Along Came a Spider

Katherine Rose suffers from the same disease, you know. Most of the movie people, the sports icons, they do, too. Millions are cheering for them, you understand. They’re telling these people how ’special’ and how ’brilliant’ they are. And some of the stars forget any limitations they might have, forget the hard work that got them to the plateau originally. I did. At the time. That is precisely why I was caught.
I believed I could escape from the McDonald’s
! Just as I had always escaped before. I would just dabble in a little ’spree’ killing, then get away. I wanted to sample all the high-impact crimes, Alex. A little Bundy, a little Geary, a little Manson, Whitman, Gilmore.”
    “Do you feel omnipotent now? Since you’re older and wiser?” I asked Soneji. He was being ironic. I assumed I could be, too.
    “I’m the closest thing to it you’ll ever see. I’m a way to understand the concept, no?”
    He smiled that blank killer smile of his again. I wanted to hit him. Gary Murphy was a tragic and almost likable sort of man. Soneji was hateful, pure evil. The human monster; the human beast.
    “When you scouted the Goldberg and Dunne houses, were you at the height of your powers?”
Were you omnipotent then, shithead
?
    “No, no, no. As
you
know, Doctor, I was already becoming sloppy. I’d read too many news accounts of my ’perfect’ killing in Condon Terrace. ’No traces, no clues, the perfect killer!’ Even I was impressed.”
    “What went wrong out in Potomac?” I thought I knew the answer. I needed him to confirm it. He shrugged. “I was being followed, of course.”
    Here we go
, I thought to myself.
The “watcher
.”
    “You didn’t know it at the time?” I asked Soneji.
    “Of course not.” He frowned at the question. “I realized I was being followed much later. Then it was confirmed at the trial.”
    “How was that? How did you find out you were being followed?”
    Soneji stared into my eyes. He seemed to be staring straight through to the back of my skull. He considered me beneath him. I was just a vessel for his outpouring. But he found me more interesting than the others to talk to. I didn’t know whether to feel honored or defiled. He was also curious about what I knew, or what I didn’t know.
    “Let me stop to make a point,” he said. “This one is important to me. I have secrets to tell you. Lots of big and little secrets. Dirty secrets, juicy secrets. I’m going to give you one secret now. Do you know why?”
    “Elementary, my dear Gary,” I told him. “It’s hell for you to be under
the control
of others. You need to be in charge.”
    “That’s very good, Doctor Detective. But I do have some neat things to trade. Crimes that go all the way back to when I was twelve and thirteen years old. There are major unsolved crimes that go back that far. Believe me. I have a treasure trove of goodies to share with you.”
    “I understand,” I told him. “I can’t wait to hear about them.”
    “You always
did
understand. All you have to do is convince the other zombies to walk and chew Juicy Fruit at the same time.”
    “The
other
zombies?” I smiled at his slip.
    “Sorry, sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude. Can you convince the zombies? You know who I mean.
You
have less respect for them than I do.”
    That was true enough. I’d have to convince Chief of Detectives Pittman for one. “You’ll help me out? Give me something concrete? I have to find out what happened to the little girl. Let her parents have some peace at last.”
    “All right. I
will
do that,” Soneji said. It was so simple in the end.
    You wait. And you wait. That’s the way it goes in almost every police investigation. You ask thousands of questions, literally thousands. You fill entire file cabinets with unnecessary paperwork. Then you ask more questions. You follow countless leads that go nowhere. Then something goes right for a change. It happens every once in a while. It was happening now. A payout for thousands of hours of work. A reward for coming to see Gary again and again.
    “I didn’t notice any surveillance back then,” Gary Soneji continued. “And none of what I’m going to tell you about happened near the Sanders house. It occurred on Sorrell Avenue in Potomac. In front of the Goldberg house, in fact.”
    Suddenly I was tired of his chest-beating games. I had to know what he knew. I was getting close.
Talk to me, you little fucker
.
    “Go on,” I said. “What