Along Came a Spider (Alex Cross, #1)

by James Patterson

I remembered something the philosopher Spinoza once wrote: “I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.” So far, I didn’t understand.

It’s all right to put the weight of the world on your shoulders sometimes, if you know how to take it off.

They wanted the kidnapping case of Maggie Rose Dunne closed.

The way this makes me boil...

Could there have been an accomplice right from the beginning?

The two of us were crazy for sure. Tell me about it. What other cop friends?

In this Year of Our Lord, nineteen hundred and ninety-three.

He was still Gary Murphy. I could see that. He had not transferred into the Soneji personality. But Gary Murphy knew about Gary Soneji’s activities; under hypnosis, Gary Murphy knew Soneji’s thoughts.

Why would he block that information? Because he knew I wanted it? Because everyone in that courtroom wanted to know the fate of Maggie Rose Dunne?

I glanced at Soneji/Murphy and thought I saw a faint smile cross his lips. Had I witnessed a tiny slipup?

Anthony Nathan and his defense team quickly left the room, avoiding questions.

So real... When it goes bad the tough get going..

hadn’t been a single false move.

Except the smirk...

“Good is not good enough,” and “Good is the enemy of great,” her father used to tell her almost every day.

O fuck... My never good enough heart...

She recognized Colombian Gold. Very good dope.

RECOGNIZED

I was offered a job in Washington as VICAP coordinator between the D.C. police department and the FBI.

It was my buyout from Carl Monroe. No thanks.

IF YOU CAN’T DAZZLE THEM WITH BRILLIANCE, BAFFLE THEM WITH BULLSHIT.

We were down in a secluded knoll, talking quietly, when I became aware of someone watching us in the woods.

“Who knows you’re down here? Anyone?” I asked her. “No one. That’s why it’s so weird. Who the hell was that? This is scary, Alex. You got any ideas?”

Maybe the person who grabbed you by the neck and shved coke down your throat!!!

The police had been watching Gary Soneji.

Neither of them was clever enough to pull off a cover-up. Jezzie was sure of that.

but she didn’t believe that somebody had been watching Soneji/Murphy. Or even that Soneji had been down near the projects himself.

A cross was burning very brightly on Jezzie’s lawn.

I can’t keep playing Murphy.

Had he been Gary Soneji all along? The “Bad Boy”? Right from the first time we’d met? That had been my diagnosis. I held to it.

Cut-off breasts and shaved genitals, so my adult victims are more like kiddies.

I’ve killed over two hundred people. A lot of children, too. I do what I feel like.

I practiced with a friend. You met him, I believe. Simon Conklin.

Maybe those were my good deeds. Who says I can’t have a social conscience, hmmm?

LARGE EYE REACTION HERE!! RACIST BASTARD !!

“Are you telling the truth?” I asked him again. I thought that he was. It all fit. “Oh, yes. Scout’s honor.… The murders in Southeast D.C. Actually, I rather liked the concept of being the first celebrated serial killer of blacks.

the Fibbers

I didn’t harm her. I didn’t get the ransom money down in Florida, either. Somebody else has it.

I wanted to sample all the high-impact crimes, Alex. A little Bundy, a little Geary, a little Manson, Whitman, Gilmore.”

“What went wrong out in Potomac?” I thought I knew the answer. I needed him to confirm it. He shrugged. “I was being followed, of course.” Here we go, I thought to myself. The “watcher.”

What I’m telling you now… is that we’ve known about them for a while, Detective. We were running a parallel investigation to your own.”

We also have good reason to believe they know we’re watching.

“We believe she’s deeply involved in this with the two men. Has been from the start. Jezzie Flanagan and Mike Devine have been lovers for years.”

I mean... I figured she knew something... but this

Sampson winked at the thugs. He fucks with everybody’s head. Nobody fucks back.

She’d pumped me for anything new the D.C. police had picked up. She’d been the ultimate insider. So confident and cool.

“I’ll take him downstairs to the hospital myself,” Robert Fishenauer said to his men.

“He’s not my boyfriend. I’ve been pumping him for information that we’ve needed.”

I knew that she was a psychopath, just like Gary. No conscience. I believed that business, the government, Wall Street were filled with people like that. No regret for their actions. Not unless they got caught. Then the crocodile tears started.

Nearly a year and a half after the kidnapping, Maggie Rose Dunne escaped from where they were hiding her.

Gary paused at the apartment door on his way out. In his best Arnold Schwarzenegger/Terminator voice, he said, “I’ll be back!”

She downplayed it, but it had been her idea.

He had a plan for them now. A neat little fantasy.

Once they were all sound asleep, probably between two and three in the morning, he would take the two children, Damon and Janelle.

He would let Doctor/Detective Alex Cross sleep through everything.

She wasn’t surprised the state had gotten the death penalty for her and Charles Chakely.