Triple Threat - James Patterson Page 0,26

the roof. He fell a solid ten feet, hit the cement floor hard enough to make cracking sounds. He screamed feebly, then lay there moaning.

I stood up then, shaking with adrenaline, and feeling that beautiful rage explode through me all over again, searing-hot and vengeful.

“Who’s next?” I roared, feeling almost giddy. “C’mon, you bastards! I’ll kill every single Soneji before I’m done!”

I swung all around, my pistol aiming high and low, finger twitching on the trigger, anticipating another Soneji to appear on the roof of the alcove or from the darkness of the three remaining anterooms.

But nothing moved, and there was no sound except for the moans of the wounded and of Kimiko Binx, who sat in the far corner of the main room, curled up in a fetal position, and sobbing.

Chapter 30

Kimiko Binx was still crying and refusing to talk to me or to the patrol officers who arrived first on the scene, or to the detectives who came soon after.

Not even Bree could get Binx to make any kind of statement, other than to say sullenly, “Cross didn’t have to shoot. He didn’t have to kill them all.”

The fact was, I had not killed them all. Two of the Sonejis were alive, and there were EMTs working feverishly on them.

“Three Sonejis?” Bree said. “Makes it easy for them to cover ground.”

I nodded, seeing how one of them could have shot Sampson, while another staked out Soneji’s grave, and the third could have driven by Bree and me outside GW Medical Center.

“You okay, Alex?” Bree asked.

“No,” I said, feeling incredibly tired all of a sudden. “Not really.”

“Tell me what happened,” Bree said.

I did to the best of my abilities, finishing with “But all you really need to know is they set up an ambush, lured me, and I walked right into it.”

Bree thought about that, and then said, “There’ll be an investigation, but from what you said, it’s cut-and-dry. Self-defense, and justified.”

I didn’t say anything because somehow it didn’t seem quite right to me. Justified, yes, but cut-and-dry? They’d tried to kill Sampson, and me, twice. But some of the threads of what had happened just didn’t—

“By the way,” Bree said, interrupting my thoughts. “The labs came back on the exhumation.”

I looked at her, revealing nothing. “And?”

“It was him in the coffin,” she said. “Soneji. They compared DNA to samples taken when he was in federal custody the first time. He’s dead, Alex. He’s been dead more than ten years.”

One of the EMTs called out to us before I could express my relief. We went to the Soneji in the far alcove, then the one who’d been crawling away, leaving blood like a snail’s track. They’d shot him up with morphine and he was out of it. They’d also cut off his shirt and found the raised latex edge of a mask that could have been crafted by one of Hollywood’s finest.

After photographing the mask, we sliced and peeled it off, revealing the ashen face of Claude Watkins, painter, performance artist, and wounded idolizer of Gary Soneji.

The second Soneji was up on a gurney and headed for an ambulance when we caught up to him.

We tore open his shirt, found the latex edge of an identical mask, photographed it, and then had the EMTs slice it off him. The man behind the mask was in his late twenties and unfamiliar to us. But as they wheeled him out, I had no doubt that, whoever he was, he’d been worshipping Gary Soneji for a long, long time.

We waited for the medical examiner to arrive and take custody of the dead Soneji before we cut off the third mask.

“It’s a woman,” Bree said, her hands going to her mouth.

“Not just any woman,” I said, stunned and confused. “That’s Virginia Winslow.”

“Who?”

“Gary Soneji’s widow.”

“Wait. What?” Bree said, staring at the dead woman closely. “I thought you said she hated Soneji.”

“That’s what she told me.”

Bree shook her head. “What in God’s name possessed her to impersonate her dead husband and then try to kill you? Did she shoot John? Or did Watkins? Or that other guy?”

“One of them did,” I said. “I’ll put money one of the pistols matches.”

“But why?” she said, still confused.

“Binx and Watkins and, evidently, Virginia Winslow made Soneji into a cult, with me being the enemy of the cult,” I said, and thought about Winslow’s son, Dylan, and the picture of me on his dartboard.

Where was the kid in all of this? Seeing Binx being led out, I thought that