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My heart was out of control, beating, banging,
thudding loudly inside my chest. I didn't want
to be here, to see any more of Soneji's handiwork, his
nasty surprises.
The cellar of his house. The symbolic place of
all Gary at childhood nightmares. The cellar
Blood. Trains. The cellar in the Murphy
house was small and neat. I looked around. The
trains were gone! There had been a train set down
here the first time we came to the house.
I didn't see any signs of the girl, though.
Nothing looked out
of place. We threw open work cabinets.
Sampson yanked open the washer, then the clothes
dryer.
There was an unpainted wooden door to one side
of the water heater and a fiberglass laundry sink.
There was no sign of blood in the sink, no
bloodstained clothes. Was there a way outside? Had
the little girl run away when her father came to the
house?
The closet! I yanked open the door. Roni
Murphy was bound with rope and gagged with old rags.
Her blue eyes were large with fear. She was alive!
She was shaking badly He didn't kill her, but
he had killed her childhood, just as his had been
killed. A few years before, he had done the same
thing with a girl called Maggie Rose. "Oh,
sweet girl," I whispered as I untied
her and took out the cloth gag her father had stuffed
into her mouth. "Everything is all right now. Everything
is okay, Roni. You're okay now."
What I didn't say was, Yourfather loved you
enough not to kill you -- but he wants to kill everything and
everyone else. "You're okay, you're okay, baby
Everything is okay," I lied to the poor little girl.
"Everything is okay now."
Sure it is.
Chapter 3 6
ONCE upon a long time ago, Nana Mama had
been the one who had taught me to play the piano.
In those days, the old upright sat like a constant
invitation to make music in our family room. One
afternoon after school, she heard me trying to play a little
boogie-woogie. I was eleven years old at the
time. I remember it well, as if it were yesterday,
Nana swept in like a soft breeze and sat
next to me on the piano bench, just the way I do now
with Jannie and Damon. "I think you're a little
ahead of yourself with that cool jazz stuff, Alex.
Let me show you something beautiful. Let me show you
where you might start your music career."
She made me practice my Czerny finger
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exercises every day until I was ready
to play and appreciate Mozart, Beethoven,
Handel, Haydn -- all from Nana Mama. She
taught me to play from age eleven until I was
eighteen, when I left for school at
Georgetown and then Johns Hopkins. By that
time, I was ready to play that cool jazz stuff, and
to know what I was playing, and even know why I liked
what I liked.
When I came home from Delaware, very late,
I found Nana
on the porch and she was playing the piano. I
hadn't heard her play like that in many years.
She didn't hear me come in, so I stood in the
doorway and watched her for several minutes. She was
playing Mozart and she still had a feeling for the music
that she loved. She'd once told me how sad it was
that no one knew where Mozart was buried.
When she finished, I whispered, "Bravo.
Bravo. That's just beautiful."
Nana turned to me. "Silly old woman,"
she said and wiped away a tear I hadn't been able
to see from where I was standing. "Not silly at all,"
I said. I sat down and held her in my arms
on the piano bench. "Old yes, really old and
cranky, but never silly"
I was just thinking," she said, "about that third movement
in Mozart's Concerto No. 21, and then I had a
memory of how I used to be able to play it, a
long, long time ago." She sighed. "So I had
myself a nice cry. Felt real good, too."
"Sorry to intrude," I said as I continued to hold
her close.
I loveyou, Alex," mygrandmother whispered.
"Canyou still play 'Clair de Lune"? Play
Debussy for me."
And so with Nana Mama close beside me, I
played.
Chapter 3 7
THE GROAN-AND-GRUNT WORK continued the
following morning.
First thing, Kyle faxed me several stories about
his agent, Thomas Pierce. The stories came from
cities where Mr. Smith had committed murders:
Atlanta, St. Louis, Seattle, San
Francisco, London, Hamburg,
Frankfurt, Rome. Pierce had helped
to capture a murderer in Fort Lauderdale in the
spring, un-
related to Smith.
Other headlines:
FOR THOMAS PIERCE, THE CRIME
SCENE IS IN THE MIND
MURDER EXPERT HERE IN ST. LOUIS
THOMAS PIERCE -- GETTING
INTO KILLERS'HEADS
NOT ALL PATTERN KILLERS ARE
BRILLIANT -- BUT AGENT THOMAS
PIERCE IS
MURDERS OF THE MIND, THE MOST
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CHILLING MURDERS OF ALL
If I didn't know better, I'd have thought
Kyle was trying to make mejealous of Pierce. I
wasn'tjealous. I didn't have the time for it right now.
A little before noon, I drove out to Lorton
Prison, one of my least favorite places in the
charted universe.
Everything moves slowly inside a high-security
federal prison. it is like being held underwater, like
being drowned by unseen human hands. It happens over
days, over years, sometimes over decades.
At an administrative max facility,
prisoners are kept in their cells twenty-two
to twenty-three hours a day The boredom is
incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't served time.
It is not imaginable. Gary Soneji
told me that, created the drowning metaphor when I
interviewed him years back at Lorton.
He also thanked me for giving him the experience of
being in prison, and he said that one day he would
reciprocate if he possibly could. More and more,
I had the sense that my time had come, and I had
to guess what the excruciating payback might be.
It was not imaginable. I could almost feel myself
drowning as I paced inside a small
administrative room near the warden's office on
the fifth floor
at Lorton.
I was waiting for a double murderer named Jamal
Autry. Autry claimed to have important information
about Soneji. He was known inside Lorton as the
Real Deal. He was a predator, a
three-hundred-pound pimp who had murdered two
teenage prostitutes in Baltimore.
The Real Deal was brought to me in restraints.
He was escorted into the small, tidy office by two
armed guards with billy clubs. "You Alex
Cross? Gah-damn. Now ain't that somethin',"
Jamal Autry said with a middle-South twang.
He smiled crookedly when he spoke. The lower
half of his face sagged like the mouth and jaw
of a bottom feeder. He had strange, uneven
piggy eyes that were hard to look at. He continued
to smile as if he were about to be paroled today, or had
just won the inmates' lottery.
I told the two guards that I wanted to talk
to Autry alone.
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