Along Came a Spider (Alex Cross 1)

“Yes, I can. First, because Jezzie is a white woman, and I do not trust most white people. I would like to, but I can’t. Most of them have no respect for us. They lie to our faces. That’s their way, at least with people they don’t believe are their equals.”

“You sound like a street revolutionary. Farrakhan or Sonny Carson,” I said to her. I started to clean the table, carting plates and silverware to stack in our old porcelain sink.

“I’m not proud of these feelings I have, but I can’t help them, either.” Nana Mama’s eyes followed me.

“Is that Jezzie’s crime, then? That she’s a white woman?”

Nana fidgeted in her chair. She adjusted her eyeglasses, which were hung around her neck by twine. “Her crime is that she goes with you. She seems willing to let you throw away your police career, everything you do here in Southeast. All the good that’s been in your life. Damon and Jannie.”

“Damon and Janelle don’t seem hurt or concerned,” I told Nana Mama. My voice was rising some. I stood there with a stack of dirty dishes in my arms.

Nana’s palm slammed down on the wooden armrest of her chair. “Well dammit, that’s because you have blinders on, Alex. You are the sun and the sky for them. Damon is afraid you’ll just leave him.”

“Those kids are upset only if you get them upset.” I said what I was feeling, what I believed to be the truth.

Nana Mama sat all the way back in her chair. The tiniest sound escaped from her mouth. It was pure hurt.

“That is so wrong for you to say. I protect those two children just like I protected you. I’ve spent my life caring for other people, looking out for others. I don’t hurt anyone, Alex.”

“You just hurt me,” I said to her. “And you know you did. You know what those two kids mean to me.”

There were tears in Nana’s eyes, but she held her ground. She kept her eyes locked tightly onto mine. Our love is a tough, uncompromising love. It’s always been that way.

“I don’t want you to apologize to me later on, Alex. It doesn’t matter to me that you’ll feel guilty about what you just said to me. What matters is that you are guilty. You are giving up everything for a relationship that just can’t work.”

Nana Mama left the kitchen table, and she went upstairs. End of conversation. Just like that. She’d made up her mind.

Was I giving up everything to be with Jezzie? Was it a relationship that could never work? I had no way of knowing yet. I had to find that out for myself.

CHAPTER 59

A PARADE of medical experts now began to testify at the Soneji/Murphy trial. Assistant medical examiners took the stand, some of them strangely quirky and flamboyant for scientists. Experts came from Walter Reed, from Lorton Prison, from the army, from the FBI.

Photos and four-by-six-foot schematic drawings were displayed and overexplained; crime-scene locations were visited and revisited on the eerie charts that dominated the trial’s first week.

Eight different psychiatrists and psychologists were brought to the stand to build the case that Gary Soneji/Murphy was in control of his actions; that he was a deviate sociopath; that he was rational, cold-blooded, and very sane.

He was described as a “criminal genius,” without any conscience or remorse; as a brilliant actor, “worthy of Hollywood,” which was how he’d manipulated and fooled so many people along the way.

But Gary Soneji/Murphy had consciously and deliberately kidnapped two children; he had killed one or both of them; he had killed others—at least five, and possibly more. He was the human monster we all have nightmares about…. So said all the prosecution experts.

The chief of psychiatry from Walter Reed was on the stand for most of one afternoon. She had interviewed Gary Murphy on a dozen occasions. After a long description of a disturbed childhood in Princeton, New Jersey, and teenage years marked by violent outbursts against both human beings and animals, Dr. Maria Ruocco was asked to give her psychiatric evaluation of Gary Murphy.

“I see someone who is an extremely dangerous sociopath. I believe Gary Murphy is fully aware of all his actions. I absolutely do not believe he is a multiple personality.”

So it was that Mary Warner artfully laid out her case every day. I admired her thoroughness, and her understanding of the psychiatric process. She was assembling a terribly complex jigsaw puzzle for the judge and jury. I’d met with her several times and she was good.

When she was finished, the jurors would have an exquisitely detailed picture in their minds… of the mind of Gary Soneji/Murphy.

Each day of the trial she would concentrate on one new puzzle piece. She would show them the piece. She would explain it thoroughly. She would then insert the piece into the puzzle.

She showed the jury exactly how the new piece related to everything else that had gone before. Once or twice, spectators in the courtroom audience were moved to applaud the soft-spoken prosecutor and her impressive performance.

She accomplished all of this while Anthony Nathan was objecting to virtually every point she attempted to make.

Nathan’s defense was simple enough, and he never wavered from it: Gary Murphy was innocent because he had committed no crime.

Gary Soneji had.