Day School for months. This moment, right now, proved it had been worth every sucky minute.
“Mr. Chips.” He thought of his nickname at the school. Mr. Chips! What a lovely, lovely bit of playacting 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 kilogram of body weight. He checked the breathing 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 God forsaken Maryland farm country. Just like little 9 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.
Along Came A Spider
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 inside. He felt the different textures of darkness as they ted 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 about Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, his all-time favorite couple. That calmed him some. He thought about Baby Charles; and about that poor fool, Bruno Hauptmann, who had obviously been framed for the brilliantly conceived and executed crime. He was convinced that the Lindbergh affair was the century's most elegant crime, not just because it remained unsolved-many, many crimes went unsolved-but because it was important and unsolved.
Soneji was confident, realistic, and, most of all, pragmatic about his own masterpiece. A “fluke” was always possible. A “lucky accident” by the police could occur. The actual exchange of money would be tricky. It meant contact, and contact was always highly dangerous in life.
To his knowledge, and his knowledge was encyclopedic, no modern kidnapper had satisfactorily solved the ransom-exchange problem. Not if they wanted to be paid for their labors, and he needed a huge payday for his multimillion-dollar kids.
Wait until they hear how much money.
The thought brought a smile to his lips. Of course, the world-beater Dunnes and the all-powerful Goldbergs could, and would, pay. It was no accident he had chosen those two families-with their pampered little snot nosed brats, and their unlimited supply of wealth and power.
Soneji lit one of the white candles he kept in a side pocket of his jacket. He sniffed a pleasant whiff of beeswax. Then he made his way to the small bathroom off the kitchen.
He was remembering an old Chambers Brothers song, 'Time.' It was time... time... time to pull the rug out from under everybody's feet. Time... time... time for his first little surprise, the first of many. Time... time... time to start to build his own legend. This was his movie.
The room, the whole house, was freezing cold in late December. Gary Soneji could see his breath wisping out as he set up shop in the bathroom.
