Cat and Mouse

the hospital, and from the Cross house. Who had entered the house? Who had Gary Soneji gotten to? That had to be it.
    The crisscrossing flashbacks were maddening and running out of control. I didn’t like the feeling, and I didn’t know if I could conduct an investigation, much less two, under these stressful, almost claustrophobic, conditions.
    It had been twenty-four hours from hell. I had flown to the United States from London. I’d landed at National Airport, in D.C., and gone to Quantico, Virginia. Then I had been rushed back to Washington, where I worked until ten in the evening on the Cross puzzle.
    To make things worse, if they could get any worse, I found I couldn’t sleep when I finally got to my room at the Washington Hilton & Towers. My mind was in a chaotic state that steadfastly refused sleep.
    I didn’t like the working hypothesis on Cross that I had heard from the FBI investigators at headquarters that night. They were stuck in their usual rut: They were like slow students who scan classroom ceilings for answers. Actually, most police investigators reminded me of Einstein’s incisive definition of insanity. I had first heard it at Harvard: “
Endlessly repeating the same process, hoping for a different result.
”
    I kept flashing back to the upstairs bedroom where Alex Cross had been brutally attacked. I was looking for something — but what was it? I could see his blood spattered on the walls, on the curtains, the sheets, the throw rug.
What was I missing? Something?
    I couldn’t sleep, goddamn it.
    I tried work as a sedative. It was my usual antidote. I had already begun extensive notes and sketches on the scene of the attack. I got up and wrote some more. My PowerBook was beside me, always at the ready. My stomach wouldn’t stop rolling and my head throbbed in a maddening way.
    I typed:
Could Gary Soneji possibly still be alive? Don’t rule anything out yet, not even the most absurd possibility.
    Exhume Soneji’s body if necessary.
    Read Cross’s book — Along Came a Spider.
    Visit Lorton Prison, where Soneji was held.
    I pushed aside my computer after an hour’s work. It was nearly two in the morning. My head felt stuffed, as if I had a terrible, nagging cold. I still couldn’t sleep. I was thirty-three years old; I was already beginning to feel like an old man.
    I kept seeing the bloody bedroom at the Cross house. No one can imagine what it’s like to live with such imagery day and night. I saw Alex Cross — the way he looked at St. Anthony’s Hospital. Then I was remembering victims of Mr. Smith, his “studies,” as he called them.
    The terrifying scenes play on and on and on in my head. Always leading to the same place, the same conclusion.
    I can see another bedroom. It is the apartment Isabella and I shared in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
    With total clarity, I remembered running down the narrow hallway that terrible night. I remember my heart pushing into my throat, its feeling larger than a clenched fist. I remember every pounding step that I took, everything I saw along the way.
    I finally saw Isabella, and I thought it must be a dream, a terrible nightmare.
    Isabella was in our bed, and I knew that she was dead. No one could have survived the butchery I witnessed there. No one did survive — neither of us.
    Isabella had been savagely murdered at twenty-three, in the prime of her life, before she could be a mother, a wife, the anthropologist she’d dreamed of becoming. I couldn’t help myself, couldn’t stop. I bent and held what was left of Isabella,
what was left.
    How can I ever forget any of it? How can I turn that sight off in my mind?
    The simple answer is, I cannot.

Chapter 82

    I WAS ON the hunt again, the loneliest road on this earth. Truthfully, there wasn’t much else that had sustained me during the past four years, not since Isabella’s death.
    The moment I awoke in the morning, I called St. Anthony’s Hospital. Alex Cross was alive, but in a coma. His condition was listed as grave. I wondered if John Sampson had remained at his bedside. I suspected he had.
    By nine in the morning, I was back at the Cross house. I needed to study the scene in much greater depth, to gather every fact, every splinter and fragment. I tried to organize everything I knew, or thought I knew at this early stage of the investigation. I was reminded of a maxim that was frequently used at Quantico — All truths are half-truths and possibly not even that.
    A fiendish