Along Came a Spider (Alex Cross 1)

The courtroom crowd was out of control. TV and print reporters rushed to make calls to their newsrooms. Judge Kaplan slammed her gavel over and over again.

Somebody else had Maggie Rose Dunne…. Was that possible?

“It’s all right, Gary,” I said. “I understand why you were afraid.”

He stared at me, then his eyes very slowly trailed around the loudly buzzing courtroom. “What happened?” he asked. “What just happened in here?”

CHAPTER 63

I STILL REMEMBERED some Kafka. In particular, the chilling opening of Kafka’s The Trial: “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” That was what Gary Murphy wanted us to believe: that he was trapped in a nightmare. That he was as innocent as Joseph K.

I had my picture taken a couple of dozen times as I left the courthouse. Everybody had a question to ask. I had no comments to make. I never miss a good chance to shut up.

Was Maggie Rose still alive? the press wanted to know. I wouldn’t say what I thought, which was that she probably wasn’t.

As I was leaving the courthouse, I saw Katherine and Thomas Dunne walking toward me. They were flanked by TV and print newspeople. I wanted to talk to Katherine, but not to Thomas.

“Why are you helping him?” Thomas Dunne raised his voice. “Don’t you know he’s lying? What’s wrong with you, Cross?”

Thomas Dunne was extremely tense and red-faced. Out of control. The veins in his forehead couldn’t have been more prominent. Katherine Rose looked miserable, completely desolate.

“I’ve been called as a hostile witness,” I said to the Dunnes. “I’m doing my job, that’s all.”

“Well, you’re doing your job badly.” Thomas Dunne continued to attack me. “You lost our daughter in Florida. Now you’re trying to free her kidnapper.”

I’d had enough from Thomas Dunne finally. He’d made personal attacks on me in the press and on TV. As much as I wanted to get his daughter back, I wasn’t about to take any more abuse from him.

“The hell I am!” I shouted back as cameras shushed and whirred around us. “I’ve had my hands tied. I’ve been taken off the case, on a whim, then put back on. And I’m the only one who’s gotten any results.”

I whirled away from both of the Dunnes and headed down a steep flight of stairs. I understood their anguish, but Thomas Dunne had been badgering me for months. He’d gotten personal, and he was wrong. Nobody seemed to get one simple fact: I was the one still trying to get at the truth about Maggie Rose. I was the only one.

As I reached the bottom of the stairs, Katherine Rose came up from behind. She had run after me. Photographers had followed her. They were everywhere, their automatic film-wasters clicking like crazy. The press was elbowing in.

“I’m sorry about all that,” she said before I could manage a word. “Losing Maggie is destroying Tom, destroying our marriage. I know you’ve done your best. I know what you’ve gone throu

gh. I’m sorry, Alex. I’m sorry for everything.”

It was a strange, strange moment. I finally reached out and took Katherine Rose Dunne’s hand. I thanked her, and promised her I wouldn’t stop trying. The photographers continued to snap pictures. Then I quickly left the scene, refusing to answer another question, absolutely refusing to tell them what had just passed between Katherine Rose and myself. Silence is the best revenge with the press jackals.

I headed home. I was still searching for Maggie Rose Dunne—but inside Soneji/Murphy’s mind now. Could she have been taken from the kidnapping site by somebody else? Why would Gary Murphy tell us that she had? As I drove into Southeast, I wondered about what Gary Murphy had said under hypnosis. Was Gary Soneji setting us all up beautifully in the courtroom? That was a scary possibility, and a very real one. Was all this part of one of his terrifying plans?

The next morning, I tried to put Soneji/Murphy under hypnosis a second time. The Amazing Detective/Doctor Cross was back on center stage! That’s how it sounded in the morning news, anyway.

The hypnosis didn’t work this time. Gary Murphy was too frightened, or so his lawyer claimed. There was too much hubbub in the crowded courtroom. The room was cleared once by Judge Kaplan, but that didn’t help, either.

I was cross-examined by the prosecution that day, but Mary Warner was more interested in getting me off the stand than in questioning my credentials. My part in the trial was over. Which was just fine by me.

Neither Sampson nor I came to court for the rest of that week, a time of more expert testimony. We went back on the street. We had new cases. We also tried to rework a couple of troubling angles concerning the actual day of the kidnapping. We reanalyzed everything, spending hours in a conference room filled with files. If Maggie Rose had been taken from the site in Maryland, she could still be alive. There was still a slim chance.

Sampson and I returned to Washington Day School one more time to interview some of the school’s teachers. To put it mildly, most of them weren’t overjoyed to see us again. We were still testing the “accomplice” theory. It was definitely a possibility that Gary Soneji had been working with someone from the start. Could it be Simon Conklin, his friend from around Princeton? If not Conklin, then who? No one at the school had seen anyone to support the notion of an “accomplice” for Gary Soneji.

We left the private school before noon and had lunch at a Roy Rogers in Georgetown. Roy’s chicken is better than the Colonel’s, and Roy has those swell “hot wings.” Lots of zing in those babies. Sampson and I settled on five orders of wings and two thirty-two-ounce Cokes. We sat at a tiny picnic table by Roy’s kiddie playground. After lunch maybe we’d go on the see-saw.

We finished our lunch and decided to drive out to Potomac, Maryland. For the rest of the afternoon, we canvassed Sorrell Avenue and the surrounding streets. We visited a couple of dozen houses, and were about as welcome as Woodward and Bernstein would be. Not that the cold reception stopped us.

No one had noticed any strange cars or people in the neighborhood. Not in the days before or after the kidnapping. No one could remember seeing an unusual delivery truck. Not even the usual kind—utility repairs, flower, and grocery deliveries.

Late that afternoon, I went for a drive by myself. I headed out toward Crisfield, Maryland, where Maggie Rose and Michael Goldberg had been kept underground during the first days of the kidnapping. In a crypt? In a cellar? Gary Soneji/Murphy had mentioned “the basement” under hypnosis. He’d been kept in a dark cellar as a child. He’d been friendless for long stretches of his life.