Page 5 of Return of the Spider

“You seen inside yet, Ned?” I asked.

The FBI agent shook his head. We followed Barthalis into the cabin, now gutted to the studs.

As we went through the kitchen to the basement stairs, Sampson asked, “Alexander, what alerted you?”

Climbing down the rickety stairs, Barthalis said, “There’s a secret room down here, and a notebook with Gary Soneji’s name on it. The second I realized this was allhisdoing, I backed out and called your boss and Mahoney’s. I brought in the dogs as a precaution, and they almost immediately struck on the east side. It’s him.”

I reserved judgment.

As on the floor above, much of the old drywall had been torn out, leaving just the studs on three walls. The fourth wall had a ragged gaping hole in it from the floor to the ceiling.

Barthalis reached over and pulled a string. A light bulb went on, revealing a six-foot-by-four-foot space with plain pine shelves on three interior sides and a small stool in the corner.

Mahoney gestured to the hole. “You knew more about him than anyone, Alex.”

I put on surgical gloves and stepped inside the hole with my phone out and the camera on, recording what I was seeing.

There were multiple dusty weapons on the shelves to the left. An Ithaca pump-action twelve-gauge shotgun, a .308 hunting rifle, and several pistols of different calibers, including a Charter Arms. 44-caliber snub-nosed, blue-barreled revolver. A sliver ofwhite athletic tape on the rosewood grip had the lettersSOSon it in black ink.

Beside it on the shelf was a. 22-caliber semiautomatic handgun, also with white athletic tape on the grip. The letters inked there wereNS.

A nine-millimeter Beretta beside that was markedZK.

A. 45 Remington Model 1911 was labeledGRK.

There were several knives on the shelf below the guns, including a black stiletto switchblade also markedNS.Beside it was a length of white nylon rope taggedTBS.On the bottom shelf lay handcuffs and a coiled length of steel wire, both markedJWG.

I took in the shelves on the back wall, which held Polaroid snapshots of various men and women (some clearly dead, some alive), a necklace, several rings, and at least a dozen locks of hair tied with ribbons of various colors.

Gesturing at them, I said, “Trophies. We’ll need DNA analysis on all of it.”

Mahoney said, “I have crime techs from Quantico on their way as we speak.”

“Good,” I said. “If these came from long-missing people, we might be able to give their families some kind of closure.”

The shelves on the wall to the right of the entrance were wider, and the lower ones held six large clear-plastic lidded storage bins. Left to right in black ink, they were labeledNS, SOS, ZK, TBS, JWG,andGRK.

On the shelf immediately above the boxes were notebooks of different colors, each with initials matching those on one of the bins below. I reached for a black leather-bound notebook on the highest shelf.

There was a plastic sleeve dead center on the cover. A file card had been put in it.

“‘Profiles in Homicidal Genius,by Gary Soneji,’” I read aloud from the scrawl on the card. “It has his twisted humor.”

I heard a female voice call, “Mr. Mahoney? Captain Barthalis? The dogs are hitting north of the house now. It might be another grave.”

“Jesus,” Ned said. “Alex, can I leave you to this?”

“Sure,” I said, opening the notebook.

Sampson said, “Too small in that hole for me to help. I’ll give Barthalis and Mahoney a hand outside.”

The three of them left. I looked down at the first page of the notebook, covered in Soneji’s distinctive scrawl, and read.

Time and again, history says, “Do not reinvent the wheel. Study what works, or worked. Study who works, or worked.”

Art students study the masters. Young athletes study the skills of geniuses older than themselves. So do singers and musicians.

In essence, one art or another, one skill or another, it’s all the same. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Study the masters.