Along Came a Spider

confided to me. “The
crème de la crème
. The best of the best. The World-beaters, man.”
    “The best of
what
?” Sampson wanted to know. I could tell he wasn’t too fond of Simon Conklin. His shades were steaming up. But he was playing along, being the good listener so far.
    “The best of the
real
psychos,” Conklin said, and he smiled smugly. “The ones who have always been out there, and will never ever get caught. The ones who’re too smart to get caught. They look down on everybody else. They show no pity, no mercy. They completely rule their own destinies.”
    “Gary Murphy was one of them?” I asked. I knew that he wanted to talk now. About Gary, but also about himself. I sensed that Conklin considered himself in the Ninety-ninth Percentile.
    “No. Not according to Gary.” He shook his head and kept the disturbing half smile. “According to Gary, he was a lot smarter than the Ninety-ninth Percentile. He always believed he was an original. The original. Called himself a ’freak of nature.’ ”

    Simon Conklin told us how he and Gary had lived on the same country road about six miles outside of town. They’d taken the school bus together. They’d been friends since they were nine or ten. The road was the same one that led to the Lindbergh farmhouse in Hopewell.
    Simon Conklin told us that Gary Murphy had definitely paid his family back with the fire. He knew all about Gary’s child-abuse sufferings. He could never prove it, but he knew Gary had set the blaze.
    “I’ll tell you exactly how I know his plan. He told me — when we were twelve years old. Gary said he was going to get them for his twenty-first birthday. He said he’d do it so it looked like he was away at school. That he’d never be a suspect. And that’s what the boy did, didn’t he? He waited for nine long years. He had a nine-year plan for that one.”
    We talked to Simon Conklin for three hours one day, then five more hours the following day. He told a series of sad and gruesome stories. Gary locked away in the Murphy basement for days and weeks at a time. Gary’s obsessive plans:
ten-year plans, fifteen-year plans, life plans
. Gary’s secret war against small animals, especially pretty birds that flew into his stepmother’s garden. How he would pluck off a robin’s leg, then a wing, then a second leg, for as long as the bird had the will to live. Gary’s vision to see himself way up in the Ninety-ninth Percentile, right at the top. Finally, Gary’s ability to mimic, to act, to play parts.
    I would have liked to have known about it while I was still meeting with Gary Murphy at Lorton Prison. I would have wanted to spend several sessions with Gary, prowling around his old Princeton haunts. Talking to Gary about his friend Simon Conklin.
    Unfortunately, I had been taken off that part of the case now. The kidnapping case had moved way beyond me and Sampson, and Simon Conklin.
    I gave our leads in Princeton over to the FBI. I wrote a twelve-page report on Simon Conklin. The Bureau never followed up. on it. I wrote a second report and sent copies to everyone on the original search team. In my report was something Simon Conklin had said about his boyhood friend, Gary Murphy: “Gary always said he was going to do
important things
.”
    Not a thing happened. Simon Conklin wasn’t interviewed again by the FBI. They didn’t want to open up new leads. They wanted the kidnapping case of Maggie Rose Dunne closed.

CHAPTER 53

    IN LATE SEPTEMBER, Jezzie Flanagan and I went away to the islands. We escaped for a long weekend. Just the two of us. It was Jezzie’s idea. I thought it was a good one. R & R. We were curious. Apprehensive. Excited about four uninterrupted days together. Maybe we wouldn’t be able to stand each other for that long. That’s what we needed to find out.
    On Front Street on Virgin Gorda, hardly a head turned to look at us. That was nice for a change, different from D.C., where people usually stared.
    We took scuba and snorkeling lessons from a seventeen-year-old black woman. We rode horses along a beach that ran uninterrupted for over three miles. We drove a Range Rover up into the jungle and got lost for a half day. The most unforgettable experience was a visit to an unlikely place that we named Jezzie and Alex’s Private Island in Paradise. It was a spot the hotel found for us. They dropped us off in a boat, and left us all alone.
    “This is the most awe-inspiring place that I’ve ever been in