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…”

Continue reading the extract here.

Buy a copy of Return of the Spider here.