Along Came a Spider (Alex Cross 1)

“What happened to the little girl? What happened to Maggie Rose Dunne?” I asked Weithas.

Weithas didn’t say anything. He blew out air over his upper lip. I got the feeling he was having a long day. In a long year.

“We don’t know,” Scorse answered. “There’s still nothing on Maggie Rose. That’s the amazing thing in all this.”

“There’s another complication,” Weithas said to me. He was seated with Scorse on a dark leather sofa. Both FBI men were leaning over a glass coffee table. An IBM computer and printer sat off to one side.

“I’m sure there are a lot of complications,” I said to the deputy director. Leave it to the FBI to keep most of them to themselves. They could have helped me along the way. Maybe we would have found Maggie Rose if we’d worked together.

Weithas glanced at Agent Scorse, then he looked back at me. “Jezzie Flanagan is the complication,” Weithas said.

I was stunned. I felt as if I’d been punched hard in the stomach. For the last few minutes, I knew something else was coming from them. I just sat there, feeling cold and empty inside, well on my way to feeling nothing.

“We believe she’s deeply involved in this with the two men. Has been from the start. Jezzie Flanagan and Mike Devine have been lovers for years.”

CHAPTER 76

AT EIGHT-THIRTY that night, Sampson and I walked along New York Avenue. It is in the tenderloin of D.C.’s ghettos. It’s where Sampson and I hang out most nights. It’s home.

He had just asked me how I was holding up. “Not too good, thanks. Yourself?” I said.

He knew about Jezzie Flanagan. I’d told him everything I knew. The plot thickened and thickened. I couldn’t have felt any worse than I did that night. Scorse and Weithas had laid out a thorough case involving Jezzie. She’d done it. There was no

room for doubt. One lie had led to another. She’d told me a hundred if she’d told me one. Never flinched once. She was better at it than Soneji/Murphy. Real smooth and confident.

“You want me to keep my mouth shut? Or talk at you?” Sampson asked me. “I’ll do it either way.”

His face was expressionless, as it usually is. Maybe it’s the sunglasses that create that impression, but I doubt it. Sampson was like that when he was ten years old.

“I want to talk,” I told John. “I could use a cocktail. I need to talk about psychopathic liars.”

“I’ll buy us a few drinks,” Sampson said.

We headed toward Faces. It’s a bar we’ve been going to since we first joined the police force. The regulars in Faces don’t mind that we’re tough-as-nails D.C. detectives. A few of them even admit that we do more good than harm in the neighborhood.

The crowd in Faces is mostly black, but white people come by for the jazz. And to learn how to dance, and dress.

“Jezzie was the one who assigned Devine and Chakely in the first place?” Sampson reviewed the facts as we waited for the stoplight at 5th Street.

A couple of local punks eyed us from their lookout in front of Popeye’s Fried Chicken. In times past, the same kind of street trash would have been on the same corner, only without so much money, or guns, in their pockets. “Yo, brothers.” Sampson winked at the thugs. He fucks with everybody’s head. Nobody fucks back.

“Right, that’s how it all started. Devine and Chakely were one of the teams assigned to Secretary Goldberg and his family. They worked under Jezzie.”

“And nobody ever suspected them?” he asked me.

“Not at first. The FBI checked them out. They checked everybody out. Chakely’s and Devine’s daily logs were off. That’s when they became suspicious. Some watchdog analyst at the Bureau figured out that the logs had been doctored. They had twenty people for every one we had. Besides that, the FBI removed the doctored logs so none of us could find them.”

“Devine and Chakely spotted Soneji checking out one of the kids. That’s how the whole circus began? The double take.” Sampson had the general rhythm of the thing now.

“They followed Soneji and his van out to the farm in Maryland. They realized they were stalking a potential kidnapper. Somebody got the idea to kidnap the kids after the actual kidnapping.”

“Ten-million-dollar idea.” Sampson glowered. “Was Ms. Jezzie Flanagan in on it from the beginning?”

“I don’t know. I think so. I’ll have to ask her about that sometime.”

“Uh huh.” Sampson nodded with the flow of our conversation. “Your head above, or below, the water line right now?”

“I don’t know that, either. You meet somebody who can lie to you the way she did, it changes your perspective on things. This is very tough to handle, man. You ever lie to me?”