Along Came a Spider (Alex Cross 1)

“Really?” He seemed resigned and his affect was indifferent and passive. I didn’t like the way he looked. It struck me that his personality could be on the verge of complete disintegration.

“I’m only allowed to talk to you about the Sanders and Turner murders, in fact. That’s my purview. But we could talk about Vivian Kim, if you like.”

“Then we don’t have a lot to talk about. I don’t know anything about those killings. I haven’t even read the newspapers. I swear on my daughter’

s life I haven’t. Maybe our friend Soneji knows. Not me, Alex.” He seemed real comfortable calling me Alex by now. Nice to know you can make friends, anywhere.

“Your lawyer must have explained the murder cases to you. There could be another trial this year.”

“I won’t see any more lawyers. It’s got nothing to do with me. Besides, those cases won’t get to trial. Too expensive.”

“Gary.” I talked to him as if he were a patient of mine. “I’d like to put you under hypnosis again. Will you sign the papers if I can get all the bullshit arranged? It’s important for me to talk to Soneji. Let me try to talk to him.”

Gary Murphy smiled and he shook his head. Finally he nodded. “Actually, I’d like to talk with him myself,” he said. “If I could, I’d kill him. I would kill Soneji. Like I’m supposed to have killed all those other people.”

That evening I went to see former Secret Service Agent Mike Devine. Devine was one of the two agents who had been assigned to Secretary Goldberg and his family. I wanted to ask him about the “accomplice” theory.

Mike Devine had taken voluntary retirement about a month after the kidnapping. Because he was still in his mid-forties, I assumed he’d been pushed out of his job. We talked for a couple of hours out on his stone terrace overlooking the Potomac.

It was a tasteful, well-appointed apartment for a now-single man. Devine was tan and looked rested. He was one of the better advertisements I’d seen for getting out of police work while you can.

He reminded me a little of Travis McGee in the John MacDonald novels. He was well built, with lots of character in his face. He’d do well in early-retirement-land, I thought: movie-hero good looks, lots of curly brown hair, an easy smile, stories galore.

“My partner and I were pushed out, you know,” Devine confessed over a couple of Corona beers. “One fuck-up that happened to turn into World War Three, and we were both history at the Service. We didn’t get a lot of support from our boss, either.”

“It was a public case. I guess there had to be heroes and villains.” I could be as philosophical as the next guy over a cold beer.

“Maybe it’s all for the best,” Mike Devine mused. “You ever think about starting over, doing something else while you still have the energy? Before the Alzheimer’s sets in?”

“I’ve thought about private practice,” I said to Devine. “I’m a psychologist. I still do some pro bono work in the projects.”

“But you love The Job too much to leave it?” Mike Devine grinned and squinted into late afternoon sunlight coming off the water. Gray seabirds with white chests flew right by the terrace. Nice. Everything about the layout was nice.

“Listen, Mike, I wanted to go over, once more, those last couple of days before the kidnapping,” I said to him.

“You are goddamn hooked, Alex. I’ve been over every square inch of that territory myself. Believe me, there’s nothing there. It’s fallow ground. Nothing grows. I’ve tried and tried, and finally I gave up the ghost.”

“I believe you. But I’m still curious about a late-model sedan that might have been seen out in Potomac. Possibly a Dodge,” I said. It was the car that Nina Cerisier remembered parked on Langley Terrace. “You ever notice a blue or black sedan parked on Sorrell Avenue? Or anywhere around the Day School?”

“Like I said, I’ve been over and over all of our daily logs. There wasn’t any mystery car. You can look at the logs yourself.”

“I have,” I told him and laughed at the seeming hopelessness of my case.

Mike Devine and I talked for a while more. He couldn’t come up with anything new. In the end, I listened to him praise the beach life, bonefishing on the Keys, “hitting the little white ball.” His new life was just starting. He’d gotten over the Dunne-Goldberg kidnapping a lot better than I had.

Something still bothered me, though. The whole “accomplice” thing. Or “the watcher” thing. More than that, I had a gut feeling about Devine and his partner. A bad feeling. Something told me they knew more than they were willing to tell anybody.

While I was still as hot as a ten-dollar pistol, I decided to contact Devine’s ex-partner, Charles Chakely, later that same night. After his dismissal, Chakely and his family had settled in Tempe, Arizona.

It was midnight my time, ten o’clock in Tempe. Not too late, I figured. “Charles Chakely? This is Detective Alex Cross calling from Washington,” I said when he got on the phone.

There was a pause, an uncomfortable silence, before he answered. Then Chakely got hostile—real strange, it seemed to me. His reaction only served to fuel my instincts about him and his partner.

“What the hell do you want?” he bristled. “Why are you calling me here? I’m retired from the Service now. I’m trying to put what happened behind me. Leave me the hell alone. Stay away from me and my family.”

“Listen, I’m sorry to bother you—” I started to apologize.

He cut me off. “Then don’t. That’s an easy fix, Cross. Butt out of my life.”