Along Came a Spider

Couldn’t focus on whoever or whatever it was. She had to keep blinking. Whoever was up there had to see the blinking, had to know she was alive.
    “Mr. Soneji? Please help me,” she tried to call out. Her throat was so dry. Her voice came out raspy and unrecognizable.
    “
Shaddup! Shaddup
!” a voice from above shouted.
    Someone was up there now! Someone was really up there and could get her out.
    It sounded like… a very old woman’s voice.
    “Please help me. Please,” Maggie begged.
    A hand came flying down and slapped her face hard.
    Maggie cried out. She was more frightened than hurt, but the blow hurt, too. She’d never been slapped before. It set off a loud roar inside her head.
    “
Stopyercrying
!” The eerie voice was closer.
    Then the person climbed down into the grave and was right over her. Maggie could smell strong body odor and someone’s bad breath. She was being pinned down now, and she was too weak to fight back.
    “Don’t fight me, yet little bastard! Don’t
ever
fight
me
! Who do yer think yer are, yer little bastard!
    “Don’t yer ever raise yer hand to me! Yer hear me? Don’t yer ever!”
    Please, God, what was happening?
    “Yer that famous Maggie Rose, aren’t yer? The rich, spoiled brat! Well, let me tell yer a secret.
Our secret
. Yer gonna die, little rich girl. Yer gonna die!”

CHAPTER 17

    THE NEXT DAY was Christmas Eve. It didn’t fee like the season to be merry. And it was going to get a whole lot worse before Christmas Day.
    None of us had been able to make any of the usual, festive holiday preparations with our families. It added to the tension the Hostage Rescue Team was feeling. It magnified the misery of the depressing task. If Soneji had chosen the holiday season for this reason, he’d chosen well. He had turned everyone’s Christmas to shit.
    Around ten o’clock in the morning, I walked down Sorrell Avenue to the Goldberg house. Sampson, meanwhile, had sneaked off to do a little work on the murders in Southeast. We planned to get back together around noon to compare horror stories.
    I talked with the Goldbergs for over an hour. They weren’t holding up well. In a lot of ways, they were even more forthcoming than Katherine and Thomas Dunne. They were stricter parents than the Dunnes, but Jerrold and Laurie Goldberg loved their son dearly. Eleven years earlier, Laurie Goldberg had been told by doctors that she couldn’t have children. Her uterus had been scarred. When she found herself pregnant with Michael, it had seemed a miracle. Had Soneji known about that? I wondered. How carefully had he picked out his victims? Why Maggie Rose and Michael Goldberg?
    The Goldbergs allowed me to see Michael’s bedroom, and to spend some time there by myself. I shut the door to the room and sat quietly for several moments. I had done the same thing in Maggie’s room at the Dunnes’.
    The boy’s room was amazing. It was a treasure chest of state-of-the-art computer hardware and software — Macintosh, Nintendo, Prodigy, Windows. The AT&T labs had less equipment than Michael Goldberg.
    Posters of Katherine Rose from her films
Taboo
and
Honeymoon
were taped up on the walls. A poster of Skid Row’s lead singer, Sebastian Bach, was centered over the bed. A picture of Albert Einstein with a mauve punk haircut stared out from Michael’s private bathroom. Also, a
Rolling Stone
magazine cover that asked “
Who Killed Pee-wee Herman
?”
    A framed photograph of Michael and Maggie Rose was propped up on the boy’s work desk. Posed arm in arm, the two kids looked like the greatest friends. What had inspired Soneji? Was it something about their special friendship?
    Neither of the Goldbergs had ever met Mr. Soneji, although Michael had talked a lot about him. Soneji was the only person, child or adult, who had ever beaten Michael at Nintendo games like “Ultima” and “Super Mario Brothers.” It suggested that Soneji might be a brainiac himself, another whiz kid, but not willing to let a nine-year-old beat him at video games for the sake of the cause. Not willing to lose at any game.

    I was back in the library with the Goldbergs, looking out a window, when everything went completely and forever crazy on the kidnapping case.
    I saw Sampson running down the street from the Dunnes’. Each of his strides covered about a third of a block. I raced out the Goldbergs’ front door at the same time that Sampson made it to the lawn. He broke stride like the San Francisco