Return of the Spider

Prologue

THE NEST

Present Day

My name is Alex Cross.

I have been a criminal psychologist for the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit and am currently working — for the second time in my life — as a homicide detective with the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police.

In my decades of investigative and profiling work, I’ve had to interview many people with vicious and violent minds. The worst of them, the psychopaths and sociopaths, the ones who loved to kill — they all had one thing in common: They lied beautifully. So beautifully that I was always left wondering how much of what they told me was truth and how much was spun out of thin air the way a spider crafts a web on a dewy morning.

One sweltering day in May, all that changed. One sweltering day in May, someone put a sledgehammer through rotten drywall and showed me where one of the first spiders I ever encountered had built his secret nest.

There’d been a thunderstorm earlier that afternoon, and despite the lingering heat, an evening breeze had picked up enough to cool the sunporch at our home on Fifth Street in Southeast Washington, DC, where I was trying to play Gershwin after dinner. Caught up in case after case, I had not sat down at the keys for well over a year. The piano was perpetually a bit out of tune, and I was rusty, but I tried to coax the melody of An American in Paris out of it.

Gershwin probably wouldn’t have appreciated my rendition, but I didn’t care. I was sitting at the instrument after a long hiatus, and all thoughts of my hectic life slipped away until there was nothing but the music for almost twenty blissful minutes.

At a quarter past eight, my cell phone blared with the ringtone I reserved for John Sampson, my oldest friend.

“You home?” he asked.

“At the piano on the sunporch. Training to be a lounge lizard.”

“Break training — I’m on my way to your place, ETA in three minutes. The Alphonso brothers have surfaced.”

“Where?” I said, getting up from the piano bench. I opened the sliding glass door and went into the kitchen.

“Right in District Heights, their mom’s old house,” Sampson said. I rushed through the darkened kitchen, hearing the television in the front room.

“You mean their aunt’s place?”

“Right. She inherited it. SWAT has already been alerted and will meet us there.”

“I’ll be out front.” I hung up and went into the front room.

Nana Mama, my ninety- something grandmother, was on the couch watching Yellowstone with my wife, Bree; she saw me rush in and hit pause on John Dutton riding a horse toward an impossible Montana sunset.

“Gotta go,” I said. “The Alphonso brothers just surfaced.”

“The meth- head bank robbers?” Nana Mama said.

“The same.” I went to the hall closet and retrieved my chest armor and service weapon, a Glock 19.

Bree came out into the hall, clearly worried. “Those guys shoot first and ask questions later, Alex.”

“Which is why there’s an entire SWAT team on its way to surround them,” I said. “John and I are merely witnesses at this point.”

“Stay that way,” Bree said. She kissed me, and I went out to the sidewalk in front of our home.

Sampson pulled up in an unmarked squad car thirty seconds later. I got in and we sped away. John explained that an informant for the regional drug task force had seen Nicky and Trevor Alphonso — armed robbers of twelve banks and killers of six innocent people in the span of four months — shortly after sundown, heading toward their childhood home on Foster Street in District Heights.

“Their aunt there?”

“The informant says she’s out of town, visiting her brother in Chicago.”

“Good,” I said. “Let’s end this. Get these guys behind bars so bank tellers in four states can sleep easier.”

Sampson put a bubble on the roof, lit it up, and hit the siren.