I whirled away from both of the Dunnes and headed down a steep flight of stairs. I understood their anguish, but Thomas Dunne had been badgering me for months. He'd gotten personal, and he was wrong. Nobody seemed to get one simple fact: I was the one still trying to get at the truth about Maggie Rose. I was the only one. As I reached the bottom of the stairs, Katherine Rose came up from behind. She had run after me. Photographers had followed her. They were everywhere, their automatic film-wasters clicking like crazy. The press was elbowing in.
“I'm sorry about all that,” she said before I could manage a word. “Losing Maggie is destroying Tom, destroying our marriage. I know you've done your best. I know what you've gone through. I'm sorry, Alex. I'm sorry for everything. ”
It was a strange, strange moment. I finally reached out and took Katherine Rose Dunne's hand. I thanked her, and promised her I wouldn't stop trying. The photographers continued to snap pictures. Then I quickly left the scene, refusing to answer another question, absolutely refusing to tell them what had just passed between Katherine Rose and myself. Silence is the best revenge with the press jackals.
I headed home. I was still searching for Maggie Rose Dunne-but inside SonejilMurphy's mind now. Could she have been taken from the kidnapping site by somebody else? Why would Gary Murphy tell us that ' she had? As I drove into Southeast, I wondered about what Gary Murphy had said under hypnosis. Was Gary Soneji setting us all up beautifully in the courtroom? That was a scary possibility, and a very real one. Was all this part of one of his terrifying plans? The next morning, I tried to put Soneji/Murphy under hypnosis a second time. The Amazing Detective/Doctor Cross was back on center stage! That's how it sounded in the morning news, anyway.
The hypnosis didn't work this time. Gary Murphy was too frightened, or so his lawyer claimed. There was too much hubbub in the crowded courtroom. The room was cleared once by Judge Kaplan, but that didn't help, either. I was cross-examined by the prosecution that day, but
Mary Warner was more interested in getting me off the stand than in questioning my credentials. My part in the trial was over. Which was just fine by me.
Neither Sampson nor I came to court for the rest of that week, a time of more expert testimony. We went back on the street. We had new cases. We also tried to rework a couple of troubling angles concerning the actual day of the kidnapping. We reanalyzed everything, spending hours in a conference room filled with files. if Maggie Rose had been taken from the site in Maryland, she could still be alive. There was still a slim chance.
Sampson and I returned to Washington Day School one more time to interview some of the school's teachers. To put it mildly, most of them weren't ovedoyed to see us again. We were still testing the “accomplice” theory. It was definitely a possibility that Gary Soneji had been working with someone from the start. Could it be Simon Conklin, his friend from around Princeton? If not Conklin, then who? No one at the school had seen anyone to support the notion of an “accomplice” for Gary Soneji.
We left the private school before noon and had lunch at a Roy Rogers in Georgetown. Roy's chicken is better than the Colonel's, and Roy has those swell “hot wings.” Lots of zing in those babies. Sampson and I settled on five orders of wings and two thirty-two-ounce Cokes. We sat at a tiny picnic table by. Roy's kiddie playground. After lunch maybe we'd go on the see-saw.
We finished our lunch and decided to drive out to Potomac, Maryland. For the rest of the afternoon, we canvassed Sorrell Avenue and the surrounding streets.
We visited a couple of dozen houses, and were about as welcome as Woodward and Bernstein would be. Not that the cold reception stopped us.
No one had noticed any strange cars or people in the neighborhood. Not in the days before or after the kidnapping. No one could remember seeing an unusual delivery truck. Not even the usual kind-utility repairs, flower, and grocery deliveries.
Late that afternoon, I went for a drive by myself. I headed out toward Crisfield, Maryland, where Maggie Rose and Michael Goldberg had been kept underground during the first days of the kidnapping. In a crypt? In a cellar? Gary Soneji/Murphy had mentioned “the basement” under hypnosis. He'd been kept in a dark cellar as a child. He'd been friendless for long stretches of his life. I wanted to see the farm all by myself this time. All the “disconnects” in the case were bothering the hell out of me. Loose fragments were flying around inside my head as disconcerting as shrapnel. Could someone else have taken Maggie Rose from Soneii/Murphy? I couldn't have cared less if Einstein was investigating the case-the possibilities would have made his head spin and maybe straightened his hair.
As I wandered around the grounds of the eerie, deserted farm, I let the facts of the case run freely through my mind. I kept coming back to the Son of Lindbergh and the fact that the Lindbergh baby had been abducted from a “farmhouse.”
Soneji's so-called accomplice. That was one unresolved problem. Soneji had also been “spotted” near the Sanders murder house-if we could believe Nina Cerisier. That was a second loose end.
Was this really a case of split personality? The psychology community remained divided over whether there was such a phenomenon. Multiple-personality cases are rare. Was all of this a Byzantine scheme by Gary Murphy? Could he be acting out both personas?
What had happened to Maggie Rose Dunne? It always came back to her. What had happened to Maggie Rose?
On the battered dashboard of the Porsche, I still kept one of the tiny candles that had been handed out around the courthouse in Washington. I lit it. I drove back to Washington with it burning against the gathering night. Remember Maggie Rose.
Along Came A Spider
CHAPTER 64
HAD A DATE to see Jezzie that night, and it had kept me going with anticipation through most of the day.
We met at an Embassy Suites motel in Arlington. Because of all the press in town for the trial, we were being especially cautious about being seen together.
Jezzie arrived at the room after I did. She looked absolutely alluring and sexy in a low-cut black tunic. She had on black seamed stockings and high-heeled pumps. She wore red lipstick and a scarlet blush. A silver comb was
