“I know who you are,” Gary Soneji’s father snapped icily. “My son’s killer.”
“He blew himself up.”
“So you’ve said.”
“Can I talk to you, sir?”
“Sir?” Peter Soneji said and laughed caustically. “Now it’s ‘sir’?”
“Far as I know, you never had anything to do with your son’s criminal career,” I said.
“Tell that to the reporters who’ve shown up at my door over the years,” Soneji’s father said. “The things they’ve accused me of. Father to a monster.”
“I’m not accusing you of anything, Mr. Soneji,” I said. “I’m simply looking for your take on a few loose ends.”
“With everything on the internet about Gary, you’d think there’d be no loose ends.”
“These are questions from my personal files,” I said.
Soneji’s father gave me a long, considered look before saying, “Leave it alone, Detective. Gary’s long dead. Far as I’m concerned, good riddance.”
He tried to shut the door in my face, but I stopped him.
“I can call the sheriff,” Peter Soneji protested.
“Just one question and then I’ll leave,” I said. “How did Gary become obsessed with the Lindbergh kidnapping?”
Chapter 10
Two hours later as I drove through the outskirts of Crumpton, Maryland, I was still wrestling with the answer Soneji’s father had given me. It seemed to offer new insight into his son, but I still couldn’t explain how or why yet.
I found the second address. The farmhouse had once been a cheery yellow, but the paint was peeling and streaked with dark mold. Every window was encased in the kind of iron barring you see in big cities.
As I walked across the front yard toward the porch, I stirred up several pigeons, flushing them from the dead weeds. I heard a weird voice talking somewhere behind the house.
The porch was dominated by several old machine tools, lathes and such, that I had to step around in order to knock at a steel door with triple dead bolts.
I knocked a second time, and was thinking I should go around the house where I’d heard the odd voice. But then the dead bolts were thrown one by one.
The door opened, revealing a dark-haired woman in her forties, with a sharp nose and dull brown eyes. She wore a grease-stained one-piece Carhartt canvas coverall, and carried at port arms an AR-style rifle with a big banana clip.
“Salesman, you are standing on my property uninvited,” she said. “I have ample cause to shoot you where you stand.”
I showed her my badge and ID, said, “I’m not a salesman. I’m a cop. I should have called ahead, but I didn’t have a number.”
Instead of calming her down, that only got her more agitated. “What are the police doing at sweet Ginny Winslow’s door? Looking to persecute a gun lover?”
“I just want to ask you a few questions, Mrs. Soneji,” I said.
Soneji’s widow flinched at the name, and turned spitting mad. “My name’s been legally changed to Virginia Winslow going on seven years now, and I still can’t get the stench of Gary off my skin. What’s your name? Who are you with?”
“Alex Cross,” I said. “With DC…”
She hardened, said, “I know you now. I remember you from TV.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You never came to talk with me. Just them US marshals. Like I didn’t even exist.”