Along Came a Spider (Alex Cross 1)

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

CHAPTER 54

POW. At 2:30 on Tuesday afternoon (I got back to Washington at eleven o’clock), I got a call from Sampson. He wanted to meet me at the Sanders house. He thought we’d made a new connection between the kidnapping and the project murders. He was pumped as hell with his news. Hard work was paying off on one of our early leads.

I hadn’t been back to the Sanders crime scene in several months, but it was all sadly familiar. The windows were dark from the outside. I wondered if the house would ever be sold, or even rented again.

I sat in my car in the Sanders driveway, and read through the original detectives’ report. There was nothing in the reports I didn’t already know and hadn’t gone over a dozen times.

I kept staring at the house. The yellowing shades were drawn, so I couldn’t see inside. Where was Sampson, and what did he want with me here?

He pulled up behind me at three o’clock sharp. He climbed out of his battered Nissan and joined me in the front seat of the Porsche.

“Oh, you are brown sugar now. You look sweet enough to eat.”

“You’re still big and ugly. Nothing changes. What do you have here?”

“Police work at its very best,” Sampson said. He lit up a Corona. “By the way, you were right to keep after this thing.”

Outside the car, the wind was howling and heavy with rain. There had been tornadoes down through Kentucky and Ohio. The weather had been bizarre the whole weekend that we were away.

“Did you snorkel, and sail, play tennis in your club whites?” Sampson asked.

“We didn’t have time for that kind of stuff. We did a lot of spiritual bonding you wouldn’t understand.”

“My, my.” Sampson talked like a black girlfriend, played the part well. “I love to talk the trash, don’t you, sister?”

“Are we going inside?” I asked him.

Selective scenes from the past had been flashing into my head for several minutes, none of them pleasant. I remembered the face of the fourteen-year-old Sanders girl. And three-year-old Mustaf. I remembered what beautiful children they had been. I remembered how nobody cared when they died here in Southeast.

“Actually, we’re here to visit the next-door neighbors,” he finally said. “Let’s go to work. Something happened here that I don’t understand yet. It’s important, though, Alex. I need your head on it.”

We went to visit the Sanderses’ next-door neighbors, the Cerisiers. It was important. It got my full attention, immediately.

I already knew that Nina Cerisier had been Suzette Sanders’s best friend since they were little girls. The families had been living next door to each other since 1979. Nina, as well as her mother and father, hadn’t gotten over the murders. If they could have afforded to, they would have moved away.

We were invited in by Mrs. Cerisier, who shouted upstairs for her daughter Nina. We were seated around the Cerisiers’ kitchen table. A picture of a smiling Magic Johnson was on the wall. Cigarette smoke and bacon grease were in the air.

Nina Cerisier was very cool and distant wh

en she finally appeared in the kitchen. She was a plain-looking girl, about fifteen or sixteen. I could tell that she didn’t want to be there.

“Last week,” Sampson said for my benefit, “Nina came forward and told a teacher’s aide at Southeast that she might have seen the killer a couple of nights before the murders. She’d been afraid to talk about it.”

“I understand,” I said. It is almost impossible to get eye-witnesses to talk to police in Condon or Langley, or any of D.C.’s black neighborhoods.

“I saw he been caught,” Nina said in an offhand manner. Beautiful rust-colored eyes stared at me from her plain face. “I wasn’t so scared no more. I’m still some scared, though.”

“How did you recognize him?” I asked Nina.

“Saw him on the TV. He did that big kidnapping thing, too,” she said. “He all over TV.”

“She recognized Gary Murphy,” I said to Sampson.

That meant she’d seen him without his schoolteacher disguise.

“You sure it was the same man as on TV?” Sampson asked Nina.