45
Helmet on, facing the Kinect camera in the apartment’s storage room, Sunday moved ultraslowly as he crept into Alex Cross’s virtual home, trying to take in everything, studying the dimensions and quirks of the old house, imagining the rooms filled with furniture and people.
The writer moved as a ghost might, out through the kitchen under construction into the backyard, where the foundation for the addition was already curing. He saw the blueprint in his mind and realized that this would be the part of the house Cross would know least. That could matter, he reasoned, and he made a mental note to have Acadia advance the software the next time so he might experience the addition half done and then complete.
Sunday returned to the bottom of the virtual staircase. He practiced slipping up the stairs, seeing every riser, imagined himself silent, lethal. He moved from room to room, conjuring up Cross’s grandmother asleep, and his son and daughter, too.
Lingering in the great detective’s bedroom, Sunday fantasized Bree Stone in his mind so vividly that he swore he could smell her. But once again, he was drawn to the third floor and the detective’s home office.
He stayed up there for a long time, altering his perspective by inches, examining every bit of the space, especially the articles about the mass killings outside Omaha and Fort Worth. When Sunday saw his own name and the quotes he’d given the journalist, he could not help smiling.
Your doom is right here, Cross, and you have no clue.
Reluctantly, the writer turned from the office and went to stand in the doorway. Then he took off, bounding down the virtual staircases and landings and bursting out the front door. When he removed the helmet, he was sweaty, exhilarated, and disoriented. The virtual model was so real he felt like he’d just escaped the place.
Outside, the sun was rising. He shut the Kinect down, went to the fridge in his own kitchen, and found cold Ethiopian takeout food. Acadia’s, no doubt. She loved that kind of stuff. Anything strange.
But why hadn’t he heard from her since she’d gone to the Berkshires on a scouting assignment? Sunday had tried her cell several times and had gotten nothing but voice mail. He popped the food into the microwave, thinking that this silence wasn’t that unusual. Acadia often fell out of touch. Hell, he did, too.
But for a moment, thinking about her, Sunday remembered how electric it felt when he was with her, how it had been that way right from that first night. They’d wandered the French Quarter drinking, listening to music, and telling each other their life stories.
Around two in the morning, back in his hotel after they’d made passionate love for the first time, Acadia had asked him what his deepest, darkest secret was. Looking into her fathomless eyes, Sunday had felt compelled to tell her something he’d never told anyone else. He’d killed his father with a shovel. He’d fed the body to his father’s hogs.
When the writer had
finished his story, Acadia had looked at him in wonder and said, “I think we were meant to be together, Marcus, to meet tonight.”
After hearing her explain how she’d killed her wife-beating father and destroyed the evidence by feeding her father to his pet alligators, Sunday had believed the same thing. He didn’t believe in souls or Kismet or Karma, but he did believe their meeting was destined somehow.
“How did you feel after you hit him?” he’d asked. “Your father.”
“Same way I do now,” she’d said, and rolled on top of him hungrily. “You?”
“Exactly the same way.”
The microwave dinged in the kitchen, waking him from his memories.
Sunday ate the leftover Ethiopian beef dish and got his mind off Acadia by thinking about Cross. He wondered whether he was moving too slowly, not putting enough pressure on the man. As he finished his meal, he ticked through the basic strategy once again.
After several minutes of detached analysis, he decided the overall plan still worked. It still did the job. He wasn’t going to try to short-circuit the process.
But perhaps there was more to be done in the short term.
The writer thought over everything he’d discovered about the Superior Spa killings in the last twenty-four hours. Could he use that information now? And then he saw how it might work, how it might dovetail nicely with his recent monkey business at the Mandarin Oriental.
Returning to the storage room, he sat at Preston Elliot’s laptop and called up Microsoft Word. He started futzing with the fonts, changing them every few words, until he had a letter that looked sufficiently bizarre but read rather well.
The writer considered it a moment and decided one more thing was needed. He put on leather gloves, fed his printer new paper. After printing the letter, he took the page into the living room, where he turned on the television and found a pen.
Sunday watched CNN as he doodled in the margins and along the top and bottom of the—
“Washington Metro police are treating the death of Mandy Bell Lee’s attorney as a murder,” the reporter on the television screen said, tearing Sunday away from his artwork.
He stared when a sketch appeared on the screen and the reporter said, “Police sources tell us they believe this man posed as a room service waiter and brought in coffee laced with pure liquid nicotine, which caused Jackson to suffer a massive heart attack.”
Sunday was unmoved by this news and by the police sketch of the suspected killer, which prominently featured the pompadour hairdo.
“Doesn’t look a thing like me,” he sniffed.