Along Came a Spider - James Patterson [17]
“Mr. Chips.” He thought of his nickname at the school. Mr. Chips! What a lovely, lovely bit of play-acting he’d done. Real Academy Award stuff. As good as anything he’d seen since Robert De Niro in The King of Comedy. And that performance was a classic. De Niro himself had to be a psychopath in real life.
Gary Soneji finally pulled open the van’s sliding door. Back to work, work, work his fingers to the bone.
One body at a time, he hauled the children out into the barn. First came Maggie Rose Dunne. Then little boy Goldberg. He laid the unconscious boy and girl beside each other on the dirt floor. He undressed each child, leaving them in their underwear. He carefully prepared doses of secobarbital sodium. Just your friendly local pharmacist hard at work. The dose was somewhere between a sleeping pill and a hospital anesthetic. It would last for about twelve hours.
He took out preloaded one-shot needles called Tubex. This was a closed injection system that came prepackaged, complete with dose and needle. He set out two tourniquets. He had to be very careful. The exact dosage could be tricky with small children.
Next, he pulled the black Saab forward about two yards. This move exposed a five-by-four-foot plot in the floor of the barn.
He’d dug the hole during several previous visits to the deserted farm. Inside the open cavity was a homemade wooden compartment, a kind of shelter. It had its own oxygen tank supply. Everything but a color TV for watching reruns.
He placed the Goldberg boy inside the wooden compartment first. Michael Goldberg weighed next to nothing in his arms, which was exactly what he felt about him. Nothing. Then came the little princess, the little pride and joy, Maggie Rose Dunne. All the way from La-la-land originally.
He slid the Tubex needles into each child’s arm. He was extra careful to give each dose slowly, over a three-minute period.
The doses were measured by weight, .25 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. He checked the breathing of each child. Sleep tight, my multimillion-dollar babies.
Gary Soneji shut the trapdoor with a bang. Then he buried the wooden compartment under half a foot of fresh soil. Inside the deserted storage barn. In the middle of godforsaken Maryland farm country. Just like little Charlie Lindbergh, Jr., had been buried sixty years before.
No one would find them out here. Not until he wanted them found. If he wanted them found. Big if.
Gary Soneji trudged back up the dirt road to what remained of the ancient farmhouse. He wanted to wash up. He also wanted to start to enjoy this a little. He’d even brought a Watchman to see himself on TV.
CHAPTER 10
NEWS BULLETINS were flashing on the television screen every fifteen minutes or so. Gary Soneji was right there on the high and mighty tube. He saw photographs of “Mr. Chips” on every news bulletin. The news reports didn’t offer a clue about what was really going on, though.
So this was fame! This was how fame felt. He liked it a lot. This was what he’d been practicing for all these years. “Hi, Mom! Look who’s on TV. It’s the Bad Boy!”
There was only one glitch all afternoon, and that was the press conference given by the FBI. An agent named Roger Graham had spoken, and Agent Graham obviously thought he was hot shit. He wanted some fame for himself. “You think this is your movie, Graham? Wrong, baby!” Gary Soneji shouted at the TV. “I’m the only star here!”
Soneji had been prowling around inside the farmhouse for several hours, watching the night slowly fall outside. He felt the different textures of darkness as they blanketed the farm. It was now seven o’clock and time to get on with his plan.
“Let’s do it.” He pranced around the farmhouse like a prizefighter before a bout. “Let’s get it on.”
For a while, he thought