I studied the charts at the base of the bed. He had suffered severe-to-moderate blood loss secondary to the tearing of the radial artery. He had a collapsed lung, numerous contusions, hematomas, and lacerations. The left wrist had been injured. There was blood poisoning, and the morbidity of the injuries put him on the “could be about to check out” list.
Alex Cross was conscious, and I stared into his brown eyes for a long time. What secrets were hidden there? What did he know? Had he actually seen the face of his assailant? who did this to you? Not Soneji Who dared to go into your bedroom?
He couldn’t talk and I could see nothing in his eyes. No awareness that I was there with Detective Sampson. He didn’t seem to recognize Sampson either. Sad.
Dr. Cross was getting excellent care at St. Anthony’s. The hospital bed had a Stryker frame attached to it. The injured wrist was encased in an elastoplast cast and the arm was anchored to a trapeze bar. He was receiving oxygen through a clear tube that ran into an outlet in the wall. A fancy monitor called a Slave scope was providing pulse, temp, blood pressure, and EKG readings.
“Why don’t you leave him alone?” Sampson finally spoke after a few minutes. “Why don’t you leave both of us. You can’t help here. Please, go.”
I nodded, but continued to look into the eyes of Alex Cross for a few more seconds. Unfortunately, he had nothing to tell me.
I finally left Cross and Sampson alone. I wondered if I would ever see Alex Cross again. I doubted that I would. I didn’t believe in miracles anymore.
Chapter 81
THAT NIGHT, I couldn’t get Mr. Smith out of my head, as usual, and now Alex Cross and his family were residing there as well. I kept revisiting different scenes from the hospital, and from the Cross house. Who had entered the house? Who had Gary Soneji gotten to? That had to be it.
The crisscrossing flashbacks were maddening and running out of control. I didn’t like the feeling, and I didn’t know if I could conduct an investigation, much less two, under these stressful, almost claustrophobic, conditions.
It had been twenty-four hours from hell. I had flown to the United States from London. I’d landed at National Airport, in D.C., and gone to Quantico, Virginia. Then I had been rushed back to Washington, where I worked until ten in the evening on the Cross puzzle.
To make things worse, if they could get any worse, I found I couldn’t sleep when I finally got to my room at the Washington Hilton & Towers. My mind was in a chaotic state that steadfastly refused sleep.
I didn’t like the working hypothesis on Cross that I had heard from the FBI investigators at headquarters that night. They were stuck in their usual rut: They were like slow students who scan classroom ceilings for answers. Actually, most police investigators reminded me of Einstein’s incisive definition of insanity. I had first heard it at Harvard: “Endlessly repeating the same process, hoping for a different result.”
I kept flashing back to the upstairs bedroom where Alex Cross had been brutally attacked. I was looking for something — but what was it? I could see his blood spattered on the walls, on the curtains, the sheets, the throw rug. What was I missing? Something?
I couldn’t sleep, goddamn it.
I tried work as a sedative. It was my usual antidote. I had already begun extensive notes and sketches on the scene of the attack. I got up and wrote some more. My PowerBook was beside me, always at the ready. My stomach wouldn’t stop rolling and my head throbbed in a maddening way.
I typed: Could Gary Soneji possibly still be alive? Don’t rule anything out yet, not even the most absurd possibility.
Exhume Soneji’s body if necessary.
Read Cross’s book — Along Came a Spider.
Visit Lorton Prison, where Soneji was held.
I pushed aside my computer after an hour’s work. It was nearly two in the morning. My head felt stuffed, as if I had a terrible, nagging cold. I still couldn’t sleep. I was thirty-three years old; I was already beginning to feel like an old man.
I kept seeing the bloody bedroom at the Cross house. No one can imagine what it’s like to live with such imagery day and night. I saw Alex Cross — the way he looked at St. Anthony’s Hospital. Then I was remembering victims of Mr. Smith, his “studies,” as he called them.
The terrifying scenes play on and on and on in my head. Always leading to the same place, the same conclusion.
I can see another bedroom. It is the apartment Isabella and I shared in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
With total clarity, I remembered running down the narrow hallway that terrible night. I remember my heart pushing into my throat, its feeling larger than a clenched fist. I remember every pounding step that I took, everything I saw along the way.
I finally saw Isabella, and I thought it must be a dream, a terrible nightmare.
Isabella was in our bed, and I knew that she was dead. No one could have survived the butchery I witnessed there. No one did survive — neither of us.
Isabella had been savagely murdered at twenty-three, in the prime of her life, before she could be a mother, a wife, the anthropologist she’d dreamed of becoming. I couldn’t help myself, couldn’t stop. I bent and held what was left of Isabella, what was left.
How can I ever forget any of it? How can I turn that sight off in my mind?
The simple answer is, I cannot.
Chapter 82
I WAS ON the hunt again, the loneliest road on this earth. Truthfully, there wasn’t much else that had sustained me during the past four years, not since Isabella’s death.
The moment I awoke in the morning, I called St. Anthony’s Hospital. Alex Cross was alive, but in a coma. His condition was listed as grave. I wondered if John Sampson had remained at his bedside. I suspected he had.
By nine in the morning, I was back at the Cross house. I needed to study the scene in much greater depth, to gather every fact, every splinter and fragment. I tried to organize everything I knew, or thought I knew at this early stage of the investigation. I was reminded of a maxim that was frequently used at Quantico — All truths are half-truths and possibly not even that.
A fiendish “ghoul” had supposedly struck back from the grave and attacked a well-known policeman and his family in their home. The ghoul had warned Dr. Cross that he would come. There was no way to stop it from happening. It was the ultimate in cruel and effective revenge.
For some reason, though, the assailant had failed to execute. None of the family members, or even Alex Cross, had been killed. That was the perplexing and most baffling part of the puzzle for me. That was the key!
I arrived at the cellar in the Cross house just before eleven in the morning. I had asked the Metro police and FBI technicians not to mess around down there until I was finished with my survey of the other floors. My data gathering, my science, was a methodical, step-by-step process.
The attacker had hidden himself (herself?) in the basement while a party had been in progress upstairs and in the backyard. There was a partial footprint near the entryway to the cellar. It was a size nine. It wasn’t much to go on, not unless the perpetrator had wanted us to find the print.
One thing struck me right away. Gary Soneji had been locked in a cellar as a child. He’d been excluded from family activities in the rest of the house. He’d been physically abused in the cellar. Just like the one in the Cross house.
The attacker had definitely hidden in the cellar. That couldn’t be a coincidence.
Had he known about Gary Soneji’s explicit warning to Cross? That possibility was disturbing as hell. I didn’t want to settle on any theories or premature conclusions yet. I just needed to collect as much raw data and information as I could. Possibly because I’d been to medical school, I approached cases as a clinical scientist would.
Collect all the data first. Always the data.
It was quiet in the cellar, and I could focus and concentrate all my attention on my surroundings. I tried to imagine the attacker lurking here during the party, and then afterward, as the
house grew quiet, until Alex Cross finally went to bed.
The attacker was a coward.
He wasn’t in a rage state. He was methodical.
It was not a crime of passion.
The intruder had struck out at each of the children first, but not fatally. He had beaten Alex Cross’s grandmother, but had spared her. Why? Only Alex Cross was meant to die, and so far even that hadn’t happened.
Had the attacker failed? Where was the intruder now?
Was he still in Washington? Checking out the Cross house right now? Or at St. Anthony’s Hospital, where the Metro police were guarding Alex Cross.
As I passed an ancient coal stove, I noticed the metal door was slightly ajar. I poked it open with my handkerchief and peered inside. I couldn’t see very well and took out a penlight. There were inches of ash that were light gray in color. Someone had burned a flammable substance recently, possibly newspapers or magazines.
Why start a fire in the middle of summer? I wondered.
A small hand shovel was on a worktable near the stove. I used the shovel to sift through the ashes.
I carefully scraped along the stove’s bottom.
I heard a clink. A metal-against-metal noise.
I scooped out a shovelful of ash. Something came with the ash. It was hard, heavier. My expectations weren’t high. I was still just collecting data, anything and everything, even the contents of an old stove. I emptied the ashes onto the worktable in a pile, then smoothed it out.
I saw what the small shovel had struck. I flipped over the new evidence with the tip of the shovel. Yes, I said to myself. I finally had something, the first bit of evidence.
It was Alex Cross’s detective shield, and it was burned and charred.
Someone wanted us to find the shield.
The intruder wants to play! I thought. This is cat and mouse.
Chapter 83
Ile-de-France
DR. ABEL SANTE was normally a calm and collected man. He was widely known in the medical community to be erudite, but surprisingly down-to-earth. He was a nice man, too, a gentle physician.
Now he desperately tried to put his mind somewhere other than where his body was. Just about anywhere else in the universe would do just fine.
He had already spent several hours remembering minute details from his pleasant, almost idyllic, boyhood in Rennes; then his university years at the Sorbonne and L’Ecole Pratique de Médecine; he had replayed tennis and golf sporting events; he had relived his seven-year love affair with Regina Becker — dear, sweet Regina.
He needed to be somewhere else, to exist anywhere else but where he actually was. He needed to exist in the past, or even in the future, but not in the present. He was reminded of The English Patient — both the book and the movie. He was Count Almasy now, wasn’t he? Only his torture was even worse than Almasy’s horribly burned flesh. He was in the grasp of Mr. Smith.
He thought about Regina constantly now, and he realized that he loved her fiercely, and what a fool he’d been not to marry her years ago. What an arrogant bastard, and what a huge fool!
How dearly he wanted to live now, and to see Regina again. Life seemed so damned precious to him at this moment, in this terrible place, under these monstrous conditions.
No, this wasn’t a good way to be thinking. It brought him down — it brought him back to reality, to the present. No, no no! Go somewhere else in your mind. Anywhere but here.
The present line of thought brought him to this tiny compartment, this infinitesimal X on the globe where he was now a prisoner, and where no one could possibly find him. Not the flics, not Interpol, not the entire French Army, or the English, or the Americans, or the Israelis!
Dr. Sante could easily imagine the furor and outrage, the panic continuing in Paris and throughout France. NOTED PHYSICIAN AND TEACHER ABDUCTED! The headline in Le Monde would read something like that. Or, NEW MR. SMITH HORROR IN PARIS.
He was the horror! He was certain that tens of thousands of police, as well as the army, were searching for him now. Of course, every hour he was missing, his chances for survival grew dimmer. He knew that from reading past articles about Mr. Smith’s unearthly abductions, and what happened to the victims.
Why me? God Almighty, he couldn’t stand this infernal monologue anymore.
He couldn’t stand this nearly upside-down position, this terribly cramped space, for one more second.
He just couldn’t bear it. Not one more second!
Not one more second!
Not one more second!
He couldn’t breathe!
He was going to die in here.
Right here, in a goddamn dumbwaiter. Stuck between floors, in a godforsaken house in Ile-de-France somewhere on the outskirts of Paris.
Mr. Smith had put him in the dumbwaiter, stuffed him inside like a bundle of dirty laundry, and then left him there — for God only knew how long. It seemed like hours, at least several hours, but Abel Sante really wasn’t sure anymore.
The excruciating pain came and went, but mostly it rushed through his body in powerful waves. His neck, his shoulders, and his chest ached so badly, beyond belief, beyond his tolerance for pain. The feeling was as if he’d been slowly crushed into a squarish heap. If he hadn’t been claustrophobic before, he was now.
But that wasn’t the worst part of this. No, it wasn’t the worst. The most terrifying thing was that he knew what all of France wanted to know, what the whole world wanted to know.
He knew certain things about Mr. Smith’s identity. He knew precisely how he talked. He believed that Mr. Smith might be a philosopher, perhaps a university professor or student.
He had even seen Mr. Smith.
He had looked out from the dumbwaiter — upside down, no less — and stared into Smith’s hard, cold eyes, seen his nose, his lips.
Mr. Smith saw that.
Now there was no hope for him.
“Damn you, Smith. Damn you to hell. I know your shitty secret. I know everything now. You are a fucking alien! You aren’t human.”
Chapter 84
“YOU REALLY think we’re going to track down this son of a bitch? You think this guy is dumb?”
John Sampson asked me point-blank, challenging me. He was dressed all in black, and he wore Ray-Ban sunglasses. He looked as if he were already in mourning. The two of us were flying in an FBI Bell Jet helicopter from Washington to Princeton, New Jersey. We were supposed to work together for a while.
“You think Gary Soneji did this somehow? Think he’s Houdini? You think maybe he’s still alive?” Sampson went on. “What the hell do you think?”
“I don’t know yet.” I sighed. “I’m still collecting data. It’s the only way I know how to work. No, I don’t think Soneji did it. He’s always worked alone before this. Always.”
I knew that Gary Soneji had grown up in New Jersey, then gone on to become one of the most savage murderers of the times. It didn’t seem as if his run were over yet. Soneji was part of the ongoing mystery.
Alex Cross’s notes on Soneji were extensive. I was finding useful and interesting insights all through the notes, and I was less than a third of the way through. I had already decided that Cross was a sharp police detective but an even better psychologist. His hypotheses and hunches weren’t merely clever and imaginative; they were often right. There’s an important difference in that, which many people fail to see, especially people in medium-high places.
I looked up from my reading.
“I’ve had some luck with difficult killers before. All except the one I really want to catch,” I told Sampson.
He nodded, but his eyes stayed locked onto mine. “This Mr. Smith something of a cult hero now? Over in Europe, especially, the Continent, London, Paris, Frankfurt.”
I wasn’t surprised that Sampson was aware of the ongoing case. The tabloids had made Mr. Smith their latest icon. The stories were certainly compelling reading. They played up the angle that Smith might be an alien. Even newspapers like th
e New York Times and the Times of London had run stories stating that police authorities believed Smith might be an extraterrestrial being who had come here to study humans. To grok, as it were.
“Smith has become the evil E.T. Something for X-Files fans to contemplate between TV episodes. Who knows, perhaps Mr. Smith is a visitor from outer space, at least from some other parallel world. He doesn’t have anything in common with human beings, I can vouch for that. I’ve visited the murder scenes.”
Sampson nodded. “Gary Soneji didn’t have much in common with the human race,” he said in his deep, strangely quiet voice. “Soneji was from another planet, too. He’s an ALF, alien life-form.”
“I’m not sure he fits the same psychological profile as Smith.”
“Why is that?” he asked. His eyes narrowed. “You think your mass killer is smarter than our mass killer?”
“I’m not saying that. Gary Soneji was very bright, but he made mistakes. So far, Mr. Smith hasn’t made any.”
“And that’s why you’re going to solve this hinky mystery? Because Gary Soneji makes mistakes?”
“I’m not making predictions,” I told Sampson. “I know better than that. So do you.”
“Did Gary Soneji make a mistake at Alex’s house?” he suddenly asked, his dark eyes penetrating.
I sighed out loud. “I think someone did.”
The helicopter was settling down to land outside Princeton. A thin line of cars silently streamed past the airfield on a state highway. People watched us from the cars. It could safely be assumed that everything had started here. The house where Gary Soneji had been raised was less than six miles away. This was the monster’s original lair.
“You’re sure Soneji’s not still alive?” John Sampson asked one more time. “Are you absolutely sure about that?”
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