A terrible fiend was loose in Cambridge. He had struck less than a dozen blocks from Harvard University. He would soon receive a name: Mr. Smith, a literary allusion that could have happened only in a university town like Cambridge.
The worst thing, what I would never forget or forgive — the final thing — Mr. Smith had cut out Isabella’s heart
My reverie ended. My plane was landing at Charles de Gaulle Airport. I was in Paris.
So was Smith.
Chapter 95
I CHECKED INTO the Hôtel de la Seine. Up in my room, I called St. Anthony’s Hospital in Washington. Alex Cross was still in grave condition. I purposely avoided meeting with the French police or the crisis team. The local police are never any help anyway. I preferred to work alone, and did so for half a day.
Meanwhile, Mr. Smith contacted the Sûreté. He always did it this way; plus a call to the local police, a personal affront to everyone involved in chasing him. Bad news, always terrible news. All of you have failed to catch me. You’ve failed, Pierce.
He had revealed where the body of Dr. Abel Sante could be found. He taunted us, called us pathetic losers and incompetents. He always mocked us after a kill.
The French police, as well as members of Interpol, were gathered in large numbers at the entrance to the Parc de Montsouris. It was ten after one in the morning when I arrived there.
Because of the possibility of crowds of onlookers and the press, the CRS, a special force of the Paris police, had been called in to secure the scene.
I spotted an inspector from Interpol whom I knew and waved in her direction. Sondra Greenberg was nearly as obsessed about catching Mr. Smith as I was. She was stubborn, excellent at her job. She had as good a chance as anyone of catching Mr. Smith.
Sondra looked particularly tense and uneasy as she walked toward to me. “I don’t think we need all these people, all this help,” I said, smiling thinly. “It shouldn’t be too damn hard to find the body, Sandy. He told us where to look.”
“I agree with you,” she said, “but you know the French. This was the way they decided it should be done. Le grand search party for le grand alien space criminal.” A cynical smile twisted along the side of her mouth. “Good to see you, Thomas. Shall we begin our little hunt? How is your French, by the way?”
“Il n’y a rien a voir, Madame, rentrez chez vous!”
Sandy laughed out of the side of her mouth. Some of the French policemen were looking at us as if we were both crazy. “I will like hell go home. Fine, though. You can tell the flics what we’d like them to do. And then they’ll do the exact opposite, I’m quite sure.”
“Of course they will. They’re French.”
Sondra was a tall brunette, willowy on top but with heavy legs, almost as if two body types had been fused. She was British, witty and bright, yet tolerant, even of Americans. She was devoutly Jewish and militantly gay. I enjoyed working with her, even at times like this.
I walked into the Parc de Montsouris with Sandy Greenberg, arm in arm. Once more into the fray.
“Why do you think he sends us both messages? Why does he want us both here?” she mused as we tramped across damp lawns that glistened under streetlights.
“We’re the stars in his weird galaxy. That’s my theory anyway. We’re also authority figures. Perhaps he likes to taunt authority. He might even have a modicum of respect for us.”
“I sincerely doubt that,” Sandy said.
“Then perhaps he likes showing us up, making himself feel superior. How about that theory?”
“I rather like it, actually. He could be watching us right now. I know he’s an egomaniac of the highest order. Hello there, Mr. Smith from planet Mars. Are you watching? Enjoying the hell out of this? God, I hate that creepy bastard!”
I peered around at the dark elm trees. There was plenty of cover here if someone wanted to observe us.
“Perhaps he’s here. He might be able to change shapes, you know. He could be that balayeur des rues, or that gendarme, or even that fille de trottoir in disguise,” I said.
We began the search at quarter past one. At two in the morning, we still hadn’t located the body of Dr. Abel Sante. It was strange and worrisome to everyone in the search party. It was obvious to me that Smith wanted to make it hard for us to locate the body. He had never done that before. He usually discarded bodies the way people throw away gum wrappers. What was Smith up to?
The Paris newspapers had evidently gotten a tip that we were searching the small park. They wanted a hearty serving of blood and guts for their breakfast editions. TV helicopters hovered like vultures overhead. Police barricades had been set up out on the street. We had everything except a victim.
The crowd of onlookers already numbered in the hundreds — and it was two o’clock in the morning. Sandy peered out at them. “Mr. Smith’s sodding fan club,” she sneered. “What a time! What a civilization! Cicero said that, you know.”
My beeper went off at half past two. The noise startled Sandy and me. Then hers went off. Dueling beepers. What a world, indeed.
I was certain it was Smith. I looked at Sandy.
“What the hell is he pulling this time?” she said. She looked frightened. “Or maybe it’s a she — what is she pulling?”
We removed our laptops from our shoulder bags. Sandy began to check her machine for messages. I got to mine first.
Pierce, the e-mail read,
welcome back to the real work, to the real chase. I lied to you. That was your punishment for unfaithfulness. I wanted to embarrass you, whatever that means. I wanted to remind you that you can’t trust me, or anyone else — not even your friend, Mr. Greenberg. Besides, I really don’t like the French. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed torturing them here tonight.
Poor Dr. Abel Sante is at the Buttes-Chaumont Park. He’s up near the temple. I swear it. I promise you.
Trust me. Ha, ha! Isn’t that the quaint sound you humans make when you laugh? I can’t quite make the sound myself. You see, I’ve never actually laughed
Always,
Mr. Smith
Sandy Greenberg was shaking her head, muttering curses in the night air. She had gotten a message, too.
“Buttes-Chaumont park,” she repeated the location. Then she added, “He says that I shouldn’t trust you. Ha, ha! Isn’t that the quaint sound we humans make when we laugh?”
Chapter 96
THE HUGE, unwieldy search team swept across Paris to the northeast, heading toward the Buttes-Chaumont Park. The syncopated wail of police sirens was a disturbing, fearsome noise. Mr. Smith still had Paris in an uproar in the early-morning hours.
“He’s in control now,” I said to Sandy Greenberg as we sped along dark Parisian streets in the blue Citroën I had rented. The car tires made a ripping sound on the smooth road surface. The noise fit with everything else that was happening. “Smith is in his glory, however ephemeral it may turn out to be. This is his time, his moment,” I rattled on.
The English investigator frowned. “Thomas, you continue to ascribe human emotions to Smith. When are you going to get it through your skull that we’re looking for a little green man.”
“I’m an empirical investigator. I’ll believe it only when I see a little green man with blood dripping from his little green mouth.”
Neither of us had ever given a millisecond’s credence to the “alien” theories, but space-visitor jokes were definitely a part of the dark humor of this manhunt. It helped to keep us going, knowing that we would soon be at a particularly monstrous and disturbing murder scene.
It was nearly three in the morning when we arrived at the Buttes-Chaumont. What difference did the late hour make to me. I never slept anymore.
The park was deserted, but brightly lit with street-lamps and police and army searchlights. A low, bluish gray fog had settled in, but there was still enough visibility for our search. The Buttes-Chaumont is an enormous area, not unlike Central Park in New York. Back in the mid-1800s, a manmade lake was dug ther
e and fed by the St. Martin’s Canal. A mountain of rocks was then constructed, and it is full of caves and waterfalls now. The foliage is dense almost anywhere you choose to roam, or perhaps to hide a body.
It took only a few minutes before a police radio message came for us. Dr. Sante had been located not far from where we had entered the park. Mr. Smith was finished playing with us. For now.
Sandy and I got out of the patrol car at the gardener’s house near the temple, and we began to climb the steep stone steps. The flics and French soldiers around us weren’t just tired and shell-shocked, they looked afraid. The body-recovery scene would stay with all of them for the rest of their lives. I had read John Webster’s The White Devil while I was an undergrad at Harvard. Webster’s weird seventeenth-century creation was filled with devils, demons, and were-wolves — all of them human. I believed Mr. Smith was a human demon. The worst kind.
We pushed our way forward through thick bushes and brush. I could hear the low, pitiful whine of search dogs nearby. Then I saw four high-strung, shivering animals leading the way.
Predictably, the new crime scene was a unique one. It was quite beautiful, with an expansive view of Montmartre and Saint-Denis. During the day, people came here to stroll, climb, walk pets, live life as it should be lived. The park closed at 11:00 P.M. for safety reasons.
“Up ahead,” Sandy whispered. “There’s something.”
I could see soldiers and police loitering in small groups. Mr. Smith had definitely been here. A dozen or more “packets,” each wrapped in newspaper, were carefully laid out on a sloping patch of grass.
“Are we sure this is it?” one of the inspectors asked me in French. His name was Faulks. “What the hell is this? Is he making a joke?”
“It is not a joke, I can promise you that. Unwrap one of the bundles. Any one will do,” I instructed the French policeman. He just looked at me as if I were mad.
“As they say in America,” Faulks said in French, “this is your show.”
“Do you speak English?” I spit out the words.
“Yes, I do,” he answered brusquely.
“Good. Go fuck yourself,” I said.
I walked over to the eerie pile of “packages,” or perhaps “gifts” was the better word. There were a variety of shapes, each packet meticulously wrapped in newspaper. Mr. Smith the artiste. A large round packet looked as if it might be a head.
“French butcher shop. That’s his motif for tonight. It’s all just meat to him,” I muttered to Sandy Greenberg. “He’s mocking the French police.”
I carefully unwrapped the newspaper with plastic gloves. “Christ Jesus, Sandy.”
It wasn’t quite a head — only half a head.
Dr. Abel Sante’s head had been cleanly separated from the rest of the body, like an expensive cut of meat. It was sliced in half. The face was washed, the skin carefully pulled away. Only half of Sante’s mouth screamed at us — a single eye reflected a moment of ultimate terror.
“You’re right. It is just meat to him,” Sandy said. “How can you stand being right about him all the time?”
“I can’t,” whispered. “I can’t stand it at all.”
Chapter 97
OUTSIDE WASHINGTON, an FBI sedan stopped to pick up Christine Johnson at her apartment. She was ready and waiting, standing vigil just inside the front door. She was hugging herself, always hugging herself lately, always on the edge of fear. She’d had two glasses of red wine and had to force herself to stop at two.
As she hurried to the car she kept glancing around to see if a reporter was staking out her apartment. They were like hounds on a fresh trail. Persistent, sometimes unbelievably insensitive and rude.
A black agent whom she knew, a smart, nice man named Charles Dampier, hopped out and held the car’s back door open for her. “Good evening, Ms. Johnson,” he said as politely as one of her students at school. She thought that he had a little crush on her. She was used to men acting like that, but tried to be kind.
“Thank you,” she said as she got into the gray-leather backseat. “Good evening, guys,” She said to Charles and the driver, a man named Joseph Denjeau.
During the ride, no one spoke. The agents had obviously been instructed not to make small talk unless she initiated it. Strange, cold world they live in, Christine thought to herself. And now I guess I live there, too. I don’t think I like it at all.
She had taken a bath before the agents arrived. She sat in the tub with her red wine and reviewed her life. She understood the good, bad, and ugly about herself pretty well. She knew she had always been a little afraid to jump off the deep end in the past, but she’d wanted to, and she’d gotten oh-so-close. There was definitely a streak of wildness inside her, good wildness, too. She had actually left George for six months during the early years of their marriage. She’d flown to San Francisco and studied photography at Berkeley, lived in a tiny apartment in the hills. She had loved the solitude for a while, the time for thinking, the simple act of recording the beauty of life with her camera every day.
She had come back to George, taught, and eventually got the job at the Sojourner Truth School. Maybe it was being around the children, but she absolutely loved it at the school. God, she loved kids, and she was good with them, too. She wanted children of her own so badly.
Her mind was all over the place tonight. Probably the late hour, and the second glass of merlot. The dark Ford sedan cruised along deserted streets at midnight. It was the usual route, almost always the same trail from Mitchellville to D.C. She wondered if that was wise, but figured they knew how to do their jobs.
Occasionally Christine glanced around, to see if they were being followed. She felt a little silly doing it. Couldn’t help it, though.
She was part of a case that was important to the press now. And dangerous, too. They had absolutely no respect for her privacy or feelings. Reporters would show up at the school and try to question other teachers. They called her at home so frequently that she finally changed her number to an unlisted one.
She heard the whoop of nearby police or ambulance sirens and the unpleasant sound brought her out of her reverie. She sighed. She was almost there now.
She shut her eyes and took deep, slow breaths. She dropped her head down near her chest. She was tired and thought she needed a good cry.
“Are you all right, Ms. Johnson?” agent Dampier inquired. He’s got eyes in the back of his head. He’s been watching me, Christine thought. He’s watching everything that happens, but I guess that’s good.
“I’m fine.” She opened her eyes and offered a smile. “Just a little tired is all. Too many early mornings and late nights.”
Agent Dampier hesitated, then he said, “I’m sorry it has to be this way.”
“Thank you,” she whispered. “You make it a lot easier for me with your kindness. And you’re a real good driver,” she kidded agent Denjeau, who mostly kept quiet, but laughed now.
The FBI sedan hurtled down a steep concrete ramp and entered the building from the rear. This was a delivery entrance, she knew by now. She noticed that she was hugging herself again. Everything about the nightly trip seemed so unreal to her.
Both agents escorted her upstairs, right to the door, at which point they stepped back and she entered alone.
She gently closed the door and leaned against it. Her heart was pounding — it was always this way.
“Hello, Christine,” Alex said, and she went and held him so tight, so tight, and everything was suddenly so much better. Everything made sense again.
Chapter 98
MY FIRST morning back in Washington, I decided to visit the Cross house on Fifth Street again. I needed to look over Cross’s notes on Gary Soneji one more time. I had a deepening sense that Alex Cross knew his assailant, had met the person at some time before the vicious attack.
As I drove to the house through the crowded D.C. streets I went over the physical evidence again. The first really significant clue was that the bedroom where
Cross was attacked had been tightly controlled. There was little or no evidence of chaos, of someone being out of his mind. There was ample evidence that the assailant was in what is called a cold rage.
The other significant factor was the evidence of “overkill” in the bedroom. Cross had been struck half a dozen times before he was shot. That would seem to conflict with the tight control at the crime scene, but I didn’t think so: Whoever came to the house had a deep hatred for Cross.
Once inside the house, the attacker operated as Soneji would have. The assailant had hidden in the cellar. Then he copycatted an earlier attack Soneji had made at the house. No weapons had been found, so the attacker was definitely clearheaded. No souvenirs had been taken from Cross’s room.
Alex Cross’s detective shield had been left behind. The attacker wanted it found. What did that tell me — that the killer was proud of what he had accomplished?
Finally, I kept returning to the single most striking and meaningful clue so far. It had jumped at me from the first moment I arrived on Fifth Street and began to collect data.
The attacker had left Alex Cross and his family alive. Even if Cross died, the assailant had departed from the house with the knowledge that Cross was still breathing.
Why would the intruder do that? He could have killed Cross. Or was it always part of a plan to leave Cross alive? If so, why?
Solve that mystery, answer that question — case solved.
Chapter 99
THE HOUSE was quiet, and it had a sad and empty feeling, as houses do when a big, important piece of the family is missing.
I could see Nana Mama working feverishly in her kithen. The smell of baking bread, roast chicken, and baked sweet potatoes flowed through the house, and it was soothing and reassuring. She was lost in her cooking, and I didn’t want to disturb her.