Return of the Spider

Chapter 70

Classes at Washington Day School formally ended at noon on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving.

Getting in his Saab, Gary Soneji felt grateful to be leaving the city and heading north before the traffic that would snarl the highways up and down the East Coast in the next twenty-four hours started. He’d packed last night and put his things in the trunk this morning. The short academic day meant Soneji had not had a chance to see Cheryl Lynn Wise before the vacation. But that was fine.

If he got too close too soon, he’d risk suspicion, and his interest in the chief of staff’s daughter might swell to uncontrollable obsession.

This was for the best. He had five free days now to not only widen his cover but thicken it to the point he’d be all but invisible to the police.

He drove north on I-95 until he reached an exit he’d circled on his map, near the Maryland-Delaware line. He drove east and then across the border, looking for the address of an abandoned farm he’d found in a real estate listing.

His experience with Bunny had made him realize how fortunate he was to have the cabin in the Pine Barrens. It had also made him aware of his remote property’s rareness and fragility. He could not make it a constant center of his quiet activities.

He had to use it as a frugal man might a treasure.

And Diggs’s grandmother’s place was out of the question. Soneji planned never to set foot on that property again. Which meant he needed a new place, one he could explore and develop before he welcomed dear Cheryl Lynn or whoever it was he decided to snatch.

When he arrived at the farm from the listing, however, he dismissed it as a possibility, given the property’s open nature. He wanted no view of the house or barns from any road or hillside.

Over the next two hours, he drove to two more farms for sale. The first one, also in Delaware, was another disappointment. The second was in New Jersey, fifteen miles north of the border. Instead of heading east toward his place in the Pine Barrens, Soneji went west in search of the elusive, secluded, and abandoned farm of his fantasies.

At first glance, the third property seemed the perfect spot: one hundred and sixty acres, forty of it overgrown CRP fields, none of it tilled in three years. And the farmhouse, barn, and yard were all well shielded from the road.

Driving by the entrance to the property, he got a glimpse of the yellow farmhouse far down a lane flanked on both sides by mature ornamental spruce trees. He also saw a FOR SALE sign with a real estate agent’s picture, name, and number.

That alone made Soneji nervous. When he swung the Saab around and drove past the property again, his instincts were confirmed and then amplified.

A maroon Chevy Blazer came down the road toward him, slowed, and turned into the drive. A magnetic sign advertising the same real estate agent clung to the driver’s-side door.

Soneji considered following the car and asking to see the place, but that would be sloppy. Besides, the agent at the wheel was a big guy. And there was a client in the passenger seat.

Too risky. He went back toward the interstate, telling himself that he had to be patient. He would find the right place. He flat-out knew it.

By the time he reached his home in Wilmington, dusk was falling. Roni greeted him at the door. He swept her up in his arms and tickled and kissed her.

“Daddy home!” she cried and ran into the kitchen. “Mama, Daddy home! Gamma, Daddy home!”

Soneji followed his daughter, chuckling. She really was a ball of energy.

He went inside and found Missy, her sister, Trish, and his mother-in-law, Christiana, sitting at the kitchen table with several large open three-ring binders between them. Trish had three kids of her own under five and looked like she could use a nap. As always, Missy’s mother was very polished and put together.

“Trish,” Soneji said. “Get some sleep.”

“In about five years,” Missy’s sister said.

“Christiana,” Soneji said to his mother-in-law. “I love the new hairdo and nails. How are things?”

Christiana smiled at him, but it felt forced. He wondered how much Missy confided in her mother and sister and started to feel as if he were being closely observed. He hated that.

He and Christiana had not gotten off to a good start. But after her husband died and she saw just how much business he was bringing into the Atlantic Heating Company, she’d warmed to him. Somewhat.

“Gary,” his mother-in-law said, nodding. “We are as good as we can be with five weeks to plan a wedding reception.”

“Five weeks?” he said, taken aback. He’d figured the following summer at the earliest.

“Christmas Eve, hon,” Missy said.

“You want to get married on Christmas Eve?”

“Perfect timing,” Trish said. “Everyone’s in a great mood, ready to party.”

“And it’s the only time of year my entire family is guaranteed to be in the area,” Missy said, looking at him hopefully.

“And just as important,” Christiana said, “my brother, Missy’s uncle Ari, has a barn he rents out for events. It’s available on Christmas Eve and he’s agreed to let us have it.”

“It’s decided,” Trish said, nodding.

Very close to the top of all things Soneji most despised was being at the whim of others, being under someone else’s thumb. It was bad when men forced him into things. It was worse when women told him what to do or made decisions about his life.

He felt anger building like lava in his brain and he had to summon every bit of control not to blow his top.

“Christmas Eve it is, then,” Soneji said finally and made himself grin as he picked up his daughter. “We’ll have a grand old time, and Roni will be our flower girl, and Missy will make me the luckiest man alive a second time.”

Chapter 71

The afternoon before thanksgiving, after more than a week of failing to get another line on the killer in the white van, Pennsylvania state police detective Tommy French called me. His friends at the DMV had compiled the results of the search Chief Pittman requested.

“They got a hit on an old registration,” French said. “A 1977 White Ford Econoline van, license plate TNS eight five four. It was last registered to a Michael and LeeAnne Lawton of Oxford, Pennsylvania. Both are now deceased. I’ll fax you the VIN and the address. You’ll have to take it from there. I’m headed home to my family for the holiday.”

“We’re right behind you, Tommy,” I said. “And we owe you.”

“Maybe,” the detective said. “You might want to check land records in Chester County, see who owns the Lawtons’ place now.”

I called the Chester County Recorder’s office after we hung up but got a message saying they were closed for the holiday and wouldn’t reopen until Friday morning.

“We’re shut down for now,” I said, getting up from my chair and grabbing my coat.

“Everyone with a brain has gone home,” Sampson said, putting his things away.

“You’re suggesting we’re brainless?” I chuckled.

“Sometimes,” he said, grinning at me. “What time tomorrow?”

“Nana Mama wants everyone there around two thirty. Dinner at four.”

“I’m fasting tonight so I can pack it away tomorrow.”

“Really?”

“Nah. I don’t do fasts.”

“I didn’t think so.”

Forty minutes later, I was home and down on the floor playing with Damon while Maria watched over us and we waited for an order of Chinese food to be delivered. I told her about Sampson’s fasting claim, which cracked her up.

“That man eats six meals a day,” she said. “He’d collapse if he fasted.”

“Right?” I tickled Damon, who squealed with laughter and ran away. “Another runner.”

Maria patted her belly. “Not like this one.”

“Still kicking?”

“I think baby’s doing a Jazzercise routine in there.”

I got up, came over, and put my hand on her belly. I could feel the movements immediately. “What a squirmer!”

“I told you,” Maria said.

The baby continued to dance around the next morning, which we spent helping my grandmother prepare for twelve guests. They started to arrive promptly at two thirty.

Sampson showed up last, around three.

“You’re late,” Nana Mama told him.

“Still on daylight saving time.”

“Shouldn’t you be early, then?”

“I’m a slow learner,” John said.

The rest of the day went on like that, with lots of laughter and stories and too much good food. Everyone brought something, but the crowning glory went to Nana’s turkey, which she deep-fried outside in a gizmo she’d bought for the occasion.

The skin was like crispy thin bacon. The meat was extraordinarily tender and juicy. I ate so much, I fell asleep with Damon crashed in my lap while watching the Detroit Lions game.

Maria had to wake me up to head home, and I was thinking about bed for the night as soon as we had Damon down.

“You going to work tomorrow?” she asked.

“I’m actually off, but I think I’ll make a couple of phone calls from here and then spend the rest of the day with you and D.”

She smiled. “We’d like that.”

The next morning I let Maria sleep in and took care of Damon, changing his diaper and feeding him breakfast, after which I called the office of the Chester County Recorder of Deeds.

A woman answered on the second ring. “Shaina Watson, recorder’s office.”

I told her who I was and gave Ms. Watson the address I was interested in.

“LeeAnne and Michael Lawton used to own that place,” she said immediately.

“You know it?”

“Mmm-hmm,” the woman said. “Off the north side of the Chrome Barrens, big untouched area up there.”

“You know who owns it now?”

Her voice got tighter. “I know who inherited it. LeeAnne’s grandson, Eamon.”

“Eamon Lawton?” I said, scribbling it down.

“Eamon Diggs,” she said, sounding disgusted. “Heard of him?”

“Can’t say that I have,” I said.

“Look the creep up. He did time for rape.”

Chapter 72

Suddenly I no longer had the day off.

“I have to go,” I told Maria when she got out of the shower.

“Alex.” She groaned. “You said you’d spend the day with us. I need you here.”

“I know, and I’m sorry,” I said. “But I have a very strong feeling that we just got him, the Bulldog killer, the guy in the white van. There’s a potential suspect we’ve just unearthed who was previously convicted for multiple rapes.”

Maria looked discouraged, maybe a little abandoned, as she sat on the edge of the bed. “Can’t wait until Monday, I suppose?”

“I don’t know if I could live with myself if we waited and—”

Maria held up her hands in surrender. “You’re right. You’re right. Go. I’ll see if Nana Mama can come over and give me a hand with a few things.”

“You’re sure?”

“Go. I won’t be responsible for someone else dying.”

I was out the door ten minutes later. Sampson picked me up in a squad car, and as soon as we were on I-95 heading north, we radioed and got patched through to Tommy French’s home phone.

“You guys are overstaying your welcome,” he grumbled by way of greeting. “I’m about to go out Christmas shopping with my daughters.”

“We apologize, Tommy,” Sampson said. “But a name’s come up in association with the registered owners of that van. You know anything about a guy named Eamon Diggs?”

There was a silence long enough for us to hear one of his daughters complaining in the background. French said quietly, “John, listen to me, that is one bad dude, so bad I can’t talk about the specifics at the moment. How did he come up?”

I said, “Turns out he’s the grandson of the van owner and inherited the farm near Oxford, Pennsylvania, where our Ford Econoline was last registered.”

There was another long silence. French said, “Where are you now?”

“On our way to that farm,” Sampson said. “Gonna look around.”

“You’ve got no jurisdiction and no cause to go in there, John,” French said firmly.

Before we could protest, the state police detective said, “But I do.”

“Two and a half hours?”

“Do me a favor?”

“Sure.”

“Stop and get a coffee and a cruller on the way. I’ll finish up this episode of ‘Daddy the Grinch Goes Christmas Shopping’ and meet you at the Mobil station in Oxford in, say, three hours?”

“Half past noon,” Sampson said. “We’ll be there.”

“Good. We won’t be but ten miles to that farm from there and not twenty to Kirkwood, where Diggs is living now.”

Chapter 73

A shiny blue Ford F-150 rolled into the Mobil station in Oxford, Pennsylvania, about ten minutes after we did. Tommy French jumped out of the pickup.

The detective was a short, stocky man with a bull neck and a buzz cut he must’ve had since his days as a U.S. Army MP. He took off his aviator glasses and shook Sampson’s hand and then mine.

“I checked with Diggs’s parole officer, and he confirmed the Kirkwood address but said he had no record of Eamon owning any property.”

“Chester County Recorder confirmed ownership,” I said.

“I know,” French said. “I double-checked, and because Diggs did not declare it, we have ample just cause to go in and take a look around to see if he is in violation of his parole.”

French said that due to the recent rain, the way into the farm that Diggs inherited was likely to be very muddy. He suggested we leave our squad car outside town and ride in his truck with him to the farm.

We put on our body armor and got in. Sampson sat up front and was immediately enamored of the truck.

“I like this, Alex. You’re up here, king of the road. This new, Tommy?”

The detective smiled, said, “Got it last month. More practical than anything for the way I live.”

“I want one.”

“Could be tough to park in DC, John.”

“I’d learn.”

I said, “Tell us about Diggs.”

French visibly stiffened at the wheel. “Diabolical. Smart. Played mind games with the women he violated. Made them think he was going to kill them at any moment.”

“Sadistic control,” I said.

“That’s Eamon Diggs through and through.”

“How’d he get out after only twelve years?”

“Like I said, Diggs is very sharp. Once he figured out the game at the penitentiary, he played it. Zero infractions. Model prisoner. Went through counseling. Found Jesus. All that bullshit. But you know how it is with those guys. They never change.”

“Some do,” I said. “But it is rare for them to keep their urges bottled up for good.”

“Exactly,” French said. “I’ve been waiting ever since he got out for a report to surface that matched his MO.”

Sampson said, “Which was what, exactly?”

“Young woman gets taken, drugged, assaulted, sometimes repeatedly, scoured clean, and then dumped alive in a rural area.”

“Alive. That’s surprising,” I said.

“He was also a suspect in two murder-rapes, but we could never make them stick.”

“So you wouldn’t put homicide past him,” Sampson said.

“Not a chance.”

Within ten minutes we were taking a left at where the preserve began, and French was explaining how the property was managed with fire in adherence with American Indian practices. Indeed, over the next few miles, we saw several long wide strips of grassland that had been burned and now awaited the regrowth of spring.

“Here we go,” French said and turned at a dilapidated mailbox that was leaning so far right, it defied gravity.

The cornfields to our left had been harvested; the odd stalk stuck up out of the dirt here and there. There were several rows of mature pines on our right, which French said had probably been planted as a windbreak.

We had almost reached the farmyard when we bounced through a muddy rut.

One hundred and fifty feet ahead of French’s pickup, dead center on the gravel drive, thunder clapped.

A fireball erupted, blowing a column fifteen feet high.

The truck’s windshield shattered.

Chapter 74

With gravel, rocks, and mud raining down on his truck, Tommy French roared, “He’s booby-trapped the place!”

The detective rammed his pickup into reverse and floored the gas. The Ford F-150 slid and swung in the wet dirt, throwing clods of greasy mud around as Sampson and I dug for our service weapons.

When we were all the way back to the road, French slammed on the brakes and threw the truck in park, panting as he looked through the filthy, spiderwebbed remnants of his windshield toward the flames at the far end of the drive.

“We need backup, Tommy,” Sampson said at last.

“We need more than that, John,” French said, picking up his police radio with shaking hands, which made me realize my own hands were trembling. “Goddamn it, this was my dream truck!”

The police detective got patched through to the Chester County dispatcher, identified himself, and reported the explosion. “I need enough manpower to seal off the road on the south side of the barrens ASAP. And the east side of the old Lawton place. No one crosses until we know what we’re dealing with.” He went on barking orders, calling for a helicopter, a special emergency response team, and a team from the hazardous devices and explosives unit.

By that point, I’d regained enough of my composure and strength to climb out of the truck. The case was now out of our control.

Squirrels chattered in the pines. Crows cawed somewhere behind me. Falling leaves from the scattered oaks floated on the chill breeze.

If I hadn’t noticed the last of the fireball dying at the other end of the drive, I might have called it an idyllic scene. Instead, my nerves twitched at every sound.

Sampson climbed out. French still had the dispatcher on the line.

“He’s calling in an army,” John said.

“He should. We don’t know what we’re facing here.”

French got out, the radio receiver still held to one ear. In the far distance, from back toward Oxford, we could hear the first sirens.

He told the dispatcher we were going to take a walk to the explosion site. Then he hung up and walked around his truck, looking at all the dings and pockmarks from the blast and shaking his head. Finally, he shrugged. “Chopper won’t be here for forty minutes. Let’s do a little recon before the cavalry comes.”

“And set off another bomb?” Sampson asked.

“No, just up the drive, past that rut we hit before the explosion, so SERT has some idea what we’re dealing with.”

The drive was torn up. There was mud all over from our skidding retreat, even in the leaves and pine needles we now crept across with weapons drawn.

The rut in the drive turned out to be a water bar that was supposed to drain the drive, put rain into the ditches. On the right side, Sampson found a thin cable that snaked to a pine tree ten yards into the woods. Some kind of remote device was linked to the cable and taped to the trunk.

“There’s got to be a pressure plate or something there under all that mud,” John said. “When we drove across it, the trigger was tripped.”

I said, “Kind of a long way from the trigger to the actual bomb.”

“Fifty yards?” French murmured.

“Far enough to make you wonder whether it was meant to kill or warn.”

“I think we’re fair to call it attempted murder,” French said, and continued past the water bar, stopping every few feet to examine the way ahead.

“Look for fishing line, trip wire, or another cable,” Sampson whispered to me.

“What if there’s another pressure plate?” I asked, suddenly feeling very uncomfortable about what we were doing. “Under the leaves, I mean.”

That stopped John for a moment. But not French, who kept on going to the charred bomb crater, which was about twenty inches deep and just as wide.

“Smells more like gasoline than cordite or C-four,” French said when we arrived beside him.

“I’ll let your bomb guys figure that out,” Sampson said.

We scanned the surface of the drive ahead but saw no fresh tracks in the thirty yards before it opened up into an overgrown field, turned to the right, and vanished. The police sirens were getting close now.

French said, “Let’s see what’s what in that field before we head back to the road.”

He eased forward and we followed, eyes searching the ground and the trees ahead for signs of a second triggering device, but we found none. We reached the last big pine standing sentinel above the drive.

French eased left around the tree trunk and took a peek. When he pulled back, he murmured, “House is about seventy out. Place looks dead. Roof’s ready to cave in.”

I was standing to his right and moved aside several of the lower pine boughs on the opposite side of the tree. It gave me a different angle and a new perspective on the field that cut back toward the road.

In the deep pocket of the field, there was a long, low, open-front shed of sorts with a metal roof and pigeons fluttering about.

One of the Chester County Sheriff’s cruisers was close now, siren whooping, almost to French’s truck.

“Let’s head back, Alex,” Sampson said behind me. “Cavalry’s here.”

But I stepped forward another foot and pushed aside the last brushy tree limb blocking my view of the far end of that shed. I took in the scene for a long moment, enough time to be sure that my heart was slamming in my chest for good reason.

“Cross!” French called.

I pivoted, stepped back around the tree, and grinned at them, feeling victorious.

“What’s going on?” Sampson said.

“I just spotted an old white van half under a tarp in a shed not a hundred yards from us. I think we’ve got our killer.”

Chapter 75

It took almost three hours for the Pennsylvania police SERT and bomb squad to arrive to sweep the area. They’d had to wait until a helicopter with infrared showed no one was on the property.

Sampson and I argued that we should be spending our time finding Eamon Diggs so we could place him under arrest. But French wanted to look at the van first.

Neither the SERT nor the hazardous devices and explosives commanders were happy to learn we had gone all the way to the edge of the farmyard; they didn’t let us in until after they’d cleared the driveway, the farmyard, the farmhouse, and the shed.

After they cleared the locations, they came back and told us that the entire place was empty, with no evidence that anyone had lived there for a long time. And they took photographs of the van and the ground around it before they made sure it was not booby-trapped.

“Both teams said the dirt floor looked as if it had been raked before the leaves and whatnot got blown in there,” French said as we donned latex gloves and booties to walk over to the van along a lane of white butcher paper that had been laid down to prevent further contamination of the site.

“Definitely the right rig,” Sampson said, gesturing to the van’s left rear quarter panel, which was scraped exactly as we’d seen in earlier security videos. “New headlight bulb cover on the left. See how it’s different from the right.”

“I see it.”

“New tires,” Sampson said. “Different treads.”

“I see them too.”

The van’s rear double doors were hanging ajar when we reached them. A bomb team member had found keys to the van on a shelf.

French opened the two doors fully. We were hit with a blast of mustiness coupled with the scent of things rotting somewhere in the old trash, moldering leaves, and God only knew what else covering the van floor.

We stood by as the forensics techs began to pick apart the chaos. They found several latex gloves similar to the ones we wore.

“How old are those?” I asked.

“There isn’t a lot of mold growing on them,” said Helen Mathers, the lead forensics officer on the scene. She was dressed in a blue hazmat suit minus the full headgear. “I’d say they’re recent, but we’ll know better back at the lab.”

“Let me check something,” I said. “Can I use the keys a second?”

Mathers frowned but nodded. I went up front and asked Javier Cruz, the tech working on the driver’s seat, to give me a moment. Then I leaned in, put the key in the ignition, and turned it to accessory. The dashboard glowed enough for me to read the mileage. I turned the key to start, and the engine coughed to life. I quickly shut it down, thanked Cruz, and went back to Sampson and French.

“It started right up,” I said. “It’s been driven recently.”

French gestured to a plastic evidence bag. “They just found a length of rope buried in there. It’s got blood and skin traces on it.”

Sampson said, “Could be the rope that strangled the real estate agent, Brenda Miles.”

I picked up the bag and looked at the cord. I said, “I’m betting MFP utility grade.”

Mathers climbed into the back of the van and crouched over the right wheel well, sifting through the debris with a trim paintbrush.

“This is going to take a long time,” Sampson said.

“Not today,” Mathers said over her shoulder. “We’ll bag it all, then dissect and test everything back in the lab. I’m looking for the obvious at this point.”

“Helen?” said Cruz from the front seat. “I have a shell casing. It’s a forty-four caliber.”

John and I gave each other high fives.

“Helen?” Cruz called again.

“That’s good, Javier,” she said, staring down. “Real good.”

She set her brush aside, took several photographs of whatever was in front of her, and retrieved a large pair of forceps from her pocket. She reached down somewhere we couldn’t see.

A moment later, she came up with a two-by-three-inch shriveled piece of dark gristle clenched in the forceps jaw.

“What’d you find, Helen?” French asked.

Mathers said soberly, “From the hairs growing out of it, I’d say part of a human scalp, Tommy.”

Sampson grimaced, said, “Could be from Alice Ways, one of the shooting victims. We know that a piece of her scalp is missing.”

“That’s more than enough now, Tommy,” I said. “We need to get Diggs into custody.”

French nodded. “Let’s go find Eamon.”

Chapter 76

Shortly after four that afternoon, the three of us took the squad car to the gate of the Keegan’s Granite quarry, where Eamon Diggs’s parole officer said Diggs had worked since leaving prison.

We showed our badges and drove to the operation’s headquarters. The office manager, a nice lady named Judy, confirmed that Diggs did indeed work at the pit but had taken the day off to hunt with a bow and arrow before the rifle deer season started on Monday.

“His creepy little friend’s with him, I think,” Judy said and gave a little shiver.

“Who’s that?” French asked.

“Harold Beech,” she said and shivered again. “He took the day off too.”

French seemed to know the name.

I said, “By any chance, do you guys use dynamite in the quarry?”

“All the time. Why?”

“Just interested,” Sampson said. “You keep it on-site? The dynamite?”

The office manager squinted. “Yes, in a moisture-and-temperature-controlled vault that is inspected by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms every year. You’d have to talk to Jack Stark, the operations manager, about the vault. But he’s gone until Tuesday afternoon, up at his brother’s place in the boondocks west of Wilkes-Barre.”

French asked, “He have a pager or beeper or anything?”

She snorted. “No, Jack’s too cheap for that. He checks in when he wants to.”

We were turning to leave when she said, “What’d he do? Diggs.”

“It’s unclear if he’s done anything, actually,” I said. “We just want to talk to him.”

“Well, whatever it is, you can bet your patootie that Beech is involved. Thick as thieves, those two.”

Before we headed back to the squad car, the police detective called his office and asked them to look up a Harold Beech, see if he had a sheet. Not five minutes later, he got a response.

After listening for several moments, French said, “Why doesn’t that surprise me?” He hung up and told us, “Beech did eleven years for assault, kidnapping, and forcible penetration with foreign objects. Victims were two sixteen-year-old girls.”

“Birds of a feather,” Sampson said.

“Wait a second,” I said. “Foreign objects?”

“That’s what the man said.”

“Brenda Miles, the real estate agent, was found with a wooden spoon in her vagina.”

“You’re thinking Beech is involved?”

“Spoon fits his MO. Beech could be the strangler.”

Sampson said, “Think we need SERT with us?”

French said, “Not unless Eamon knows his bomb went off. Otherwise, we’re just dropping by for a chat. But if I see something I don’t like, I’ll get them up here pronto.”

We piled back into the squad car and drove toward Diggs’s residence. A mile or so down the road, we passed a woman walking an Airedale, then we pulled into Diggs’s yard. An older Chevy pickup with plates that matched Diggs’s DMV records was parked to the right of the double-wide. Next to it sat a blue beater Subaru with cardboard duct-taped where the rear window should have been.

We got out and went to the front door. French knocked while Sampson and I kept our hands on the grips of our service weapons.

No answer. Then a dog whined behind us.

A woman said softly, “Hey, if you’re looking for the pervs, they’re not in there.”

Chapter 77

The lady walking the Airedale had come up to what passed for a lawn in front of Diggs’s double-wide. She was a tired-looking brunette in her late forties.

“Where are they?” I asked just as quietly.

“Sit, Bernie,” she said, and the dog sat smartly at her side. She pointed to woods diagonally across the street. “It’s state land. They’ve got a blind back in there off the logging road. Bernie and I don’t go in there during hunting season, and we try to avoid them at all costs.”

“Them?”

“Diggs and his friend. My brother Jimmy’s a criminal lawyer. Knew all about them when they moved in here. Both of them convicted perverts.”

“We know.”

“Once I found that out, I had double bolts put on every door and an alarm on every window in my place. Bought a twelve-gauge too. And I wait until they’re at work or off in the woods before I take Bernie out in this direction.”

French gestured toward the woods. “How far is this blind?”

She shrugged. “Go down the logging road to the roundabout, then there’s three trails off it. I can’t remember which one is theirs. Bernie and I like to go for tramps off the path when we can, but anyway, it’s another sixty yards or so off that roundabout. You can’t miss it even with all the brush and branches they put on top of it.”

We thanked her, got her name — Penelope Harris — and started toward the woods and the entrance to the logging road. Halfway there, I noticed a two-by-eight board fixed high between two large pine trees.

A rope passed through a pulley bolted into the crossbar.

I pointed to it, muttered to Sampson and French, “What are the odds that’s a MFP utility-grade rope?”

“I’m thinking high,” John said as we headed for the opening where the logging road began.

The weeds and grass growing in the lane had withered and browned after a recent frost. The maple and oak trees were already bare.

The leaves underfoot were damp and quiet. Rain began to patter down. The wind picked up. A gloomy light seized the woods.

Sampson had his hand on his pistol. So did I. So did French.

We reached the place Ms. Harris had described about two hundred yards into the forest. The logging road dead-ended in a circle of sorts with three trails running off it at ten o’clock, twelve, and two.

The police detective whispered, “We each take one. Sneak in. Second you see this blind, get out of sight and squawk like a crow. We’ll come to you.”

I said, “I’ll take the trail on the right.”

Sampson gestured at the path straight ahead, and French went toward the one at ten o’clock. I saw him take out his pistol before he entered the trees.

I did the same, holding the pistol loosely at my side as I tried to make as little noise as possible with each step in those soft wet leaves and the pattering of the rain. Several small branches popped beneath my shoes about twenty yards in, and I paused.

I scanned the woods ahead for a mound of branches, saw nothing, and kept going. About fifty yards down the trail, I heard a crow caw to my far left.

French, I thought, and started to turn.

From high and back over my left shoulder came a soft, two-toned whistle.

I paused and looked up and behind me into the treetops. I saw a camouflaged Eamon Diggs on a metal tree stand about twenty-five feet in the air and twenty yards away. He was holding a bow and aiming a nasty-looking broadhead arrow right at me.

“Toss the gun, asshole,” he growled.

My survival instincts told me to get my gun up and fire at him.

But his bow was at full draw, and I was holding my gun waist high, muzzle pointed down. Still looking at that broadhead, I tossed the gun and said, “I’m a cop, Eamon. Just wanted to talk—”

Diggs squinted. He made a shrugging motion with his right shoulder.

I caught a flash of yellow a split second before his arrow hit me square in the chest and sent me staggering. My feet got tangled and I fell.

The back of my head struck something hard, and everything went wavy and then black.

Chapter 78

I don’t know how long I was out. A minute? Ninety seconds?

All I know is when I came to, I felt like I’d been kicked by a mule. Eamon Diggs’s arrow jutted from the low center of my chest, that nasty broadhead embedded in my body armor; the shaft and yellow vanes danced above me as I struggled for air.

“Goddamn it!” Diggs cursed. “Goddamn it to hell!”

I looked up to see him still twenty feet up but free of his safety line and getting off his stand, arms wrapped around the tree, his thighs and upper body scraping against the bark as his right foot groped for a climbing peg screwed into the trunk.

He found the steel step and came down the tree, still cursing, his bow hanging from a hook at his left hip.

I heard Maria’s voice in my head: He’s going to kill you, Alex. The white-van psycho is going to come down and finish you off.

Dazed, struggling to breathe, I knew I had to get to my gun. I started to roll over and get to my knees, but the nock of the arrow in my chest snagged the damp ground and hindered me.

I grunted against it, feeling the bruise building beneath my armor, and gasped against the pain; the aluminum shaft bent and I got to my knees. My head was too foggy for me to stand. I started crawling along the trail when Diggs was halfway down the tree.

I saw my pistol on the other side of the path, its handle sticking out from the leaves. The throbbing in my chest was so acute, I did not know if I could go on.

But then I saw Maria and Damon in my mind, and the pain was overwhelmed by my love for them and for my unborn child and the knowledge of how crushed they would be if I died here in the woods. I crawled faster, ignoring the arrow flopping and catching on the roots and sticks under me, my focus on my weapon, now fifteen feet away, and now ten.

I caught a flash of something in my peripheral vision and could not help but glance over. Diggs was almost at the bottom of his tree.

Get to the gun! Get to the gun, Alex! With Maria’s voice screaming in my head, I scrambled forward and lunged for the pistol at the same time I heard the thud of Diggs’s boots hitting the ground. I got hung up on the bent arrow for a second before it snapped.

But the holdup was enough to leave me four inches short of my weapon.

“Don’t! Don’t, goddamn it!” Diggs yelled. “I don’t want to do this!”

I looked over and saw him standing there not fifteen feet from me, his bow raised and drawn, another nasty broadhead nocked and aimed right at me. I glanced back at my gun and knew I could not reach it before he shot.

This close, he could shoot me in the throat. No armor would save me there.

But before I could raise my hands, I heard John yell behind me, “Police, Diggs! Drop the bow, or I will shoot!”

Diggs glanced over. I peered back and saw Sampson in the trail about fifty feet away, crouched in a combat-shooting stance, weapon up, ready to fire.

“Goddamn police,” Diggs said in a resigned voice. He lowered the bow and tossed it and the arrow aside.

He gazed at me and said, his voice shaking, “I swear to Jesus Hisself, man, I did not mean to shoot you.”

Chapter 79

Sampson told Diggs to lie facedown in the leaves, fingers laced behind his head. A beaten man, he complied.

Sampson hustled forward. He secured the ex-con’s wrists and read him his Miranda rights, then came over to me. I’d struggled to a sitting position, breathing hard and hurting, adrenaline pumping, the sweat pouring off my forehead. The saliva at the back of my throat had a burned-aluminum taste that made me want to gag.

“Jesus, he did shoot you,” Sampson said, looking at the stub of the arrow sticking out of the front of my shirt.

“Almost point-blank,” I said, feeling dizzy. “Chest was hammered.”

“I bet,” he said. “You’re lucky it wasn’t a bullet at that distance.”

Diggs, still facedown and restrained, yelled, “I did not mean to do that, man. I would never shoot a cop!”

“But you did, Mr. Diggs,” Sampson snapped. He yelled, “Tommy!”

A second later, from off in the woods a good hundred yards, French yelled back, “I’ve got Beech in custody!”

“Call the sheriff! Call an ambulance! Diggs shot Cross with an arrow.”

“What!”

“His armor stopped it. But he’s shook up bad and I want him looked at.”

“Done!”

By that point, I was trembling head to toe.

“I didn’t have a chance, John,” I said, hearing my voice wavering. “My gun was pointed down and I was looking for a blind on the ground, not up in a tree. I...”

“Doesn’t matter,” Sampson said. “You’re going to be fine. You’re going to go home, see Maria and Damon.”

“Help me up.”

“Not a good idea.”

“I feel like I should get up, John.”

He sighed, helped me to my feet. I stood there, my focus swirling, my balance off.

“I might have a mild concussion,” I said, feeling a little nauseated as the egg throbbed at the back of my head.

Sampson said, “Which is why we’re getting you checked out ASAP.”

I reached over and put my hand against a young oak tree. “Agreed.”

Sampson went back to Diggs. Before John hauled him to his feet, he scraped a square in the leaves around the bow and arrow.

“Let’s go,” John said.

“I want a lawyer,” Diggs said.

“I bet you do.” Sampson told him to walk out the path. “And don’t run because I’d love nothing more than to shoot you in the ass.”

“I told you, I didn’t mean to do it!”

“And yet you did do it,” John said. “Now, march.”

Diggs appeared ready to cry but started down the trail slowly. Sampson offered me his arm, which I took.

I don’t remember much of the walk out, but we were met in the turnaround on the old logging road by French and a small, scrawny man, presumably Beech. He was in cuffs and spitting mad.

“What is this?” Beech demanded. He nodded at the state police detective. “This shithead here won’t tell me nothing. Just dragged me out of my blind.”

“I read you your rights,” French said. “First thing.”

“For what?” Beech demanded. “We are allowed to own bows. They’re not guns. And we are allowed to hunt.”

“Not for humans, you aren’t,” Sampson said.

“For humans?” Beech said, losing color. “No, no, we’ve—”

“Shut up, Harry,” Diggs said. “This is wrong, so until you talk to a lawyer, just shut the hell up.”

His friend appeared to have been on the wrong end of a gut punch, which was how I still felt when the sheriff’s cruiser and an ambulance met us in Diggs’s front yard. French had Beech and Diggs transported to the state police barracks in Coatesville while an EMT checked me out.

I had a livid diamond-shaped bruise low over my sternum, that egg on the back of my head, and signs of a mild concussion. But I turned down the offer of a ride to the closest hospital.

“If I feel different in a half hour, you’ll take me there,” I said when Sampson protested. “I want to see what’s in that trailer first.”

French agreed. I sat outside when they went in. But although I had a colossal headache, my mind became less foggy with each passing minute, and soon I felt strong and clear enough to go inside and help with the search.

We combed through the double-wide and the yard around it for more than an hour. We did not find the .44 Bulldog pistol, but we had the rope from the deer pole. And we came across several items that were violations of Diggs’s parole, including marijuana and cocaine.

But it wasn’t until Sampson searched a shed in the back of Diggs’s place that we knew we had him cold. John exited the small outbuilding wearing gloves and carrying a handful of blasting caps with tags that read PROPERTY OF KEEGAN’S GRANITE.

Tommy French saw them and broke into a toothy grin. “Well, well, well.”

Chapter 80

Two hours later, John Sampson and I were at the Pennsylvania state police barracks in Coatesville, a long, low brick-faced affair surrounded by leafless bushes. John and I were on the phone with Chief Pittman while Tommy French was on another line with his supervisor.

“An arrow to the chest?” Pittman said. “That had to hurt, Cross.”

I had thought he’d be angry that I’d been caught with my guard down. Relieved, I said, “I have a whopper of a bruise on my chest, and my ego’s a bit crushed, but I’ll be all right, sir.”

“Good, good,” Pittman said. “Are we ready to announce this? That we got the Bulldog killer and maybe the strangler? Or should we call them the white-van killers?”

Sampson said, “Give us a chance to talk to them first, sir. Both have lawyered up, but we’re going to tell them what we found in the double-wide, see if that will pry something open.”

“Anyone searching Beech’s place?”

I said, “French sent a team right after we took him into custody.”

“Keep me posted.”

“We’ll call as soon as we know something,” John promised and hung up.

French finished his conversation, and a sergeant led us all to a hall outside an interrogation room. The sergeant knocked, leaned his head in. “Detectives would like to talk to you, Ms. Cox.”

A few moments later, Emelie Cox, Diggs’s public defender, exited the room and crossed her arms. “My client says he accidentally shot one of you.”

“Me,” I said. “For the record, he whistled at me and heard me identify myself as a cop before he shot me. It was no accident.”

Cox, a petite redhead in her thirties, said, “Hear him out. To clear up whatever you think he’s done, he says he’ll answer your questions unless I tell him not to.”

In the interrogation room, Diggs looked across the table at me with an agonized expression. “Look, man, I’m sorry. I did not mean to shoot you.”

“But you did!” Sampson said, slamming his hand on the table. “You shot him. If it hadn’t been for his vest, my partner would be dead now.”

Diggs cringed like a kicked dog. “I admit I saw him coming through the woods. Saw the pistol. I did not know what to think. I came to full draw on a guy roaming around the woods with a pistol. Who knew what he wanted?”

He turned to me. “You got to understand that there are people out there who want to kill me for some of the things I’ve done in the past.”

“I could see that,” I said. “But why did you pull the trigger on me if you didn’t mean to shoot me?”

His head bobbed. “See, that’s the thing. There is no trigger. I had what’s called target panic when I used a trigger release, so now I use a back-tension release. You had to have found it near my bow.”

French said, “I’m sure we did. So what?”

Diggs said the back-tension release was a mechanical device with small jaws that attached to the nock of the bowstring. The system was engineered to release an arrow only after the shooter pushed hard enough against the bow handle with the left arm and pulled back hard enough with the muscles of the right shoulder to, in effect, pry open the jaws.

He stared at me. “Honest to God, when you said you were a cop, I remember thinking I’d better let down. So I shrugged, you know, like, Okay, he’s not a threat. But then the bow just went off, man. I had no idea it would do that. I would never intentionally shoot a cop. Ever.”

French was having none of it. “How about the bomb booby trap at your farm? How about all the pot and blow we found in your trailer? How about the blasting caps we found in your shed? Stolen from Keegan’s Granite, along with dynamite, no doubt.”

“What?” Diggs said, sounding frightened. “No. No, that’s BS.”

Cox, his lawyer, put her hand up in front of him. “No more, Mr. Diggs.”

Sampson said, “We almost died earlier today when we triggered the bomb you set up on the dirt road to your grandmother’s old place.”

Diggs, ignoring his attorney, shook his head violently. “No. Absolutely not. I haven’t even been down that way in months, and I sure as hell didn’t booby-trap anything there. Is that what this is about? Is that why you were out looking for me?”

“You’re here because of the murders you committed,” French said.

Diggs said, “Murders? Me? No way.”

Cox again put her hand in front of her client. “Don’t say a thing, Mr. Diggs.”

Sampson said, “We’ve got you, you puke. We’ve got your white Ford Econoline van out at the farm.”

His attorney said, “What white van?”

Diggs squinted. “You mean my grandfather’s old junker? Doesn’t even run.”

“Oh, yes, it does,” I said. “And it’s impounded. The best crime techs in Pennsylvania are all over it. We’ve already found the piece of scalp you cut off one of your victims and a shell casing from the forty-four-caliber bullet you put in her head.”

Diggs said, “Hey, hey, man, I don’t even own a gun. I can’t own a gun. I am a convicted felon and the only thing I can have is a bow. That’s all I have. And I don’t know where the drugs and those blasting caps came from. Other guys at Keegan’s, other ex-cons, lived there before me. Lots of guys just out of the stir.”

“Mr. Diggs, please,” his attorney said.

I said, “Okay, Eamon, let’s say you’re telling the truth. You never meant to stick an arrow in me, and you don’t own a forty-four.”

“Didn’t and don’t.”

I nodded. “But what about your friend? What about Harold Beech? Did he know about the farm? The van?”

Cox stood up. “Detectives, we’re done.”

Diggs sighed, then said, “Why don’t you ask Harry? On the advice of counsel, I’m shutting my yap.”

Chapter 81

Ryan Davis, Harold Beech’s public defender, was fresh out of law school. He was likely in his late twenties but looked fourteen. He had a wild shock of black hair and wore a disheveled suit and a semi-dazed expression that said he knew he was in way over his head. But when the three of us entered the second interrogation room he did his best to sound authoritative.

“My client’s done nothing wrong, Detectives,” Davis declared, pushing his glasses farther up the bridge of his nose. “He has no idea why he’s here. Charge him or let him walk.”

“He’ll be sticking around for a while yet, Counselor,” French said, taking a seat across from Beech, who was wringing his hands, lips twisted like he’d just tasted something rancid.

Beech had been wearing archery gloves when we encountered him in the woods. Now I noticed his palms. I reached over and pointed to the livid lines around a quarter of an inch wide that ran across both of them.

“Where did those come from, Mr. Beech?”

Beech looked at his attorney, who shrugged.

“Rope burns,” Beech said. “Own fault. Wasn’t wearing my gloves like I should have been last week when we took down Eamon’s deer from the game pole.”

“So your blood’s on that rope?”

“Who knows? That’s what happened.”

I decided not to ask him about Brenda Miles yet. “You and Eamon Diggs good friends?”

“About the only one I got. We keep each other on the narrow, you know?”

French said, “Knew Eamon in prison, did you?”

“Of course,” Beech said. “We met in an after-release program and got hired together at the quarry. One of the few places that will hire people like us. Fresh out, I mean.”

John said, “What about his grandmother’s farm, the one he inherited. Ever been there?”

He nodded. “We’ve shot our bows long-distance-like down there a couple of times, maybe three? I told him to sell the place, buy something where he could live nice, ’stead of renting.”

“Why didn’t he?” I asked.

Beech shrugged. “Can’t let go, I guess. He said it was the only place where he was happy as a kid. With his grandparents.”

“You see the white van at that farm?” French asked. “The one in the shed?”

He nodded. “Got inside and under the hood to see if there were salvageable parts.”

“Were there any?” I asked.

“Engine, radiator, transmission weren’t bad, and the quarter panels and doors weren’t rusted at all ’cause of the van’s being under the shed roof, but Eamon wouldn’t let me scavenge it. Said it had sentimental value too.”

“You see him drive it? The van?” French asked.

Beech snorted. “I didn’t even think there was a key to it.”

“There was one, and it does run,” I said.

“News to me. What’s the big deal?”

“The van was seen in the vicinity of several recent murders in the greater Washington, DC, area.”

The sour look on Beech’s face deepened, but he did not reply.

“Three were shot point-blank in their cars,” Sampson said. “One was strangled with a rope exactly like the rope you say you burned your hands on, Harry.”

I said, “And the strangled woman was found with a wooden spoon rammed in her vagina, Harry.”

Beech licked his lips nervously but still said nothing.

French leaned across the table. “That was one of your favorite moves, wasn’t it, Harry? Putting things like wooden spoons in the girls you drugged and assaulted?”

All the blood drained out of Beech’s face. He said in a shaking, gasping voice, “I don’t do that kind of thing no more. I was sick in the mind back then. I paid my debt to society and have my head on straight now. I been through behavior-modification therapy. I have!”

“I’ll bet you have,” French said. “Except it modified you from a deviant to a killer.”

“No!”

“Mr. Beech,” his young attorney finally said, “I think we should stop now.”

“I didn’t do nothing, man,” he snarled at him. “Nothing.”

Sampson asked Beech where he’d been on the evenings of the Bulldog murders. Beech said probably where he always was, in his dump of an apartment or at Diggs’s double-wide.

“I don’t go out. I don’t do nothing ’cept work and bow-hunt in the fall, fish for bass in the summer. Stay away from all women. Especially young ones.”

“What about Diggs?” I asked.

Beech shook his head, struggling with something. “I don’t know. I mean, I’m not paid to be the dude’s keeper, am I? But I’ll tell you what, and this is no lie: Eamon’s been known to disappear now and then. And when I asked him where he’d got to, he told me I didn’t want to know.”

Chapter 82

On the Sunday after Thanksgiving, Gary Soneji continued to act the part of the attentive husband, one who was sorry to soon be leaving his family yet again. He played with Roni outside in the leaves on the blustery fall day. He held Missy’s hands as darkness approached and told her that he’d be back from the road on Friday evening and said how much he was looking forward to Christmas Eve.

“Can’t you stay tonight and drive south first thing in the morning?” she asked. “The traffic will be heavy on the interstate.”

That was true, but he had places to be. “I’m taking back roads to Philly. I’ll spend the night there and drive the rest of the way to my first appointment in the morning. There’s some company Marty wants me to pitch to in Spofford, Virginia.”

Missy gave a faux pout. “We’ll miss you, Gary. This new you.”

“And the new Gary will miss you, Missy, and Roni. I promise I’ll call every night.”

As he was leaving a few minutes later, he looked up to see his wife holding Roni, who was in her cute pink sweatshirt, both of them waving. He waved back and quickly drove away.

As he almost always did after leaving, Soneji felt a weight come off his shoulders. But even a mantle of invisibility could be heavy, right?

Heading toward the interstate, he turned on the radio and searched for an all-news station. He found one on the AM dial, broadcasting out of Philadelphia.

He did not have to wait long before he heard what he wanted, an update on the big story in the region. He’d read about it briefly in the Philadelphia Inquirer that very morning, and he wanted to know more, much more.

The radio announcer said, “Police from three states and the District of Columbia as well as agents from the FBI and the BATF are still searching a remote farm in Chester County for clues to five homicides in the Washington, DC, area. Two felons convicted of sex crimes, forty-two-year-old Eamon Diggs and thirty-seven-year-old Harold Beech, have been arrested based on evidence gathered at the farm, including the remains of a booby trap that exploded when detectives began their search.

“Both men await arraignment and extradition hearings tomorrow in Chester County. WKW-AM will be there for the latest on these troubling crimes.”

When the broadcast moved on to football coverage, Soneji turned the radio off, feeling pleased with himself. He’d questioned whether he’d gone over the top by booby-trapping the driveway, but it had worked to turn all investigative leads toward the rapists.

The police surely had the van by now. They had to be tearing that thing apart.

Driving south on I-95, past the exit that led toward the Pennsylvania border, Chester County, and the farm, Soneji went from smug to ecstatic. He’d created suspicions that were now pointing the investigation and prosecution in a direction entirely opposite from him. In his mind, Soneji was already the there-but-not-there man, easy to overlook.

The traffic on I-95 south wasn’t as bad as he’d expected. When he approached the Beltway sometime later, he slowly came down off that euphoric high and allowed himself to cast his mind forward, to imagine his future both near and distant.

First, he saw himself getting through the whole wedding farce, of course. Then he saw himself snatching Cheryl Lynn Wise and bringing her to...

He shook his head, telling himself he could not bring the girl to his uncle’s cabin. He had to take her to another place, a new place, one that had no connection to him. He couldn’t just go off like Bruno Hauptmann, snatching the Lindbergh baby and murdering him within hours. That was unacceptable as far as Soneji was concerned. Besides, he had more important issues to address in the short term — and keeping his part-time teaching job at Washington Day School was one hundred percent his long-term plan.

There was no way he was leaving a place with so many opportunities to indulge his various hungers anytime soon.

Chapter 83

At our staff meeting the Monday morning after Thanksgiving, Chief Pittman loudly praised the work Sampson and I had done in bringing Eamon Diggs and Harold Beech to justice.

“Detective Sampson and Detective Cross went above and beyond the call of duty bringing these fiends in. And I mean that word, fiends,” Pittman said. “As far as I’m concerned, mimicking serial killers like Son of Sam and the Boston Strangler is fiendish and incomprehensible behavior, a total distortion of human values.”

He took a big breath, then said he was putting us both up for commendations for our “dogged work and commitment to solving the white-van murders.”

There was a lot of congratulations. Even from Detectives Edgar Kurtz and Corina Straub Diehl, though they came up to us afterward and told us not to get used to it.

“We’re still top dogs around here,” Kurtz said.

“Agreed,” Sampson said. “Just don’t piss on our ankles to prove it.”

That made them both laugh, and they walked away.

We spent the day writing detailed reports of all that had transpired at the farm, in the woods near Eamon Diggs’s home, in his double-wide, and at the state police barracks. I kept coming back to the photographic evidence gathered at the farm, specifically one picture that showed the rear of the white Ford Econoline van.

The shot, by the Pennsylvania state police forensics team, showed the interior of the van with both back doors flung wide. At a glance, it looked like a roadside dump strewn with an inch or two of dead leaves.

But below that light carpet of leaves, there seemed to have been little or no effort to hide what was found in the van: the chunk of scalp, the used latex gloves, and especially the spent .44-caliber-bullet casings. It was like they’d just been tossed in the back as an afterthought following each heinous crime.

Who does that? What kind of mind?

Keeping some sort of souvenir was not unusual. Many of the serial killers I’d interviewed for my doctoral dissertation had kept souvenirs of their victims. But those souvenirs had been safeguarded, at the least, and enshrined more often than not. Yet Diggs and Beech seemed to have been tossing their murder trophies into what was essentially a trash bin.

What was the psychology behind that?

I could not come up with a satisfactory explanation, so I asked Sampson.

“I don’t know,” John said. “Maybe Diggs’s twisted psyche sees it as throwing his victims into the void.”

I thought about that. “Maybe you should be sitting where I am.”

“I’m good right over here, man,” Sampson said and laughed.

Something about the case felt off, but by the time I made my way home, I’d managed to set thoughts of it aside.

Maria opened the front door and stepped way back so I could get past her belly.

“Damon’s got a little sniffle,” she said quietly, shutting the door behind me. “He fell asleep on the couch.”

“How’re you?” I whispered. I kissed her hello and put my hand on her belly. “How’s our little runner?”

“Playing gymnast today,” Maria said. “Doing cartwheels, I think. How about you? Doctor look at your chest?”

“She did, and I’ve got a bruise on my sternum, but I will be fine,” I said, wanting to move on. She’d about flipped when she found out about the arrow.

I took off my coat and followed Maria into the kitchen, where she was preparing shrimp in a red sauce, another amazing recipe from her mother that filled the air with good smells and ordinarily gave me an intense desire to eat. But I was distracted.

Ever intuitive, Maria studied my face as she stirred the sauce. “What are you confused about, mister?”

“Whether we’ve got the right guys.”

“You said the evidence looked ironclad.”

“We’re waiting for labs, but it did and does.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“Why would Diggs and Beech just dump all that stuff in the van like it meant nothing?”

“Maybe they didn’t dump it all. Maybe you’re finding traces of other victims back there. Alex, you need to be happy about this. If the labs back you up, you’re now batting one thousand on your murder cases. I think you need to bring that to Chief Pittman’s attention before you’re not batting one thousand.”

“You’re saying I’ll screw up eventually?”

“We all do, baby. We all do.”

Chapter 84

Mid-December turned dank and cold up and down the mid-Atlantic. But the foul weather did nothing to dampen Missy Murphy’s enthusiasm for her and Gary’s rapidly approaching wedding.

“Do you want to hear about the cutest napkins Mom found for the appetizer table?” she asked as Soneji stood shivering at an outdoor pay phone on a commercial strip in Lincolnia, Virginia. A wintry mix of rain and snow was falling in the fading afternoon light.

I’d rather suck a bullet, Soneji thought. “Tell me about them,” he said.

“The napkins have little Santas officiating at weddings on them!” Missy cried. “Roni loves them. So do I!”

“That’s hilarious,” Soneji said. “Hey, babe?”

“What’s that?”

“I’m in a phone booth freezing my ass off, and it’s snowing and they’re saying the DC area is going to get clobbered tonight. Can I go eat and call you later from my motel?”

There was a long pause before she sighed. “Okay, but promise to call after I get Roni to bed, okay? There are still many, many things we need to discuss.”

“And I love you and I can’t wait to hear them,” he said, then hung up.

He got in the Saab, turned the heat on high, and moved his toes to restore circulation. Then he drove down a series of roads and parked up the street from an eggshell-blue, two-story Colonial.

Soneji turned off the Saab’s ignition, checked his watch, and saw it was already past five. Movement would not be long in coming now.

At twenty past the hour, the lights of a Christmas tree went on in the Colonial’s front room, casting a festive glow through the window and onto the lawn. At five forty-five, as she’d done every evening for the past three, a woman Soneji had met only once came out the front door.

Sandy Ravisky, the computer science teacher he was subbing for, got in a Chrysler minivan and backed out. An older woman, presumably Ravisky’s mother, stood in the doorway holding her newborn grandchild. When her daughter was gone, she shut the door.

For the first time since he’d started watching the Ravisky family, Soneji did not follow Sandy. The woman was habitually late wherever she went and liked to drive fast, which made her difficult to tail.

Besides, he knew exactly where she was going: to pick up her husband, Peter, at work.

True to form, the Raviskys returned around six thirty and quickly went inside together. Sandy’s mother left the house soon after, retreating to a mother-in-law’s cottage in the backyard.

Soneji drove to Old Town, Alexandria, and had Greek food, no alcohol.

Tonight’s work had to be mechanically flawless. He’d spent two weeks researching how best to achieve his aims and felt he understood the process cold.

At nine p.m., he called Missy from a warmer pay phone in the hallway near the restaurant. They talked about seating plans for obscure relatives he’d never met before and would probably never meet again.

By the time they got to flower arrangements, he’d had enough. “Sorry, Miss, but I have to be up early. Can we talk again before I head out?”

After a pause, she said, “That would be nice. Get a good sleep.”

“You too,” he said, and went outside to the Saab, which had about a half an inch of snow on the windshield.

He was back in his observation post down the street from the Raviskys’ home at ten thirty. The snow was falling heavily now.

Soneji left the engine running, listening to the radio. The forecast was calling for as much as three inches overnight with plunging temperatures toward dawn, exactly why he’d chosen this evening to act.

The Raviskys’ Christmas tree went dark at eleven p.m. The bedroom lights went off not long after. Soneji stayed put, waiting for the lights to go out in the mother-in-law’s place, starting his car every half hour to warm his feet. The cottage finally went dark shortly after midnight. He kicked off his shoes, put on a second layer of wool socks, and slipped on low rubber galoshes.

He donned a black hood, a headlamp, and gloves, picked up a small bag with the essential tools, and slipped outside. It was snowing steadily as he padded diagonally to the Raviskys’ Chrysler minivan.

Soneji paused at the rear of the minivan for a long moment, studying the house and the mother-in-law’s cottage, then lay down on his back in the snow building on the drive.

He wriggled beneath the vehicle, dragging his tool kit, ignoring the icy slurry that found its way under his collar. When he turned on his headlamp’s red bulb, he could see the underbelly of the minivan well enough to identify the brake linkages.

Soneji opened his tool kit, found the correct sprocket wrench, and set about loosening the linkages until they would dance on a razor’s edge before shearing.

Chapter 85

The morning of December fifteenth, the nation’s capital was a quintessential mess. Four inches of snow, sleet, and freezing rain had fallen and temperatures had plunged into the twenties with a howling wind behind them.

I almost hit the ground three times on the slick sidewalks between the Metro stop and work; and I called Maria when I got to the office to tell her not to go out at all and to reschedule her appointment with her obstetrician. Sampson did not make it to the office until after nine.

Diehl and Kurtz came in together at a quarter to ten.

“Nice brunch?” I asked.

“Yeah, I wish,” Kurtz said. “Effing Beltway was a hockey rink.”

“DC don’t do ice,” Diehl said, plopping down at her desk. “I don’t do ice.”

Kurtz said, “We made it in slowly, but we heard there were fifteen accidents this morning, including a bad one westbound on the Beltway. Chain-reaction pileup.”

Diehl nodded grimly. “Ten cars. They’re taking out survivors by chopper.”

“Survivors?” Sampson said.

“I was told two dead in the first vehicle to crash. They expect the toll to rise.”

Before we could comment on that sad state of affairs, Helen Mathers, with the Pennsylvania crime lab, called.

“Tommy French wanted me to say happy holidays to you and Detective Sampson and give you both an early gift,” she said. “It wasn’t easy because there was deer blood on the rope, but we got a match to Brenda Miles’s blood type. Diggs’s and Beech’s blood are on the rope too.”

Sampson grinned, sat back with his fingers laced behind his head. “We got them. No matter what, we’ve got those bastards.”

“That’s amazing, Helen,” I said. “Really seals the deal.”

“Oh, there’s more.”

Mathers said that her team had identified human hair in the debris removed from the back of the van. Auburn, probably female.

“Could belong to Bunny Maddox,” I said. “We know she was in the back of that van.”

“Bunny could be buried somewhere on Diggs’s farm,” Sampson said.

“Tommy French is going back with cadaver dogs once the weather clears,” Mathers said. “Oh, and we have a blood type match from the scalp to Alice Ways as well.”

We hung up, and suddenly it did feel a lot like Christmas. Whatever misgivings I might have had about Diggs and Beech’s involvement in the Bulldog shootings and the strangling of Brenda Miles were a thing of the past.

For the next hour, we contacted the various detectives who’d helped us on the case, including Deb Angelis in Fairfax County and Kelsey Girard in Goochland County, and told them about the evidence linking both men to the strangling of Brenda Miles, the murder of Alice Ways, and the kidnapping and possible murder of Bunny Maddox.

“You want me to call Calvin, Bunny’s brother?” I asked Detective Girard.

“No, thanks. That’s on me.”

Both detectives told us they were going to recommend that Diggs and Beech be charged and tried for capital murder in Virginia for Brenda Miles’s death before Maryland and the District of Columbia had their chance, which worked for us because we had the pair sitting in the federal detention center in Alexandria awaiting disposition of trial venue.

The temperatures had risen throughout the morning, and the wind calmed. That afternoon, we drove over to the detention center and arranged to meet with Diggs and his new defender, a sharp-faced guy in his forties named Richard Conlon.

“Tell us about Brenda Miles,” I said when they sat down.

“Never heard of her,” Diggs growled.

“She was a real estate agent here in Alexandria.”

“Still never heard of her.”

“How about Bunny Maddox?”

“Nope.”

“What is this all about?” Conlon demanded.

Sampson said, “Your client’s blood was all over the rope that strangled Brenda Miles. Bunny Maddox, who is missing and presumed dead, left hair in your client’s van, and hair and blood from known murder victim Alice Ways was found there as well. Mr. Diggs is looking to go down for at least two murders and maybe as many as six. And since it looks like he will be tried here in Virginia, he will face the death penalty.”

Diggs turned beet red and furious. “I don’t know anything about any of these women! I’m being framed! You guys are all either too stupid to see it or too corrupt to want to.”

Chapter 86

Around nine in the morning at Washington Day School, Gary Soneji was walking around his classroom, cup of coffee in hand. It had been a long day already for him as he tried to make up for yesterday’s snow day.

His seventh- and eighth-grade students were tackling a simple coding sequence he’d introduced that morning, and he actually found himself happy with their progress. Most of them were getting the concept rapidly. Even dear Cheryl Lynn Wise, ordinarily not the sharpest of tacks, had completed the task on her second try.

A knock came at the door, and the headmaster, Charles Pendleton Little, poked his head inside. “Mr. Soneji, might I have a word, please?”

“Absolutely,” he said. He put his coffee on his desk and told the class to try to reverse the coding sequence. “You should be able to get out of anything you get into, right?” he asked.

He hurried out into the hall to find Little and U.S. Secret Service agent Jezzie Flanagan looking stricken. When the door shut behind Soneji, the headmaster spoke in slow, whispered, and choking words.

“Agent Flanagan just heard that Washington Day has suffered a terrible tragedy, Mr. Soneji,” Little said, and then he stopped, unable to go on.

Flanagan jumped in. “There was a ten-car pileup on the Beltway yesterday morning. Among the casualties were Sandy Ravisky, her husband, Peter, and their new baby, Irene.”

“Wait, what?” Soneji gasped, his trembling hands going to his lips. “No. No, that’s... oh my God.”

The truth was, Soneji felt gutted.

He had prepared for everything but the baby’s death. His reconnaissance had clearly shown Sandy’s mother coming over daily to care for the baby while Sandy took Peter to work and then again in the evening when Sandy picked him up. Every time.

“Are they sure?” he asked, the sickening sensation growing.

“I confirmed with the state troopers,” Flanagan said. “And the family.”

Soneji took a step back and put his hand against the lockers to steady himself. “You’re right, Mr. Little. This is terrible.”

The headmaster said, “We’re going to tell the rest of the faculty in person and then call an assembly for sixth period to inform the students.”

“You okay with keeping this quiet until then, Mr. Soneji?” Flanagan asked.

Soneji smiled weakly. “I don’t have much of a choice, but yes, I am okay.”

“Then go back to her students,” the headmaster said. “Though I guess they are your students now if you want the job.”

“They’re still Mrs. Ravisky’s students for the moment,” Soneji said, feeling acid churn his stomach. He glanced at Flanagan, then returned his gaze to Little. “Today, I’m still a stand-in for her, Mr. Little.”

Chapter 87

Gary Soneji went back into the classroom and saw his students as if through steam brewing up out of the sourness in his stomach. The kids seemed part of a dream he was observing; he was wholly separate from them, from everything now.

He went to his desk, needing to sit, though he still felt no remorse whatsoever about the loss of Sandy and Peter Ravisky. They were obstacles that had stood in the way of the job being his. No more. No less.

But the baby. The infant. What was her name? Iris? Irene.

She was not supposed to be in that van. Irene was supposed to be home with Grandma. But she was collateral damage.

Any way Soneji looked at it, he didn’t feel regret.

That understanding cut some last cord inside him.

He was different now, stronger in a way. He told himself he was more dangerous than Berkowitz. More deadly than DeSalvo and every other homicidal maniac he had ever studied, from Jack the Ripper to the Green River Killer. None of them had ever killed a baby. Not one.

He had gone beyond all of them.

He was—

“Mr. Soneji?”

Soneji startled when he realized that Cheryl Lynn Wise had come up to his desk. This was a first.

“I’m trying to do the retreat by flipping the code, but for some reason it’s not working. Or at least, I don’t think it’s working.”

“Let’s take a look, shall we?” Soneji said. She handed the printout to him and came around the desk so they could look at it together.

It took every bit of his willpower not to focus on Cheryl Lynn being so close, not to smell her preteen odor, as he showed her how she could work toward the answer without the extra steps she’d added, which had cut her off from the solution.

“Thank you, Mr. Soneji,” Cheryl Lynn said and laughed. “My mom says I always make things more difficult than they have to be.”

“It’s just a learning process, Ms. Wise,” Soneji said. “Sometimes we have to go down blind alleys in the maze to find our way out.”

He smiled, handed her the printout, then gazed at his desk as she walked back to her seat.

Soneji was his own monster now.

That lovely idea spawned another thought, a new one. It triggered a sudden bolt of power that spiraled up through him, triggering the new thought again and causing another surge of strength that became a dead certainty in his mind. He raised his head to watch Cheryl Lynn take her seat.

He was his own monster now.

And with monsters, anything was possible.

Absolutely anything.

Chapter 88

The deeper we got into December, the bigger and more uncomfortable Maria became and the more excited and boisterous Damon turned in anticipation of Christmas.

He’d caught on to the concept of presents at his last birthday and was using that word and the word candy more and more as we closed in on the twenty-fifth of the month.

Maria had officially started her maternity leave and wasn’t sleeping well, which meant I wasn’t sleeping well either. But I was still getting up to take care of Damon while she rested.

I was yawning and drinking a strong cup of coffee at my desk downtown on December 23 when John Sampson plopped another stack of files in front of me.

“More evidence against Diggs and Beech,” he said.

Chief George Pittman had made his way into the squad room. “It’s a slam dunk now. Diggs is going to fry, and Beech? Who knows?”

“Chief—” I began.

“That’s over for now, Cross. I have a new case for you and Sampson.”

Pittman said he’d been contacted by the chief of homicide for NYPD in Brooklyn.

“They’re dealing with a gangland slaying up there, an Italian Mob hit that might have ties down here,” the chief said, putting a piece of paper with a phone number on it on my desk. “Detective’s name is Slattery. He’s waiting for your call.”

I could tell it was an order, so I nodded, told Sampson to get on the same line, and punched in the NYPD detective’s number on my desk phone.

“Damian Slattery, Homicide,” said a harried voice.

“Alex Cross and John Sampson, DC Homicide,” I said. “Our bosses thought we should talk.”

“Yeah, that’s affirmative, Detectives, and I appreciate the call back,” Slattery said, and he gave us a brief intro to his case.

Late the afternoon before, Aldo Ricci, a lieutenant in the Capula crime family, had been found dead — beaten and skinned in places — near the back of a junkyard. The consensus among investigators was that the murder was the work of the rival Maggione syndicate.

“But no one’s talking on either side, Capula or Maggione. Least of all to me, a mick.”

Sampson said, “That’s how it still goes up there?”

“Being Italian helps in certain circles; being Irish helps in others,” he said matter-of-factly. “Which is why I don’t think the killer was a Maggione soldier.”

“Contract killer?” I said.

“A very specific one,” Slattery said. “His name is Michael Sullivan, but he goes by a dozen aliases. In Ireland and at Scotland Yard, they call him ‘the Butcher of Sligo.’ Likes to leave a calling card like flaying skin off his victims before and after death.”

Slattery said Sullivan was last known to be working in Europe, but the way Aldo Ricci was beaten and his skin taken off his back, the NYPD detective was fairly sure they were dealing with the Butcher.

“But you could help me nail that down by visiting Aldo’s brother Emilio,” Slattery said. “He lives in DC. He does not know that his brother is dead. We have not announced the killing yet.”

“Give us an address,” Sampson said, “and we’re on our way.”

Chapter 89

Emilio Fazio, a lean, intense man in his late thirties, lived by himself in a small condo complex near the Bethesda line. We caught him exiting his place dressed in running gear.

When he saw our badges, Fazio was initially hostile. “Whatever’s going on, I had nothing to do with it and I intend to keep it that way.”

“We’re not here because of you, Mr. Fazio,” I said. “It’s your brother Aldo.”

Fazio turned stony. “Aldo’s my stepbrother, and I am not involved. Whatever Aldo’s done now, I am not involved.”

“I’m sorry to say that Aldo’s dead, Mr. Fazio,” Sampson said.

The news hit Fazio hard. He looked at the ground, shaking his head at the injustice.

“When?” he asked finally.

“He was found yesterday afternoon,” I said. “We’re waiting on time of death.”

Fazio bobbed his head slowly. “How? Where?”

Sampson and I exchanged glances.

I said, “In a Brooklyn junkyard. Beaten to death.”

The dead man’s stepbrother took a long breath and let it out slowly. “I’m sorry to hear that. Aldo deserved something more... merciful. Just glad my mom’s not around to know.”

“Some skin was cut off his back,” Sampson told him.

“His upper back?”

We nodded.

“The tattoo,” Fazio said.

“He had a tattoo on his upper back?”

“Eagle wings,” he said. “Got them when he was fifteen. Drove my mom nuts.”

Fazio talked to us for an hour, describing how his widowed mother had married Aldo’s divorced father. His stepfather had operated on the fringes of the Maggione family, running small bookie operations.

“Aldo and I, we were almost the same age,” Fazio said. “At first, like when we were ten, it was good between us. But I did everything to stay out of the crime thing. And then Aldo got that tattoo and started hanging with guys from the Capula family just to piss his dad off.”

Fazio said his life and Aldo’s life had gone in separate directions.

“I went to Fordham at eighteen,” he said. “Aldo boosted seven cars at eighteen, got caught, and went to Sing Sing for grand theft auto.”

By the time his stepbrother was released, Emilio Fazio had a whole new life.

“I have a law degree and work for the Commerce Department, cover international trade issues,” he said. “I’ve had nothing to do with Aldo for years.”

“When’s the last time you saw him?” I said.

Fazio looked uncomfortable. “Two Thanksgivings ago. So, a little over a year? My mom was sick, and she insisted we both come to her place in Queens.”

“How’d that go?”

“Bad,” Fazio said. “Aldo got drunk and started talking about all the women he was seeing, the money he was making, and the people who had it out for him.”

“He mention any names?”

“Just that they were all with the Maggione family,” he said, and frowned at some distant memory. “No, that’s not true. He did mention someone specifically and seemed very unnerved when he did.”

My pager buzzed. I took it out and saw it was my grandmother calling, which she never did when I was at work.

I walked away from Sampson and Fazio, found a pay phone, and called her. “Nana? Something wrong?”

“Everything’s right,” my grandmother said. “Maria’s gone into labor. I’ve just come back from taking her to St. Anthony’s. Go meet her there, and I’ll stay here with Damon.”

Chapter 90

Maria’s first delivery had been slow, with Damon coming into our lives after fourteen hours of labor. But she’d dilated fast after her water broke at Nana Mama’s house, and I almost missed this birth.

I literally skidded into Maria’s room to find her sweating from head to toe, tended by two nurses and her obstetrician, Dr. Barbara Holmes, and very happy to see me.

“You made it for the grand finale,” she said, grinning.

“Just made it,” said Dr. Holmes. “We’re going to push at the next contraction, okay?”

I took my wife’s hand, and when the contraction came, Maria strained and screamed. At the end a nurse said, “Already starting to crown. Your baby’s at the finish line!”

Twenty-five minutes later, the miracle that was Janelle “Jannie” Cross slid from her mother. She immediately began taking heaving breaths of air that she expelled in cries and squawks. Maria and I broke down, grinning with joy through our tears.

“She’s a big girl, got all her fingers and toes,” Dr. Holmes announced, examining her. “Look at those legs. And listen to the set of lungs she’s got!”

Indeed, Janelle squawked and wiggled and sputtered between deep breaths that visibly expanded her rib cage. We started laughing.

“No wonder it felt like she was fighting to get out,” Maria said.

I said, “My little Janelle, my little Jannie, was ready for life. She is ready for life!”

I gazed at my daughter. Even though she was full of what Nana Mama would call piss and vinegar, it was love at first sight. The nurse laid Jannie on her mama’s chest.

Jannie almost instantly stopped squawking, and Maria cooed. “Look at you, little one. Welcome to the world, Janelle.”

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a more beautiful sight or had a better moment. I started tearing up again. The nurse took Jannie to check her vital signs, and the baby squawked again.

“You’ll be right back, young lady, I promise,” the nurse said.

She weighed and measured Jannie, then brought her back to Maria, who was being cleaned up, and laid our baby on her chest again, skin to skin. “Eight pounds and two ounces, twenty inches,” she said. “Perfect APGAR score.”

“Yay,” Maria said softly, tiredly, stroking Jannie’s back while the other nurse put a warm blanket over her little body.

I put my hand by Maria’s on Janelle’s back, and we basked in the grace of that for several minutes before Maria said, “You should make some calls, tell Damon he’s got a baby sister.”

“When do you think I can bring him in?” I asked Dr. Holmes.

“I think mom and baby will be ready to greet visitors in a few hours or so,” she said. “Give Maria and Janelle time to rest.”

I got home about two hours later. Damon was just waking up from his nap.

I went into his bedroom and said, “Santa brought you an early Christmas present.”

That got him alert pronto. “Present?”

“Your baby sister was born!”

He seemed confused until I said that Janelle was the present, at which point he looked a little disappointed, but he cheered up when I asked him if he wanted to go with me and Nana to meet Jannie and see his mother.

We walked into Maria’s hospital room soon after, with Nana Mama leading the way. Jannie was swaddled in Maria’s arms and sound asleep.

“She’s beautiful, Maria,” my grandmother whispered.

“Isn’t she?”

I carried Damon over to the bed. At first he frowned, as if he were unsure about this new thing taking his spot in his mother’s arms.

“Isn’t she pretty, Damon?” Maria asked.

Damon shrugged and held out his arms, whining, “Mommy.”

“Mommy can’t hold you right now. I have to hold your sister for a bit, just like I held you when you were born. But do you want a kiss?”

He nodded with a pout, and I lowered him until she could kiss him on the cheek. He laughed and said, “Kiss Jannie?”

“You want to?” Maria asked.

Damon nodded. We moved them close, and he kissed her forehead, which set off Ahhs in the room from the nurses on duty.

“Jannie pretty,” Damon said when I shifted him to my hip.

“She’s more than that, bud,” I said and rubbed his head. “She’s your little sister, and you always need to help and take care of her. Okay?”

“Okay,” he said, and laid his head on my shoulder, and suddenly everything was perfect in my life.

Chapter 91

Gary Soneji had to admit it: Missy was right about the tuxedo. It fit him well and made him feel different, empowered even.

And her mother, Christiana, had been absolutely correct about her brother’s heated barn being a wonderful venue for a wedding and reception, especially when it was lavishly decorated for Christmas Eve.

Fresh holly, laurel, and evergreen garlands wrapped the old posts, lower beams, and railings inside the barn. A string trio was softly playing Christmas tunes. The air was scented with spice from pots bubbling atop woodstoves burning in the corners.

Three large wood and electric-candle chandeliers were suspended over the central space, throwing a warm glow on the crowd of one hundred, all busily gabbing or drinking or nibbling cheese or finding assigned dinner seats at one of the long tables on the floor or up in one of the old haylofts.

It was all so wonderful that it unnerved Soneji a little as he moved through the crowd, sipping from his champagne glass, accepting congratulations, and feigning interest in the names of the perfect strangers who’d come at him in waves since Roni had toddled down the aisle with flowers, and he and Missy had exchanged their vows. By the time he crossed the room a second time, he was getting upset. How was he supposed to remember all these names?

“Gary!”

Soneji would not have turned if the call had come from behind him, but Missy’s older brother, Marty, was coming right at him, his bow tie already undone and his collar open. A glass of whiskey neat was nestled in his paw of a hand.

“Marty,” Soneji said, and prepared for the man-hug he knew was coming.

Built like a Greco-Roman wrestler, Marty Kasajian had huge, long arms that he wrapped around Soneji as he rubbed his dense, dark beard against Soneji’s cheek. His breath stank of cigar smoke and liquor.

“You’re true family now, Murph,” Marty said when he broke the embrace. “A brother to me and to all who are gathered here for you and my baby sister and that precious Roni.”

“That’s kind and great,” Soneji said, trying to sound pleased. “So great. Thank you, Marty.”

“A drink!” Marty cried. “We must drink to this union, Gar, with a great bourbon!”

Soneji hated it when Marty called him Gar.

“I promise I’ll share one with you later,” he said. “I don’t think Missy would want me sloppy drunk this early in the night.”

Marty Kasajian closed one eye, pursed his lips, and nodded as he held out his glass. “And my sister would be right. She’s always right. That’s the thing about wives and sisters — they have a sixth sense about what’s right, don’t they?”

Soneji spotted Missy waving him to their table. “I’m learning that,” he said. He left his brother-in-law and went to his bride’s side.

“You look stunning in that dress,” he said. “Really.”

“Aww,” Missy said. “Thank you. Mama says I got lucky.”

“No, I’m the one who got lucky.”

Beside Missy, Roni started clinking a glass with her spoon. Soon many in the barn were clinking. Soneji leaned in and kissed Missy and then Roni, which got a roar of approval.

Soneji raised his glass to the crowd, feeling once again that this was all happening to someone else. The sense of being an impostor in the constant center of attention intensified during dinner and with every spoon-clinking and kiss.

Halfway through his roast duck, claustrophobia began to set in. He needed air. He needed a few moments alone.

He excused himself and told Missy he’d be right back, then he went to the stall that served as a cloakroom and found his overcoat.

Soneji went outside. He walked away from the barn into the darkness, glad for the clear, cold night, glad to be free of the incessant chatter that constantly boiled out of his wife and everyone at the event. Couldn’t they all just shut up once in a while?

He wasn’t sure how long he stood there looking up at the night sky, but it was long enough that his fingers and toes felt numb when he turned back toward the barn and his future. He was confronted at the door by Missy, who whispered furiously, “I’ve been looking for you. We’ve all been looking for you.”

“But Missy—” he began.

“Don’t ‘But Missy’ me,” she hissed. “You’re embarrassing me. We were supposed to cut the cake with Roni, and you were nowhere to be found! And the band kept playing and saying, ‘Where’s the groom? Do we have a runner?’”

“I was looking at the stars on Christmas Eve at my wedding reception,” he said wearily. “I suppose I could get angry at you for not being there. But I’m not.”

“Let’s cut the cake, shall we?” she said after a long pause. She took him by the hand and led him back into the barn. “He was out there freezing and looking at stars,” Missy said in a voice loud and exasperated enough to make the crowd laugh. But he could see she wasn’t amused as they cut the cake.

Soneji kept smiling as they pushed pieces of cake into each other’s mouths, but Missy shoved a little too hard for his liking.

He kept smiling. He would let her get away with this kind of thing tonight, but not in the future. Missy would have to be taught not to diminish him in public. She would have to learn there were punishments for that.

The harsh fantasies that sparked in his brain then should have been enough to calm his anger. But when it was time for their first dance and Missy warned him against stepping on her hem and ruining everything, he had had enough.

As they danced, Soneji kept looking at his twice-bride’s eyes and then down at her neck, thinking once again how satisfying it would be to strangle Missy with his bare hands and how perfect it would be when Cheryl Lynn Wise finally took her rightful place in his cruel loving arms.

Chapter 92

Late Christmas afternoon found our family at Nana Mama’s, where we’d spent the previous day and evening after Maria and Jannie’s release from St. Anthony’s.

Mom and newborn were upstairs nursing. My grandmother was baking a ham and making garlic potato pancakes, the delicious smell of which competed with the odor of the Fraser fir tree in the front room. On the TV was a football game.

I was on the floor with my back to the Christmas tree and the opened presents, paying little attention to the game and playing with Damon, his new Tonka dump truck, and the little figurines from his Lego set. He had a grandma in the cab at the wheel of the truck and the other five figures seated in the dump bed with a stuffed little Saint Bernard he was calling Tilly for reasons that were unclear.

“Tilly nice dog,” Damon said.

“I can see that,” I said. “Why is she named Tilly?”

Damon shrugged. “She Tilly, Dad.”

That was about as logical as toddlers got, so I decided not to probe further. He got on his knees and began to push the toy truck around, making vroom-vroom noises. The doorbell rang.

The door opened and shut, and John Sampson peeked his head into the front room. “Merry Christmas!”

“Merry Christmas to you! Dinner in half an hour,” I said.

My little boy popped to his feet as Sampson entered with several wrapped gifts.

“Presents?” Damon said.

“He’s addicted,” I explained.

“Isn’t every kid on Christmas?” Sampson laughed and handed him a gift. “They’re for you, Damon.”

My son tore off the paper and looked puzzled for a second when the contents fell out. They looked like two large wool socks, but when he turned them over, he saw the faces of Big Bird and Cookie Monster and started giggling. “Puppets,” he said.

“That’s right,” Sampson said. He knelt down to put Damon’s hand into Cookie Monster’s body. The puppet was a little big for his arm, and the head flopped, but my son did not care.

“Nana!” he yelled and headed off toward the kitchen. “Look! I Cookie!”

I started laughing. “I Cookie.”

Sampson chuckled. “Where’s the new baby?”

“Upstairs with Maria,” I said. “They’ll be down soon. By the way, what happened after I left you with Fazio? He was saying something about some guy his stepbrother was afraid of?”

John’s eyebrows rose. “That’s correct. He remembered the guy being Irish, not Italian. A few minutes later, no prompting from me, he came up with a name, Sullivan, and said the guy owned a meat shop.”

“Like a butcher,” I said.

“Exactly,” Sampson said.

“You tell the NYPD detective?”

“Called Slattery on the spot. He was pretty happy, said he knew it had to be the Butcher of Sligo’s work.”

Chapter 93

Before I could respond to John, Maria came down the stairs with Jannie swaddled in her arms. All thoughts of work went by the wayside. And Sampson got to hold his goddaughter for the first time.

As long a body as Janelle had for being a two-day-old, she looked like a peanut in the big man’s arms.

“She’s gorgeous,” Sampson said. “Just a miracle, isn’t she?”

Maria smiled. “She is.”

“How you feeling?”

“Like my stomach got beaten by a two-by-four and I’m a whole lot tired,” Maria said, yawning. “She didn’t sleep well last night.”

Nana Mama called us to dinner. Big Bird and Cookie Monster were not allowed on Damon’s high chair, but my grandmother stopped his crying by propping up the puppets on the counter beside him.

She had used a Creole recipe on the Virginia ham that made it both sweet and a little fiery. Her potato and red onion pancakes came out perfectly crispy on the outside and savory on the inside. The green beans roasted with slab bacon chips were a vegan’s nightmare and a carnivore’s dream.

“That’s the best Christmas dinner I’ve ever had,” Sampson said, putting his napkin down after consuming a gargantuan quantity of food.

Nana Mama grinned. “Same thing you said last year and the year before that and the year before that.”

“What can I say? You keep outdoing yourself.”

“You do,” Maria said.

I said, “Absolutely, Nana.”

That pleased my grandmother even more.

“I have an announcement,” Maria said as I helped serve pie and ice cream.

“You’re not pregnant again already, are you?” Sampson said.

“Ha-ha,” Maria said and gently punched his arm before looking at me. “I’m going to leave St. Anthony’s when I’m ready to go back to work.”

That was a big surprise to me, since she’d been working at the hospital since we’d met and always said she loved it.

“And go where?” I asked.

“There’s a social work position open where I grew up, in Potomac Gardens.”

Nana Mama winced. “That’s a tougher place than you remember.”

“Which is exactly why I’m needed there,” Maria said, gazing at me. “I think I can do more good in Potomac Gardens than I can at St. Anthony’s.”

I could see the conviction in her eyes and hear the passion in her voice. Feeling concern as much as pride over her decision, I said, “As long as there’s ample security for you, I’m all for it.”

Maria beamed at me. “The position doesn’t start for another three months, and I’ll make sure about the security.”

“Perfect,” I said, though again, there was hesitation in my thoughts. Potomac Gardens was one of the roughest projects in the District of Columbia.

After the dishes were cleared, we retreated to the front room and finished the football game. We watched A Christmas Story until Sampson had to leave.

Nana Mama went upstairs cackling after Santa told Ralphie that he’d shoot his eye out and then put his boot in the kid’s face, her favorite scene.

Damon fell asleep in my lap during the scene about the Scott Farkus affair, Maria’s favorite. She fell asleep on my shoulder with Jannie in her lap before Ralphie actually got his BB gun.

After watching all the way to the scene of the beheading of the roast duck during the Christmas dinner at the Chinese restaurant, I clicked off the TV with the remote. I sat and looked at the lights on the tree, feeling Damon shift in my lap and hearing Maria breathe with her mouth open. Jannie made fussy little newborn noises.

I felt tears come to my eyes as I gazed up at the angel ornament that always sat atop Nana Mama’s Christmas tree.

“Thank you for my family,” I whispered. “Keep them safe in the coming year.”

Chapter 94

By ten a.m. on New Year’s Eve day, snow was falling steadily in the Pine Barrens. A couple of inches of it already coated the pines and the ground when Soneji drove his brother-in-law Marty’s Dodge Ram pickup up the steep two-track to his house.

He stopped shy of the gate and the multiple NO TRESPASSING signs, looking ahead into the yard. Seeing no tracks and nothing out of place since his visit with Bunny Maddox, Soneji got out, unlocked the gate, and pushed it open, noticing that the length of rope he’d practiced with was still hanging around the post there and was clad in snow.

He got in the truck, pulled into the yard, backed up to the porch, and turned the engine off. He lowered the window. The gentle tapping of the snowflakes deadened all other sound.

Soneji closed his eyes a second, thankful for this peace and quiet after the wedding and their three-day honeymoon at Missy’s cousin’s condo in the Poconos. The sex aside, Missy had yammered so much about all the changes to be put into effect after their marriage restart that he’d thought about hitting her over the head with a hammer at one point and cutting her vocal cords at several more.

In the end, he said he had to help an old friend do some carpentry work on his lake house to satisfy a real estate agent who wanted to list the place. Marty offered him the truck, saying he could use his Cadillac in the meantime. And Soneji told Missy not to worry, that he’d be back long before the start of Trish’s annual New Year’s Eve party.

At the back of the pickup, he lifted the window on the cap and lowered the tailgate so he could get at the eight-foot lengths of two-by-four pine studs stacked on top of drywall sheets. Soneji got the lumber into the basement in four trips.

The drywall was trickier to handle and demanded a difficult negotiation of the steep staircase. But once he had the method down, he quickly got two more sheets into position and stepped out onto his porch for the final one.

“Halloo the house!”

Soneji stopped short, looked over the truck cap, and saw a woman puffing and trudging toward him in the snow. She was in her late forties, doughy, dowdy, and wore an old navy pea jacket over a peasant dress and boots.

A bright, multicolored knit wool cap sat on her head at an angle. A matching scarf hung loosely around her shoulders.

Holding up mittens in another riot of color, the perimenopausal hippie stopped about forty feet from his truck and said, “So sorry to intrude, but I got myself stuck in the ditch a good way up from the bottom of your steep driveway.”

“Why were you coming up my steep driveway?” Soneji asked. “There’s a No Trespassing sign on each side.”

Chapter 95

“My mistake! My mistake!” the woman said and then chuckled. “Had directions to my sister-in-law’s place somewhere out here and I got turned around and saw your fresh tracks and started after them to ask directions. Do you know her? Lainey Dodge?”

“Can’t say I do.”

“Too bad. Anyway, I was wondering if you might help me get out of the ditch? Or let me use your phone to call a tow truck?”

“I don’t have a phone yet,” Soneji said, seeing new possibilities in this previously unwanted visit. “Let’s go take a look at your predicament and I’ll see if I can get you out.”

He came down off the porch, strode up to her, grinning, and stuck out his gloved hand. “Gary Murphy.”

She pushed back her hat, revealing sweaty hair, and shook his hand. “Cynthia Owens. My friends call me Cyn-Cyn.”

“Okay, Cyn-Cyn, lead on.”

Owens started back. “I’m clueless with maps and compasses and such. You?”

“Also terrible with navigation,” he said, though that was far from true.

“Didn’t help myself coming out here without better tires,” Owens said, almost to the gate with Soneji a few yards behind now. “But I’m one of those folks just likes to dive right in once I decide. Lainey said at Christmas she had a place rented in the Pine Barrens for New Year’s Eve, and I woke up early this morning, fed the cats, and thought, Why not go? Make it a surprise for my cousin that I actually showed up for once.”

She chuckled and shook her head. Soneji sniffed something familiar floating off her and tried not to scowl. He hated cats. He hated the smell of cat people.

She passed through the gate and she shook her right rainbow mitten. “Typical Cyn-Cyn Owens move. If I’d been born a hundred fifty years ago, I’d have just jumped on a wagon train and headed west. Oregon trail, you know?”

Soneji couldn’t believe it. He’d come in search of a little quiet time away from Missy, and here he’d traded one chatty Cathy for another.

Then he saw the practice rope there, looped over the gate post. He reached out and snagged the rope as he walked through the opening in the fence.

With all the newly fallen and still falling snow, it was almost too easy for him to move up quick and silent behind the woman as she jabbered on about people who were supposed to be at her sister-in-law’s party.

Soneji no longer cared. He was set on sating a sudden and overwhelming need.

For the second time, Soneji felt the rush, the adrenaline, as he flipped the rope over the woman’s foolish cap, nose, and chin. He felt it settle at her throat and yanked back viciously.

Owens made a gargling cry of alarm as her boots slid out from under her on the slippery drive. As she crashed down, her full weight came against the rope, choking her even more.

“Nnnnn-aaa!” she grunted. “Nnnnn-aaa!”

Soneji wrenched the rope tighter, smelling the feline stench all over her now.

“Nnnn-aa,” she grunted again, weaker this time.

“What’s that, Cyn-Cyn?” Soneji said. “Cat got your tongue?”

Her mittens flailed at her throat, and she made guttural noises in her windpipe for almost fifteen seconds. Then the sounds stopped. The mittens slowly sagged, followed by her shoulders, and finally her head.

Despite the cat smell, Soneji felt the thrill of strangulation, so close, so intimate, exploding through him as strong as it had when he’d throttled the real estate agent. He let loose his hold on the rope and allowed the cat lady’s corpse to collapse into the snow.

Soneji stood there, chest heaving, as happy as he’d ever been.

Then he caught the scent of something fouler than cat and realized the woman had shit herself dying. That completely destroyed the mood, the elation, the celebration.

He needed to get rid of the body and its... stenches. He thought about going to get the truck, then decided to just drag her carcass by the rope already around her neck. He’d leave drag marks, but the snow was intensifying. The drag marks would be gone within the hour.

Once he had her inside the shed, he’d get the truck and pull her car out of the ditch, bring it up, and put it under tarps until he could move her vehicle where it would never be linked to the house.

“Ground’s going to be tough to crack today, Cyn-Cyn,” Soneji said, pulling hard on the rope, squeezing her neck, causing her head to loll and her damn hat to fall off.

He cursed and grabbed the hat, which reeked of cat and made him want to dry-heave, and stuck it back on her head. He took up the rope once more and slid the body across the snow, up the drive. “I’m probably going to need to use a pickax first.”

That meant no progress on his secret room. Not today. He felt frustrated.

Then again, he had managed to get all the remaining building supplies for the room into the basement. That counted.

The cat woman walking into his life also counted. She had confirmed his love of strangulation. The feline and crap odors aside, he thought that choking her had almost felt better than the first time with the real estate agent.

As he dragged Owens’s body through the gate and up the slight rise toward the shed and the house, he told himself that these kinds of one-off events, crimes of opportunity, just might be enough to check his hunger, his need to kill, while he took his sweet time learning about Cheryl Lynn Wise and the heavy security around her so he could execute the perfect kidnapping.

After all, Soneji was his own monster now.

He would no longer study and role-play the homicidal greats of yore.

“Let them study me,” Soneji said and chortled. “Let them all study me now.”