Along Came a Spider (Alex Cross 1)

“I’ve been to England once, on police business. That’s the one and only time I’ve been to Europe. Never had the money to spare.”

“Some villages you go to in Ireland—the people are so articulate, but they live in such poverty. You see these ‘white ghettos.’ Every third storefront seems to be a pub. There are so many educated failures in that country. I didn’t want to be another smart failure. I’ve told you about that fear of mine. That would be hell on earth to me…. I pushed myself so hard in school. I needed to be number one, no matter what the cost. Then in the Treasury Department. I got ahead, comfortably ahead. Alex, for whatever reasons, I was becoming happy with my career, with my life in general.”

“But it disintegrated after the Goldberg-Dunne kidnapping. You were the scapegoat. You weren’t the golden girl anymore.”

“Just like that, I was finished. Agents were talking behind my back. Eventually, I quit, left the Service. I didn’t have a choice. It was total bullshit and unfair. I came down here. To figure out who the hell I was. I needed to do it all by myself.”

Jezzie reached out, and she put her arms around me in the heart of the woods. She began to sob very quietly. I had never seen her cry before. I held Jezzie tightly in my arms. I’d never felt so close to her before. I knew she was telling me some hard truths. I owed her some hard truth in return.

We were down in a secluded knoll, talking quietly, when I became aware of someone watching us in the woods. I kept my head rock-steady, but my eyes darted to the right. Somebody else was in the woods.

Someone was watching us.

Another watcher.

“Somebody’s up there, Jezzie. Just beyond that hill to our right,” I whispered to her. She didn’t look in that direction. She was still a cop.

“Are you sure, Alex?” she asked.

“I’m sure. Trust me on this one. Let’s split up,” I said. “If whoever it is starts to take off, we run them down.”

We separated, and walked so that we’d flank the hill where I’d seen the watcher. That probably confused whoever it was.

He took off!

The watcher was a man. He had on sneakers and a dark, hooded jumpsuit that blended in with the woods. I couldn’t tell about his height or build. Not yet, anyway.

Jezzie and I raced behind him for a good quarter of a mile. Both of us were barefoot, so we didn’t gain any distance on the watcher. We probably lost a few yards during our all-out sprint. Branches and thorns tore at our faces and arms. We finally burst out of the pine woods, and found ourselves at a blacktop country road. We were just in time to hear a car accelerating around a nearby curve. We never saw the car, not even a glimpse of the license plate.

“Now that’s really goddamn weird!” Jezzie said as we stood by the roadside, trying to catch our breath. Sweat was rolling down our faces, and our hearts pounded in synch.

“Who knows you’re down here? Anyone?” I asked her.

“No one. That’s why it’s so weird. Who the hell was that? This is scary, Alex. You got any ideas?”

I had jotted down at least a dozen theories on the watcher whom Nina Cerisier had seen. The most promising theory I had was the simplest. The police had been watching Gary Soneji. But which police? Could it have been anyone in my own department? Or Jezzie’s?

It certainly was scary.

We made it back to Jezzie’s cabin just before it turned dark. A wintry chill was entering the air.

We built a big fire inside and cooked a fine meal that would have fed four.

There was sweet white corn, a huge salad, a twenty-ounce steak for each of us, a dry white wine with Chassagne-Montrachet, Premier Cru, Marquis de Laguiche etched on the label.

After we ate we got around to talking about Mike Devine and Charlie Chakely, and the watcher. Jezzie couldn’t help too much. She told me I was probably looking in the wrong place with the Secret Service agents. She said that Chakely was an excitable type who just might blow up over a call to Arizona. She told me he was bitter on the job, so he’d probably be bitter off it. In her opinion, Mike Devine and Chakely were both good, but not great, agents. If something was worth noting during the Goldberg family surveillance, they would have seen it. Their logs would have been accurate. Neither of them was clever enough to pull off a cover-up. Jezzie was sure of that.

She didn’t doubt that Nina Cerisier had seen a car parked on her street the night before the Sanders murder, but she didn’t believe that somebody had been watching Soneji/Murphy. Or even that Soneji had been down near the projects himself.

“I’m not on the case anymore,” Jezzie finally said to me. “I don’t represent the interests of Treasury or anybody else. Here’s my honest opinion, Alex. Why don’t you just give it up? It’s over. Let it go.”

“I can’t do that,” I told Jezzie. “That isn’t how we do things at King Arthur’s Round Table. I can’t give up on this case. Every time I try, something pops up and changes my mind.”

That night we went to bed fairly early. Nine, nine-fifteen. The Chassagne-Montrachet, Premier Cru did its job. There was still passion, but there was also warmth and tenderness between us.

We cuddled, and we laughed, and we didn’t go to sleep early. Jezzie dubbed me “Sir Alex, the Black Knight of the Round Table.” I called her “Lady of the Lake.” We finally fell asleep whispering like that, peaceful in each other’s arms.

I don’t know what time it was when I woke up. I was on top of ruffled bed covers and comforter, and it was very cold.