Return of the Spider

Chapter 96

I heard footsteps coming down the stairs, shaking me from the trance I’d been in, reading Soneji’s kill diary inside his secret room in the Pine Barrens cabin.

I looked at the last line I’d read: Let them all study me now.

“Alex? You still in there?” Sampson called. “We’ve been outside three hours.”

I shook my head, set Profiles in Homicidal Genius aside with a quarter of the pages still unread, and stood up. “Felt like weeks to me.”

“The dogs have located more bodies,” John said. “Going to be a chore identifying them.”

I shook my head. “Probably not. In his book, he names several of the victims and describes where he buried them. There’s probably more in the pages I didn’t get to. One will be a woman named Cynthia Owens. And you don’t want to know the names of two of them.”

Sampson frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

I gazed around at the bins. “These are murder kits, John. Specific kits assembled so Soneji could practice the methods of serial killers he admired. TBS is the Boston Strangler. NS is the Night Stalker. ZK is the Zodiac Killer, GRK is the Green River Killer, JWG is John Wayne Gacy, and SOS—”

Mahoney came pounding down the stairs. “We’ve got another one, and I need all hands on deck.”

Realizing I desperately needed fresh air, I took a last look at the bins, the macabre treasures, and Soneji’s memoir. When I ducked out of the room, Mahoney and Sampson studied me.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Ned said.

“I have, in a way. Quite a few, in fact,” I said, jabbing my thumb over my shoulder. “It’s all in there.”

“All what?”

Sampson said, “The names and burial locations of Soneji’s victims.”

“And all the evidence against Soneji — and us,” I said, feeling gutted again. I wanted to cry or rage at everything that had changed so completely inside the spider’s nest.

“Evidence against us? Who is us?” Sampson demanded.

I gazed at John, then Ned. “A long time ago, Soneji duped the FBI, the Virginia state police, the Maryland state police, and the Pennsylvania state police. But most of all, he duped DC Metro’s Homicide team, specifically me and John, when we were junior detectives on our earliest cases.”

Sampson’s expression turned hard. “I do not know what you’re talking about, Alex.”

“I’ll explain it in full on the drive back to DC, but for now, Ned, I don’t think John and I should have anything further to do with this investigation.”

Mahoney rubbed his jaw. “What? Why? Stop talking in opaque loops.”

“We can’t be a part of this because we are compromised,” I said. I felt closed in and pushed past them, heading toward the stairs. “Like it or not, culpable or not, Sampson and I had a role in a lot of what happened in this cabin.”

John came after me as I climbed up from the basement. “What in God’s name are you talking about, Alex?” he yelled.

I ignored him, wanting cold air in my lungs and something in my stomach before I explained it all. He stayed right behind me, and Mahoney followed him. When we were all out on the front porch, I gazed across Soneji’s yard with new and stunned eyes.

“We could have stopped him,” I said. “A long time ago.”

My anguish must have shown on my face because when Sampson spoke again, it was in a lower voice and with more empathy. “What did you mean when you said I didn’t want to know the names of two of the people buried here? Please, brother, you’re upsetting me.”

“And me,” Mahoney said.

“A nineteen-year-old named Joyce Adams was evidently the first to be tortured, killed, and buried here,” I said.

“Joyce Adams?” Sampson said, squinting. “I have no idea who—”

“She was a freshman who disappeared from Princeton University a long time ago, more than a decade before Maggie Rose Dunne was kidnapped from the Washington Day School,” I said. “Bunny Maddox is buried here too.”

Sampson blinked and shook his head slowly as he turned from me. “No.”

“Yes, John,” I said firmly. “And I believe ballistics will prove that the forty-four-caliber Bulldog pistol down in that room fired the bullets that killed Conrad Talbot and the two hospital techs. The rope we found in the van? Soneji stole it from Diggs’s game pole to use on Brenda Miles. It was all an elaborate frame job designed to ensure that evidence of Soneji’s early killings pointed straight at Diggs and Beech.”

Looking into the middle distance, my oldest friend shook his head again, then faced me. “Diggs kept telling us he was innocent.”

“I remember.”

“Everyone said the evidence against him was ironclad. Jury. Appeals courts. Everyone.”

“Every single one,” I replied.

Sampson’s defenses broke down then. There was a tremor in his voice and a glassiness in his eyes when he choked out, “We helped put an innocent man...”

“We did,” I said, and the damage to my reputation and my belief in the judicial system felt completely and utterly irrevocable.

Chapter 97

We took turns driving back to Washington, both of us silent, the weight of what we’d done and hadn’t done so long ago pressing in around us.

Eamon Diggs had proclaimed his innocence throughout his years on death row and all the way through the appeals process, or almost all the way. He’d been waiting to hear if the U.S. Supreme Court would hear his case when he was stabbed to death in a prison fight.

Afterward, Sampson and I told the relatives of his victims, including Bunny’s brother and Conrad Talbot’s parents, that in a savage way, justice had been served.

The memories made me sick. The memories made me question whether we had made other deadly mistakes in the years we’d been investigating homicides since the white-van murders.

I thought about how painstaking Soneji’s framing of Diggs had been. I recalled his descriptions of how he’d hunted Bunny Maddox when she’d tried to escape, how he’d strangled Brenda Miles. How Cynthia Owens had died just because she’d had the bad luck to step into this psychopath’s lair, and how he had planned to abduct Cheryl Lynn Wise long before he’d set his sights on nine-year-old Maggie Rose Dunne and her friend Michael “Shrimpie” Goldberg.

I thought back to that Christmas right after Jannie was born, remembered how Maria, Damon, and my infant daughter had all fallen asleep in my arms on the couch at Nana Mama’s and how I’d looked at the angel on the tree’s top and prayed for my family to be kept safe.

But that had not happened.

After a Virginia grand jury indicted Diggs and Beech for capital crimes, Sampson and I helped the NYPD and the FBI in the hunt for the Butcher of Sligo. Michael Sullivan had eventually come to our home and confronted me, looking for a woman who’d told Maria that the Butcher had raped her.

The following evening, I went to Potomac Gardens to pick up Maria, and as I hugged her hello after a long day’s work, one of Sullivan’s henchmen shot her. The love of my life and the mother of my two young kids died in my arms.

The children and I moved in with Nana Mama. She helped me raise Damon and Jannie.

But Maria’s death sent me into a long, slow, haunted downward spiral.

I became obsessed with catching killers, and I put the hunt for them above everything else in my life. Eventually I became Metro PD’s deputy chief of detectives and then a profiler for the FBI, where I partnered with Ned Mahoney in the Behavioral Science Unit.

During those years, I am ashamed to admit that I neglected my kids too many times and I neglected myself all the time. Most nights I went to bed feeling like a hollow man, like I had little to live for outside of my work and providing for my children.

And now, as Sampson pulled up in front of my house on Fifth Street, I felt the same way, hollowed out, as if all the work I’d done since Maria’s murder were tainted by my involvement in the wrongful conviction of Eamon Diggs and by my inability to see through the veils of deceit Soneji had hung.

Sampson said, “I feel like I’ve been mugged, hit over the head by this. I don’t know what to say or do about it.”

“I feel the same way, partner,” I said, getting out. “I’ll call you later.”

I went into the house and found Bree watching the evening news and Nana Mama doing a crossword.

Bree said, “I thought you wouldn’t be showing up until long after midnight.”

“We had to leave the investigation. Turns out John and I are compromised.”

“What?” my grandmother said, setting her puzzle aside.

“Compromised how?” my wife said.

“Hold that thought,” I said. I went and got a beer, then sat down and told them.

When I finished, there were four empty beer cans on the coffee table, all of them mine, and shock and silence in the room.

“I don’t know what to do to change things,” I said. “To make it right.”

“You can always make some good out of the worst situations,” Nana Mama said.

“Diggs spent nearly twenty years in prison unjustly, and now he’s dead,” I said sharply. “There’s no fixing that.”

“I’m aware,” she replied calmly. “But get outside your head and all this nonsense about the destruction of your reputation. It’s tarnished a little, but that happens to the armor of any great knight. Go play some of your Gershwin. You’ll figure out what to do.”

Bree gazed at me with a degree of sadness. “That’s probably not a bad idea, babe,” she said. “A better one than having another beer, anyway.”

I shrugged and walked, wobbling a little, through the house and out to the porch, where I sat at the piano and once again tried to play An American in Paris.

It was so bad, I almost gave up and went to the fridge for a fifth beer. But I knew in my heart that Bree was right, booze was not a good answer, so I kept playing.

Slowly, as sections of the piece came together, thoughts of Soneji, of Diggs, and of Maria slipped away until I was thinking of nothing but the music.

I don’t know how long I sat there playing.

But when I came back to reality, I knew exactly what I had to do to start to remove the tarnish on my armor and fight the pull of the downward spiral that threatened to swallow me for the second time in my life.

Chapter 98

Three days after leaving the Pine Barrens, John Sampson and I took a long drive to the southwestern tip of Virginia and the Red Onion State Prison.

One of the commonwealth’s two supermax facilities, the Red Onion squatted in a large clearing in a forested unincorporated area near the town of Pound.

In aerial photos I’d seen, the prison was laid out in four repeating geometric patterns, like the design of an American Indian blanket. Seen from the parking area, the facility looked like what it was: a place for dangerous criminals to be caged for the safety of inmates in other correctional facilities.

“They’ve got the poor bastard with the worst of the worst these days,” Sampson said when we climbed out of his new Ford F-150 into ungodly heat. He loved that truck.

Before I could reply, I heard a man say, “Dr. Cross? Detective Sampson?”

We turned and saw a sharp-suited man hurrying toward us with an awkward gait; he carried a briefcase and kept pushing a pair of heavy black-framed eyeglasses up the bridge of his nose. He was in his late forties and wore a nice suit, but that move with the glasses and his wild tousle of now-graying hair gave him away.

“Ryan Davis,” I said, shaking his hand. “I’m glad you could come, Counselor.”

“It’s the least I could do,” he said. “Except for a little gray at the temples, you guys look the same. I mean, it’s kind of amazing. Like it all could have happened yesterday.”

“Some ways, it feels like it did,” I said. “Shall we?”

We went to the gate, showed our credentials, and turned over our weapons while Davis’s briefcase was searched. Then we were led through six different security doors and gates before being met by Warden Daniel Celt, a tall whippet of a man in his fifties.

“Does he know we’re coming?” Sampson asked.

“He has no idea,” the warden replied.

I said, “And he’s heard nothing from the outside world?”

“Been in solitary for breaking the rules,” Celt said. “Twenty-three hours a day in his cell. One hour of exercise in the yard, which is where he’ll be coming from.”

Celt led us to an interior room with booths that faced bulletproof glass.

I said, “Given the circumstances, can we meet with him without the glass?”

The warden hesitated, then nodded and took us to a second room with a long table and benches made of concrete. Eyebolts jutted up out of the other side of the table and the floor.

The warden left through another door. A few minutes later, it opened.

A slight, older man in an orange jumpsuit with sweaty gray hair, glasses, and a furious expression shuffled in. An armed guard followed. A short chain linked the handcuffs he wore to a leather belt around his waist. A longer chain linked the cuffs around his ankles.

He sat, rage on his face, glasses fogged from coming out of the heat and into the air-conditioning. He said nothing as the guard connected his restraints to the eyebolts in the floor and on the other side of the table.

When the guard left, the inmate said angrily, “Can’t see you for nothing. But I told the guard and the warden, I don’t want to talk to no lawyer, much less three. Got no use for goddamned lawyers and I’m missing my fresh-air time.”

“Mr. Beech,” Ryan Davis said. “You probably don’t remember me, but I was your attorney when you were held in the state police barracks in Coatesville.”

“Here,” I said, “let me clean your glasses before we go on. Is that okay?”

“Go ahead,” Harold Beech said, sounding even more infuriated.

I took the glasses, wiped them clean, and put them back on his face.

Beech blinked, looked at Davis. “You’re right. I don’t remember you.”

“How about us?” Sampson asked.

The inmate stared at each of us in turn and then nodded, stony. “Cross and Sampson. You put me here.”

“We did,” I said. “And now we’re going to get you out.”

Chapter 99

Shaking his head slowly, Harold Beech glared at me, Sampson, and Davis, then snarled, “Don’t you be effing with me now, giving me hope like that. I been effed on hope and every appeal for decades. I just can’t—”

“It’s different this time, Mr. Beech,” Davis, the attorney, said.

Sampson said, “We’ve uncovered new and incontrovertible evidence that we believe exonerates you from the accessory-to-murder convictions in the deaths of Conrad Talbot, Selena DeMille, Alice Ways, Brenda Miles, and Bunny Maddox.”

“It’s going to take a little while for the old DNA samples to be matched to the bodies found recently in the Pine Barrens,” Davis cautioned. “And I have to file motions based on the new evidence to get us a court hearing. But we are all confident that you will soon be a free man, Mr. Beech.”

The anger began to leave the inmate’s face, and tears welled in his eyes. “Is this real, man? Am I dreaming?”

“It’s real, sir,” I said. “No dream.”

“I was framed. Isn’t that right?”

“You were framed,” Sampson said. “Clearly.”

“You were caught in the web of a diabolical spider named Gary Soneji,” I said. “We all were.”

After we gave him all the nuts and bolts — who Soneji was and who he became and how he had slowly and meticulously planted the evidence that had sent him to prison for life — Beech swallowed hard and stared at us, the anger returning.

“Eamon,” he said.

Both Sampson and I hung our heads. “We know,” John said.

“He was innocent, just like he always said.”

“He was innocent of the white-van killings,” I said, hearing my own voice shake. “And we’re never going to get over that, Mr. Beech. Never. We know our work helped lead to his wrongful imprisonment, which led to his murder. It’s crushing to us.”

“Beyond crushing,” Sampson said. “Like buckshot in our hearts.”

I said, “Soneji has been dead for years now, but it turns out he still has the power to inflict pain and suffering. And we want to end your pain and suffering by helping you get free.”

Beech sat quietly for a moment, seemingly lost in thoughts of a different world.

“I been in a long time,” he said hoarsely, emotion in his voice. “Spent more of my life behind bars than out.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“How do I learn to live outside prison?” he asked. “I’m too old and broken to work in a granite quarry. And I got nothing else to give.”

Davis said, “You’ve given enough, Harry. Which is why Dr. Cross and Detective Sampson contacted me. I haven’t worked as a criminal defense lawyer in decades. I’m a private litigator in Philadelphia, a very good one. If you agree, I intend to sue in multiple states and jurisdictions on your behalf for wrongful imprisonment and demand reparations for all the years you have served unjustly.”

I said, “We will testify for you. Explain how Soneji framed you, the whole thing, and show them the evidence, including a journal written in his own hand.”

“And because of that, you will likely get millions,” the attorney said.

“What?” Beech said, stunned.

“True,” Sampson said. “You’ll be taken care of for the rest of your life, Mr. Beech.”

Chapter 100

On the five-hour drive home, John and I felt a lot better than we had coming down that morning. It was terrible that Harold Beech had spent decades behind bars for crimes he didn’t commit. But we were putting an end to his incarceration.

We decided that, while we could never forgive ourselves for our role in Eamon Diggs’s imprisonment and violent death, we would be men enough to travel to Pittsburgh, see Diggs’s family, explain what had happened, and recommend they sue as well.

As we neared my home, Sampson said, “It does make you wonder, though.”

“Wonder what?”

“How things would have been different if Soneji had been caught at the beginning, after Joyce Adams and before Conrad Talbot.”

“Whole lot fewer people dying needlessly,” I said, sighing and feeling the guilt of that. “Soneji was a rabid dog, and he was in front of us from early on. I mean, he was right there in the Charles School faculty meeting the day after he shot Conrad Talbot.”

“And at Washington Day after the computer science teacher and her husband and baby died on the Beltway after he sabotaged the brake linkage.”

“Cold,” I said, shaking my head. “And he was right there the whole time when Maggie Rose and Shrimpie were taken. Right under our nose for so long. He was so ordinary, so unremarkable, he was invisible, just like he always wanted to be.”

“Remember his wife? Missy?”

“It was years before she knew that he was working part-time at Washington Day. Mr. Secrets, she called him, and she was right.”

All of it nagged at me as I trudged up the steps to our house after Sampson dropped me off. Bree wasn’t home from work yet. Ali was in his room studying.

I found Nana Mama in the kitchen, getting a leftover casserole out of the refrigerator. “You made good time,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, taking a seat at the kitchen island.

“How’d Harold Beech take it?”

“Angry at life before we told him. Astonished at life by the time we left.”

“That must have made you feel good.”

I nodded. “It did. But I can’t help wondering if it’s enough. Honestly, it makes me question if I want to go on being a detective. I mean, my reputation, my career — it was all built on lies, Nana.”

My grandmother set the casserole dish down on the stovetop. “First of all, getting Harold Beech out of prison is not enough. It’s a start, but you’ll have to keep at it, doing good deeds in his name and in Eamon Diggs’s memory. And second, enough of this woe-is-me stuff. You were born to be a detective, Alex Cross. You were born to right wrongs.”

“Even my own?”

“Especially your own,” she said. “That’s the mark of a real man.”

For reasons I couldn’t explain, I felt overwhelmed at that. I went to her, leaned over, and hugged her tiny little bird body tight.

“What’s this about?” Nana said, sounding baffled and patting me on the back.

“I love you for always setting me straight, for always seeing a smart way forward.” I pulled back and looked down at her. “I don’t tell you that enough. I don’t know what I would have done without you after Maria died. And I don’t know what I’d do without you now.”

“Well, thank you for all that. My God,” she said, wiping tears off her cheeks after I kissed her on the head. “And I love you too, Alex. But I’ll have you know, according to my cardiologist, I’m not going anywhere anytime soon.”

I thought of everything I’d been through that day and started chuckling.

“What are you laughing at?”

“I don’t know. I’ve spent years going after evil spiders in all sizes and shapes. And here you are, this little old lady in her nineties, and you are the strongest person I’ve ever known, and you remember everything. You’re like... you’re like an elephant or something.”

Nana Mama laughed. “I’d say I’m more like a tortoise these days. But a lot of them do live to be a hundred years old or more.”

“I’ve heard that,” I said, hugging her again. “Lucky me.”