Along Came a Spider (Alex Cross 1)

“And one more thing,” I said, as if we’d just finished our last conversation a minute ago.

Jezzie laughed and opened the screen door. I didn’t go inside. I stood my ground on the porch. Wind chimes sounded from the house next door. I watched for some false move, something that would show me she didn’t have her act down perfectly. There was nothing.

“How about a ride in the country? My treat,” I said to Jezzie.

“Sounds good to me, Alex. I’ll put on some long pants.”

A few minutes later we were on the bike, blasting away from her place. I was still humming “I Gave My Love a Candle.” I was also thinking everything through one final time. Making my plan, checking it twice. Gonna find out who’s naughty and nice.

“We can ta

lk and ride the bike at the same time.” Jezzie turned her head and shouted into the wind.

I held on to her back and chest tighter. That made me feel a little worse than I’d been feeling. I shouted against the side of her hair. “I was worried about you, with Soneji on the loose.” That much was true. I didn’t want to find Jezzie murdered. With her breasts cut off.

She turned her head. “Why’s that? Why were you worried about me? My Smith and Wesson is at the house.”

Because you helped ruin his perfect crime spree, and maybe he knows that, I wanted to say to her. Because you took that little girl from the farmhouse, Jezzie. You took Maggie Rose Dunne, and then you had to kill her, didn’t you?

“He knows abut the two of us from the newspapers,” I said to Jezzie instead. “He might go after anyone who was involved with the case. Especially anybody he thinks helped spoil his little plan.”

“Is that the way his mind works, Alex? You’d know if anybody would. You’re the criminal shrink.”

“He wants to show the world how superior he is,” I said. “He needs this to be as big and as complicated as the Lindbergh thing was in its day. I believe that’s his Lindbergh angle. He wants his crime to be the biggest and the best. He isn’t through yet. Probably thinks he’s just getting started again.”

“Who’s Bruno Hauptmann in our story? Who is Soneji trying to set up?” Jezzie called out over the wind.

Was Jezzie trying to give me her own alibi? Was it possible that she’d been framed by Soneji somehow? That would be the ultimate… But how? And why?

“Gary Murphy is Bruno Hauptmann,” I told her, because I thought I knew the answer. “He’s the one Gary Soneji cleverly framed. He was convicted and went to jail, and he’s innocent.”

We talked back and forth for the first half hour of the ride. Then it got quiet for mile after mile of open highway.

We were both off in our own private worlds. I found myself just holding on to her back. I was remembering different things about us. Feeling so bad inside; wanting all the feeling to stop. I knew that she was a psychopath, just like Gary. No conscience. I believed that business, the government, Wall Street were filled with people like that. No regret for their actions. Not unless they got caught. Then the crocodile tears started.

“What if we go away again?” I finally asked Jezzie the question I’d been working up to. “Go down to the Virgin Islands again? I need it.”

I wasn’t sure if she’d heard me. Then Jezzie said, “All right. I’d like some time in the sun. The islands it is.”

I moved in behind her on the speeding motorcycle. The deed was done. We streaked through the beautiful countryside, but all the blurred passing scenes, everything that was happening now, hurt my head and it wouldn’t stop hurting.

CHAPTER 81

MAGGIE ROSE Dunne wanted to live more than anything else. She understood that now.

She wanted her life to return to the way it had been. She wanted to see her mother and father so much. To see all of her friends, her Washington and Los Angeles friends, but especially Michael. What had happened to Shrimpie Goldberg? Had they let him go? Had he been ransomed, but for some reason she hadn’t?

Maggie worked picking vegetables every day, and the work was hard, but, most of all, the work was the most boring thing she could ever imagine doing. She had to put her mind somewhere else during the long days under the burning sun. She just had to get her mind off what she was doing, and where she was.

Nearly a year and a half after the kidnapping, Maggie Rose Dunne escaped from where they were hiding her.

She had disciplined herself to wake up early every morning, before any of the others. She did this for weeks before she tried anything. It was still dark outside, but she knew the sun would start to rise in almost an hour. Then it would be so hot.

She went into the kitchen in her bare feet, holding her work shoes in her hand. If they caught her now, she could say she was only going to the bathroom. Her bladder was full, a precaution she’d taken in case she was caught.

They’d told her that she would never escape, not even if she got out of that particular village. It was over fifty miles to another town, in any direction she chose. So they told her.

The mountains were full of snakes and dangerous cats. Sometimes she heard the cats growl at night. She would never make it to another town. They told her that.