Criss Cross (Alex Cross) - James Patterson Page 0,90
than one of us there.”
“I had a camera put in before he was transferred,” Mahoney said. “We’ll watch from down the hall.”
Sampson said, “Good luck.”
“Thanks, brother.”
The two of them walked away.
I took a deep breath and gazed at Bree. “This feels daunting.”
Her eyes were glassy as she squeezed my hand and smiled. “You were born for this, Alex Cross. Go get your boy.”
She kissed me and then followed Ned and John. Nodding at the officer standing guard, I prayed for the right words to come and then went through the door.
M, or whatever his real name was, lay semi-upright in his hospital bed, a bank of monitors and medical devices cheeping and whirring around him.
He opened red, watery eyes. He tracked me as I came to the foot of his bed.
“Can you tell me where you took my son now?”
“Told you,” he said, his voice thick and his words slurred due to the pain meds. “I buried him deep underground.”
“Then tell me where I can dig him up and give him a proper burial.”
“You’re bright. You’ll find him eventually.”
“Look—you win. I concede. You outplayed me. You’re still outplaying me.” I said that last with as much sincerity as I could muster.
“And yet I’m the one who might never walk again and will spend my life behind bars.”
Maybe the drugs had loosened his tongue, because that felt like an honest comment, and an open one, and I decided to radically change tactics.
“So when did you stop listening to your heart?” I asked.
“Don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do. There had to be a time in your long-ago past when you knew right from wrong instinctively. Do you remember that time?”
He swallowed, shrugged. “One set of foster parents brought me to church when I was a kid. Read scripture and other such nonsense.”
“But apart from that, there was a time when you felt in your heart what was right and wrong. Do you remember that time?”
M’s eyes narrowed. “What does this have to do with your son?”
“Do you remember?”
He closed his eyes. “Yeah, sure, I guess.”
“Of course you remember. Of course you do. It was there when you were born. It was there before you were born. Did you know that the heart has its own nervous system? It’s true. The heart is alive and alert long before the brain develops. It’s a deeper organ of thinking, another way of knowing.”
M’s eyes opened. “So?”
“When did you stop listening to your heart?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re—”
“Yes, you do,” I said. “You stopped listening to your heart because you thought it was broken. And that’s when you started listening to the angry voices in your head. Were you thirteen? Fourteen?”
CHAPTER 103
I HAD NOT ASKED THESE questions idly.
A remarkable number of suicidal or homicidal adults endured some traumatic event in their late tweens to early teens, when their hormones were surging and going haywire and their emotions were swinging wildly.
In essence, the experience of that trauma is magnified by the hormones and amplified by the mood swings. I believe such a brutal event in those years wounds the brain, causes short circuits, and etches in hatred, self-loathing, and neuroses.
When I asked M about his early teen years, a shadow came over his face, and he shut his eyes.
For almost five minutes, I waited for an answer. The only sounds were our breathing and the monitors.
“I was fourteen,” M said at last, opening his eyes. “My sister was raped and murdered. I found the man who did it and beat him to death with a chain.”
“That’s when you stopped listening to your heart? Before you killed him?”
“Afterward,” he said. “When I realized I’d liked beating that son of a bitch to death, and I wanted to do it over and over and over again.”
I nodded. “That would do it.”
“Do what?”
“Silence your heart. Divorce you from your soul.”
I stayed in eye contact with him, saw the twitching of his cheek muscles.
“I don’t have a soul or a heart.”
“Of course you do,” I said. “The bullet missed it completely, and it’s still there. You can listen to it if you dare. You might find hope.”
“Of what?”
“Redemption.”
He laughed softly. “There is no redemption for a man like me.”
“Yes, there is. Close your eyes.”
I had a moment of doubt when I thought he might shut me down. But then his eyelids closed.
“Listen to your heart,” I said quietly. “It’s still there. It will tell you what to do.”
He breathed, swallowed, shifted uncomfortably, and then opened