Along Came a Spider (Alex Cross 1)

It was as if she were looking straight into a hundred flashbulbs, all of them going off at once.

Her heart beat so fast and so hard that Maggie Rose knew she must be alive. In some terrible, terrible place. Someone had put her there.

Maggie Rose whispered up into the light, “Who is it? Who’s there? Who’s up there right now? I see a face!”

The light was so very bright that Maggie Rose couldn’t really see anything.

For the second—or third—time, it had gone from pitch-black to blinding, blinding white.

Then someone’s silhouette blocked out most of the light. Maggie still couldn’t see who was there. Light radiated behind the person.

Maggie clamped shut her eyes, tightly. Then opened them. She did this over and over again.

She couldn’t really see anything. Couldn’t focus on whoever or whatever it was. She had to keep blinking. Whoever was up there had to see the blinking, had to know she was alive.

“Mr. Soneji? Please help me,” she tried to call out. Her throat was so dry. Her voice came out raspy and unrecognizable.

“Shaddup! Shaddup!” a voice from above shouted. Someone was up there now! Some

one was really up there and could get her out.

It sounded like… a very old woman’s voice.

“Please help me. Please,” Maggie begged.

A hand came flying down and slapped her face hard.

Maggie cried out. She was more frightened than hurt, but the blow hurt, too. She’d never been slapped before. It set off a loud roar inside her head.

“Stopyercrying!” The eerie voice was closer.

Then the person climbed down into the grave and was right over her. Maggie could smell strong body odor and someone’s bad breath. She was being pinned down now, and she was too weak to fight back.

“Don’t fight me, yer little bastard! Don’t ever fight me! Who do yer think yer are, yer little bastard!

“Don’t yer ever raise yer hand to me! Yer hear me? Don’t yer ever!”

Please, God, what was happening?

“Yer that famous Maggie Rose, aren’t yer? The rich, spoiled brat! Well, let me tell yer a secret. Our secret. Yer gonna die, little rich girl. Yer gonna die!”

CHAPTER 17

THE NEXT DAY was Christmas Eve. It didn’t feel like the season to be merry. And it was going to get a whole lot worse before Christmas Day.

None of us had been able to make any of the usual, festive holiday preparations with our families. It added to the tension the Hostage Rescue Team was feeling. It magnified the misery of the depressing task. If Soneji had chosen the holiday season for this reason, he’d chosen well. He had turned everyone’s Christmas to shit.

Around ten o’clock in the morning, I walked down Sorrell Avenue to the Goldberg house. Sampson, meanwhile, had sneaked off to do a little work on the murders in Southeast. We planned to get back together around noon to compare horror stories.

I talked with the Goldbergs for over an hour. They weren’t holding up well. In a lot of ways, they were even more forthcoming than Katherine and Thomas Dunne. They were stricter parents than the Dunnes, but Jerrold and Laurie Goldberg loved their son dearly. Eleven years earlier, Laurie Goldberg had been told by doctors that she couldn’t have children. Her uterus had been scarred. When she found herself pregnant with Michael, it had seemed a miracle. Had Soneji known about that? I wondered. How carefully had he picked out his victims? Why Maggie Rose and Michael Goldberg?

The Goldbergs allowed me to see Michael’s bedroom, and to spend some time there by myself. I shut the door to the room and sat quietly for several moments. I had done the same thing in Maggie’s room at the Dunnes’.

The boy’s room was amazing. It was a treasure chest of state-of-the-art computer hardware and software—Macintosh, Nintendo, Prodigy, Windows. The AT&T labs had less equipment than Michael Goldberg.

Posters of Katherine Rose from her films Taboo and Honeymoon were taped up on the walls. A poster of Skid Row’s lead singer, Sebastian Bach, was centered over the bed. A picture of Albert Einstein with a mauve punk haircut stared out from Michael’s private bathroom. Also, a Rolling Stone magazine cover that asked “Who Killed Pee-wee Herman?”

A framed photograph of Michael and Maggie Rose was propped up on the boy’s work desk. Posed arm in arm, the two kids looked like the greatest friends. What had inspired Soneji? Was it something about their special friendship?