Cross Kill (Alex Cross 24.50)

“I’m here to talk now,” I said.

“Ten years too late. Get the hell off my property before I embrace my Second Amendment rights and—”

“I saw Gary’s father this morning,” I said. “He told me how Gary’s obsession with the Lindbergh kidnapping began.”

She knitted her brows. “How’s that?”

“Gary’s dad said when Gary was eight they were in a used book store, and while his father was wandering in the stacks, his son found a tattered copy of True Detective Mysteries, a crime magazine from the 1930s, and sat down to read it.”

Finger still on the trigger of her semiautomatic rifle, Virginia Winslow shrugged. “So what?”

“When Mr. Soneji found Gary, his son was sitting on the floor in the bookstore, the magazine in his lap, and staring in fascination at a picture from the Lindbergh baby’s autopsy that showed the head wound in lurid detail.”

She stared at me with her jaw slack, as if remembering something that frightened and appalled her.

“What is it?” I asked.

Soneji’s widow hardened again. “Nothing. Doesn’t surprise me. I used to catch him looking at autopsy pictures. He was always saying he was going to write a book and needed to look at them for research.”

“You didn’t believe him?”

“I believed him until my brother Charles noticed that Gary was always volunteering to gut deer they killed,” she said. “Charles told me Gary liked to put his hands in the warm innards, said he liked the feeling, and told me how Gary’d get all bright and glowing when he was doing it.”

Chapter 11

“I didn’t know that about Gary, either,” I said.

“What’s this all about?” Virginia Winslow asked, studying me now.

“There was a cop shooting in DC,” I said. “A man who fit Gary’s description was the shooter.”

I expected Soneji’s widow to respond with total skepticism. But instead she looked frightened and appalled again.

“Gary’s dead,” she said. “You killed him, didn’t you?”

“He killed himself,” I said. “Detonated the bomb he was carrying.”

Her attention flitted to the boards. “That’s not what the internet is saying.”

“What’s the internet saying?”

“That Gary’s alive,” she said. “Our son, Dylan, said he’s seen it online. Gary’s dead, isn’t he? Please tell me that.”

The way she clenched the rifle told me she needed to hear it, so I said, “As far as I know, Gary Soneji’s dead and has been dead for more than ten years. But someone who looked an awful lot like him shot my partner yesterday.”

“What?” she said. “No.”

“It’s not him,” I said. “I’m almost certain.”

“Almost?” she said before a phone started ringing back in the house.

“I…I have to get that,” she said. “Work.”

“What kind of work?”

“I’m a machinist and gunsmith,” she said. “My father taught me the trade.”

She shut the door before I could comment. The bolts were thrown one by one.