his attention back to me. “Maybe it will jog something else you know about Soneji.”
“Detective Sampson asked you a question,” I said.
“Yeah, but it was a pointless question. I don’t have time for PC crap or pointless questions. Like I said, let’s move on. Soneji is on the loose in my town.”
“You know much about knives? You cover a lot of stabbings?” Sampson asked. I could tell that he was starting to lose it. He towered over Manning Goldman. Actually, both of us did.
“Yeah, I’ve covered quite a few stabbings,” Goldman said. “I also know where you’re going. It’s extremely unlikely for Soneji to kill three out of three with a knife. Well, the knife he used had a double serpentine blade, extremely sharp. He cut each victim like some surgeon from NYU Medical Center. Oh yeah, he tipped the knife with potassium cyanide. Kill you in under a minute. I was getting to that.”
Sampson backed off. The mention of poison on the knife was news to us. John knew we needed to hear what Goldman had to say. We couldn’t let this get personal here in New York. Not yet anyway.
“Soneji have any history with knives?” Goldman asked. He was talking to me again. “Poisons?”
I understood that he wanted to pump me, to use me. I didn’t have a problem with it. Give and take is as good as it gets on most multijurisdictional cases.
“Knives? He once killed an FBI agent with a knife. Poisons? I don’t know. I wouldn’t be surprised. He also shot an assortment of handguns and rifles while he was growing up. Soneji likes to kill, Detective Goldman. He’s a quick study, so he could have picked it up. Guns and knives, and poisons, too.”
“Believe me, he did pick it up. He was in and out of here in a couple of minutes. Left three dead bodies just like that.” Goldman snapped his fingers.
“Was there much blood at the scene?” I asked Goldman. It was the question I’d had on my mind all the way from Washington.
“There was a helluva lot of blood. He cut each victim deep. Slashed two of their throats. Why?”
“There could be an angle connected with all the blood.” I told Goldman one of my findings at Union Station. “The sniper in D.C. made a mess. I’m pretty sure Soneji did it on purpose. He used hollow-points. He also left traces of my blood on his weapon,” I revealed to Goldman.
He probably even knows I’m here in New York, I thought. And I’m not completely sure who is tracking whom.
Chapter 27
FOR THE next hour, Goldman, with his partner practically walking up his heels, showed us around Penn Station, particularly the three stabbing sites. The body markings were still on the floor, and the cordoned-off areas were causing more than the usual congestion in the terminal.
After we finished with a survey of the station, the NYPD detectives took us up to the street level, where it was believed Soneji had caught a cab headed uptown.
I studied Goldman, watched him work. He was actually pretty good. The way he walked around was interesting. His nose was poised just a little higher than those belonging to the rest of the general population. His posture made him look haughty, in spite of the odd way he was dressed.
“I would have guessed he’d use the subway to escape,” I offered as we stood out on noisy Eighth Avenue. Above our heads, a sign announced that Kiss was appearing at Madison Square Garden. Shame I’d have to miss it.
Goldman smiled broadly. “I had the same thought. Witnesses are split on which way he went. I was curious whether you’d have an opinion. I think Soneji used the subway, too.”
“Trains have a special significance for him. I think trains are part of his ritual. He wanted a set of trains as a kid, but never got it.”
“Ah, quod erat demonstrandum,” Goldman said and smirked. “So now he kills people in train stations. Makes perfect sense to me. Wonder he didn’t blow up the whole fucking train.”
Even Sampson laughed at Goldman’s delivery on that one.
After we had finished the tour of Penn Station and the surrounding streets, we made a trip downtown to One Police Plaza. By four o’clock I knew what the NYPD had going-at least everything that Manning Goldman was prepared to tell me at this time.
I was almost sure that Gary Soneji was the Penn Station killer. I personally contacted Boston, Philly, and Baltimore and suggested tactfully that they pay attention to the train terminals. I passed on the same advice to Kyle Craig and the FBI.
“We’re going to head back to Washington,” I finally told Goldman and Groza. “Thanks for calling us in on this. This helps a lot.”
“I’ll call if there’s anything. You do the same, hey?” Manning Goldman put out his hand, and we shook. “I’m pretty sure we haven’t heard the last of Gary Soneji.”
I nodded. I was sure of it, too.
Chapter 28
IN HIS mind, Gary Soneji lay down beside Charles Joseph Whitman on the roof of the University of Texas tower, circa 1966.
All in his goddamn incredible mind!!
He had been up there with Charlie Whitman many, many times before-ever since 1966, when the spree killer had become one of his boyhood idols. Over the years, other killers had captured his imagination, but none were like Charlie Whitman. Whitman was an American original, and there weren’t many of those left.
Let’s see now, Soneji ran down the names of his favorites: James Herberty, who had opened fire without warning inside the McDonald’s in San Ysidro, California. He had killed twenty-one, killed them at an even faster clip than they could dish out greasy hamburgers. Soneji had actually copycatted the McDonald’s shootings a few years earlier. That was when he’d first met Cross face to face.
Another of his personal favorites was postman Patrick Sherill, who’d blown away fourteen coworkers in Edmond, Oklahoma, and also probably started the postman-as-madman paranoia. More recently, he had admired the handiwork of Martin Bryant at the Port Arthur penal colony in Tasmania. Then there was Thomas Watt Hamilton, who invaded the mind space of virtually everyone on the planet after his shooting spree at a primary school in Dunblane, Scotland.
Gary Soneji desperately wanted to invade everybody’s mind space, to become a large, disturbing icon on the world’s Internet. He was going to do it, too. He had everything figured out.
Charlie Whitman was still his sentimental favorite, though. Whitman was the original, the “madman in the tower.” A Bad Boy down there in Texas.
God, how many times had he lain on that same tower, in the blazing August sun, along with Bad Boy Charlie?
All in his incredible mind!
Whitman had been a twenty-five-year-old student of architectural engineering at the University of Texas when he’d gone tapioca pudding. He’d brought an arsenal up onto the observation deck of the limestone tower that soared three hundred feet above the campus, and where he must have felt like God.
Just before he’d gone up in the clock tower, he had murdered his wife and mother. Whitman had made Charlie Starkweather look like a piker and a real chump that afternoon in Texas. The same could be said for Dickie Hickock and Perry Smith, the white-trash punks Truman Capote immortalized in his book In Cold Blood. Charles Whitman made those two look like crap, too.
Soneji never forgot the actual passage from the Time magazine story on the Texas tower shootings. He knew it word for word: “Like many mass murderers, Charles Whitman had been an exemplary boy, the kind that neighborhood mothers hold up as a model to their own recalcitrant youngsters. He was a Roman Catholic altar
