Along Came a Spider

happened out in Potomac? What did you see at the Goldbergs’?
Who
did you see?”
    “I drove by there one of those nights before the kidnapping. A man was walking on the sidewalk. I thought nothing of him. It never registered until I saw the same man at the trial.”
    Soneji stopped talking for a moment. Was he playing again? I didn’t think so. He stared at me as if he were looking right into my soul.
He knows who I am. He knows me, perhaps better than I know myself
.
    What did he want from me? Was I a substitute for something missing from his childhood? Why had I been chosen for this horrific job?
    “Who was the man you recognized at the trial?” I asked Gary Soneji.
    “It was the Secret Service agent. It was
Devine
. He and his pal Chakely must have seen me watching the Goldberg and Dunne houses. They were the ones who followed me. They took precious Maggie Rose!
They
got the ransom in Florida. You should have been looking for cops all this time.
Two cops
murdered the little girl.”

CHAPTER 75

    MY HUNCH about Devine and Chakely had been right after all. Soneji/Murphy was the only eye-witness, and he’d confirmed it. Now we had to move.
    I had to personally reopen the Dunne-Goldberg case — and with news that no one in Washington would want to hear.
    I decided to talk to the FBI first…
Two cops had murdered Maggie Rose
. The investigation had to be opened up again. The kidnapping hadn’t been solved the first time. Now the whole mess was going to blow up once more.
    I dropped in on my old buddy of buddies, Gerry Scorse, at FBI headquarters. After I cooled my heels for forty minutes in reception, Scorse brought me coffee and invited me into his office. “Come right in, Alex. Thanks for waiting.”
    He listened politely, and with apparent concern, as I went over what I had previously learned, and then what Soneji had told me concerning Secret Service agents Mike Devine and Charles Chakely. He took notes, a lot of notes on yellow foolscap.
    After I’d finished, Scorse said, “I have to make a phone call. Sit tight, Alex.”
    When he returned, he asked me to come upstairs with him. He never said it but I assumed he was impressed by the news from Gary Soneji.
    I was escorted to the deputy director’s private conference room on the top floor. The deputy, Kurt Weithas, is the number-two person at the Bureau. They wanted me to understand that this was an important meeting. I got it.
    Scorse went with me into the impressive, very cushy conference room. All the walls and most of the furnishings were dark blue, very sober and severe. The room reminded me of the cockpit of a foreign car. Yellow pads and pencils were laid out for us.
    It was clearly Weithas’s meeting from the start. “What we’d like to accomplish is twofold, Detective Cross.” Weithas spoke and acted like a very successful, very cool Capitol Hill lawyer. In a manner of speaking, that’s what he was. He wore a brilliant white shirt with a Hermès tie. He slipped off his wire-rimmed reading glasses when I entered the room. He appeared to be in a dark mood.
    “I’d like to show you all the information we have on agents Devine and Chakely. In return, we must ask for your full cooperation in keeping this matter absolutely confidential. What I’m telling you now…
is that we’ ve known about them for a while, Detective
. We were running a parallel investigation to your own.”
    “You have my cooperation,” I said, trying not to show my surprise at
his
news. “But I’m going to have to file a report back at the department.”
    “I’ve already spoken to your commanding officer about the matter.” Weithas brushed that little detail aside. He’d already broken my confidence; he absolutely expected me to keep his.
    “You’ve been ahead of us a couple of times during the investigation. This time, maybe we’re a little ahead of you. Half a step.”
    “You have a little bigger staff,” I reminded him.
    Scorse took over for Weithas at that point. He hadn’t lost his touch for condescension. “We started our investigation of agents Devine and Chakely at the time of the kidnapping,” he said. “They were obvious suspects, though not ones we took seriously. During the course of the investigation a great deal of pressure was placed on both men. Since the Secret Service reports directly to the secretary of the treasury, you can imagine what they were subjected to.”
    “I watched most of it firsthand,” I reminded both FBI