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.