“C’mon. Let’s walk and talk a little,” I said. “This sun feels so good.”
I pulled Jezzie up, and she came along with me somewhat reluctantly. She didn’t bother to put her top back on.
We walked along the shoreline with our feet in the clear, calm water. We weren’t touching now, but we were only inches apart. It was so strange and unreal. It was one of the worst moments of my life, if not the worst.
“You’re being so serious, Alex. We were going to have fun, remember? Are we having fun yet?”
“I know what you did, Jezzie. It’s taken a while, but I finally pulled it together,” I told her. “I know that you took Maggie Rose Dunne from Soneji. I know that you killed her.”
CHAPTER 85
“I WANT TO TALK about all of it. I don’t have a wire on me, Jezzie. Obviously.”
She half smiled at that. Always the perfect actress. “I can see you don’t,” she said.
My heart was booming at a tremendous rate. “Tell me what happened. Just tell me why, Jezzie. Tell me what I spent almost two years trying to find out, and you knew all the time. Tell me your side of this.”
Jezzie’s mask, which was always her perfectly beautiful smile, had finally disappeared. She sounded resigned. “All right, Alex. I’ll tell you some of what you want to know, what you just wouldn’t leave alone.”
We continued to walk, and Jezzie finally told me the truth.
“How did it happen? Well, in the beginning, we were just doing our job. I swear that’s true. We were babysitting the secretary’s family. Jerrold Goldberg wasn’t used to getting threats. The Colombians made a threat against him. He acted like the civilian that he is. He overreacted. He demanded Secret Service protection for his entire family. That’s how it all began. With a surveillance detail that none of us thought was necessary.”
“So you assigned two lightweight agents.”
“Two friends, actually. Not lightweights at all. We figured the detail would be a boondoggle. Then Mike Devine noticed that one of the teachers, a math teacher named Gary Soneji, had made a couple of passes by th
e Goldberg house. At first we thought he had a crush on the boy. Devine and Chakely thought he might be a pederast. Nothing much more than that. We had to check him out, anyway. It was in the original logs that Devine and Chakely kept.”
“One of them followed Gary Soneji?”
“A couple of times, yes. To a couple of places. We weren’t really concerned at that point, but we were following through. One night, Charlie Chakely tailed him into Southeast. We didn’t connect Soneji to the murders there, especially since the story never made any splash in the papers. Just more inner-city murders, you know.”
“Yeah. I do know. When did you suspect something else about Gary Soneji?”
“We didn’t suspect a kidnapping until he actually picked up the two kids. Two days before that, Charlie Chakely had followed him out to the farm in Maryland. Charlie didn’t suspect a kidnapping at the time. No reason to.
“But he knew where the farm was located now. Mike Devine called me from the school when it all came crashing down. They wanted to go after Soneji then. That’s when it struck me about taking the ransom ourselves. I don’t know for sure. Maybe I’d thought of it before. It was so easy, Alex. Three or four days and it would be over. Nobody would be hurt. Not any more than they’d already been hurt. We’d have the ransom money. Millions.”
The way Jezzie spoke about the kidnapping plot so casually was scary. She downplayed it, but it had been her idea. Not Devine’s or Chakely’s idea, Jezzie’s. She was the mastermind. “What about the children?” I asked. “What about Maggie Rose and Michael?”
“They’d already been kidnapped. We couldn’t stop what had already happened. We staked out the farm in Maryland. We were confident that nothing could happen to the kids. He was a math teacher. We didn’t think he’d hurt them. We thought he was nothing but an amateur. We were completely in control.”
“He buried them in a box, Jezzie. And Michael Goldberg died.”
Jezzie stared out to sea. She nodded slowly. “Yes, the little boy died. That changed everything, Alex. Forever. I didn’t know if we could have prevented it. We moved in and took Maggie Rose then. We made our own kidnap demands. The whole plan changed.”
The two of us continued to walk along the edge of the shimmering water. If anyone had seen us, they probably would have thought we were lovers, having a serious talk about our relationship. The second half of that was true enough.
Jezzie finally looked at me. “I want to tell you how it was between us, Alex. My side of things. It’s not what you think.”
I had no words for her. It felt as if I were standing on the dark side of the moon again, and about to explode. My mind was screaming. I let Jezzie go on, let her talk. It didn’t really matter now.
“When it started, down in Florida, I needed to know whatever you could find out. I wanted a connection inside the D.C. police. You were supposed to be a good cop. You were also your own man.”
“So you used me to watch your flanks. You chose me to hand over the ransom. You couldn’t trust the Bureau. Always the professional, Jezzie.”
“I knew you wouldn’t do anything to endanger the little girl. I knew you’d deliver the ransom. The complications started after we got back from Miami. I don’t know exactly when. I swear this is the truth.”