Cat and Mouse

stepped out from behind a raised counter. He was tall and gangly and painfully thin. His milky brown eyes were distant, as if he were someplace else. He was instantly unlikable.
    He had on faded black jeans and a studded black leather vest, no shirt under the vest. If I hadn’t known a few Harvard flameouts myself, I wouldn’t have imagined he had graduated from Princeton and ended up like this. All around him were pleasure kits, masturbators, dildos, pumps, restraints. Simon Conklin seemed right in his element.
    “I’m starting to enjoy these unexpected visits from you assholes. I didn’t at first, but now I’m getting into them,” he said. “I remember you, Detective Sampson. But
you’re
new to the traveling team. You must be Alex Cross’s unworthy replacement.”
    “Not really,” I said. “Just haven’t felt like coming around to this shithole until now.”
    Conklin snorted, a phlegmy sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “You haven’t felt like it. That means you have feeling that you occasionally act on. How quaint. Then you
must
be with the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Analysis Program. Am I right?”
    I looked away from him and checked out the rest of the store.
    “Hi,” I said to a man perusing a rack with Spanish Fly Powder, Sta-Hard, and the like. “Find anything you like today? Are you from the Princeton area? I’m Thomas Pierce with the FBI.”
    The man mumbled something unintelligible into his chin and then he scurried out, letting a blast of sunlight inside.
    “Ouch. That’s not nice,” Conklin said. He snorted again, not quite a laugh.
    “I’m not very nice sometimes,” I said to him.
    Conklin responded with a jaw-cracking yawn. “When Alex Cross got shot, I was with a friend all night. Your very thorough cohorts already spoke to my squeeze, Dana. We were at a party in Hopewell till around midnight. Lots and lots of witnesses.”
    I nodded, looked as bored as he did. “On another, more promising subject, tell me what happened to Gary’s trains? The ones he stole from his stepbrother?”
    Conklin wasn’t smiling anymore. “Look, actually I’m getting a little tired of the bullshit. The repetition bores me and I’m not into ancient history. Gary and I were friends until we were around twelve years old. After that, we never spent time together. He had his friends, and so did I.
The end.
Now get the hell out of here.”
    I shook my head. “No, no, Gary never had any other friends. He only had time for the ‘great ones.’ He believed you were one of them. He told that to Alex Cross. I think you were Gary’s friend until he died. That’s why you hated Dr. Cross. You had a reason to attack his house. You had a motive, Conklin, and you’re the
only
one who did.”
    Conklin snorted out of his nose and the side of his mouth again. “And if you can prove that, then I go directly to jail. I do not pass Go. But you can’t prove it.
Dana. Hopewell. Several witnesses.
Bye-bye, assholes.”
    I walked out the front door of the adult bookstore. I stood in the blazing heat of the parking lot and waited for Sampson to catch up with me.
    “What the hell is going on? Why did you just walk out like that?” he asked.
    “Conklin is the leader,” I said. “Soneji was
the follower.
”

Chapter 101

    S OONER OR later almost every police investigation becomes a game of cat and mouse. The difficult, long-running ones always do. First you have to decide, though:
Who is the cat? Who is the mouse?
    For the next few days, Sampson and I kept Simon Conklin under surveillance. We let him know we were there, waiting and watching, always just around the next corner, and the corner after that. I wanted to see if we could pressure Conklin into a telling action, or even a mistake.
    Conklin’s reply was a occasional jaunty salute with his middle finger. That was fine. We were registering on his radar. He knew we were there, always there, watching. I could tell we were unnerving him, and I was just beginning to play the game.
    John Sampson had to return to Washington after a few days. I had expected that. The D.C. police department couldn’t let him work the case indefinitely. Besides, Alex Cross and his family needed Sampson in Washington.
    I was alone in Princeton, the way I liked it, actually.
    Simon Conklin left his house on Tuesday night. After some maneuvering of my own, I followed in my Ford Escort. I let him see me early on. Then I dropped back in the heavy traffic out near the malls, and