Cat and Mouse (Alex Cross 4)

He heard the grating mid-Atlantic accent a few times, too. “I’ve got to phewn heum” (“I’ve got to phone home”). A plain and ugly dialect for plain and ugly thoughts.

Jesus, what a place to have lived. How the hell had he survived during those sterile years? Why had he bothered to come back now? Well, he knew the answer to that question. Soneji knew why he’d come back.

Revenge.

Payback time.

He turned off North Street and onto his old street, Central Avenue. He stopped across from a whitepainted brick house. He stared at the house for a long time. It was a modest Colonial, two stories. It had belonged to Missy’s grandparents originally, and that was why she hadn’t moved.

Click your heels together, Gary. Jesus, there’s no place like home.

He opened his duffel bag and took out his weapon of choice. He was especially proud of this one. He’d been waiting for a long time to use it.

Gary Soneji finally crossed the street. He marched up to the front door as if he owned the place, just as he had four years ago, the last time he’d been here, the day Alex Cross had barged into his life along with his partner, John Sampson.

The door was unlocked — how sweet — his wife and daughter were waiting up for him, eating Poppycock and watching Friends on television.

“Hi. Remember me?” Soneji said in a soft voice.

They both started to scream.

His own sweet wife, Missy.

His darling little girl, Roni.

Screaming like strangers, because they knew him so well, and because they had seen his weapon.

Chapter 19

IF YOU ever began to face all the facts, you probably wouldn’t get up in the morning. The war room inside police headquarters was filled beyond capacity with ringing telephones, percolating computers, state-of-the-art surveillance equipment. I wasn’t fooled by all the activity or the noise. We were still nowhere on the shootings.

First thing, I was asked to give a briefing on Soneji. I was supposed to know him better than anyone else, yet somehow I felt that I didn’t know enough, especially now. We had what’s called a roundtable. Over the course of an hour, I shorthanded the details of his kidnapping of two children a few years earlier in Georgetown, his eventual capture, the dozens of interviews we’d had at Lorton Prison prior to his escape.

Once everybody on the task force was up to speed, I got back to work myself. I needed to find out who Soneji was, who he really was; and why he had decided to come back now; why he had returned to Washington.

I worked throug

h lunch and never noticed the time. It look that long just to retrieve the mountain of data we had collected on Soneji. Around two in the afternoon, I found myself painfully aware of pushpins on the “big board,” where we were collecting “important” information.

A war room just isn’t war room without pushpin maps and a large bulletin board. At the very top of our board was the name that had been given to the case by the chief of detectives. He had chosen “Web,” since Soneji had already picked up the nickname “Spider” in police circles. Actually, I’d coined the nickname. It came out of the complex webs he was always able to spin.

One section of the big board was devoted to “civilian leads.” These were mostly reliable eyewitness accounts from the previous morning at Union Station. Another section was “police leads,” most of which were the detective’s reports from the train terminal.

Civilian leads are “untrained eye” reports; police leads are “trained eye.” The thread in all of the reports so far was that no one had a good description of what Gary Soneji looked like now. Since Soneji had demonstrated unusual skill with disguises in the past, the news wasn’t surprising, but it was disturbing to all of us.

Soneji’s personal history was displayed on another part of the board. A long, curling computer printout listed every jurisdiction where he had ever been charged with a crime, as well as several unsolved homicides that overlapped his early years in Princeton, New Jersey.

Polaroid pictures depicting the evidence we had so far were also pinned up. Captions had been written in marker on the photos. The captions read: “known skills, Gary Soneji”; “hiding locations, Gary Soneji”; “physical characteristics, Gary Soneji”; “preferred weapons, Gary Soneji.”

There was a category for “Known associates” on the board, but this was still bare. It was likely to remain that way. To my knowledge, Soneji had always worked alone. Was that assumption still accurate? I wondered. Had he changed since our last run-in?

Around six-thirty that night, I got a call from the FBI evidence labs in Quantico, Virginia. Curtis Waddle was a friend of mine, and knew how I felt about Soneji. He had promised he’d pass on information as fast as he got it himself.

“You sitting down, Alex? Or you pacing around with one of those insipid, state-of-the-artless cordless phones in your hand?” he asked.

“I’m pacing, Curtis. But I’m carrying around an old-fashioned phone. It’s even black. Alexander Graham himself would approve.”

The lab head laughed and I could picture his broad, freckled face, his frizzy red hair tied with a rubber band in a ponytail. Curtis loves to talk, and I’ve found you have to let him go on or he gets hurt and can even get a little spiteful.