Cross Kill

Chapter 9

Three hours later, I’d left I-95 for Route 29, which parallels the Delaware River. Heading upstream, I soon realized that I was not far from East Amwell Township, where the aviator Charles Lindbergh’s baby was kidnapped in 1932.

Gary Soneji had been obsessed with the Lindbergh case. He’d studied it in preparing for the kidnappings of the treasury secretary’s son, the late Michael Goldberg, and Maggie Rose Dunne, the daughter of a famous actress.

I’d noticed before on a map the proximity of East Amwell to Rosemont, where Soneji grew up. But it wasn’t until I pulled through the tiny unincorporated settlement that I realized Soneji had spent his early life less than five miles from the Lindbergh kidnapping site.

Rosemont itself was quaint and leafy, with rock walls giving way to sopping green fields.

I tried to imagine Soneji as a boy in this rural setting, tried to see him discovering the crime of the century. He wouldn’t have cared much for the police detectives who’d worked the Lindbergh case. No, Soneji would have obsessed on the information surrounding Bruno Hauptmann, the career criminal convicted and executed for taking the toddler and caving in his skull.

My mind was flooded with memories of going into Soneji’s apartment for the first time, seeing what was essentially a shrine to Hauptmann and the Lindbergh case. In writings we found back then, Soneji had fantasized about being Hauptmann in the days just before the killer was caught, when the whole world was fixated and speculating on the mystery he’d set in motion.

“Audacious criminals change history,” Soneji wrote. “Audacious criminals are remembered long after they’re gone, which is more than can be said of the detectives who chase them.”

I found the address on the Rosemont Ringoes Road, and pulled over on the shoulder beyond the drive. The storm had ebbed to sprinkles when I climbed out in front of a gray-and-white clapboard cottage set back in pines.

The yard was sparse and littered with wet pine needles. The front stoop was cracked and listed to one side, so I had to hold on to the iron railing in order to ring the bell.

A few moments later, one of the curtains fluttered. A few moments after that, the door swung open, revealing a bald man in his seventies. He leaned over a walker and had an oxygen line running into his nose.

“Peter Soneji?”

“What do you want?”

“I’m Alex Cross. I’m a—”

“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?”