Cat and Mouse (Alex Cross 4)

There was other “evidence.” A shoe print had been discovered near the cellar. The Metro police were working on a “walking picture” of the assailant. A white male had been spotted around midnight in the mostly black neighborhood. For a moment, I was almost glad I’d been rushed up here from Virginia. There was so much raw data to take in and process, almost too much. The mussed bed, where Cross had apparently slept on top of a hand-sewn quilt. Photos of his children on the walls.

Alex Cross had been moved to St. Anthony’s Hospital, but his bedroom was intact, just the way the mysterious assailant had left it.

Had he left the room like this on purpose? Was this his first message to us?

Of course it was.

I looked at the papers still out on Cross’s small work desk. They were notes on Gary Soneji. They had been left undisturbed by the assailant. Was that important?

Someone had taped a short poem to the wall over the desk. Wealth covers sins — the poor/Are naked as a pin.

Cross had been reading a book called Push, a novel. A piece of lined yellow paper was stuck inside, so I read it: Write the talented author about her wonderful book!

The time I spent in the room passed like a snap of the fingers, almost a mind fugue. I drank several cups of coffee. I remembered a line from the offbeat TV show Twin Peaks, “Damn fine cup of coffee, and hot!”

I had been inside Cross’s bedroom for almost an hour and a half, lost in forensic detail, hooked on the case in spite of myself. It was a nasty and disturbing puzzle, but a very intriguing one. Everything about the case was intense, and highly unusual.

I heard footsteps thumping outside in the hallway and looked up, my concentration interrupted. The bedroom door suddenly swung open and thudded against the wall.

Kyle Craig popped his head inside. He looked concerned. His face was white as chalk. Something had happened. “I have to go right now. Alex has gone into cardiac arrest!”

Chapter 76

“I’LL GO with you,” I said to Kyle. I could tell that Kyle badly needed company. I wanted to see Alex Cross before he died, if that was what it had come to, and it sounded like it, felt like it to me.

On the ride over to St. Anthony’s I gently questioned Kyle about the extent of Dr. Cross’s injuries and the tenor of concern at the hospital. I also made a guess about the cause of the cardiac arrest.

“It sounds like it’s due to blood loss. There’s a lot of blood in the bedroom. It’s all over the sheets, the floor, the walls. Soneji was obsessed with blood, right? I heard that at Quantico before I left this morning.”

Kyle was quiet for a moment in the car, and then he asked the question I expected. I’m sometimes a step or two ahead in conversations.

“Do you ever miss it, not being a doctor anymore?”

I shook my head, frowned a little. “I really don’t. Something delicate and essential broke inside me when Isabella died. It will never be repaired, Kyle, at least I don’t think so. I couldn’t be a doctor now. I find it hard to believe in healing anymore.”

“I’m sorry,” he whispered solemnly.

“And I’m sorry about your friend. I’m sorry about Alex Cross,” I said to him.

In the spring of 1993, I had just graduated from Harvard Medical School. My life seemed to be spiraling upward at dizzying speed, when the woman I loved more than life itself was murdered in our apartment in Cambridge. Isabella Calais was my lover, and she was my best friend. She was one of the first victims of “Mr. Smith.”

After the murder, I never showed up at Massachusetts General, where I’d been accepted as an intern. I didn’t even contact them. I knew I would never practice medicine. In an odd way, my life had ended with Isabella’s, at least that was how I saw it.

Eighteen months after the murder, I was accepted into the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, what some wags call the “b.s. group.” It was what I wanted to do, what I needed to do. Once I had proven myself in the BSU, I asked to be put on the Mr. Smith case. My superiors fought the move at first, but finally they gave in.

“Maybe you’ll change your mind one day,” Kyle said. I had a feeling that he personally believed I would. Kyle likes to believe that everyone thinks as he does: with perfectly clear logic and a minimum of emotional baggage.

“I don’t think so,” I told him, without sounding argumentative, or even too firm on the point. “Who knows, though?”

“Maybe after you finally catch Smith,” he persisted with his point.

“Yes, maybe then,” I said.

“You don’t think Smith—” he started to say, but then backed off from the absurd notion that Mr. Smith could be involved with the attack here in Washington.

“No,” I said, “I do not Smith couldn’t have made this attack. They would all be dead and mutilated if he had.”

Chapter 77