Return of the Spider

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4

•••

Chapter 1

MY NAME IS ALEX CROSS.

I have been a criminal psychologist for the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit and am currently working—for the second time in my life—as a homicide detective with the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police.

In my decades of investigative and profiling work, I’ve had to interview many people with vicious and violent minds. The worst of them, the psychopaths and sociopaths, the ones who loved to kill— they all had one thing in common: They lied beautifully. So beautifully that I was always left wondering how much of what they told me was truth and how much was spun out of thin air the way a spider crafts a web on a dewy morning. One sweltering day in May, all that changed. One sweltering day in May, someone put a sledgehammer through rotten drywall and showed me where one of the first spiders I ever encountered had built his secret nest.

There’d been a thunderstorm earlier that afternoon, and despite the lingering heat, an evening breeze had picked up enough to cool the sunporch at our home on Fifth Street in Southeast Washington, DC, where I was trying to play Gershwin after dinner. Caught up in case after case, I had not sat down at the keys for well over a year. The piano was perpetually a bit out of tune, and I was rusty, but I tried to coax the melody of An American in Paris out of it

Gershwin probably wouldn’t have appreciated my rendition, but I didn’t care. I was sitting at the instrument after a long hiatus, and all thoughts of my hectic life slipped away until there was nothing but the music for almost twenty blissful minutes.

At a quarter past eight, my cell phone blared with the ringtone I reserved for John Sampson, my oldest friend.

“You home?” he asked.
“At the piano on the sunporch. Training to be a lounge lizard.”
“Break training— I’m on my way to your place, ETA in three minutes. The Alphonso brothers have surfaced.”
“Where?” I said, getting up from the piano bench. I opened the sliding glass door and went into the kitchen.
“Right in District Heights, their mom’s old house,” Sampson said. I rushed through the darkened kitchen, hearing the television in the front room.
“You mean their aunt’s place?”
“Right. She inherited it. SWAT has already been alerted and will meet us there.”
“I’ll be out front.” I hung up and went into the front room. Nana Mama, my ninety-something grandmother, was on the couch watching Yellowstone with my wife, Bree; she saw me rush in and hit pause on John Dutton riding a horse toward an impossible Montana sunset.

“Gotta go,” I said. “The Alphonso brothers just surfaced.”
“The meth- head bank robbers?” Nana Mama said.
“The same.” I went to the hall closet and retrieved my chest armor and service weapon, a Glock 19.
Bree came out into the hall, clearly worried. “Those guys shoot first and ask questions later, Alex.”
“Which is why there’s an entire SWAT team on its way to surround them,” I said. “John and I are merely witnesses at this point.”
“Stay that way,” Bree said. She kissed me, and I went out to the sidewalk in front of our home. Sampson pulled up in an unmarked squad car thirty seconds later. I got in and we sped away. John explained that an informant for the regional drug task force had seen Nicky and Trevor Alphonso— armed robbers of twelve banks and killers of six innocent people in the span of four months— shortly after sundown, heading toward their childhood home on Foster Street in District Heights.
“Their aunt there?”
“The informant says she’s out of town, visiting her brother in Chicago.”
“Good,” I said. “Let’s end this. Get these guys behind bars so bank tellers in four states can sleep easier.”
Sampson put a bubble on the roof, lit it up, and hit the siren.

•••

Chapter 2

SAMPSON SHUT DOWN THE siren and the bubble a good four blocks back from the small brick house with double dormers and a bare-grass lawn where the Alphonso brothers had grown up.

We reached the perimeter and parked behind the SWAT van, the rear of which was open. A Black female officer with a headset sat in the back talking to someone as we got out.

“Good, it’s Knight,” Sampson said.
“The best of the bunch,” I said.

Captain Nyla Knight saw us come to the rear of the van, nodded, and pulled her headset to one side. “We have four snipers in position. The breach team is on its way. You can watch it all here.”

We climbed into the van and saw a small bank of screens showing feeds from various members of the SWAT team. “How many total SWAT on scene?” I asked.

“Twelve,” she said. “Taking no chances with these two.”

The plan was for the eight-man breaching team to get flashbang grenades into the little house from the sides and then use the battering rams on the front and rear doors. We watched the team break into two groups of four. One man from each sub team darted across the lawn to the scraggly bushes below the side windows, where lights glowed behind drawn shades.

“Someone’s home,” I said.
“Four someones,” Knight said. “We ran infrared and—”

The shade on the east side of the house flew up. The window sash was already raised. The muzzle of an automatic weapon stuck out and someone fired, hitting the officer running in to deliver the flash- bang. He fell.

A second gunman opened fire from a window on the opposite side of the house, but the targeted officer managed to take cover.

“Officer down!” Captain Knight bellowed into her headset.
The breach team’s commander came back over the radio:
“Affirmative, Belmont down! Belmont down!”
A sniper positioned on the roof of a house a block away said over the comms, “Got Trevor, Cap. Permission to fire?”
“Take him,” Knight said.

It was hard to see from our angle, but the sniper shot through the open window and hit Trevor Alphonso in the chest, killing him instantly. Members of the breach team raced forward to retrieve the fallen Officer Belmont.

“Once he’s clear, put a flash-bang in that open window!” Knight said.
“Roger that, Cap.”

The shooting paused. The SWAT captain changed frequencies and called to a support helicopter circling overhead, “Give me infrared on that house.”
“Two in the west front room. Another moving to the rear exit.”
She switched back to SWAT comms and called her snipers.
“Aubrey, watch that back door now.”
“On it, Cap,” Officer Aubrey said a second before the rear door of the house flew open and Nicky Alphonso surged out, gun up, spraying bullets in an arc and screaming in rage, “This is my house! Welcome to my house!”
Knight said, “Take him, Aubrey.”

Amid the bursts of rapid fire from the younger Alphonso brother, I didn’t hear the single shot exit Officer Aubrey’s rifle, but I saw Nicky crumple, shot through the throat. Lights out.

Frantic radio traffic ensued as the breaching teams readied to attack the house again. The front door opened. Two terrified, sobbing young women stepped out with their arms held high.

Captain Knight breathed a sigh of relief, then looked at us. “That could have gone a whole lot better.”
I said, “Not like you had a lot of choice. They went all Scarface on you.”
Sampson nodded, said, “Look at it this way, Captain. You cleaned the streets of some serious bad guys, and you just saved the government’s justice system a whole lot of time and money.”

•••

Chapter 3

I GOT HOME AROUND two a.m. My phone started ringing less than five hours later, at six forty.

“Cross,” I grumbled.
“It’s Kane,” the caller said. “I just got off the phone with New Jersey state police captain Alexander Barthalis.”
“I know Alexander,” I said to my chief of detectives. I got out of bed and padded into the bathroom so as not to wake Bree.
Chief Kane said, “Which is why Captain Barthalis wants you and Sampson to meet him in Batsto, New Jersey, ASAP. Got a pen?”
I shut the bathroom door. “Not handy. Text it to me. Can you tell me what—”
The line went dead. Kane had hung up on me in mid- sentence, as he often did.

As I showered and shaved, I tried not to stew over Kane’s rudeness. After I’d dressed and snuck out of my bedroom, Bree still snoozing, I saw that he’d texted me and Sampson an unfamiliar address in the Pine Barrens.

John called a minute later. “I don’t recognize it. You?”
“Never even heard of Batsto. But Alexander Barthalis requested us personally.”
Over the years, we had collaborated with Barthalis several times, including on an investigation into a serial rapist who worked the I-95 corridor between Newark and DC.
“Oh. I like Alexander. Good cop. I’ll pick you up in twenty.”
Ali, my youngest child, was already up and eating granola and bananas at the kitchen island, scrolling on his iPad while Nana Mama sat at the table drinking coffee and reading the newspaper in her nightgown and robe, her sparse gray hair looking like silk lace above her ageless face.
“Eggs?” she asked when she saw me.
“Toast and coffee will be fine,” I said. “John and I have to drive to the Pine Barrens in New Jersey.”
“Egg sandwiches for the both of you, then,” Nana Mama said, getting to her feet and starting toward the stove.
“How was Hamilton?” I asked Ali. He’d seen the play on a school trip.
He beamed at me. “Greater than great! I’d go again tomorrow.”
“I would too, actually,” I said, pouring myself coffee from the pot.
Ali said, “Did you see the Alphonso brothers getting shot, Dad? It’s on the Washington Post website.”
“It was hard to see,” I said. “But we were there. Given their history and their actions last night, they gave the SWAT team no choice.”
“World’s better off without brothers like that,” Nana Mama said, frying eggs.
“I’d rather have seen them brought to trial.”
She said nothing in reply as she made two egg sandwiches on sourdough bread, with jack cheese and her special mustard. I heard a honk out front, so I kissed Ali and Nana Mama goodbye, grabbed the sandwiches, and hurried outside.
When I got in the car and handed Sampson his breakfast, he smiled and moaned. “Did she put the special mustard in there?”
“Twice as much as usual, just the way you like it.”
Three hours later, after devouring breakfast and stopping twice for coffee, we were in a desolate area of New Jersey on a two-lane highway flanked by dense pines. We didn’t need the exact address in the end.

North of Batsto, we saw FBI vehicles, coroner’s office vans, and New Jersey state police patrol cars parked on both sides of a rutted gravel driveway that snaked uphill and into the pines. We got out of the car and walked over to two young FBI agents standing at the end of the driveway.

“Captain Barthalis called us in,” I said, showing them my credentials. “Who’s in charge?”
“Agent Mahoney,” one of them said. “He just arrived on scene.”
Ned Mahoney’s presence meant this was a very high-profile case. It helped that he’d been my partner back when we both worked in the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit.
“This way?” Sampson asked, gesturing up the driveway.
“Yeah, they’re up there.”

We climbed the steep driveway in the oppressive heat. I could hear dogs barking in the woods as we broke into a clearing and saw a cabin with a small porch and a shed, both of which looked like they were about to rot away and collapse at any minute.

Moss grew on the roof. The shake shingles had not been stained in years. Most were curling upward, and many were missing. Paint hung in spirals from the eaves.

Ned Mahoney, a short, lean man with gray-flecked sandy hair, stood near the cabin talking to Alexander Barthalis.

Mahoney nodded at us. “I was going to call you two, but Alexander beat me to it.”
Barthalis, a burly, florid-faced guy wearing gray suit pants but no jacket, a shoulder holster with a weapon, and dark Terminator sunglasses, said, “Well, who else would I call? Been a long time.”
“Five years?” I said, reaching out to shake Barthalis’s hand.
“Good to see you, Captain.”
Barthalis pumped my hand. “Always Alexander to you and Detective Sampson, Dr. Cross.”
“It’s Alex, Alexander,” I said.
“And John,” Sampson said, shaking Alexander’s hand. “So, bring us up to speed. What’s going on?”
Barthalis turned all business. “Four bodies have been found by the cadaver dogs, all of them in the woods right around here. There are probably more.”
Mahoney said, “But we think you’re going to be more interested in what was found behind a false wall in the cabin’s basement. That’s what got us to bring in the dogs and the FBI.”
He and Mahoney started toward the sagging front porch; Sampson and I followed. “Who’s the owner?” I asked.
“Guy named Adam Brenner. He bought it last month when the county auctioned off the property because the owner of record— a Delaware company called MKM Holdings— was decades behind on taxes and unreachable, having gone out of business years ago,” Barthalis said. “We know this because Mr. Brenner had a title search done on the property before making his bid. Here’s where it gets interesting.”
He stopped on the porch. “MKM’s address was a post office box in Camden, and a long-dead lawyer was listed as treasurer. The president was given as M. K. Murphy, and his address was a different post office box in Camden.”
I frowned. “Okay?”
“Who sold M. K. Murphy the property?” Sampson asked.
Barthalis pointed at Sampson. “Smart man. The property was sold to MKM by one Gary Murphy shortly after he inherited it from his uncle.”

•••

Chapter 4

GARY MURPHY. MY FIRST spider, now long dead. As was Gary Soneji. Both had inhabited the same body— one mind split by dissociative identity disorder.

Murphy’s Soneji side was obsessed with fame, serial killing— and kidnapping the children of the rich and powerful.

Sampson and I caught him and sent him to prison— but things didn’t end there. Soneji had been abused repeatedly as a child, traumatic events that damaged his psyche. In prison, he contracted HIV and developed AIDS. Finding out he was terminally ill sent him into a violent rage; he escaped and went on a killing spree that began with a mass murder in a DC Metro station.

I caught up to him in New York City and chased him into a Grand Central Station train tunnel. During a shoot-out, he fell, and the makeshift bomb in his jacket detonated, engulfing him in flames.

Only then was he finally stopped.

But that was years ago, long before Alexander Barthalis called us to the moldering cabin in the Pine Barrens near Batsto.

“You seen inside yet, Ned?” I asked.
The FBI agent shook his head. We followed Barthalis into the cabin, now gutted to the studs.
As we went through the kitchen to the basement stairs, Sampson asked, “Alexander, what alerted you?”
Climbing down the rickety stairs, Barthalis said, “There’s a secret room down here, and a notebook with Gary Soneji’s name on it. The second I realized this was all his doing, I backed out and called your boss and Mahoney’s. I brought in the dogs as a precaution, and they almost immediately struck on the east side. It’s him.”

I reserved judgment.

As on the floor above, much of the old drywall had been torn out, leaving just the studs on three walls. The fourth wall had a ragged gaping hole in it from the floor to the ceiling.

Barthalis reached over and pulled a string. A light bulb went on, revealing a six-foot-by-four-foot space with plain pine shelves on three interior sides and a small stool in the corner.

Mahoney gestured to the hole. “You knew more about him than anyone, Alex.”

I put on surgical gloves and stepped inside the hole with my phone out and the camera on, recording what I was seeing.

There were multiple dusty weapons on the shelves to the left. An Ithaca pump-action twelve-gauge shotgun, a .308 hunting rifle, and several pistols of different calibers, including a Charter Arms .44-caliber snub-nosed, blue-barreled revolver. A sliver of white athletic tape on the rosewood grip had the letters SOS on it in black ink.

Beside it on the shelf was a .22-caliber semiautomatic handgun, also with white athletic tape on the grip. The letters inked there were NS.

A nine- millimeter Beretta beside that was marked ZK.

A .45 Remington Model 1911 was labeled GRK.

There were several knives on the shelf below the guns, including a black stiletto switchblade also marked NS. Beside it was a length of white nylon rope tagged TBS. On the bottom shelf lay handcuffs and a coiled length of steel wire, both marked JWG.

I took in the shelves on the back wall, which held Polaroid snapshots of various men and women (some clearly dead, some alive), a necklace, several rings, and at least a dozen locks of hair tied with ribbons of various colors.

Gesturing at them, I said, “Trophies. We’ll need DNA analysis on all of it.”
Mahoney said, “I have crime techs from Quantico on their way as we speak.”
“Good,” I said. “If these came from long- missing people, we might be able to give their families some kind of closure.”

The shelves on the wall to the right of the entrance were wider, and the lower ones held six large clear- plastic lidded storage bins. Left to right in black ink, they were labeled NS, SOS, ZK, TBS, JWG, and GRK.

On the shelf immediately above the boxes were notebooks of different colors, each with initials matching those on one of the bins below. I reached for a black leather-bound notebook on the highest shelf.

There was a plastic sleeve dead center on the cover. A file card had been put in it.

“‘Profiles in Homicidal Genius, by Gary Soneji,’” I read aloud from the scrawl on the card. “It has his twisted humor.”
I heard a female voice call, “Mr. Mahoney? Captain Barthalis? The dogs are hitting north of the house now. It might be another grave.”
“Jesus,” Ned said. “Alex, can I leave you to this?”
“Sure,” I said, opening the notebook.
Sampson said, “Too small in that hole for me to help. I’ll give Barthalis and Mahoney a hand outside.”

The three of them left. I looked down at the first page of the notebook, covered in Soneji’s distinctive scrawl, and read.

Time and again, history says, “Do not reinvent the wheel. Study what works, or worked. Study who works, or worked.”
Art students study the masters. Young athletes study the skills of geniuses older than themselves. So do singers and musicians.
In essence, one art or another, one skill or another, it’s all the same. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Study the masters. And so I shall study the masters of murder, the geniuses of homicide.

I lifted my head from the page and gazed at the initials on the bins. Standing in Soneji’s secret room holding his murder diary in my hands, I wanted to puke and cry at the same time because my gut was telling me that the bins on the shelves held murder kits, very specific murder kits, and my brain was telling me that a long time ago, Sampson and I might have made a terrible mistake.

In my mind, I saw a big man in prison proclaiming his innocence to me and Sampson before he died.

Deep in the pit of my stomach, doubt and fear grew, as did the strange sense that I was being haunted by a ghost from my long-ago past.

I sat there, frozen by that idea, not wanting to push on in Soneji’s notebook but knowing I had to. With shaking fingers, I turned the page and fell back in time.