The Midnight Club_ A Novel - James Patterson [92]
“It’s so unreal, Stef. So bad. I can’t believe this has happened. Why wasn’t I more careful? I should have known this could happen.” Sarah couldn’t eat.
“Stop. You couldn’t have known.” Stefanovitch reached across the table and held her hand. He wanted to help her, but there didn’t seem to be any way. Everything possible was being done. He had already seen to that.
“Soon we’ll hear from the police about the canvassing they did in the neighborhood yesterday. There might be something to help us. Somewhere to start us at least.”
Stefanovitch had requested that the precinct canvass reports be delivered to Sarah’s apartment as soon as they were tabbed. At ten o’clock, the copies finally arrived via Detective Cirelli. Included was a crime-scene sketch drawn from what Sarah remembered, plus the few details other witnesses had supplied. Detective Cirelli was his usual obliging self.
There was also a sketch of the perpetrator, as he had been described: a white male, in his middle to late thirties. Clean-cut, in a beige summer business suit.
He looked like any of a thousand businessmen who walked down Park Avenue every morning. Sarah had thought that he could be German, so they were working with Immigration to check recent visitors from that country.
To pass time, Sarah and Stefanovitch read all the verbatims from pedestrians who’d been on either Park Avenue or Sixty-sixth Street at the time of the abduction. Several had noticed the man carrying “his little boy,” and “playing with him,” “taking him over to their car.”
Not one of the witnesses had understood that he or she was actually watching a kidnapping. At the end of every statement were the capitalized letters NR, meaning “negative results.”
That was all they’d gotten for the past twenty days. Negative results on the initial investigation of the shooting at Allure; negative results on the massacre at Trump Plaza in Atlantic City. Now this. Alexandre St.-Germain always seemed to have the upper hand. Somehow, he was always in control.
Throughout the rest of the morning and early afternoon, the horror grew for Sarah…
At noon, Sam would have come home from school…By twelve-fifteen, he and Sarah would be eating lunch she prepared when she broke from her writing, but today there was no Sam. The silence, the emptiness in the apartment were palpable and unbearable.
Sarah finally wandered back to Sam’s bedroom. Stefanovitch went with her. She understood it was the worst thing to do. She began to sob once again, folding her arms over her eyes. She’d never been so completely out of control, or felt so empty.
Goose bumps swelled over her arms and legs. Sam’s belongings, his ball glove, a taped hockey stick, his neatly folded clothes, were all around the cheery room. A favorite childhood book, Harold and the Purple Crayon, was propped on the windowsill. His things seemed to be accusing her. She had never thought of herself as the hysterical type, but she’d never lost her son before either.
“We’ll get Sam back,” Stefanovitch whispered. But he wasn’t sure anymore.
He was finally beginning to completely understand Alexandre St.-Germain. He understood that as intelligent as he’d thought St.-Germain was, he had seriously underestimated him. St.-Germain was thorough. He would do anything to win—commit any crime, order any murder, any unthinkable act. That was the pattern, in fact: unthinkable acts. Obscenity on obscenity. The Grave Dancer was a psychopathic killer. He had no concept of right or wrong; no conscience; no morals; and there was no legal way to stop him.
Alexandre St.-Germain had beaten them again and again. The Grave Dancer had won everything that was worth winning.
Men like him completely controlled the world now.
The crumb-bums.
89
Isiah Parker; East Seventy-fourth Street
ISIAH PARKER HAD the sense that he’d been followed for the past few days. He hadn’t actually seen any of the trackers, but he’d