Along Came a Spider

old.
    She squinted a look at me and she started to smile again.
    “Two nice kids, nice Sunday morning at home with them. You’re not such a tough guy after all.”
    “No, I’m a tough guy, too,” I said. “I just happen to be a tough guy who finds his way home by Sunday morning.”
    “Okay, Alex.” She kept her smile turned on. “Just don’t let this newspaper nonsense get you down. Nobody believes the funny pages, anyway. I’ve got to go. I’ll take a rain check on the coffee.”
    Jezzie Flanagan opened the front door and started to leave. She waved to the kids as the door was closing behind her.
    “So long, Big Daddy,” she said to me and grinned.

CHAPTER 31

    AFTER JEZZIE FLANAGAN had finished her business in Southeast, she drove out to the farm where Gary Soneji had buried the two children. She had been there twice before, but a lot of things still bothered her about the farm in Maryland. She was obsessive as hell, anyway. She figured that nobody wanted to catch Soneji any more than she did.
    Jezzie ignored the
crime scene
signage and sped down the rutted dirt road to a cluster of buildings in disrepair. She distinctly remembered everything about the place. There was the main farmhouse, a garage for machinery, and the barn where the kids had been kept.
    Why this place
? she asked herself.
Why here, Soneji
? What should it tell her about who he really is?
    Jezzie Flanagan had been a whiz-kid investigator since the day she’d first entered the Secret Service. She’d come there with an honors law degree from the University of Virginia, and Treasury had tried to steer her toward the FBI, where nearly half the agents had law degrees. But Jezzie had surveyed the situation and chosen the Service, anyway, where the law degree would make her stand out more. She’d worked eighty-and hundred-hour weeks from the beginning, right up to the present. She’d been a shooting star for one reason: she was smarter
and
tougher than any of the men she worked with, or the ones she worked for. She was more driven. But Jezzie had known from the beginning that, if she ever made a big mistake, her starship would crash. She’d known it. There was only one solution. She had to find Gary Soneji, somehow. She had to be the one.
    She walked the farmhouse grounds until darkness fell. Then she walked them again with a flashlight. Jezzie scribbled down notes, trying to find some missing connection. Maybe it did have something to do with the old Lindbergh case, the so-called crime of the century from the 1930s.
    Son of Lindbergh?
    The Lindbergh place in Hopewell, New Jersey, had been a farmhouse, too.
    Baby Lindbergh had been buried not far from the kidnap site.
    Bruno Hauptmann, the Lindbergh kidnapper, had been from New York City. Could the kidnapper in Washington be some kind of distant relative? Could he be from somewhere near Hopewell? Maybe Princeton? How could nothing have turned up on Soneji so far?
    Before she left the farm, Jezzie sat in her town car. She turned on the engine, the heat, and just sat there. Obsessing. Lost in her thoughts.
    Where was Gary Soneji? How had he disappeared? Nobody can just disappear nowadays. No one is that smart.
    Then she thought about Maggie Rose Dunne and “Shrimpie” Goldberg, and tears began to roll down her cheeks. She couldn’t stop sobbing. That was the real reason she’d come out to the farmhouse, she knew. Jezzie Flanagan had to let herself cry.

CHAPTER 32

    MAGGIE ROSE was in complete darkness.
    She didn’t know how long she had been there. A long, long time, though. She couldn’t remember when she’d eaten last. Or when she’d seen or talked to anybody, except the voices inside her head.
    She wished somebody would come right now. She held that thought in her head — for hours.
    She even wished the old woman would come back and scream at her. She’d begun to wonder why she was being punished; what she’d done that was so wrong. Had she been bad, and deserved all this to happen to her? She was starting to think that she must have been a bad person for all these terrible things to be happening.
    She couldn’t cry again. Not even if she wanted to. She couldn’t cry anymore.
    A lot of the time, she thought she must be dead. Maggie Rose almost didn’t feel things now. Then she would pinch herself really hard. Even bite herself. One time she bit her finger until it bled. She tasted her own warm blood and it was weirdly wonderful. Her time in the dark seemed to go on