Along Came a Spider

career-making case.”
    I nodded at Monroe.
Sure thing
, I thought. “Whose career, Carl?”
    I had stopped in front of the District Building with all its fancy trimmings. Monroe slid out of his seat. He looked down at me from outside the car. “This case is going to be enormously important, Alex. It’s yours.”
    “No, thanks,” I said.
    But Monroe was already gone.

CHAPTER 9

    AT TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES PAST TEN, well within the range he’d set during his dry runs from Washington, Gary Soneji turned his van onto an unmarked drive. The side road was badly potholed and densely overgrown with weeds. A blackberry bramble was on either shoulder.
    Less than fifty yards in from the main highway, he couldn’t see anything but the dirt road and a mess of overhanging bushes. No one could see his van from the highway.
    The van bumped along past a ramshackle, faded white farmhouse. The building looked as if it were shrinking, collapsing right back into its foundation. No more than forty yards past the house was what remained of an equally run-down storage barn.
    Soneji drove the van inside. He’d done it; he’d pulled it off.
    A black 1985 Saab was parked in the barn. Unlike the rest of the deserted farm, the barn had a lived-in feel.
    It had a dirt floor. Cheesecloth was taped over three broken windows in the hayloft. There were no rusting tractors or other farm machinery. The barn had the smell of damp earth and gasoline.
    Gary Soneji pulled two Cokes from a cooler on the passenger seat. He polished off both sodas, letting out a satisfied belch after downing the second cold one.
    “Either of you guys want a Coke?” he called out to the drugged, comatose children. “No? Okay then, but you’re going to be real thirsty soon.”
    There were no sure things in life, he was thinking, but he couldn’t imagine how any policeman could get him now. Was it foolish and dangerous to be this confident? he wondered. Not really, because he was also being realistic.
There was no way to trace him now
. There wasn’t a single clue for them to follow.
    He had been planning to kidnap somebody famous since — well, since forever. Who that someone was had changed, and changed again, but never the clear, main objective in his mind. He’d been working at Washington Day School for months. This moment, right now, proved it had been worth every sucky minute.
    “Mr. Chips.” He thought of his nickname at the school. Mr. Chips! What a lovely, lovely bit of play-acting he’d done. Real Academy Award stuff. As good as anything he’d seen since Robert De Niro in
The King of Comedy
. And that performance was a classic. De Niro himself had to be a psychopath in real life.
    Gary Soneji finally pulled open the van’s sliding door. Back to work, work, work his fingers to the bone.
    One body at a time, he hauled the children out into the barn. First came Maggie Rose Dunne. Then little boy Goldberg. He laid the unconscious boy and girl beside each other on the dirt floor. He undressed each child, leaving them in their underwear. He carefully prepared doses of secobarbital sodium. Just your friendly local pharmacist hard at work. The dose was somewhere between a sleeping pill and a hospital anesthetic. It would last for about twelve hours.
    He took out preloaded one-shot needles called Tubex. This was a closed injection system that came prepackaged, complete with dose and needle. He set out two tourniquets. He had to be very careful. The exact dosage could be tricky with small children.
    Next, he pulled the black Saab forward about two yards. This move exposed a five-by-four-foot plot in the floor of the barn.
    He’d dug the hole during several previous visits to the deserted farm. Inside the open cavity was a homemade wooden compartment, a kind of shelter. It had its own oxygen tank supply. Everything but a color TV for watching reruns.
    He placed the Goldberg boy inside the wooden compartment first. Michael Goldberg weighed next to nothing in his arms, which was exactly what he felt about him. Nothing. Then came the little princess, the little pride and joy, Maggie Rose Dunne. All the way from La-la-land originally.
    He slid the Tubex needles into each child’s arm. He was extra careful to give each dose slowly, over a three-minute period.
    The doses were measured by weight, .25 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. He checked the breathing of each child. Sleep tight, my multimillion-dollar babies.
    Gary Soneji shut the trapdoor with a bang.