Cat and Mouse

with the blood bank at St. Anthony’s. A pint of my blood was missing from our family’s supply. Someone had taken the trouble to break in and take my blood.
Gary Soneji? Who else? He continued to show me that nothing was safe in my life.
    “Soneji” was actually a pseudonym Gary had used as part of a plan to kidnap two children in Washington. The strange name had stuck in news stories, and that was the name the FBI and media used now. His real name was Gary Murphy. He had lived in Wilmington with his wife, Meredith, who was called Missy. They had one daughter, Roni.
    Actually, Soneji was the name Gary had appropriated when he fantasized about his crimes as a young boy locked in the cellar of his house. He claimed to have been sexually abused by a neighbor in Princeton, a grade-school teacher named Martin Soneji. I suspected serious problems with a relative, possibly his paternal grandfather.
    We arrived at the house on Central Avenue at a little past ten in the morning. The pretty street was deserted, except for a small boy with Rollerblades. He was trying them out on his front lawn. There should have been local police surveillance here, but, for some reason, there wasn’t. At least I didn’t see any sign of it yet.
    “Man, this perfect little street kills me,” Sampson said. “I still keep looking for Jimmy Stewart to pop out of one of these houses.”
    “Just as long as Soneji doesn’t,”I muttered.
    The cars parked up and down Central Avenue were almost all American makes, which seemed quaint nowadays: Chevys, Olds, Fords, some Dodge Ram pickup trucks.
    Meredith Murphy wasn’t answering her phone that morning, which didn’t surprise me.
    “I feel sorry for Mrs. Murphy and especially the little girl,” I told Sampson as we pulled up in front of the house. “Missy Murphy had no idea who Gary really was.”
    Sampson nodded. “I remember they seemed nice enough. Maybe too nice. Gary fooled them. Ole Gary the Fooler.”
    There were lights burning in the house. A white Chevy Lumina was parked in the driveway. The street was as quiet and peaceful as I remembered it from our last visit, when the peacefulness had been short-lived.
    We got out of the Porsche and headed toward the front door of the house. I touched the butt of my Glock as we walked. I couldn’t help thinking that Soneji could be waiting, setting some kind of trap for Sampson and me.
    The neighborhood, the entire town, still reminded me of the 1950s. The house was well kept and looked as if it had recently been painted. That had been part of Gary’s careful facade. It was the perfect hiding place: a sweet little house on Central Avenue, with a white picket fence and a stone walkway bisecting the front lawn.
    “So what do you figure is going on with Soneji?” Sampson asked as we came up to the front door. “He’s changed some, don’t you think? He’s not the careful planner I remember. More impulsive.”
    It seemed that way. “Not everything’s changed. He’s still playing parts, acting. But he’s on a rampage like nothing I’ve seen before. He doesn’t seem to care if he’s caught. Yet everything he does is planned. He
escapes.”
    “And why is that, Dr. Freud?”
    “That’s what we’re here to find out. And that’s why we’re going to Lorton Prison tomorrow. Something weird is going on, even for Gary Soneji.”
    I rang the front doorbell. Sampson and I waited for Missy Murphy on the porch. We didn’t fit into the small-town-America neighborhood, but that wasn’t so unusual. We didn’t exactly fit into our own neighborhood back in D.C. either. That morning we were both wearing dark clothes and dark glasses, looking like musicians in somebody’s blues band.
    “Hmm, no answer,” I muttered.
    “Lights blazing inside,” Sampson said. “Somebody must be here. Maybe they just don’t want to talk to Men In Black.”
    “Ms. Murphy,” I called out in a loud voice, in case someone was inside but not answering the door. “Ms. Murphy, open the door. It’s Alex Cross from Washington. We’re not leaving without talking to you.”
    “Nobody home at the Bates Motel,” Sampson grunted.
    He wandered around the side of the house, and I followed close behind. The lawn had been cut recently and the hedges trimmed. Everything looked so neat and clean and so harmless.
    I went to the back door, the kitchen, if I remembered. I wondered if he could be hiding inside. Anything was possible with Soneji — the more twisted and