earth. That’s where she got one of her many nicknames, “Velcro.”
Jezzie sensed it, too. She reached out and hugged Jannie. It was a neat little scene to watch. Damon immediately decided to join in. It was the thing to do. It was as if their long-lost best friend had suddenly returned from the wars.
After a minute or so, Jezzie stood up again. At that moment it struck me that she was a real nice person, and that I hadn’t met too many of those during the investigation. Her house visit was thoughtful, but also a little brave. Southeast is not a great neighborhood for white women to travel in, even one who was probably carrying a gun.
“Well, I just stopped by for a few hugs.” She winked to me. “Actually, I have a case not too far from here. Now I’m off to be a workaholic again.”
“How about some hot coffee?” I asked her. I thought I could manage the coffee. Nana probably had some in the kitchen that was only five or six hours old.
She squinted a look at me and she started to smile again.
“Two nice kids, nice Sunday morning at home with them. You’re not such a tough guy after all.”
“No, I’m a tough guy, too,” I said. “I just happen to be a tough guy who finds his way home by Sunday morning.”
“Okay, Alex.” She kept her smile turned on. “Just don’t let this newspaper nonsense get you down. Nobody believes the funny pages, anyway. I’ve got to go. I’ll take a rain check on the coffee.”
Jezzie Flanagan opened the front door and started to leave. She waved to the kids as the door was closing behind her.
“So long, Big Daddy,” she said to me and grinned.
CHAPTER 31
AFTER JEZZIE FLANAGAN had finished her business in Southeast, she drove out to the farm where Gary Soneji had buried the two children. She had been there twice before, but a lot of things still bothered her about the farm in Maryland. She was obsessive as hell, anyway. She figured that nobody wanted to catch Soneji any more than she did.
Jezzie ignored the crime scene signage and sped down the rutted dirt road to a cluster of buildings in disrepair. She distinctly remembered everything about the place. There was the main farmhouse, a garage for machinery, and the barn where the kids had been kept.
Why this place? she asked herself. Why here, Soneji? What should it tell her about who he really is?
Jezzie Flanagan had been a whiz-kid investigator since the day she’d first entered the Secret Service. She’d come there with an honors law degree from the University of Virginia, and Treasury had tried to steer her toward the FBI, where nearly half the agents had law degrees. But Jezzie had surveyed the situation and chosen the Service, anyway, where the law degree would make her stand out more. She’d worked eighty- and hundred-hour weeks from the beginning, right up to the present. She’d been a shooting star for one reason: she was smarter and tougher than any of the men she worked with, or the ones she worked for. She was more driven. But Jezzie had known from the beginning that, if she ever made a big mistake, her starship would crash. She’d known it. There was only one solution. She had to find Gary Soneji, somehow. She had to be the one.
She walked the farmhouse grounds until darkness fell. Then she walked them again with a flashlight. Jezzie scribbled down notes, trying to find some missing connection. Maybe it did have something to do with the old Lindbergh case, the so-called crime of the century from the 1930s.
Son of Lindbergh?
The Lindbergh place in Hopewell, New Jersey, had been a farmhouse, too.
Baby Lindbergh had been buried not far from the kidnap site.
Bruno Hauptmann, the Lindbergh kidnapper, had been from New York City. Could the kidnapper in Washington be some kind of distant relative? Could he be from somewhere near Hopewell? Maybe Princeton? How could nothing have turned up on Soneji so far?
Before she left the farm, Jezzie sat in her town car. She turned on the engine, the heat, and just sat there. Obsessing. Lost in her thoughts.
Where was Gary Soneji? How had he disappeared? Nobody can just disappear nowadays. No one is that smart.
Then she thought about Maggie Rose Dunne and “Shrimpie” Goldberg, and tears began to roll down her cheeks. She couldn’t stop sobbing. That was the real reason she’d come out to the farmhouse,