Cross Kill

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.”

“I’m here to talk now,” I said.

“Ten years too late. Get the hell off my property before I embrace my Second Amendment rights and—”

“I saw Gary’s father this morning,” I said. “He told me how Gary’s obsession with the Lindbergh kidnapping began.”

She knitted her brows. “How’s that?”

“Gary’s dad said when Gary was eight they were in a used book store, and while his father was wandering in the stacks, his son found a tattered copy of True Detective Mysteries, a crime magazine from the 1930s, and sat down to read it.”

Finger still on the trigger of her semiautomatic rifle, Virginia Winslow shrugged. “So what?”

“When Mr. Soneji found Gary, his son was sitting on the floor in the bookstore, the magazine in his lap, and staring in fascination at a picture from the Lindbergh baby’s autopsy that showed the head wound in lurid detail.”

She stared at me with her jaw slack, as if remembering something that frightened and appalled her.

“What is it?” I asked.

Soneji’s widow hardened again. “Nothing. Doesn’t surprise me. I used to catch him looking at autopsy pictures. He was always saying he was going to write a book and needed to look at them for research.”

“You didn’t believe him?”

“I believed him until my brother Charles noticed that Gary was always volunteering to gut deer they killed,” she said. “Charles told me Gary liked to put his hands in the warm innards, said he liked the feeling, and told me how Gary’d get all bright and glowing when he was doing it.”