Around six-thirty that night, I got a call from the FBI evidence labs in Quantico, Virginia. Curtis Waddle was a friend of mine, and knew how I felt about Soneji. He had promised he’d pass on information as fast as he got it himself.
“You sitting down, Alex? Or you pacing around with one of those insipid, state-of-the-artless cordless phones in your hand?” he asked.
“I’m pacing, Curtis. But I’m carrying around an old-fashioned phone. It’s even black. Alexander Graham himself would approve.”
The lab head laughed and I could picture his broad, freckled face, his frizzy red hair tied with a rubber band in a ponytail. Curtis loves to talk, and I’ve found you have to let him go on or he gets hurt and can even get a little spiteful.
“Good man, good man. Listen, Alex, I’ve got something here, but I don’t think you’re going to like it . I don’t like it. I’m not even sure if we trust what we have.”
I edged in a few words. “Uh, what do you have, Curtis?”
“The blood we found on the stock and barrel of the rifle at Union Station? We’ve got a definite match on it. Though, as I said, I don’t know if I trust what we have. Kyle agrees. Guess what? It’s not Soneji’s blood.”
Curtis was right. I didn’t like hearing that at all. I hate surprises in any murder investigation. “What the hell does that mean? Whose blood is it then, Curtis? You know yet?”
I could hear him sigh, then blow out air in a Whoosh. “Alex, it’s yours. Your blood was on the sniper rifle.”
Part Two
Monster Hunt
Chapter 20
IT WAS rush hour in Penn Station in New York City when Soneji arrived. He was on time, right on schedule, for the next act. Man, he had lived this exact moment a thousand times over before today.
Legions of pathetic burnouts were on the way home, where they would drop onto their pillows (no goose down for these hard cases), sleep for what would seem like an instant, and then get back up the following morning and head for the trains again. Jesus — and they said he was crazy!
This was absolutely, positively, the best — he’d been dreaming of this moment for more than twenty years. This very moment!
He had planned to get to New York between five and five-thirty — and here he was. Heeere’s Gary! He’d imagined himself, saw himself, coming up out of the deep dark tunnels at Penn Station. He knew he was going to be out-of-his-head furious when he got upstairs, too. Knew it before he began to hear the piped-in circus music, some totally insane John Philip Sousa marching band ditty, with an overlay of tinny-sounding train announcements.
“You may now board through Gate A to Track 8, Bay Head Junction,” a fatherly voice proclaimed to the clueless.
All aboard to Bay Head Junction. All aboard, you pathetic morons, you freaking robots!
He checked out a poor moke porter who wore a dazed, flat look, as if life had left him behind about thirty years ago.
“You just can’t keep a bad man down,” Soneji said to the passing redcap. “You dig? You hear what I’m saying?”
“Fuck off,” the redcap said. Gary Soneji snorted out a laugh. Man, he got such a kick out of the surly downtrodden. They were everywhere, like a league these days.
He stared at the surly redcap. He decided to punish him — to let him live.
Today’s not your day to die. Your name stays in the Book of Life. Keep on walking.
He was furious — just as he knew he would be. He was seeing red. The blood rushing through his brain made a deafening, pounding sound. Not nice. Not conducive to sane, rational thought. The blood? Had the bloodhounds figured it out yet?
The train station was filled to the gills with shoving, pushing, and grumbling New Yorkers at their worst. These goddamn commuters were unbelievably aggressive and irritating.
Couldn’t any of them see that? Well, hell, sure they could. And what did they do about it? They got even more aggressive and obnoxious.
None of them came close to approaching his own seething anger, though. Not even close. His hatred was pure. Distilled. He was anger. He did the things most of them only fantasized about. Their anger was fuzzy and unfocused, bursting in their bubbleheads. He saw anger clearly, and he acted upon it swiftly.
This was so fine, being inside Penn Station, creating another scene. He was really getting into the spirit now. He was noticing everything in full-blast, touchy-feely 3-D. Dunkin’ Donuts, Knot Just Pretzels, Shoetrician Shoe Shine. The omnipresent rumble of the trains down below — it was just as he’d always imagined it.
He knew what would come next — and how it would all end.
Gary Soneji had a six-inch knife pressed against his leg. It was a real collector’s item. Had a mother-of-pearl handle and a tight serpentine blade on both sides. “An ornate knife for an ornate individual,” a greasy salesman had told him once upon a long time ago. “Wrap it up!” he’d said. Had it ever since. For special occasions like today. Or once to kill an FBI agent named Roger Graham.
He passed Hudson News, with all of its glossy magazine faces staring out at the world, staring at him, trying to work their propaganda. He was still being shoved and elbowed by his fellow commuters. Man, didn’t they ever stop?
Wow! He saw a character from his dreams, from way back when he was a kid. There was the guy. No doubt about it. He recognized the face, the way the guy held his body, everything about him. It was the guy in the gray-striped business getup, the one who reminded him of his father.
“You’ve been asking for this for a long time!” Soneji growled at Mr. Gray Stripes. “You asked for this.”
He drove the knife blade forward, felt it sink into flesh. It was just as he had imagined it.
The businessman saw the knife plunge near his heart. A frightened, bewildered look crossed his face. Then he fell to the station floor, stone cold dead, his eyes rolled back and his mouth frozen in a silent scream.
Soneji knew what he had to do next. He pivoted, danced to his left, and cut a second victim who looked like a slacker type. The guy wore a “Naked Lacrosse” T-shirt. The details didn’t matter, but some of them stuck in his mind. He cut a black man selling Street News. Three for three.
The thing that really mattered was the blood. Soneji watched as the precious blood spilled onto the dirty, stained, and mottled concrete floor. It spattered the clothes of commuters, pooled under the bodies. The blood was a clue, a Rorschach test for the police and FBI hunters to analyze. The blood was there for Alex Cross to try and figure out.
Gary Soneji dropped his knife. There was incredible confusion, shrieking everywhere, panic in Penn Station that finally woke the walking dead.
He looked up at the maze of maroon signs, each with neat Helvetic lettering: Exit 31st St., Parcel Checking, Visitor Information, Eighth Avenue Subway.
He knew the way out of Penn Station. It was all preordained. He had made this decision a thousand times before.
He scurried back down into the tunnels again. No one tried to stop him. He was the Bad Boy again. Maybe his stepmother had been right about that. His punishment would be to ride the New York subways.
Brrrr. Scar-ry!
Chapter 21
SEVEN P.M. that evening. I was caught in the strangest, most powerful epiphany. I felt that I was outside myself, watching myself. I was driving by the Sojourner Truth School, on my way home. I saw Christine Johnson’s car and stopped.
I got out of my car and waited for her. I felt incredibly vulnerable. A little foolish. I hadn’t expected Christine to be at the school this late.
At quarter past seven, she finally wandered out of the school. I couldn’t catch my breath from the instant I spotted her. I felt like a schoolboy. Maybe that was all right, maybe it was good. At least I was feeling again.
She looked as fresh and attractive as if she’d just arrived at the school. She had on a yellow-and-blue flowered dress cinched around her narrow waist. She wore blue sling-back heels and carried a blue bag over one shoulder. The theme song from Waiting t
o Exhale floated into my head. I was waiting, all right.
Christine saw me, and she immediately looked troubled. She kept on walking, as if she were in a hurry to be somewhere else, anywhere else but here.
Her arms were crossed across her chest. A bad sign, I thought. The worst possible body language. Protective and fearful. One thing was clear already: Christine Johnson didn’t want to see me.
I knew I shouldn’t have come, shouldn’t have stopped, but I couldn’t help myself. I needed to understand what had happened when we left Kinkead’s. Just that, nothing more. A simple, honest explanation, even if it hurt.
I sucked in a deep breath and walked up to her. “Hi,” I said, “you want to take a walk? It’s a nice night.” I almost couldn’t speak, and I am never at a loss for words.
“Taking a break in one of your usual twenty-hour workdays?” Christine half smiled, tried to anyway.
I returned the smile, felt queasy all over. I shook my head. “I’m off work.”
“I see. Sure, we can walk a little bit, a few minutes. It is a nice night, you’re right.”
We turned down F Street and entered Garfield Park, which was especially pretty in the early summer. We walked in silence. Finally we stopped near a ballfield swarming with little kids. A frenzied baseball game was in progress.
We weren’t far from the Eisenhower Freeway, and the whoosh of rush-hour traffic was steady, almost soothing. Tulip poplars were in bloom, and coral honey-suckle. Mothers and fathers were playing with their kids; everybody in a nice mood tonight.
This had been my neighborhood park for almost thirty years, and during the daylight hours it can almost be idyllic. Maria and I used to come here all the time when Damon was a toddler and she was pregnant with Jannie. Much of that is starting to fade away now, which is probably a good thing, but it’s also sad.
Christine finally spoke. “I’m sorry, Alex.” She had been staring at the ground, but now she raised her lovely eyes to mine. “About the other night. The bad scene at my car. I guess I panicked. To be honest, I’m not even sure what happened.”
“Let’s be honest,” I said. “Why not?”
I could tell this was hard for her, but I needed to know how she felt. I needed more than she’d told me outside the restaurant.
“I want to try and explain,” she said. Her hands were clenched. One of her feet was tapping rapidly. Lots of bad signs.
“Maybe it’s all my fault,” I said. “I’m the one who kept asking you to dinner until—”
Christine reached out and covered my hand with hers. “Please let me finish,” she said. The half smile came again. “Let me try to get this out once and for all. I was going to call you anyway. I was planning to call you tonight. I would have.
“You’re nervous now, and so am I. God, am I nervous,” she said quietly. “I know I’ve hurt your feelings, and I don’t like that. It’s the last thing I meant to do. You don’t deserve to be hurt.”
Christine was shivering a little. Her voice was shaking, too, as she spoke. “Alex, my husband died because of the kind of violence you have to live with every day. You accept that world, but I don’t think I can. I’m just not that kind of person. I couldn’t bear to lose someone else I was close to. Am I making sense to you? I’m feeling a little confused.”
Everything was becoming clearer to me now. Christine’s husband had been killed in December. She said that there had been serious problems in the marriage, but she loved him. She had seen him shot to death in their home, seen him die. I had held her then. I was part of the murder case.
I wanted to hold her again, but I knew it was the wrong thing to do. She was still hugging herself tightly. I understood her feelings.
“Please listen to me, Christine. I’m not going to die until probably in my late eighties. I’m too stubborn and ornery to die. That would give us longer together than either of us has been alive so far. Forty-plus years. It’s also a long time to avoid each other.”
Christine shook her head a little. She continued to look into my eyes. Finally, a smile peeked through.
“I do like the way your crazy mind works. One minute, you’re Detective Cross — the next minute you’re this very open, very sweet child.” She put her hands up to her face. “Oh, God, I don’t even know what I’m saying.”
Everything inside me said to do it, every instinct, every feeling. I slowly, carefully, reached out and took Christine into my arms. She fit so right. I could feel myself melting and I liked it. I even liked that my legs felt shaky and weak.
We kissed for the first time and Christine’s mouth was soft and very sweet. Her lips pushed against mine. She didn’t pull away, as I’d expected she might. I ran the tips of my fingers along one cheek, then the other.
Her skin was smooth and my fingers tingled at the tips. It was as if I had been without air for a long, long time and suddenly could breathe again. I could breathe. I felt alive.
Christine had shut her eyes, but now she opened them. Our eyes met, and held. “Just like I imagined it,” she whispered, “times about four hundred and fifty.”
Then the worst thing imaginable happened — my pager beeped.
Chapter 22
AT SIX o’clock in New York City, police cruisers and EMS van sirens were wailing everywhere in the always highly congested five-block radius around Penn Station. Detective Manning Goldman parked his dark blue Ford Taurus in front of the post office building on Eighth Avenue and ran toward the multiple-murder scene.
People stopped walking on the busy avenue to watch Goldman. Heads turned everywhere, trying to find out what was going on, and how this running man might fit in.
Goldman had long, wavy caramel-and-gray hair and a gray goatee. A gold stud glinted from one earlobe. Goldman looked more like an aging rock or jazz musician than a homicide detective.
Goldman’s partner was a first-year detective named Carmine Groza. Groza had a strong build and wavy black hair, and reminded people of a young Sylvester Stallone, a comparison he hated. Goldman rarely talked to him. In his opinion, Groza had never uttered a single word worth listening to.
Groza nonetheless followed close behind his fifty-eight-year-old partner, who was currently the oldest Manhattan homicide detective working the streets, possibly the smartest, and definitely the meanest, grumpiest bastard Groza had ever met.
Goldman was known to be somewhere to the right of Pat Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh when it came to politics but, like most rumors, or what he called “caricature assassinations,” this one was off the mark. On certain issues — the apprehension of criminals, the rights of criminals versus the rights of other citizens, and the death penalty, Goldman was definitely a radical conservative. He knew that anyone with half a brain who worked homicide for a couple of hours would come to exactly the same conclusions that he had. On the other hand, when it came to women’s right to choose, same-sex marriages, or even Howard Stern, Goldman was as liberal as his thirty-year-old son, who just happened to be a lawyer with the ACLU. Of course, Goldman kept that to himself. The last thing he wanted was to ruin his reputation as an insufferable bastard. If he did that, he might have to talk to up-and-coming young assholes like “Sly” Groza.
Goldman was still in good shape — better than Groza, with his steady diet of fast foods and high-octane colas and sugary teas. He ran against the tide of people streaming out of Penn Station. The murders, at least the ones he knew about so far, had taken place in and around the main waiting area of the train station.
The killer had chosen the rush hour for a reason, Goldman was thinking as the train-station waiting area came into view. Either that, or the killer just happened to go wacko at a time when the station was jam-packed with victims-to-be.
So what brought the wacko to Penn Station at rush hour? Manning Goldman wondered. He already had one scary theory that he was keeping to himself so far.
“Manning, you think he’s still in here someplace?” Groza asked from behind.
Groza’s habit of calli
ng people by their first name, as if they were all camp counselors together, really got under his skin.
Goldman ignored his partner. No, he didn’t believe the killer was still in Penn Station. The killer was on the loose in New York. That bothered the hell out of him. It made him sick to his stomach, which wasn’t all that hard these days, the past couple of years, actually.
Two pushcart vendors were artfully blocking the way to the crime scene. One cart was called Montego City Slickers Leather, the other From Russia With Love. He wished they would go back to Jamaica and Russia, respectively.
“NYPD. Make way. Move these ashcarts!” Goldman yelled at the vendors.
He pushed his way through the crowd of onlookers, other cops, and train-station personnel who were gathered near the body of a black man with braided hair and tattered clothing. Bloodstained copies of Street News were scattered around the body, so Goldman knew the dead man’s occupation and his reason for being at the train station.
As he got up close, he saw that the victim was probably in his late twenties. There was an unusual amount of blood. Too much. The body was surrounded by a bright red pool.
Goldman walked up to a man in a dark blue suit with a blue-and-red Amtrak pin prominent on his lapel.
“Homicide Detective Goldman,” he said, flashing his shield. “Tracks ten and eleven.” Goldman pointed at one of the overhead signs. “What train would have come in on those tracks — just before the knifings?”
The Amtrak manager consulted a thick booklet he kept in his breast pocket.
“The last train on ten… that would have been the Metroliner from Philly, Wilmington, Baltimore, originating in Washington.”
Goldman nodded. It was exactly what he’d been afraid of when he’d heard that a spree killer had struck at the train station, and that he was able to get away. That fact meant he was clearheaded. The killer had a plan in mind.