Chapter 96
CHAPTER
I heard footsteps coming down the stairs, shaking me from the trance I’d been in, reading Soneji’s kill diary inside his secret room in the Pine Barrens cabin.
I looked at the last line I’d read: Let them all study me now.
“Alex? You still in there?” Sampson called. “We’ve been outside three hours.”
I shook my head, set Profiles in Homicidal Genius aside with a quarter of the pages still unread, and stood up. “Felt like weeks to me.”
“The dogs have located more bodies,” John said. “Going to be a chore identifying them.”
I shook my head. “Probably not. In his book, he names several of the victims and describes where he buried them. There’s probably more in the pages I didn’t get to. One will be a woman named Cynthia Owens. And you don’t want to know the names of two of them.”
Sampson frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
I gazed around at the bins. “These are murder kits, John. Specific kits assembled so Soneji could practice the methods of serial killers he admired. TBS is the Boston Strangler. NS is the Night Stalker. ZK is the Zodiac Killer, GRK is the Green River Killer, JWG is John Wayne Gacy, and SOS—”
Mahoney came pounding down the stairs. “We’ve got another one, and I need all hands on deck.”
Realizing I desperately needed fresh air, I took a last look at the bins, the macabre treasures, and Soneji’s memoir. When I ducked out of the room, Mahoney and Sampson studied me.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Ned said.
“I have, in a way. Quite a few, in fact,” I said, jabbing my thumb over my shoulder. “It’s all in there.”
“All what?”
Sampson said, “The names and burial locations of Soneji’s victims.”
“And all the evidence against Soneji—and us,” I said, feeling gutted again. I wanted to cry or rage at everything that had changed so completely inside the spider’s nest.
“Evidence against us? Who is us?” Sampson demanded.
I gazed at John, then Ned. “A long time ago, Soneji duped the FBI, the Virginia state police, the Maryland state police, and the Pennsylvania state police. But most of all, he duped DC Metro’s Homicide team, specifically me and John, when we were junior detectives on our earliest cases.”
Sampson’s expression turned hard. “I do not know what you’re talking about, Alex.”
“I’ll explain it in full on the drive back to DC, but for now, Ned, I don’t think John and I should have anything further to do with this investigation.”
Mahoney rubbed his jaw. “What? Why? Stop talking in opaque loops.”
“We can’t be a part of this because we are compromised,” I said. I felt closed in and pushed past them, heading toward the stairs. “Like it or not, culpable or not, Sampson and I had a role in a lot of what happened in this cabin.”
John came after me as I climbed up from the basement. “What in God’s name are you talking about, Alex?” he yelled.
I ignored him, wanting cold air in my lungs and something in my stomach before I explained it all. He stayed right behind me, and Mahoney followed him. When we were all out on the front porch, I gazed across Soneji’s yard with new and stunned eyes.
“We could have stopped him,” I said. “A long time ago.”
My anguish must have shown on my face because when Sampson spoke again, it was in a lower voice and with more empathy. “What did you mean when you said I didn’t want to know the names of two of the people buried here? Please, brother, you’re upsetting me.”
“And me,” Mahoney said.
“A nineteen-year-old named Joyce Adams was evidently the first to be tortured, killed, and buried here,” I said.
“Joyce Adams?” Sampson said, squinting. “I have no idea who—”
“She was a freshman who disappeared from Princeton University a long time ago, more than a decade before Maggie Rose Dunne was kidnapped from the Washington Day School,” I said. “Bunny Maddox is buried here too.”
Sampson blinked and shook his head slowly as he turned from me. “No.”
“Yes, John,” I said firmly. “And I believe ballistics will prove that the forty-four-caliber Bulldog pistol down in that room fired the bullets that killed Conrad Talbot and the two hospital techs. The rope we found in the van? Soneji stole it from Diggs’s game pole to use on Brenda Miles.
It was all an elaborate frame job designed to ensure that evidence of Soneji’s early killings pointed straight at Diggs and Beech. ”
Looking into the middle distance, my oldest friend shook his head again, then faced me. “Diggs kept telling us he was innocent.”
“I remember.”
“Everyone said the evidence against him was ironclad. Jury. Appeals courts. Everyone.”
“Every single one,” I replied.
Sampson’s defenses broke down then. There was a tremor in his voice and a glassiness in his eyes when he choked out, “We helped put an innocent man…”
“We did,” I said, and the damage to my reputation and my belief in the judicial system felt completely and utterly irrevocable.