on digging and, minutes later, we found another cache. Only the sound of our labored breathing broke the silence.

There were more bones, possibly from a large animal, possibly a deer, but probably human.

And there was something else, a definite sign from young Gary. It had been wrapped in tinfoil, which I now carefully removed.

It was a Lionel locomotive, undoubtedly the one he had stolen from his stepbrother.

The toy train that launched a hundred deaths.

Chapter 88

CHRISTINE JOHNSON knew she had to go to the Sojourner Truth School, but once she got there, she wasn’t sure she was ready for work yet. She was nervous, distracted, and not herself. Maybe school would help to get her mind off Alex, though.

She stopped at Laura Dixon’s first-grade class on her morning walk. Laura was one of her best friends in the world, and her classes were stimulating and fun. Besides, first graders were so damn cute to be around. “Laura’s babies,” she called them. Or, “Laura’s cuddly kittens and perky puppies.”

“Oh, look who it is, look who’s come to visit. Aren’t we the luckiest first-grade class in the whole world!” the teacher cried when she spotted Christine at the door.

Laura was just a smidgen over five foot tall, but she was still a very big girl, large at the hips and breasts. Christine couldn’t keep from smiling at her friend’s greeting. Trouble was, she was also incredibly close to tears. She realized she wasn’t ready for school.

“Good morning, Ms. Johnson!” the first graders chorused like a practiced glee club. God, they were wonderful! So bright and enthusiastic, sweet and good.

“Good morning back at you.” Christine beamed. There, she felt a little better. A big letter B was scrawled on the blackboard, as well as Laura’s sketches of a Bumblebee Buzzing around Batman and a Big Blue Boat.