FOR THE next hour, Goldman, with his partner practically walking up his heels, showed us around Penn Station, particularly the three stabbing sites. The body markings were still on the floor, and the cordoned-off areas were causing more than the usual congestion in the terminal.
After we finished with a survey of the station, the NYPD detectives took us up to the street level, where it was believed Soneji had caught a cab headed uptown.
I studied Goldman, watched him work. He was actually pretty good. The way he walked around was interesting. His nose was poised just a little higher than those belonging to the rest of the general population. His posture made him look haughty, in spite of the odd way he was dressed.
“I would have guessed he’d use the subway to escape,” I offered as we stood out on noisy Eighth Avenue. Above our heads, a sign announced that Kiss was appearing at Madison Square Garden. Shame I’d have to miss it.
Goldman smiled broadly. “I had the same thought. Witnesses are split on which way he went. I was curious whether you’d have an opinion. I think Soneji used the subway, too.”
“Trains have a special significance for him. I think trains are part of his ritual. He wanted a set of trains as a kid, but never got it.”
“Ah, quod erat demonstrandum,” Goldman said and smirked. “So now he kills people in train stations. Makes perfect sense to me. Wonder he didn’t blow up the whole fucking train.”
Even Sampson laughed at Goldman’s delivery on that one.
After we had finished the tour of Penn Station and the surrounding streets, we made a trip downtown to One Police Plaza. By four o’clock I knew what the NYPD had going — at least everything that Manning Goldman was prepared to tell me at this time.
I was almost sure that Gary Soneji was the Penn Station killer. I personally contacted Boston, Philly, and Baltimore and suggested tactfully that they pay attention to the train terminals. I passed on the same advice to Kyle Craig and the FBI.
“We’re going to head back to Washington,” I finally told Goldman and Groza. “Thanks for calling us in on this. This helps a lot.”
“I’ll call if there’s anything. You do the same, hey?” Manning Goldman put out his hand, and we shook. “I’m pretty sure we haven’t heard the last of Gary Soneji.”
I nodded. I was sure of it, too.
Chapter 28
IN HIS mind, Gary Soneji lay down beside Charles Joseph Whitman on the roof of the University of Texas tower, circa 1966.
All in his goddamn incredible mind!!
He had been up there with Charlie Whitman many, many times before — ever since 1966, when the spree killer had become one of his boyhood idols. Over the years, other killers had captured his imagination, but none were like Charlie Whitman. Whitman was an American original, and there weren’t many of those left.
Let’s see now, Soneji ran down the names of his favorites: James Herberty, who had opened fire without warning inside the McDonald’s in San Ysidro, California. He had killed twenty-one, killed them at an even faster clip than they could dish out greasy hamburgers. Soneji had actually copycatted the McDonald’s shootings a few years earlier. That was when he’d first met Cross face to face.
Another of his personal favorites was postman Patrick Sherill, who’d blown away fourteen coworkers in Edmond, Oklahoma, and also probably started the postman-as-madman paranoia. More recently, he had admired the handiwork of Martin Bryant at the Port Arthur penal colony in Tasmania. Then there was Thomas Watt Hamilton, who invaded the mind space of virtually everyone on the planet after his shooting spree at a primary school in Dunblane, Scotland.
Gary Soneji desperately wanted to invade everybody’s mind space, to become a large, disturbing icon on the world’s Internet. He was going to do it, too. He had everything figured out.
Charlie Whitman was still his sentimental favorite, though. Whitman was the original, the “madman in the tower.” A Bad Boy down there in Texas.
God, how many times had he lain on that same tower, in the blazing August sun, along with Bad Boy Charlie?
All in his incredible mind!
Whitman had been a twenty-five-year-old student of architectural engineering at the University of Texas when he’d gone tapioca pudding. He’d brought an arsenal up onto the observation deck of the limestone tower that soared three hundred feet above the campus, and where he must have felt like God.
Just before he’d gone up in the clock tower, he had murdered his wife and mother. Whitman had made Charlie Starkweather look like a piker and a real chump that afternoon in Texas. The same could be said for Dickie Hickock and Perry Smith, the white-trash punks Truman Capote immortalized in his book In Cold Blood. Charles Whitman made those two look like crap, too.
Soneji never forgot the actual passage from the Time magazine story on the Texas tower shootings. He knew it word for word: “Like many mass murderers, Charles Whitman had been an exemplary boy, the kind that neighborhood mothers hold up as a model to their own recalcitrant youngsters. He was a Roman Catholic altar boy, and a newspaper delivery boy.”
Cool goddamn beans.
Another master of disguise, right. Nobody had known what Charlie was thinking, or what he was ultimately going to pull off.
He had carefully positioned himself under the “VI” numeral of the tower’s clock. Then Charles Whitman opened fire at 11:48 in the morning. Beside him on the six-foot runway that went around the tower were a machete, a Bowie knife, a 6mm Remington bolt-action rifle, a 35mm Remington, a Luger pistol, and a .357 Smith & Wesson revolver.
The local and state police fired thousands of rounds up onto the tower, almost shooting out the entire face of the clock — but it took over an hour and a half to bring an end to Charlie Whitman. The whole world marveled at his audacity, his unique outlook and perspective. The whole goddamn world took notice.