Cat & Mouse

Chapter 68

MATTHEW LEWIS happily drove the graveyard shift on the city bus line that traveled along East Capitol Street in D.C. He was absently whistling a Marvin Gaye song, “What’s Going On,” as he piloted his bus through the night.

He had driven this same route for nineteen years and was mostly glad to have the work. He also enjoyed the solitude. Lewis had always been a fairly deep thinker, according to his friends and Alva, his wife of twenty years. He was a history buff, and interested in government, sometimes a little sociology, too. He had developed the interests in his native Jamaica and had kept up with them.

For the past few months, he had been listening to self-improvement tapes from an outfit called the Teaching Company, in Virginia. As he rode along East Capitol at five in the morning, he was really getting into an excellent lecture called “The Good King-the American Presidency Since the Depression.” Sometimes he’d knock off two or three lectures in a single night, or maybe he’d listen to a particularly good tape a couple of times in a night.

He saw the sudden movement out of the corner of his eye. He swerved the steering wheel. The brakes screeched. His bus skidded hard right and would up diagonally across East Capitol.

The bus emitted a loud hiss. There wasn’t any traffic coming, thank goodness, just a string of green lights as far as he could see.

Matthew Lewis threw open the bus doors and climbed out. He hoped he’d missed whoever, or whatever, had run into the street.

He wasn’t sure, though, and he was afraid of what he might find. Except for the drone of his tape inside the bus, it was quiet. This was so weird, and as bad as can be, he thought to himself.

Then he saw an elderly black woman lying in the street. She was wearing a long, blue-striped bathrobe. Her robe was open and he could see her red nightgown. Her feet were bare. His heart bucked dangerously.

He ran across the street to help her, and thought he was going to be sick. In his headlights he saw that her nightgown wasn’t red. It was bright red blood, all over her. The sight was gruesome and awful. It wasn’t the worst thing he’d encountered in his years on the night route, but it was right up there.

The woman’s eyes were open and she was still conscious. She reached out a frail, thin arm toward him. Must be domestic violence, he thought. Or maybe a robbery at her home.

“Please help us,” Nana Mama whispered. “Please help us.”

Chapter 69

FIFTH STREET was blocked off and completely barricaded to traffic! John Sampson abandoned his black Nissan and ran the rest of the way to Alex’s house. Police cruiser and ambulance sirens were wailing everywhere on the familiar street that he almost thought of as his own.

Sampson ran as he never had before, in the grip of the coldest fear of his life. His feet pounded heavily on the sidewalk stone. His heart felt heavy, ready to break. He couldn’t catch a breath, and he was certain he would throw up if he didn’t stop running this second. The hangover from the night before had dulled his senses, but not nearly enough.

Metro police personnel were still arriving at the confused, noisy, throbbing scene. Sampson pushed his way past the neighborhood looky-loos. His contempt for them had never been more obvious or more intense. People were crying everywhere Sampson looked-people he knew, neighbors and friends of Alex. He heard Alex’s name being spoken in whispers.

As he reached the familiar wooden picket fence that surrounded the Cross property, he heard something that turned his stomach inside out. He had to steady himself against the whitewashed fence.

“They’re all dead inside. The whole Cross family gone,” a pock-faced woman in the crowd was shooting off her mouth. She looked like a character from the TV show Cops, had the same crude lack of sensitivity.

He spun round toward the source of the words, toward the hurt. Sampson gave the woman a glazed look and pushed forward into the yard, past collapsible sawhorses and yellow crime-scene tape.

He took the front porch steps in two long, athletic strides, and nearly collided with EMS medics hurrying a litter out of the living room.

Sampson stopped cold on the Cross’s front porch. He couldn’t believe any of this. Little Jannie was on the litter and she looked so small. He bent over, and then collapsed hard on his knees. The porch shook beneath his weight.

A low moan escaped his mouth. He was no longer strong, no longer brave. His heart was breaking and he choked back a sob.

When she saw him, Jannie started to cry. “Uncle john, Uncle John.” She said his name in the tiniest, saddest, hurt voice.

Jannie isn’t dead, Jannie is alive, Sampson thought, and the words almost tumbled out of his mouth. He wanted to shout the truth to the looky-loos. Stop your damn rumors and lies! He wanted to know everything, all at once, but that just wasn’t possible.

Sampson leaned in close to Jannie, his goddaughter, whom he loved as if she were his own child. Her nightgown was smeared with blood. The coppery smell of blood was strong and he was almost sick again.

More blood ribboned through Jannie’s tight, carefully braided hair. She was so proud of her braids, her beautiful hair. Oh, dear God. How could this happen? How could it be? he remembered her singing “Ja Da,” just the night before.

“You’re okay, baby,” Sampson whispered, the words catching like barbed wire in his throat. “I’m going to be back here with you in a minute. You’re okay, Jannie. I need to run upstairs. I’ll be right back, baby. Be right back, Promise you.”

“What about Damon? What about my daddy?” Jannie whimpered as she softly cried.

Her eyes were wide with fear, with a terror that made Sampson’s heart break all over again. She was just a little girl. How could anyone do this?

“Everybody’s okay, baby. They’re okay,” Sampson whispered again. His tongue was thick, his mouth as dry as Sandpaper. He could barely get out the words. Everybody’s okay, baby. He prayed that was true.

The EMS medics did their best to wave Sampson away, and they carried Jannie down to a waiting ambulance. More ambulances were still arriving in front, and more police cruisers as well.

He pushed his way into the house, which was crowded with police-both street officers and detectives. When the first alarm came, half of the precinct must have rushed over to the Cross house. He had never seen so many cops in one place.

He was late as usual-the late John Sampson, Alex liked to call him. He’d slept at a woman’s house. Cee walker’s and couldn’t be reached right away. His beeper was off, taking a night off after Alex’s party-after the big celebration.

Someone knew Alex would have his guard down, Sampson thought, being a homicide detective already. Who knew? Who did this terrible thing?

What in the name of God happened here?

Chapter 70

SAMPSON BOLTED up the narrow, twisting stairs to the second floor of the house. He wanted to shout above the blaring noise, the buzz of the incipient police investigation, to yell Alex’s name, to see him appear out of one of the bedrooms.

He’d had way too much to drink the night before and he was reeling, feeling shaky, rubbery all over. He rushed into Damon’s room and let out a deep moan. The boy was being transferred from his bed to a litter. Damon looked so much like his father, so much like Alex when he was Damon’s age.

He looked worse than Jannie. The side of his face was beaten raw. One of Damon’s eyes was closed, swollen to twice its size. Deep purple and scarlet bruises were around the eye. There were contusions and lacerations.

Gary Soneji wad dead-he’d gone down in Grand Central Station. He couldn’t have done this horrible thing at Alex’s house.

And yet, he had promised that he would!

Nothing made sense to Sampson yet. He wished he were dreaming this nightmare, but knew he wasn’t

A detective named Rakeem Powell grabbed him by the shoulder, grabbed him hard and shook him. “Damon’s all right, John. Somebody came in here, beat the living hell out of the kids. Looks like he just used fists. Hard punches. Didn’t mean to kill them, though, or maybe the cowardly fuck couldn’t finish the job. Who the hell knows at this point. Damon’s all right. John? Are you all right?”

Sampson pushed Rakeem away, threw him off impatiently. “What about Alex? Nana?”

“Nana was beaten bad. Bus driver found her on the street, took her to St. Tony’s. She’s conscious, but she’s an old woman. Skin rips when they’re old. Alex got shot in his bedroom, John. They’re up there with him.”

“Who’s in there?” Sampson groaned. He was close to tears, and he never cried. He couldn’t help himself now, couldn’t hide his feelings.

“Christ, who isn’t?” Rakeem said and shook his head. “ EMS, us, FBI. Kyle Craig is here.”

Sampson broke away from Rakeem Powell and lunged toward the bedroom. Everybody wasn’t dead inside the house-but Alex had been shot. Somebody came here to get him! Who could it have been?

Sampson tried to go into Alex’s bedroom, but he was held back by men he didn’t know-probably FBI from the look of them.

Kyle Craig was in the room. He knew that much. The FBI was here already. “Tell Kyle I’m here,” he told the men at the door. “Tell Kyle Craig it’s Sampson.”

One of the FBI agents ducked inside. Kyle came out immediately, pushed his way into the hall to Sampson.

“Kyle, what the hell?” Sampson tried to talk. “Kyle, what happened?”

“He’s been shot twice. Shot and beaten,” Kyle said. “I need to talk to you, John. Listen to me, just listen to me, will you.”

Chapter 71

SAMPSON TRIED to hold back his fears, his true feelings, tried to control the chaos in his mind. Detectives and police personnel were clustered at the bedroom door in the narrow hallway. A couple of them were crying. Others were trying not to.

None of this could be happening!

Sampson turned away from the bedroom. He was afraid he was going to lose it, something he never did. Kyle hadn’t stopped talking, but he couldn’t really follow what Kyle was saying. He couldn’t concentrate on the FBI man’s words.

He inhaled deeply trying to fight off the reverberations of shock. It was shock, wasn’t it? Then not tears started to stream down his cheeks. He didn’t care if Kyle saw. The pain in his heart cut so deep, cut right to the bone. His nerve endings were already rubbed raw. Never anything like this before.

“Listen to me, John,” Kyle said, but Sampson wasn’t listening.

Sampson’s body slumped heavily against the wall. He asked Kyle how he’d gotten here so fast. Kyle had an answer, always an answer for everything. Still-nothing was really making sense to Sampson, not a word of it.

He was looking at something over the FBI man’s shoulder. Sampson couldn’t believe it. Through the window, he could see an FBI helicopter. It was landing in the vacant lot just across Fifth Street. Things were getting stranger and stranger.

A figure lurched out of the helicopter, crouched under the rotor blades, then started toward the Cross house. It almost seemed as if he were levitating above the blowing grass in the yard.

The man was tall and slender, with dark sunglasses, the kind with small round lenses. His long blond hair was bound in a ponytail. He didn’t look like FBI.

There was definitely something different about him, something radical for the Bureau. He almost looked angry as he pushed the looky-loss away. He also looked as if he were in charge, at least in charge of himself.

Now…what was this? Sampson thought. What’s going on here?

“Who the hell is that?” he asked Kyle Craig. “Who is that, Kyle? Who is that goddamn ponytailed asshole?”

Chapter 72

MY NAME is Thomas Pierce, but the press usually call me “Doc.” I was once a medical student at Harvard. I graduated, but never worked a day in a hospital. Never practiced medicine. Now I’m part of the Behavioral Science Unit of the FBI. I’m thirty-three years old. Truthfully, the only place I might look like a “Doc” is in an episode of the TV show ER.

I was rushed from the training compound at Quantico to Washington early that morning. I had been ordered to help investigate the attack on Dr. Alex Cross and members of his immediate family. To be candid, I didn’t want to be involved in the case for a number of reasons. Most important, I was already part of a difficult investigation, one that had drained nearly all of my energy-the Mr. Smith case.

Instinctively, I knew that some people would be angry with me because of the shooting of Alex Cross and my being at the crime scene so quickly. I knew with absolute certainty I would be seen as opportunistic, when that couldn’t be farther from the truth.

There was nothing I could do about it now. The Bureau wanted me there. So I put it out of my mind. I tried to anyway. I was performing my job. The same as Dr. Cross would have done for me under comparably unfortunate circumstances.

I was certain of one thing, though, from the moment I arrived. I knew I looked as shocked and outraged as anyone else standing sentinel in the crowd gathered at the house of Fifth street. I probably looked angry to some of them. I was angry. My mind was full of chaos, fear of the unknown, fear of failure, too. I was close to the state of mind described as “toast.” Too many days, weeks, months in a row with Mr. Smith. Now this new bit of blasphemy.

I had listened to Alex Cross speak once at a profiler seminar at the University of Chicago. He had made an impression. I hoped that he would live, but the reports were all bad. Nothing I’d heard so far left room for hope.

I figured that was why they’d brought me in on the case right away. The vicious attack on Cross would mean major headings, and put intense pressure on both the Washington police and the Bureau. I was there on Fifth Street for the simplest of reasons-to relieve the pressure.

I felt an unpleasant aura, residue from the recent violence, as I approached the tidy, white-shingled Cross house. Some policemen I passed were red-eyed and a few seemed almost to be in shock. It was all very strange and disquieting.

I wondered if Alex Cross had died since I had left Quantico. I already had a sixth sense for the terrible and unexpected violence that had taken place inside the modest, peaceful-looking house. I wished that none of the others were at the crime scene, So I could absorb everything without all these distractions.

That was what I had been brought here to do. Observe the scene of unbelievable mayhem. Get a gut feeling for what might have happened in the early hours of the morning. Figure everything out quickly and efficiently.

Out of the corner of my eye, I say Kyle Craig coming out of the house. He was in a hurry, as he always is. I sighed. Now it begins, now it begins

Kyle crossed Fifth Street in a quick job. He came up to me and we shook hands. I was glad to see him. Kyle is smart and very organized, and also supportive of those he works with. He’s famous for getting things done.

“They just moved Alex,” he said, “He’s hanging on.”

“What’s the prognosis? Tell me, Kyle.” I needed to know everything. I was there to collect facts. This was the start of it.

Kyle averted his eyes. “Not good. They say he won’t live. They’re sure he won’t live.”

Chapter 73

THE PRESS CORPS intercepted Kyle and me as we headed toward the Cross house. There were already a couple dozen reporters and cameramen at the scene. The vultures effectively blocked our way, wouldn’t let us pass. They knew who Kyle was and possibly they knew about me, too.

“Why is the FBI already involved?” one of them shouted above the street noise and general commotion. Two news helicopters fluttered overhead. They loved this sort of disaster. “We hear this is connected to the Soneji case. Is that true?”

“Let me talk to them,” Kyle whispered close to my ear.

I shook my head. “They’ll want to talk to me about it anyway. They’ll find out who I am. Let’s get the silly shit over with.”

Kyle frowned, but then he nodded slowly. I tried to control my impatience as I walked toward the horde of reporters.

I waved my hands over my head and that quieted some of them. The media is extremely visual, I’ve learned the hard way, even the print journalists, the so-called wordsmiths. They all watch far too many movies. Visual signals work best with them.

“I’ll answer your questions,” I volunteered and served up a thin smile, “as best I can anyway.”

“First question, who are you?” a man with a scraggly red beard and Salvation Army store taste in clothes hollered from the front of the pack. He looked like the reclusive novelist Thomas Harris, and maybe he was.

“That’s an easy one,” I answered, “I’m Thomas Pierce. I’m with BSU.”

That quieted the reporters for a moment. Those who didn’t recognize my face knew the name. The fact that I’d been brought in on the Cross case was news in itself. Camera flashes exploded in front of me, but I was used to them by now.

“Is Alex Cross still alive?” Someone called out. I had expected that to be the first question, but there’s no way to predict with the press corps.

“Dr. Cross is alive. As you can see, I just got here, so I don’t know much. So far, we have no suspects, no theories, no leads, nothing particularly interesting to talk about,” I said.

“What about the Mr. Smith case,” a woman reporter shouted at me. She was a dark-haired anchorperson type, perky as a chipmunk. “Are you putting Mr. Smith on hold now? How can you work two big cases? What’s up, Doc?” the reporter said and smiled. She was obviously smarter and wittier than she looked.

I winced, rolled my eyes, and smiled back at her. “No suspects, no theories, no leads, nothing interesting to talk about,” I repeated. “I have to go inside. The interview’s over. Thanks for your concern. I know it’s genuine is this god-awful case. I admire Alex Cross, too.”

“Did you say admire or admired?” another reporter shouted at me from the back.

“Why did they bring you in on this, Mr. Pierce? Is Mr. Smith involved?”

I couldn’t help arching my eyebrows at the question. I felt an unpleasant itch in my brain. “I’m here because I get lucky sometimes, all right? Maybe I’ll get lucky again. I have to go into the trenches now. I promise that I’ll tell you if and when we have anything. I sincerely doubt that Mr. Smith attacked Alex Cross last night. And I said admire, present tense.”

I pulled Kyle Craig out of there with me, holding on to his arm for support as much as anything. He grinned as soon as we had our backs to the horde.

“That was pretty goddamn good,” he said. “I think you managed to confuse the hell out of the, even beyond the usual blank stares.”

“Mad dogs of the Fourth Estate,” I shrugged. “Smears of blood on their lips and cheeks. They couldn’t care less about Cross or his family. Not one question about the kids. Edison said, ‘We don’t know a millionth of one per cent about anything!’ The press doesn’t get that. They want everything in black-and-white. They mistake simplicity, and simplemindedness, for the truth.”

“Make nice with the D.C. police,” Kyle cajoled, or maybe he was giving me a friendly warning. “This is an emotional time for them. That’s Detective John Sampson on the porch. He’s a friend of Alex. Alex’s closest friend, in fact.”

“Great,” I muttered. “Just who I don’t want to see right now.”

I glanced at Detective Sampson. He looked like a bad storm about to happen. I didn’t want to be here, Didn’t want or need any of this.

Kyle patted my shoulder. “We need you on this one. Soneji promised this would happen,” he suddenly told me. “He predicted it.”

I stared at Kyle Craig. He’d delivered his stunning thunderbolt of news in his usual deadpan, understated way, sort of like Sam Shepard on Quaalude.

“Say again? What was that last bit?”

“Gary Soneji warned Alex that he’d get him, even if he died Soneji said he couldn’t be stopped. It looks like he made good on his promise. I want you to tell me how. Tell me how Soneji did it. That’s why you’re here, Thomas.”

Chapter 74

MY NERVES were already on edge. My awareness was heightened to a level I found almost painful. I couldn’t believe I was here in Washington, involved in this case. Tell me how Gary Soneji did this? Tell me how it could have happened. That’s all I had to do.

The press had one thing right. It’s fair to say that I am the FBI’s current hotshot profiler. I should be used to graphic, violent crime scenes, but I’m not. It stirs up too much white noise, too many memories of Isabella. Of Isabella and myself. Of another time and place, another life.

I have a sixth sense, which is nothing paranormal, nothing like that at all. It’s just that I can process raw information and data better than most people, better than most policemen anyway. I feel things very powerfully, and sometimes my “felt” hunches have been useful not only to the FBI but also to Interpol and Scotland Yard.

My methods differ radically from the Federal Bureau’s famed investigative process, however. In spite of what they say, the Bureau’s Behavioral Science Unit believes in formalistic investigation with much less room for surprising hunches. I subscribe to a belief in the widest possible array of hunches and instincts, followed by the most exacting science.

The FBI and I are polar opposites, yet to their credit they continue to use me. Until I screw up badly, which I could do at any moment. Like right now.

I had been working hard at Quantico, reporting in on the gruesome and complex “Mr. Smith” investigation, when the news arrived about the attack on Cross. Actually, I had been in Quantico for less than a day, having just returned from England, where “Smith” was blazing his killer trail and I was in lukewarm pursuit.

Now I was in Washington, at the center of a raging storm over the Cross family attack. I looked at my watch, a TAG Heuer 6000 given to me by Isabella, the only material possession I really care about. It was a few minutes past eight when I entered the Cross front yard. I noted the time. Something about it bothered me, but I wasn’t sure what it was yet.

I stopped beside a battered and rusting EMS truck. The roof lights were flashing, the rear doors thrown open. I looked inside and saw a boy-it had to be Damon Cross.

The boy had been badly beaten. His face and arms were bloody, but he was alert and talking in a soft voice to the medics, who tried to be gentle and comforting.

“Why wouldn’t he have killed the children? Why just thrash out at them?” Kyle said. We had the same mind-set on that question.

“His heart wasn’t in it.” I said the first thing that came into my head, the first feeling I had. “He was compelled to make a symbolic gesture toward the Cross children, but no more than that.”

I turned to look at Kyle. “I don’t know, Kyle. Maybe he was frightened. Or in a hurry. Maybe he was afraid of waking Cross.” All of those thoughts invaded my mind, almost in an instant. I felt as if I had briefly met the attacker.

I looked up at the old house, the Cross house. “Okay, let’s go to the bedroom, if you don’t mind. I want to see it before the techies do their number in there. I need to see Alex Cross’s room. I don’t know, but I think something is seriously fucked up here. This certainly wasn’t done by Gary Soneji or his ghost.”

“How do you know that?” Kyle grabbed his arm and made eye contact. “How can you know for sure?”

“Soneji would have killed the two kids and the grandmother.”

Chapter 75

ALEX CROSS’S blood was spattered everywhere in the corner bedroom. I could see where a bullet had exited through the window directly behind Cross’s bed. The glass fracture was clean and the radial lines even: The shooter had fired from a standing position, directly across the bed. I made my first notes, and also a quick sketch of the small, unadorned bedroom.

There was other “evidence.” A shoe print had been discovered near the cellar. The Metro police were working on a “walking picture” of the assailant. A white male had been spotted around midnight in the mostly black neighborhood. For a moment, I was almost glad I’d been rushed up here from Virginia. There was so much raw data to take in and process, almost too much. The mussed bed, where Cross had apparently slept on top of a hand-sewn quilt. Photos of his children on the walls.

Alex Cross had been moved to St. Anthony’s Hospital, but his bedroom was intact, just the way the mysterious assailant had left it.

Had he left the room like this on purpose? Was this his first message to us?

Of course it was.

I looked at the papers still out on Cross’s small work desk. They were notes on Gary Soneji. They had been left undisturbed by the assailant. Was that important?

Someone had taped a short poem to the wall over the desk. Wealth covers sins-the poor/Are naked as a pin.

Cross had been reading a book called Push, a novel. A piece of lined yellow paper was stuck inside, so I read it: Write the talented author about her wonderful book!

The time I spent in the room passed like a snap of the fingers, almost a mind fugue. I drank several cups of coffee. I remembered a line from the offbeat TV show Twin Peaks, “Damn fine cup of coffee, and hot!”

I had been inside Cross’s bedroom for almost an hour and a half, lost in forensic detail, hooked on the case in spite of myself. It was a nasty and disturbing puzzle, but a very intriguing one. Everything about the case was intense, and highly unusual.

I heard footsteps thumping outside in the hallway and looked up, my concentration interrupted. The bedroom door suddenly swung open and thudded against the wall.

Kyle Craig popped his head inside. He looked concerned. His face was white as chalk. Something had happened. “I have to go right now. Alex has gone into cardiac arrest!”

Chapter 76

“I’LL GO with you,” I said to Kyle. I could tell that Kyle badly needed company. I wanted to see Alex Cross before he died, if that was what it had come to, and it sounded like it, felt like it to me.

On the ride over to St. Anthony’s I gently questioned Kyle about the extent of Dr. Cross’s injuries and the tenor of concern at the hospital. I also made a guess about the cause of the cardiac arrest.

“It sounds like it’s due to blood loss. There’s a lot of blood in the bedroom. It’s all over the sheets, the floor, the walls. Soneji was obsessed with blood, right? I heard that at Quantico before I left this morning.”

Kyle was quiet for a moment in the car, and then he asked the question I expected. I’m sometimes a step or two ahead in conversations.

“Do you ever miss it, not being a doctor anymore?”

I shook my head, frowned a little. “I really don’t. Something delicate and essential broke inside me when Isabella died. It will never be repaired, Kyle, at least I don’t think so. I couldn’t be a doctor now. I find it hard to believe in healing anymore.”

“I’m sorry,” he whispered solemnly.

“And I’m sorry about your friend. I’m sorry about Alex Cross,” I said to him.

In the spring of 1993, I had just graduated from Harvard Medical School. My life seemed to be spiraling upward at dizzying speed, when the woman I loved more than life itself was murdered in our apartment in Cambridge. Isabella Calais was my lover, and she was my best friend. She was one of the first victims of “Mr. Smith.”

After the murder, I never showed up at Massachusetts General, where I’d been accepted as an intern. I didn’t even contact them. I knew I would never practice medicine. In an odd way, my life had ended with Isabella’s, at least that was how I saw it.

Eighteen months after the murder, I was accepted into the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, what some wags call the “b.s. group.” It was what I wanted to do, what I needed to do. Once I had proven myself in the BSU, I asked to be put on the Mr. Smith case. My superiors fought the move at first, but finally they gave in.

“Maybe you’ll change your mind one day,” Kyle said. I had a feeling that he personally believed I would. Kyle likes to believe that everyone thinks as he does: with perfectly clear logic and a minimum of emotional baggage.

“I don’t think so,” I told him, without sounding argumentative, or even too firm on the point. “Who knows, though?”

“Maybe after you finally catch Smith,” he persisted with his point.

“Yes, maybe then,” I said.

“You don’t think Smith-” he started to say, but then backed off from the absurd notion that Mr. Smith could be involved with the attack here in Washington.

“No,” I said, “I do not Smith couldn’t have made this attack. They would all be dead and mutilated if he had.”

Chapter 77

AT ST. Anthony ’s Hospital, I left Kyle and roamed about playing “Doc.” It didn’t feel too bad to be working in a hospital, contemplating what it might have been like. I tried to find out as much as I could about Alex Cross’s condition, and his chances of surviving his wounds.

The staff nurses and doctors were surprised that I understood so much about trauma and gunshot wounds, but no one pressed me as to how or why. They were too busy trying to save Alex Cross’s life. He had done pro bono work at the hospital for years and no one there could bear to let him die. Even the porters liked and respected Cross, calling him a “regular brother.”

I learned that the cardiac arrest had been caused by the loss of blood, as I had guessed. According to the doctor in charge, Alex Cross had gone into massive arrest minutes after he arrived at the ER. His blood pressure had dipped dangerously low: 60 over 0.

The staff’s prognosis was that he could probably die during the surgery necessary to repair his massive internal injuries, but that he would definitely die without the surgery. The more I heard, the more I was certain they were right. An old saying of my mother’s ran through my head, “May his body rise to heaven, before the devil finds out he’s dead.”

Kyle caught up with me in the busy and chaotic hallway on the fourth floor at St. Anthony’s. A lot of people working there knew Cross personally. They were all visibly upset and helpless to do anything about it. The hospital scene was raw and emotional, and I couldn’t help being swept up in the tragedy, even more so than I had been at the Cross house.

Kyle was still pale, his brow furrowed and punctuated by blisters of sweat. His eyes had a distant look as he gazed down the hospital corridor. “What did you find out? I know you’ve been poking around.” he said. He rightly suspected that I would have already conducted my own mini-investigation. He knew my style even my motto: Assume nothing, question everything.

“He’s in surgery now. He’s not expected to make it,” I gave him the bad news. Unsentimentally, the way I knew he wanted it. “That’s what the doctors believe. But what the hell do doctors know?” I added.

“Is that what you think?” Kyle asked.

The pupils of his eyes were the tiniest, darkest points. He was taking this as badly as I’d seen him react to anything since I’d known him. He was being very emotional for Kyle. I understood how close he and Cross had been.

I sighed and shut my eyes. I wondered if I should tell him what I really thought. Finally, I opened them. I said, “It might be better if he doesn’t make it, Kyle.”

Chapter 78

“C’MON WITH me,” he said, pulling me along. “I want you to meet someone. C’mon.”

I followed Kyle down one floor to a room on three. The patient in the room was an elderly black woman.

Her head was swathed in Webril, a stretchy woven bandage. The head bandage resembled a turban. A few wisps of gray hair hung loose from the dressing. Telfa bandages covered the abrasions on her face.

There were two IV lines, “cut downs,” one for blood and one for fluids and antibiotics. She was hooked to a cardiac monitor.

She looked up at us as if we were intruders, but then she recognized Kyle.

“How is Alex? Tell me the truth,” She said in a hoarse, nearly whispering voice that still managed to be firm. “No one here will tell me the truth. Will you, Kyle?”

“He’s in surgery now, Nana. We won’t know anything until he comes out,’ Kyle said, “and maybe not even then.”

The elderly woman’s eyes narrowed. She shook her head sadly.

“I asked you for the truth. I deserve at least that much. Now, how is Alex? Kyle, is Alex still alive?”

Kyle sighed loudly. It was weary sound, and a sad one. He and Alex Cross had been working together for years.

“Alex’s condition is extremely grave,” I said, as gently as I could. “That means-”

“I know what grave means.” she said. “I taught school for forty-seven years. English, History, Boolean algebra.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I didn’t mean to sound over-bearing.” I paused for a second or two, then continued to answer her question.

“The internal injuries involve a kind of ‘ripping,’ probably with a high degree of contamination to the wounds. The most serious wound is to his abdomen. The shot passed through the liver and apparently nicked the common hepatic artery. That’s what I was told. The bullet lodged in the rear of the stomach, where it’s now pressing onto the spinal column.”

She winced, but she was listening intently, waiting for me to finish. I was thinking that if Alex Cross was anything near as strong as this woman, as willful, then he must be something special as a detective.

I went on.

“Because of the nick to the artery there was considerable blood loss. The contents of the stomach itself and the small bowel can be sources of E. coli infection. There’s danger of inflammation of the abdominal cavity-peritonitis, and possibly pancreatitis, all of which can be fatal. The gunshot wound is the injury, the injection is the complication. The second shot went through his left wrist, without shattering bone, but missed the radial artery. That’s what we know so far. That’s the truth.”

I stopped at that point. My eyes never left those of the elderly woman, and hers never left mine.

“Thank you,” she said in a resigned whisper. “I appreciate that you didn’t condescend to me. Are you a doctor here at the hospital? You speak as if you were.”

I shook my head. “No, I’m not. I’m with the FBI. I studied to be a doctor.”

Her eyes widened and seemed even more alert than when we had come in. I sensed that she had tremendous reserves of strength. “Alex is a doctor and a detective.”

“I’m a detective, too,” I said.

“I’m Nana Mama. I’m Alex’s grandmother. What’s your name?”

“Thomas,” I told her. “My name is Thomas Pierce.”

“Well, thank you for speaking the truth.”

Chapter 79

Paris, France

THE POLICE would never admit it, but Mr. Smith had control of Paris now. He had taken the city by storm and only he knew why. The news of his fearsome presence spread along boulevard Saint-Michel, and then rue de Vaugirard. This sort of thing wasn’t supposed to happen in the “très luxe” sixth arrondissement.

The seductively chic shops along boulevard Saint-Michel lured tourists and Parisians alike. The panthéon and beautiful Jardins du Luxembourg were nearby. Lurid murders weren’t supposed to happen here.

Clerks from the expensive shops were the first to leave their posts and hurriedly walk or run toward No. 11 rue de Vaugirard. They wanted to see Smith, or at least his handiwork. They wanted to see the so-called Alien with their own eyes.

Shoppers and even owners left the fashionable clothing shops and cafis. If they didn’t walk up rue de Vaugirard, they at least looked down to where several police black-and-whites and also an army bus were parked. High above the eerie scene, pigeons fluttered and squawked. They seemed to want to see the famous criminal as well.

Across Saint-Michel stood the Sorbonne, with its foreboding chapel, its huge clock, its open cobblestone terrace. A second bus filled with soldiers was parked in the plaza. Students tentatively wandered up rue Champollion to have a look-see. The tiny street had been named after Jean-Francois Champollion, the French Egyptologist who had discovered the key to Egyptian hieroglyphics while deciphering the Rosetta stone.

A police inspector named Rene Faulks shook his head as he pulled onto rue Champollion and saw the crowd. Faulks understood the common man’s sick fascination with “Mr. Smith.” It was the fear of the unknown, especially fear of sudden, horrible death, that drew people’s interest to these bizarre murders. Mr. Smith had gained a reputation because his actions were so completely incomprehensible. He actually did seem to be an “alien.” Few people could conceive of another human acting as Smith routinely did.

The inspector let his eyes wander. He took in the electronic sign hanging at the Lycée St. Louis corner. Today it advertised “Tour de France Femina” and also something called “Formation d’artistes.” More madness, he thought. He coughed out a cynical laugh.

He noticed a sidewalk artist contemplating his sidewalk chalk masterpiece. The man was oblivious to the police emergency. The same could be said of a homeless woman blithely washing her breakfast dishes in the public fountain.

Good for both of them. They passed Faulks’s test for sanity in the modern age.

As he climbed the gray stone stairway leading to a blue painted door, he was tempted to turn toward the crowd of onlookers massed on rue de Vaugirard, and to scream, “Go back to your little chores and your even smaller lives. Go see an art movie at Cinéma Champollion. This has nothing whatsoever to do with you. Smith takes only interesting and deserving specimens-so you people have absolutely nothing to worry about.”

That morning, one of the finest young surgeons at L’Ecole Pratique de Médecine had been reported missing. If Mr. Smith’s pattern held, within a couple of days, the surgeon would be found dead and mutilated. That was the way it had been with all the other victims. It was the only strand that represented anything like a repeating pattern. Death by mutilation.

Faulks nodded and said hello to two flics and another low-ranking inspector inside the surgeon’s expensively furnished apartment. The place was magnificent, filled with antique furniture, expensive art, with a view of the Sorbonne.

Well, the golden boy of L’Ecole Pratique de Médecine had finally gotten a bad break. Yes, things had suddenly gotten very bleak for Dr. Abel Sante.

“Nothing, no sign of a struggle?” Faulks asked the closest flic as he entered the apartment.

“Not a trace, just like the others. The poor rich bastard is gone, though. He’s disappeared, and Mr. Smith has him.”

“He’s probably in Smith’s space capsule,” another flic said, a youngish man with longish red hair and trendy sunglasses.

Faulks turned brusquely. “You! Get the hell out of here! Go out on the street with the rest of the madmen and the goddamned pigeons! I would hope Mr. Smith might take you for his space capsule but, unfortunately, I suspect his standards are too high.”

Having said his piece and banished the offending police officer, the inspector went to examine the handiwork of Mr. Smith. He had a procès-verbal to write up. He had to make some sense out of the madness somehow. All of France, all of Europe, waited to hear the latest news.

Chapter 80

FBI HEADQUARTERS in Washington is located on Pennsylvania Avenue between Ninth and Tenth Streets. I spent from four until almost seven in a BOGSAAT with a half dozen special agents, including Kyle Craig, BOGSAAT is a bunch of guys sitting around a table. Inside a Strategic Ops Center conference room, we vigorously discussed the Cross attack.

At seven that night, we learned that Alex Cross had made it through the first round of surgery. A cheer went up around the table. I told Kyle that I wanted to go back to St. Anthony’s Hospital.

“I need to see Alex Cross,” I told him. “I really do need to see him, even if he can’t talk. No matter what condition he’s in.”

Twenty minutes later, I was in an elevator headed to the sixth floor of St. Anthony’s. It was quieter there than the rest of the building. The high floor was a little spooky, especially under the circumstances.

I entered a private recovery room near the center of the semidarkened floor. I was too late. Someone was already in there with Cross.

Detective John Sampson was standing vigil by the bed of his friend. Sampson was tall and powerful, at least six foot six, but he looked incredibly weary, as if he were ready to fall over from exhaustion and the long day’s stress.

Sampson finally looked at me, nodded slightly, then turned his attention back to Dr. Cross. His eyes were a strange mixture of anger and sadness. I sensed that he knew what was going to happen here.

Alex Cross was hooked up to so many machines it was a visceral shock to see him. I knew that he was in his early forties. He looked younger than his age. That was the only good news.

I studied the charts at the base of the bed. He had suffered severe-to-moderate blood loss secondary to the tearing of the radial artery. He had a collapsed lung, numerous contusions, hematomas, and lacerations. The left wrist had been injured. There was blood poisoning, and the morbidity of the injuries put him on the “could be about to check out” list.

Alex Cross was conscious, and I stared into his brown eyes for a long time. What secrets were hidden there? What did he know? Had he actually seen the face of his assailant? who did this to you? Not Soneji Who dared to go into your bedroom?

He couldn’t talk and I could see nothing in his eyes. No awareness that I was there with Detective Sampson. He didn’t seem to recognize Sampson either. Sad.

Dr. Cross was getting excellent care at St. Anthony’s. The hospital bed had a Stryker frame attached to it. The injured wrist was encased in an elastoplast cast and the arm was anchored to a trapeze bar. He was receiving oxygen through a clear tube that ran into an outlet in the wall. A fancy monitor called a Slave scope was providing pulse, temp, blood pressure, and EKG readings.

“Why don’t you leave him alone?” Sampson finally spoke after a few minutes. “Why don’t you leave both of us. You can’t help here. Please, go.”

I nodded, but continued to look into the eyes of Alex Cross for a few more seconds. Unfortunately, he had nothing to tell me.

I finally left Cross and Sampson alone. I wondered if I would ever see Alex Cross again. I doubted that I would. I didn’t believe in miracles anymore.

Chapter 81

THAT NIGHT, I couldn’t get Mr. Smith out of my head, as usual, and now Alex Cross and his family were residing there as well. I kept revisiting different scenes from the hospital, and from the Cross house. Who had entered the house? Who had Gary Soneji gotten to? That had to be it.

The crisscrossing flashbacks were maddening and running out of control. I didn’t like the feeling, and I didn’t know if I could conduct an investigation, much less two, under these stressful, almost claustrophobic, conditions.

It had been twenty-four hours from hell. I had flown to the United States from London. I’d landed at National Airport, in D.C., and gone to Quantico, Virginia. Then I had been rushed back to Washington, where I worked until ten in the evening on the Cross puzzle.

To make things worse, if they could get any worse, I found I couldn’t sleep when I finally got to my room at the Washington Hilton amp; Towers. My mind was in a chaotic state that steadfastly refused sleep.

I didn’t like the working hypothesis on Cross that I had heard from the FBI investigators at headquarters that night. They were stuck in their usual rut: They were like slow students who scan classroom ceilings for answers. Actually, most police investigators reminded me of Einstein’s incisive definition of insanity. I had first heard it at Harvard: “Endlessly repeating the same process, hoping for a different result.”

I kept flashing back to the upstairs bedroom where Alex Cross had been brutally attacked. I was looking for something-but what was it? I could see his blood spattered on the walls, on the curtains, the sheets, the throw rug. What was I missing? Something?

I couldn’t sleep, goddamn it.

I tried work as a sedative. It was my usual antidote. I had already begun extensive notes and sketches on the scene of the attack. I got up and wrote some more. My PowerBook was beside me, always at the ready. My stomach wouldn’t stop rolling and my head throbbed in a maddening way.

I typed: Could Gary Soneji possibly still be alive? Don’t rule anything out yet, not even the most absurd possibility.

Exhume Soneji’s body if necessary.

Read Cross’s book-Along Came a Spider.

Visit Lorton Prison, where Soneji was held.

I pushed aside my computer after an hour’s work. It was nearly two in the morning. My head felt stuffed, as if I had a terrible, nagging cold. I still couldn’t sleep. I was thirty-three years old; I was already beginning to feel like an old man.

I kept seeing the bloody bedroom at the Cross house. No one can imagine what it’s like to live with such imagery day and night. I saw Alex Cross-the way he looked at St. Anthony’s Hospital. Then I was remembering victims of Mr. Smith, his “studies,” as he called them.

The terrifying scenes play on and on and on in my head. Always leading to the same place, the same conclusion.

I can see another bedroom. It is the apartment Isabella and I shared in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

With total clarity, I remembered running down the narrow hallway that terrible night. I remember my heart pushing into my throat, its feeling larger than a clenched fist. I remember every pounding step that I took, everything I saw along the way.

I finally saw Isabella, and I thought it must be a dream, a terrible nightmare.

Isabella was in our bed, and I knew that she was dead. No one could have survived the butchery I witnessed there. No one did survive-neither of us.

Isabella had been savagely murdered at twenty-three, in the prime of her life, before she could be a mother, a wife, the anthropologist she’d dreamed of becoming. I couldn’t help myself, couldn’t stop. I bent and held what was left of Isabella, what was left.

How can I ever forget any of it? How can I turn that sight off in my mind?

The simple answer is, I cannot.

Chapter 82

I WAS ON the hunt again, the loneliest road on this earth. Truthfully, there wasn’t much else that had sustained me during the past four years, not since Isabella’s death.

The moment I awoke in the morning, I called St. Anthony’s Hospital. Alex Cross was alive, but in a coma. His condition was listed as grave. I wondered if John Sampson had remained at his bedside. I suspected he had.

By nine in the morning, I was back at the Cross house. I needed to study the scene in much greater depth, to gather every fact, every splinter and fragment. I tried to organize everything I knew, or thought I knew at this early stage of the investigation. I was reminded of a maxim that was frequently used at Quantico -All truths are half-truths and possibly not even that.

A fiendish “ghoul” had supposedly struck back from the grave and attacked a well-known policeman and his family in their home. The ghoul had warned Dr. Cross that he would come. There was no way to stop it from happening. It was the ultimate in cruel and effective revenge.

For some reason, though, the assailant had failed to execute. None of the family members, or even Alex Cross, had been killed. That was the perplexing and most baffling part of the puzzle for me. That was the key!

I arrived at the cellar in the Cross house just before eleven in the morning. I had asked the Metro police and FBI technicians not to mess around down there until I was finished with my survey of the other floors. My data gathering, my science, was a methodical, step-by-step process.

The attacker had hidden himself (herself?) in the basement while a party had been in progress upstairs and in the backyard. There was a partial footprint near the entryway to the cellar. It was a size nine. It wasn’t much to go on, not unless the perpetrator had wanted us to find the print.

One thing struck me right away. Gary Soneji had been locked in a cellar as a child. He’d been excluded from family activities in the rest of the house. He’d been physically abused in the cellar. Just like the one in the Cross house.

The attacker had definitely hidden in the cellar. That couldn’t be a coincidence.

Had he known about Gary Soneji’s explicit warning to Cross? That possibility was disturbing as hell. I didn’t want to settle on any theories or premature conclusions yet. I just needed to collect as much raw data and information as I could. Possibly because I’d been to medical school, I approached cases as a clinical scientist would.

Collect all the data first. Always the data.

It was quiet in the cellar, and I could focus and concentrate all my attention on my surroundings. I tried to imagine the attacker lurking here during the party, and then afterward, as the house grew quiet, until Alex Cross finally went to bed.

The attacker was a coward.

He wasn’t in a rage state. He was methodical.

It was not a crime of passion.

The intruder had struck out at each of the children first, but not fatally. He had beaten Alex Cross’s grandmother, but had spared her. Why? Only Alex Cross was meant to die, and so far even that hadn’t happened.

Had the attacker failed? Where was the intruder now?

Was he still in Washington? Checking out the Cross house right now? Or at St. Anthony’s Hospital, where the Metro police were guarding Alex Cross.

As I passed an ancient coal stove, I noticed the metal door was slightly ajar. I poked it open with my handkerchief and peered inside. I couldn’t see very well and took out a penlight. There were inches of ash that were light gray in color. Someone had burned a flammable substance recently, possibly newspapers or magazines.

Why start a fire in the middle of summer? I wondered.

A small hand shovel was on a worktable near the stove. I used the shovel to sift through the ashes.

I carefully scraped along the stove’s bottom.

I heard a clink. A metal-against-metal noise.

I scooped out a shovelful of ash. Something came with the ash. It was hard, heavier. My expectations weren’t high. I was still just collecting data, anything and everything, even the contents of an old stove. I emptied the ashes onto the worktable in a pile, then smoothed it out.

I saw what the small shovel had struck. I flipped over the new evidence with the tip of the shovel. Yes, I said to myself. I finally had something, the first bit of evidence.

It was Alex Cross’s detective shield, and it was burned and charred.

Someone wanted us to find the shield.

The intruder wants to play! I thought. This is cat and mouse.

Chapter 83

Ile-de-France

DR. ABEL SANTE was normally a calm and collected man. He was widely known in the medical community to be erudite, but surprisingly down-to-earth. He was a nice man, too, a gentle physician.

Now he desperately tried to put his mind somewhere other than where his body was. Just about anywhere else in the universe would do just fine.

He had already spent several hours remembering minute details from his pleasant, almost idyllic, boyhood in Rennes; then his university years at the Sorbonne and L’Ecole Pratique de Médecine; he had replayed tennis and golf sporting events; he had relived his seven-year love affair with Regina Becker-dear, sweet Regina.

He needed to be somewhere else, to exist anywhere else but where he actually was. He needed to exist in the past, or even in the future, but not in the present. He was reminded of The English Patient-both the book and the movie. He was Count Almasy now, wasn’t he? Only his torture was even worse than Almasy’s horribly burned flesh. He was in the grasp of Mr. Smith.

He thought about Regina constantly now, and he realized that he loved her fiercely, and what a fool he’d been not to marry her years ago. What an arrogant bastard, and what a huge fool!

How dearly he wanted to live now, and to see Regina again. Life seemed so damned precious to him at this moment, in this terrible place, under these monstrous conditions.

No, this wasn’t a good way to be thinking. It brought him down-it brought him back to reality, to the present. No, no no! Go somewhere else in your mind. Anywhere but here.

The present line of thought brought him to this tiny compartment, this infinitesimal X on the globe where he was now a prisoner, and where no one could possibly find him. Not the flics, not Interpol, not the entire French Army, or the English, or the Americans, or the Israelis!

Dr. Sante could easily imagine the furor and outrage, the panic continuing in Paris and throughout France. NOTED PHYSICIAN AND TEACHER ABDUCTED! The headline in Le Monde would read something like that. Or, NEW MR. SMITH HORROR IN PARIS.

He was the horror! He was certain that tens of thousands of police, as well as the army, were searching for him now. Of course, every hour he was missing, his chances for survival grew dimmer. He knew that from reading past articles about Mr. Smith’s unearthly abductions, and what happened to the victims.

Why me? God Almighty, he couldn’t stand this infernal monologue anymore.

He couldn’t stand this nearly upside-down position, this terribly cramped space, for one more second.

He just couldn’t bear it. Not one more second!

Not one more second!

Not one more second!

He couldn’t breathe!

He was going to die in here.

Right here, in a goddamn dumbwaiter. Stuck between floors, in a godforsaken house in Ile-de-France somewhere on the outskirts of Paris.

Mr. Smith had put him in the dumbwaiter, stuffed him inside like a bundle of dirty laundry, and then left him there-for God only knew how long. It seemed like hours, at least several hours, but Abel Sante really wasn’t sure anymore.

The excruciating pain came and went, but mostly it rushed through his body in powerful waves. His neck, his shoulders, and his chest ached so badly, beyond belief, beyond his tolerance for pain. The feeling was as if he’d been slowly crushed into a squarish heap. If he hadn’t been claustrophobic before, he was now.

But that wasn’t the worst part of this. No, it wasn’t the worst. The most terrifying thing was that he knew what all of France wanted to know, what the whole world wanted to know.

He knew certain things about Mr. Smith’s identity. He knew precisely how he talked. He believed that Mr. Smith might be a philosopher, perhaps a university professor or student.

He had even seen Mr. Smith.

He had looked out from the dumbwaiter-upside down, no less-and stared into Smith’s hard, cold eyes, seen his nose, his lips.

Mr. Smith saw that.

Now there was no hope for him.

“Damn you, Smith. Damn you to hell. I know your shitty secret. I know everything now. You are a fucking alien! You aren’t human.”

Chapter 84

“YOU REALLY think we’re going to track down this son of a bitch? You think this guy is dumb?”

John Sampson asked me point-blank, challenging me. He was dressed all in black, and he wore Ray-Ban sunglasses. He looked as if he were already in mourning. The two of us were flying in an FBI Bell Jet helicopter from Washington to Princeton, New Jersey. We were supposed to work together for a while.

“You think Gary Soneji did this somehow? Think he’s Houdini? You think maybe he’s still alive?” Sampson went on. “What the hell do you think?”

“I don’t know yet.” I sighed. “I’m still collecting data. It’s the only way I know how to work. No, I don’t think Soneji did it. He’s always worked alone before this. Always.”

I knew that Gary Soneji had grown up in New Jersey, then gone on to become one of the most savage murderers of the times. It didn’t seem as if his run were over yet. Soneji was part of the ongoing mystery.

Alex Cross’s notes on Soneji were extensive. I was finding useful and interesting insights all through the notes, and I was less than a third of the way through. I had already decided that Cross was a sharp police detective but an even better psychologist. His hypotheses and hunches weren’t merely clever and imaginative; they were often right. There’s an important difference in that, which many people fail to see, especially people in medium-high places.

I looked up from my reading.

“I’ve had some luck with difficult killers before. All except the one I really want to catch,” I told Sampson.

He nodded, but his eyes stayed locked onto mine. “This Mr. Smith something of a cult hero now? Over in Europe, especially, the Continent, London, Paris, Frankfurt.”

I wasn’t surprised that Sampson was aware of the ongoing case. The tabloids had made Mr. Smith their latest icon. The stories were certainly compelling reading. They played up the angle that Smith might be an alien. Even newspapers like the New York Times and the Times of London had run stories stating that police authorities believed Smith might be an extraterrestrial being who had come here to study humans. To grok, as it were.

“Smith has become the evil E.T. Something for X-Files fans to contemplate between TV episodes. Who knows, perhaps Mr. Smith is a visitor from outer space, at least from some other parallel world. He doesn’t have anything in common with human beings, I can vouch for that. I’ve visited the murder scenes.”

Sampson nodded. “Gary Soneji didn’t have much in common with the human race,” he said in his deep, strangely quiet voice. “Soneji was from another planet, too. He’s an ALF, alien life-form.”

“I’m not sure he fits the same psychological profile as Smith.”

“Why is that?” he asked. His eyes narrowed. “You think your mass killer is smarter than our mass killer?”

“I’m not saying that. Gary Soneji was very bright, but he made mistakes. So far, Mr. Smith hasn’t made any.”

“And that’s why you’re going to solve this hinky mystery? Because Gary Soneji makes mistakes?”

“I’m not making predictions,” I told Sampson. “I know better than that. So do you.”

“Did Gary Soneji make a mistake at Alex’s house?” he suddenly asked, his dark eyes penetrating.

I sighed out loud. “I think someone did.”

The helicopter was settling down to land outside Princeton. A thin line of cars silently streamed past the airfield on a state highway. People watched us from the cars. It could safely be assumed that everything had started here. The house where Gary Soneji had been raised was less than six miles away. This was the monster’s original lair.

“You’re sure Soneji’s not still alive?” John Sampson asked one more time. “Are you absolutely sure about that?”

“No,” I finally said. “I’m not sure of anything yet.”

Chapter 85

ASSUME NOTHING, question everything.

As we set down in the small private airfield, I could feel the hair on the back of my neck standing on end. What was wrong here? What was I feeling about the Cross case?

Beyond the thin ribbons of landing strip were acre upon acre of pine forests and hills. The beauty of the countryside, the incredible shades of green, reminded me of something Cézanne had once said: “When color is at its richest, form is at its fullest.” I never looked at the world in quite the same way after hearing that.

Gary Soneji was brought up near here, I thought to myself. Was it possible that he could still be alive? No, I didn’t believe that. But could there be connections?

We were met in New Jersey by two field agents who brought a blue Lincoln sedan for our use. Sampson and I proceeded from Princeton to Rocky Hill and then over to Lambertville, to see his grandfather. I knew that Sampson and Alex Cross had been to Princeton less than a week ago. Still, I had questions of my own, theories that needed field-testing.

I also wanted to see the entire area where Gary Soneji had grown up, where his madness had been inflicted and nurtured. Mostly I wanted to talk with someone neither Cross nor Sampson had spent much time investigating, a brand-new suspect.

Assume nothing, question everything…and everyone.

Seventy-five-year-old Walter Murphy, Gary ’s grandfather, was waiting for us on a long, whitewashed porch. He didn’t ask us inside his house.

The porch had a nice view out from the farmhouse. I saw multiflora rose everywhere, an impenetrable bramble. The nearby barn was also overrun by sumac and poison ivy. I guessed that the grandfather was letting this happen.

I could feel Gary Soneji at his grandfather’s farm, I felt him everywhere.

According to Walter Murphy, he’d had no inkling that Gary was capable of murder. Not at any time. Not a clue.

“Some days I think I’ve gotten used to what’s happened, but then suddenly it’s fresh and incomprehensible to me all over again,” he told us as the midday breeze ruffled his longish white hair.

“Did you stay close to Gary as he got older?” I asked cautiously. I was studying his build, which was large. His arms were thick and looked as if they could still do physical damage.

“I remember long talks with Gary from the time he was a boy right up until it was alleged he’d kidnapped those two children in Washington.” Alleged.

“And you were taken by surprise?” I said. “You had no idea?”

Walter Murphy looked directly at me-for the first time. I knew that he resented my tone, the irony in it. How angry could I make him? How much of a temper did the old man have?

I leaned in and listened more closely. I watched every gesture, every tic. Collected the data.

“ Gary always wanted to fit in, just like everybody else does,” he said abruptly. “He trusted me because he knew I accepted him for what he was.”

“What was it about Gary that needed to be accepted?”

The old man shifted his eyes to the peaceful-looking pine woods surrounding the farm. I could feel Soneji in those woods. It was as if he were watching us.

“He could be hostile at times, I’ll admit. His tongue was sharp, double-barbed. Gary had an air of superiority that ruffled some tail feathers.”

I kept at Walter Murphy, didn’t give him space to breathe. “But not when he was around you?” I asked. “He didn’t ruffle your feathers?”

The old man’s clear blue eyes returned from their trip into the woods. “No, we were always close. I know we were, even if the expensive shrinks say it wasn’t possible for Gary to feel love, to feel anything for anybody. I was never the target for any of his temper explosions.”

That was a fascinating revelation, but I sensed it was a lie. I glanced at Sampson. He was looking at me in a new way.

“These explosions at other people, were they ever premeditated?” I asked.

“Well, you know damn well he burned down his father and stepmother’s house. They were in it. So were his stepbrother and stepsister. He was supposed to be away at school. He was an honor student at the Peddie School in Hightstown. He was making friends there.”

“Did you ever meet any of the friends from Peddie?” The quickening tempo of my questions made Walter Murphy uneasy. Did he have his grandson’s temper?

A spark flared in the old man’s eyes. Unmistakable anger was there now. Maybe the real Walter Murphy was appearing.

“No, he never brought his friends from school around here. I suppose you’re suggesting that he didn’t have friends, that he just wanted to seem more normal than he was. Is that your two-bit analysis? Are you a forensic psychologist, by the way? Is that your game?”

“Trains?” I said.

I wanted to see where Walter Murphy would go with it. This was important, a test, a moment of truth and reckoning.

C’mon, old man. Trains?

He looked off into the woods again, still serene and beautiful. “Mmm. I’d forgotten, hadn’t thought of the trains in a while. Fiona’s son, her real son, had an expensive set of Lionel trains. Gary wasn’t allowed to even be in the same room with them. When he was ten or eleven, the train set disappeared. The whole damn set, gone.”

“What happened to the train set?”

Walter Murphy almost smiled. “They all knew Gary had taken it. Destroyed it, or maybe buried it somewhere. They spent an entire summer questioning him as to the train set’s whereabouts, but he never told them squat. They grounded him for the summer and he still never told.”

“It was his secret, his power over them,” I said, offering a little more “two-bit analysis.”

I was beginning to feel certain disturbing things about Gary and his grandfather. I was starting to know Soneji and, maybe in the process, getting closer to whoever had attacked the Cross house in Washington. Quantico was researching possible copycat theories. I liked the partner angle-except for the fact that Soneji had never had one before.

Who had crept into Cross’s house? And how?

“I was reading some of Dr. Cross’s detective logs on the way here,” I told the grandfather. “ Gary had a recurring nightmare. It took place here on your farm. Are you aware of it? Gary ’s nightmare at your farm?”

Walter Murphy shook his head. He was blinking his eyes, twitching. He knew something.

“I’d like your permission to do something here,” I finally said. “I’ll need two shovels. Picks, if you have them.”

“And if I say no?” he raised his voice suddenly. It was the first time he’d been openly uncooperative.

And then it struck me. The old man is acting, too. That’s why he understood so much about Gary. He looks off into the trees to set his mind and gain control for the next few lines he has to deliver. The grandfather is an actor! Just not as good as Gary.

“Then we’ll get a search warrant,” I told him. “Make no mistake. We will do the search anyway.”

Chapter 86

“WHAT THE hell is this all about?” Sampson asked as we trudged from the ramshackle barn to a gray fieldstone fireplace that stood in an open clearing. “You think this is how we catch the Bug-Eyed Monster? Beating up on this old man?”

Both of us carried old metal shovels, and I had a rusted pickax also.

“I told you-data. I’m a scientist by training. Trust me for about half an hour. The old man is tougher than he looks.”

The stone fireplace had been built for family cookouts a long time ago, but apparently had not been used in recent years. Sumac and other vines were creeping over the fireplace, as if to make it disappear.

Just beyond the fireplace was a rotting, wooden-plank picnic table with splintered benches on either side. Pines, oaks, and sugar maples were everywhere.

“ Gary had a recurring dream. That’s what brought me here. This is where the dream takes place. Near the fireplace and the picnic table at Grandpa Walter’s farm. It’s quite horrible. The dream comes up several times in the notes Alex made on Soneji when he was inside Lorton Prison.”

“Where Gary should have been cooked, until he was crispy on the outside, slightly pink toward the center,” Sampson said.

I laughed at his dark humor. It was the first light moment I’d had in a long time and it felt good to share it with someone.

I picked out a spot midway between the old fireplace and a towering oak tree that canted toward the farmhouse. I drove the pickax into the ground, drove it hard and deep. Gary Soneji. His aura, his profound evil. His paternal granddaddy. More data.

“In his bizarre dreams,” I told Sampson, “ Gary committed a gruesome murder when he was a young boy. He may have buried the victim out here. He wasn’t sure himself. He felt he couldn’t separate dreams from reality sometimes. Let’s spend a little time searching for Soneji’s ancient burial ground. Maybe we’re about to enter Gary ’s earliest nightmare.”

“Maybe I don’t want to enter Gary Soneji’s earliest nightmare,” Sampson said laughing again. The tension between us was definitely breaking some. This was better.

I lifted the pickax high and swung down with great force. I repeated the action again and again, until I found a smooth, comfortable, working rhythm.

Sampson looked surprised as he watched me handle the pick. “You’re done this kind of fieldwork before, boy,” he said, and began to dig at my side.

“Yes, I lived on a farm in El Toro, California. My father, his father, and my grandfather’s were all small-town doctors. But they continued to live on our family horse farm. I was supposed to go back there to set up practice, but then I never finished my medical training.”

The two of us were hard at work now. Good, honest work: looking for old bodies, searching for ghosts from Gary Soneji’s past. Trying to goad Grandfather Murphy.

We took off our shirts, and soon both of us were covered with sweat and dust.

“This was like a gentleman’s farm? Back in California? The one you lived on as a boy?”

I snorted out a laugh as I pictured the gentleman’s farm. “It was a very small farm. We had to struggle to keep it going. My family didn’t believe a doctor should get rich taking care of other people. ‘You shouldn’t take a profit from other people’s misery,’ my father said. He still believes that.”

“Huh. So your whole family’s weird?”

“That’s reasonably accurate portrait.”

Chapter 87

AS I continued to dig in Walter Murphy’s yard, I thought back to our farm in Southern California. I could still vividly see the large red barn and two small corrals.

When I lived there we owned six horses. Two were breeding stallions, Fadl and Rithsar. Every morning I took rake, pitchfork, and wheelbarrow, and I cleared the stalls; and then made my trip to the manure pile. I put down lime and straw, washed out and refilled the water buckets, made minor repairs. Every single morning of my youth. So yes, I knew how to handle a shovel and pickax.

It took Sampson and me half an hour before we had a shallow ditch stretching toward the ancient oak tree in the Murphy yard. The sprawling tree had been mentioned several times in Gary ’s recounting of his dreams.

I had almost expected Walter Murphy to call the local police on us, but it didn’t happen. I half expected Soneji to suddenly appear. That didn’t happen either.

“Too bad old Gary didn’t just leave us a map.” Sampson grunted and groaned under the hot, beating sun.

“He was very specific about his dream. I think he wanted Alex to come out here. Alex, or somebody else.”

“Somebody else did. The two of us. Hot shit, there’s something down here. Something under my feet,” Sampson said.

I moved around toward his spot in the trench. The two of us continued to dig, picking up the pace. We worked side by side, sweating profusely. Data, I reminded myself. It’s all just data on the way to an answer. The beginning of a solution.

And then I recognized the fragments we had uncovered in the shallow grave, in Gary ’s hiding place near the fireplace.

“Jesus Christ, I don’t believe it. Oh God, Jesus!” Sampson said.

“Animal bones. Looks like the skull and upper thigh bone of a medium-sized dog,” I said to Sampson.

“Lots of bones!” he added.

We continued to dig even faster. Our breathing was harsh and labored. We had been digging in the summer heat for nearly an hour. It was in the nineties, sticky-hot, and claustrophobic. We were in a hole up to our waists.

“Shit! Here we go again. You recognize this from any of your med-school anatomy classes?” Sampson asked.

We were looking down at fragments from a human skeleton. “It’s the scapula and mandible. It could be a young boy or girl,” I told him.

“So this is the handiwork of young Gary? This Gary ’s first kill? Another kid?”

“I don’t know for sure. Let’s not forget about Grandpa Walter. Let’s keep looking. If it is Gary, maybe he left a sign. These would be his earliest souvenirs. They would have been precious to him.”

We kept on digging and, minutes later, we found another cache. Only the sound of our labored breathing broke the silence.

There were more bones, possibly from a large animal, possibly a deer, but probably human.

And there was something else, a definite sign from young Gary. It had been wrapped in tinfoil, which I now carefully removed.

It was a Lionel locomotive, undoubtedly the one he had stolen from his stepbrother.

The toy train that launched a hundred deaths.

Chapter 88

CHRISTINE JOHNSON knew she had to go to the Sojourner Truth School, but once she got there, she wasn’t sure she was ready for work yet. She was nervous, distracted, and not herself. Maybe school would help to get her mind off Alex, though.

She stopped at Laura Dixon’s first-grade class on her morning walk. Laura was one of her best friends in the world, and her classes were stimulating and fun. Besides, first graders were so damn cute to be around. “Laura’s babies,” she called them. Or, “Laura’s cuddly kittens and perky puppies.”

“Oh, look who it is, look who’s come to visit. Aren’t we the luckiest first-grade class in the whole world!” the teacher cried when she spotted Christine at the door.

Laura was just a smidgen over five foot tall, but she was still a very big girl, large at the hips and breasts. Christine couldn’t keep from smiling at her friend’s greeting. Trouble was, she was also incredibly close to tears. She realized she wasn’t ready for school.

“Good morning, Ms. Johnson!” the first graders chorused like a practiced glee club. God, they were wonderful! So bright and enthusiastic, sweet and good.

“Good morning back at you.” Christine beamed. There, she felt a little better. A big letter B was scrawled on the blackboard, as well as Laura’s sketches of a Bumblebee Buzzing around Batman and a Big Blue Boat.

“Don’t let me interrupt progress,” she said. “I’m just here for a little refresher course. B is for Beautiful Beginnings, Babies.”

The class laughed, and she felt connected with them, thank God. It was at times like this when she dearly wished she had kids of her own. She loved the first graders, loved kids, and, at thirty-two, it was definitely time.

Then, out of nowhere, an image flashed from the terrible scene a few days earlier. Alex being moved from his house on Fifth Street to one of the ambulances! She had been called to the scene by neighbors, friends of hers. Alex was conscious. He said, “Christine, you look so beautiful. Always.” And then they took him away from her.

The image from that morning and his final words made her shiver to remember. The Chinese had a saying that had been in her mind for a while, troubling her: Society prepares the crime; the criminal only commits it.

“Are you all right?” Laura Dixon was at her side, had seen Christine falter at the door.

“Excuse us, ladies and gentlemen,” she said to her class. “Ms. Johnson and I have to chat for a minute right outside the door. You may chat as well. Quietly. Like the ladies and gentlemen that you are, I trust.”

Then Laura took Christine’s arm and walked her out into the deserted hallway.

“Do I look that bad?” Christine asked. “Does it show all over my face, Laura?”

Laura hugged her tightly and the heat from her friend’s ample body felt good. Laura was good.

“Don’t you try to be so goddamn strong, don’t try to be so brave,” Laura said. “Have you heard anything more, sweetheart? Tell Laura. Talk to me.”

Christine mumbled into Laura’s hair. It felt so good to hold her, to hold on to someone. “Still listed as critical. Still no visitors. Unless you happen to be high up in the Metro police or the FBI.”

“Christine, Christine,” Laura whispered softly. “What am I going to do with you?”

“What, Laura? I’m okay now. I really am.”

“You are so strong, girl. You are about the best person I have ever met. I love you dearly. That’s all I’ll say for right now.”

“That’s enough. Thank you,” Christine said. She felt a little better, not quite so hollowed out and empty, but the feeling didn’t last very long.

She started to walk back to her office.

As she turned down the east corridor, she spotted the FBI’s Kyle Craig waiting for her near her office. She hurried down the hallway toward him. This is not good, she told herself. Oh dear God, no. Why is Kyle here? What does he have to tell me?

“Kyle, what is it?” Her voice trembled and nearly went out of control.

“I have to talk to you,” he said, taking her hand. “Please, just listen. Come inside your office, Christine.”

Chapter 89

THAT NIGHT, back in my room at the Marriott in Princeton, I couldn’t sleep again. It was two cases, both running concurrently in my mind. I skimmed several chapters from a rather pedestrian book about trains, just to gather data.

I was starting to familiarize myself with the vocabulary of trains: vestibules, step boxes, roomettes, annunciators, the deadman control. I knew that trains were a key part to the mystery I had been asked to solve.

What part had Gary Soneji played in the attack at Alex Cross’s house?

Who was his partner?

I went to work at my PowerBook, which I’d had set up on the hotel room desk. As I would later relate to Kyle Craig, I no sooner sat down than the specially designed alarm in the computer started to beep. A fax was waiting for me.

I knew instantly what it was-Smith was calling. He had been contacting me for over a year, on a regular basis. Who was tracking whom? I sometimes asked myself.

The fax message was classic Smith. I read it line by line.

Paris -Wednesday.

In Foucault’s Discipline amp; Punish, the philosopher suggests that in the modern age we are moving from individual punishment to a paradigm of generalized punishment. I, for one, believe that is an unfortunate happenstance. Do you see where I might be going with this line of thinking, and what my ultimate mission might be?

I’m missing you over here on the Continent, missing you terribly. Alex Cross isn’t worth your valuable time and energy.

I’ve taken one here in Paris in your honor-a doctor! A doctor, a surgeon, just like you wanted to be once upon a time.

Always,

Mr. Smith

Chapter 90

THIS WAS THE WAY the killer communicated with me for more than a year. E-mail messages arrived on the PowerBook at any time of day or night. I would then transmit them to the FBI. Mr. Smith was so contemporary, a creature of the nineties.

I relayed the message to the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico. Several of the profilers were still working. I could visualize the scene of consternation and frustration. My trip to France was approved.

Kyle Craig telephoned my room at the Marriott a few minutes after the message had been relayed to Quantico. Mr. Smith was giving me another window of opportunity to catch him, usually only a day or so, but sometimes only hours. Smith was challenging me to save the kidnapped doctor in Paris.

And yes, I did believe Mr. Smith was far superior to Gary Soneji. Both his mind and his methodology outstripped Soneji’s more primitive approach.

I was carrying my travel bag and computer when I saw John Sampson. He was outside in the parking lot of the hotel. It was a little past midnight. I wondered what he’d been up to in Princeton that night.

“What the hell is this, Pierce? Where do you think you’re going?” he said in a loud, angry voice. He towered over me in the parking lot. His shadow stretched out thirty or forty feet from the lights of the building.

“Smith contacted me about thirty minutes ago. He does this just before he makes a kill. He gives me a location and challenges me to stop the murder.”

Sampson’s nostrils flared. He was shaking his head from side to side. There was only one case in his mind.

“So you’re just dropping what we’re working on here? You weren’t even going to tell me, were you? Just leave Princeton in the dead of night.” His eyes were cold and unfriendly. I had lost his trust.

“John, I left a message explaining everything to you. It’s at the front desk. I already spoke to Kyle. I’ll surely be back in a few days. Smith never takes long. He knows it’s too dangerous. I need time to think about this case anyway.”

Sampson frowned and he continued to shake his head. “You said it was important to visit Lorton Prison. You said Lorton is the one place where Soneji could have gotten somebody to do his dirty work. His partner probably came from Lorton.”

“I still plan to visit Lorton Prison. Right now, I have to try and prevent a murder. Smith abducted a doctor in Paris. He’s dedicating the kill to me.”

John Sampson wasn’t impressed with anything I’d said.

I didn’t get a chance to tell him the other thing, the part that bothered me the most. I hadn’t told Kyle Craig either.

Isabella had come from Paris. Paris was her home. I hadn’t been there since her murder.

Mr. Smith knew that.

Chapter 91

IT WAS a beautiful spot, and Mr. Smith wanted to spoil it, to ruin it forever inside his mind. The small stone house with its earth-grouted walls and white-shuttered windows and country-lace curtains was peaceful and idyllic. The garden was surrounded by twig fencing. Under a lone apple tree sat a long wooden table, where friends, family, and neighbors might gather to eat and talk.

Smith carefully spread out pages from Le Monde across the linoleum floor of the spacious farmhouse kitchen. Patti Smith-not a relation-was screeching from his CD player. She sang “Summer Cannibals,” and the blatant irony wasn’t lost on him.

The newspaper front page screamed as well-Mr. Smith Takes Surgeon Captive in Paris!

And so he had, so he had.

The idée fixe that had captured the public’s fancy and fear was that Mr. Smith might be an alien visitor roaming and ravaging the earth for dark, unknown, perhaps unknowable reasons. He didn’t share any traits with humans, the lurid news stories reasoned. He was described as “not of the earth,” “incapable of any human emotion.”

His name-Mr. Smith-came from “Valentine Michael Smith,” a visitor from Mars in Robert Heinlein’s science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. The book had always been a cult favorite. Stranger was the single book in Charles Manson’s backpack when he was captured in California.

He studied the French surgeon lying nearly unconscious on the kitchen floor. One FBI report stated that “Mr. Smith seems to appreciate beauty. He has a human artist’s eye for composition. Observe the studied way in which he arranges the corpses.”

A human artist’s eye for beauty and composition. Yes, that was true enough. He had loved beauty once, lived for it, actually. The artful arrangements were one of the clues he left for…his followers.

Patti Smith finished her song, and the Doors immediately came on. “People Are Strange.” The moldy oldie was wonderful mood music as well.

Smith let his gaze wander around the country kitchen. One entire wall was a stone fireplace. Another wall was white tile, with antique shelves that held copper pots, white cafi au lait bowls, antique jam jars, or confitures fines, as they were called here. He knew that, knew just about everything about everything. There was an antique black cast-iron stove with brass knobs. And a large white porcelain sink. Adjacent to the sink, just above a butcher-block worktable, hung an impressive array of kitchen knives. The knives were beautiful, absolutely perfect in every way.

He was avoiding looking at the victim, wasn’t he?

He knew that he was. He always did.

Finally, he lowered his eyes and looked into the victim’s.

So this was Abel Sante.

This was lucky number nineteen.

Chapter 92

THE VICTIM was a very successful thirty-five-year-old surgeon. He was good-looking in a Gallic sort of way, in excellent shape even without very much meat left on his bones. He seemed a nice person, an “honorable” man, a “good” doctor.

What was human? What exactly, was human-ness? Mr. Smith wondered. That was the fundamental question he still had, after physical exams like this, in nearly a dozen countries around the world.

What was human? What, exactly, did the word mean?

Could he finally find an answer here in this French country kitchen? The philosopher Heidegger believed the self is revealed by what we truly care about. Was Heidegger onto something? What was it that Mr. Smith truly cared about? That was a fair question to ask.

The French surgeon’s hands were tightly tied behind his back. The ankles were bound to the hands; the knees were bent back toward the head. The remaining length of rope was attached to the neck in a noose.

Abel Sante had already realized that any struggling, any thrashing about, created intense strangulation pressure. As the legs eventually tired, they would become numb and painful. The urge to straighten them would be overpowering. If he did this, it would induce self-strangulation.

Mr. Smith was ready. He was on a schedule. The autopsy would start at the top of the body, then work its way down. The correct order: neck, spine, chest. Then abdomen, pelvic organs, genitalia. The head and brain would be examined last, in order to allow the blood to drain as much as possible-for maximum viewing.

Dr. Sante screamed, but no one could hear him out here. It was an ungodly sound and almost made Smith scream, too.

He entered the chest via a classic “Y” incision. The first cut went across the chest from shoulder to shoulder, continued over the breasts, then traveled from the tip of the sternum. He cut down the entire length of the abdomen to the pubic area.

The brutal murder of an innocent surgeon named Abel Sante.

Absolutely inhuman, he thought to himself.

Abel Sante-he was the key to everything, and none of the police masterminds could figure it out. None of them were worth shit as detectives, as investigators, as anything. It was so simple, if only they would use their minds.

Abel Sante.

Abel Sante.

Abel Sante.

The autopsy finished, Mr. Smith lay down on the kitchen floor with what was left of poor Dr. Sante. He did this with every victim. Mr. Smith hugged the bleeding corpse against his own body. He whispered and sighed, whispered and sighed. It was always like this.

And then, Smith sobbed loudly. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. Please forgive me. Somebody forgive me,” he moaned in the deserted farmhouse.

Abel Sante.

Abel Sante.

Abel Sante.

Didn’t anyone get it?

Chapter 93

ON THE American Airlines flight to Europe, I noticed that mine was the only overhead lamp glaring as the flight droned over the Atlantic.

Occasionally, one of the stewardesses stopped to offer coffee or liquor. But for the most part, I just stared into the blackness of the night.

There had never been a mass killer to match Mr. Smith’s unique approach to violence, not from a scientific vantage point anyway. That was one thing the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico and I agreed on. Even the contrarians at Interpol, the international clearinghouse for police information, agreed with us.

In point of fact, the community of forensic psychologists is, or at least had been, in relative agreement about the different repeat- or pattern-murderer types; and also the chief characteristics of their disorders. I found myself reviewing the data as I flew.

Schizoid personality disorder types, as they are currently called, tend to be introverted and indifferent to social relationships. This freak is a classic loner. He tends to have no close friends or close relationships, except possibly family. He exhibits an inability to show affection in acceptable ways. He usually chooses solitary activities for his free time. He has little or no interest in sex.

Narcissists are different. They exhibit little or no concern for anyone but themselves, though they sometimes pretend to care about others. True narcissists can’t empathize. They have an inflated sense of self, can become highly unstable if criticized, and feel they are entitled to special treatment. They are preoccupied with grandiose feelings of success, power, beauty, and love.

Avoidant personality disorder types usually won’t get involved with other people unless they’re completely sure of acceptance. These types avoid jobs and embarrass easily. They’re considered “sneaky dangerous.”

Sadistic personality disorder types are ultimate in badness, as destructive individuals go. They habitually use violence and cruelty to establish control. They enjoy inflicting physical and psychological pain. They like to tell lies, simply for the purpose of inflicting pain. They are obsessed with involving violence, torture, and especially the death of others.

As I said, all of this ran through my mind as I sat in my airplane seat high over the Atlantic. What interested me mostly, though, was the conclusion I’d reached about Mr. Smith, and which I had recently shared with Kyle Craig at Quantico.

At different times during the long and complex investigation, Mr. Smith had fit all four of these classic murderer types. He would seem to fit one personality disorder type almost perfectly-then change into another-back and forth at whim. He might even be a fifth type of psychopathic killer, a whole new breed of disorder type.

Perhaps the tabloids were right about Mr. Smith, and he was an alien. He wasn’t like any other human. I knew that. He had murdered Isabella.

This was really why I couldn’t sleep on the flight to Paris. It was why I could never sleep anymore.

Chapter 94

WHO COULD ever begin to forget the cold blooded murder of a loved one? I couldn’t. Nothing has diminished its vividness or unreality in four years. It goes like this, exactly the way I told it to the Cambridge police.

It is around two in the morning, and I use my key to open the front door of our two-bedroom apartment on Inman Street in Cambridge. Suddenly, I stop. I have the sense that something is wrong in the apartment.

Details inside are particularly memorable. I will never forget any of it. A poster in our foyer: Language is more than speech. Isabella is a closet linguist, a lover of words and word games. So am I. It’s an important connection between us.

A favorite Noguchi rice paper lamp of Isabella’s.

Her treasured paperbacks from home, most of them Folio. White uniformed spines with black lettering, so perfect and neat.

I’d had a few glasses of wine at Jillian’s with some other medical students, recent graduates like myself. We were letting off steam after too many days and nights and weeks and years in the Harvard pressure cooker. We were comparing notes about the hospitals each of us would be working at in the fall. We were promising to stay in touch, knowing that we probably wouldn’t.

The group included three of my best friends through medical school. Maria Jane Ruocco, who would be working at Children’s Hospital in Boston; Chris Sharp, who was soon off to Beth Israel; Michael Fescoe, who had landed a prize internship at NYU. I had been fortunate, too. I was headed to Massachusetts General, one of the best teaching hospitals in the world. My future was assured.

I was high from the wine, but not close to being drunk, when I got home. I was in a good mood, unusually carefree. Odd, guilty detail-I was horny for Isabella. Free. I remember singing “With or Without You” on the way back in my car, a ten-year-old Volvo befitting my economic status as a med student.

I vividly remember standing in the foyer, seconds after I flicked on the hall lights. Isabella’s Coach purse is on the floor. The contents are scattered about in a three-or four-foot radius. Very, very strange.

Loose change, her favorite Georg Jensen earrings, lipstick, assorted makeup containers, compact, cinnamon gum-all there on the floor.

Why didn’t Isabella pick up her purse? Is she pissed at me for going out with my med-school chums?

That wouldn’t be like Isabella. She is an open woman, liberal-minded to a fault.

I start back through the narrow, long apartment, looking for her everywhere. The apartment is laid out railroad-style, small rooms on a tight track leading to a single window that looks onto Inman Street.

Some of our secondhand scuba equipment is sitting in the hall. We had been planning a trip to California. Two air tanks, weight belts, wet suits, two sets of rubber fins clutter the hallway.

I grab a speargun-just in case. In case of what? I have no idea. How could I?

I become more and more frantic, and then afraid. “Isabella!” I call at the top of my voice. “Isabella? Where are you?”

Then I stop, everything in the world seems to stop. I let go of the speargun, let it fall, crash and clatter against the bare hardwood floor.

What I see in our bedroom will never leave me. I can still see, smell even taste, every obscene detail. Maybe this is when my sixth sense is born, the strange feeling that is so much a part of my life now.

“Oh God! Oh Jesus, no!” I scream loud enough for the couple who live above us to hear. This isn’t Isabella, I remember thinking. Those words of total disbelief. I may have actually spoken them aloud. Not Isabella. It couldn’t be Isabella. Not like this.

And yet-I recognize the flowing auburn hair that I so love to stroke, to brush; the pouting lips that can make me smile, make me laugh out loud, or sometimes duck for cover; a fan-shaped, mother-of-pearl barrette Isabella wears when she wants to look particularly coquettish.

Everything in my life has changed in a heartbeat, or lack of one. I check for signs of breathing, a sign of life. I can feel no pulse in the femoral or carotid arteries. Not a beat. Nothing at all. Not Isabella. This can’t be happening.

Cyanosis, a bluish coloration of the lips, nail beds, and skin is already taking place. Blood is pooled on the underside of her body. The bowels and bladder have relaxed, but these bodily secretions are nothing to me. They are nothing under the circumstances.

Isabella’s beautiful skin looks waxy, almost translucent, as if it isn’t her after all. Her pale green eyes have already lost their liquid and are flattening out. They can no longer see me, can they? I realize they will never look at me again.

The Cambridge police arrive at the apartment somehow. They are everywhere all at once, looking as shocked as I know I look. My neighbors from the building are there, trying to comfort me, trying to calm me, trying not to be sick themselves.

Isabella is gone. We never even got to say good-bye Isabella is dead, and I can’t bring myself to believe it. An old James Taylor lyric, one of our favorites, weaves through my head. “But I always thought that I’d see you, one more time again.” The song was “Fire and Rain.” It was our song. It still is.

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 there 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.

“Is she okay?” I asked Sampson. He had agreed to meet me at the house, though I could tell he was still angry about my leaving the case for a few days.

He shrugged his shoulders. “She won’t accept that Alex isn’t coming back, if that’s what you mean,” he said. “If he dies, I don’t know what will happen to her.”

Sampson and I climbed the stairs in silence. We were in the hallway when the Cross children appeared out of a side bedroom.

I hadn’t formally met Damon and Jannie, but I had heard about them. Both children were beautiful, though still showing bruises from the attack. They had inherited Alex’s good looks. They had bright eyes and their intelligence showed.

“This is Mr. Pierce,” Sampson said, “he’s a friend of ours. He’s one of the good guys.”

“I’m working with Sampson,” I told them. “Trying to help him.”

“Is he, Uncle John?” the little girl asked. The boy just stared at me-not angry, but wary of strangers. I could see his father in Damon’s wide brown eyes.

“Yes, he is working with me, and he’s very good at it,” Sampson said. He surprised me with the compliment.

Jannie stepped up close to me. She was the most beautiful little girl, even with the lacerations and a bruise the size of a baseball on her cheek and neck. Her mother must have been a beautiful woman.

She reached out and shook my hand. “Well, you can’t be as good as my daddy, but you can use my daddy’s bedroom,” she said, “but only until he comes back home.”

I thanked Jannie, and nodded respectfully at Damon. Then I spent the next hour and a half going over Cross’s extensive notes and files on Gary Soneji. I was looking for Soneji’s partner. The files dated back over four years. I was convinced that whoever attacked Alex Cross didn’t do it randomly. There had to be a powerful connection with Soneji, who claimed to always work alone. It was a knotty problem and the profilers at Quantico weren’t making headway with it either.

When I finally trudged back downstairs, Sampson and Nana were both in the kitchen. The uncluttered and practical-looking room was cozy and warm. It brought back memories of Isabella, who had loved to cook and was good at it, too, memories of our home and life together.

Nana looked up at me, her eyes as incisive as I remembered. “I remember you,” she said. “You were the one who told me the truth. Are you close to anything yet? Will you solve this terrible thing?” she asked.

“No, I haven’t solved it, Nana,” I told her the truth again. “But I think Alex might have. Gary Soneji might have had a partner all along.”

Chapter 100

A RECURRING THOUGHT was playing constantly inside my head: Who can you trust? Who can you really believe? I used to have somebody-Isabella.

John Sampson and I boarded an FBI Bell Jet Ranger around eleven the following morning. We had packed for a couple of days’ stay.

“So who is this partner of Soneji’s? When do I get to meet him?” Sampson asked during the flight.

“You already have,” I told him.

We arrived in Princeton before noon and went to see a man named Simon Conklin. Sampson and Cross had questioned him before. Alex Cross had written several pages of notes on Conklin during the investigation of the sensational kidnapping of two young children a few years back: Maggie Rose Dunne and Michael “Shrimpie” Goldberg. The FBI had never really followed up on the extensive reports at the time. They wanted the high-profile kidnapping case closed.

I’d read the notes through a couple of times now. Simon Conklin and Gary had grown up on the same country road, a few miles outside the town of Princeton. The two friends thought of themselves as “superior” to other kids, and even to most adults. Gary had called himself and Conklin the “great ones.” They were reminiscent of Leopold and Loeb, two highly intelligent teens who had committed a famous thrill killing in Chicago one year.

As boys, Simon Conklin and Gary had decided that life was nothing more than a cock-and-bull “story” conveniently cooked up by the people in charge. Either you followed the “story” written by the society you lived in, or you set out to write your own.

Cross double-underscored in the notes that Gary had been in the bottom fifth of his class at Princeton High School, before he transferred to The Peddie School. Simon Conklin had been number one, and gone on to Princeton University.

A few minutes past noon, Sampson and I stepped out into the dirt-and-gravel parking lot of a dreary little strip mall between Princeton and Trenton, New Jersey. It was hot and humid and everything looked bleached out by the sun.

“ Princeton education sure worked out well for Conklin,” Sampson said with sarcasm in his voice. “I’m really impressed.”

For the past two years, Simon Conklin had managed an adult bookstore in the dilapidated strip mall. The store was located in a single-story, red-brick building. The front door was painted black and so were the padlocks. The sign read ADULT.

“What’s your feeling about Simon Conklin? Do you remember much about him?” I asked as we walked toward the front door. I suspected there was a back way out, but I didn’t think he would run on us.

“Oh, Simon Says is definitely a world-class freakazoid. He was high on my Unabomber list at one time. Has an alibi for the night Alex was attacked.”

“He would,” I muttered. “Of course he would. He’s a clever boy. Don’t ever forget that.”

We walked inside the seedy, grungy store and flashed our badges. Conklin stepped out from behind a raised counter. He was tall and gangly and painfully thin. His milky brown eyes were distant, as if he were someplace else. He was instantly unlikable.

He had on faded black jeans and a studded black leather vest, no shirt under the vest. If I hadn’t known a few Harvard flameouts myself, I wouldn’t have imagined he had graduated from Princeton and ended up like this. All around him were pleasure kits, masturbators, dildos, pumps, restraints. Simon Conklin seemed right in his element.

“I’m starting to enjoy these unexpected visits from you assholes. I didn’t at first, but now I’m getting into them,” he said. “I remember you, Detective Sampson. But you’re new to the traveling team. You must be Alex Cross’s unworthy replacement.”

“Not really,” I said. “Just haven’t felt like coming around to this shithole until now.”

Conklin snorted, a phlegmy sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “You haven’t felt like it. That means you have feeling that you occasionally act on. How quaint. Then you must be with the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Analysis Program. Am I right?”

I looked away from him and checked out the rest of the store.

“Hi,” I said to a man perusing a rack with Spanish Fly Powder, Sta-Hard, and the like. “Find anything you like today? Are you from the Princeton area? I’m Thomas Pierce with the FBI.”

The man mumbled something unintelligible into his chin and then he scurried out, letting a blast of sunlight inside.

“Ouch. That’s not nice,” Conklin said. He snorted again, not quite a laugh.

“I’m not very nice sometimes,” I said to him.

Conklin responded with a jaw-cracking yawn. “When Alex Cross got shot, I was with a friend all night. Your very thorough cohorts already spoke to my squeeze, Dana. We were at a party in Hopewell till around midnight. Lots and lots of witnesses.”

I nodded, looked as bored as he did. “On another, more promising subject, tell me what happened to Gary ’s trains? The ones he stole from his stepbrother?”

Conklin wasn’t smiling anymore. “Look, actually I’m getting a little tired of the bullshit. The repetition bores me and I’m not into ancient history. Gary and I were friends until we were around twelve years old. After that, we never spent time together. He had his friends, and so did I. The end. Now get the hell out of here.”

I shook my head. “No, no, Gary never had any other friends. He only had time for the ‘great ones.’ He believed you were one of them. He told that to Alex Cross. I think you were Gary ’s friend until he died. That’s why you hated Dr. Cross. You had a reason to attack his house. You had a motive, Conklin, and you’re the only one who did.”

Conklin snorted out of his nose and the side of his mouth again. “And if you can prove that, then I go directly to jail. I do not pass Go. But you can’t prove it. Dana. Hopewell. Several witnesses. Bye-bye, assholes.”

I walked out the front door of the adult bookstore. I stood in the blazing heat of the parking lot and waited for Sampson to catch up with me.

“What the hell is going on? Why did you just walk out like that?” he asked.

“Conklin is the leader,” I said. “Soneji was the follower.”

Chapter 101

SOONER OR later almost every police investigation becomes a game of cat and mouse. The difficult, long-running ones always do. First you have to decide, though: Who is the cat? Who is the mouse?

For the next few days, Sampson and I kept Simon Conklin under surveillance. We let him know we were there, waiting and watching, always just around the next corner, and the corner after that. I wanted to see if we could pressure Conklin into a telling action, or even a mistake.

Conklin’s reply was a occasional jaunty salute with his middle finger. That was fine. We were registering on his radar. He knew we were there, always there, watching. I could tell we were unnerving him, and I was just beginning to play the game.

John Sampson had to return to Washington after a few days. I had expected that. The D.C. police department couldn’t let him work the case indefinitely. Besides, Alex Cross and his family needed Sampson in Washington.

I was alone in Princeton, the way I liked it, actually.

Simon Conklin left his house on Tuesday night. After some maneuvering of my own, I followed in my Ford Escort. I let him see me early on. Then I dropped back in the heavy traffic out near the malls, and I let him go free!

I drove straight back to his house and parked off the main road, which was hidden from sight by thick scrub pines and brambles. I walked through the dense woods as quickly as I could. I knew I might not have a lot of time.

No flashlight, no lights of any kind. I knew where I was going now. I was pumped up and ready. I had figured it all out. I understood the game now, and my part in it. My sixth sense was active.

The house was brick and wood and it had a quirky hexagonal window in the front. Loose, chipped, aqua-colored shutters occasionally banged against the house. It was more than a mile from the closest neighbor. No one would see me break in through the kitchen door.

I was aware that Simon Conklin might circle back behind me-if he was as bright as he thought he was. I wasn’t worried about that. I had a working theory about Conklin and his visit to Cross’s house. I needed to test it out.

I suddenly thought about Mr. Smith as I was picking the lock. Smith was obsessed with studying people, with breaking and entering into their lives.

The inside of the house was absolutely unbearable: Simon Conklin’s place smelled like Salvation Army furniture laced with BO and immersed in a McDonald’s deep fryer. No, it was actually worse than that. I held a handkerchief over my nose and mouth as I began to search the filthy lair. I was afraid that I might find a body in here. Anything was possible.

Every room and every object was coated with dust and grime. The best that could be said for Simon Conklin was that he was an avid reader. Volumes were spread open in every room, half a dozen on his bed alone.

He seemed to favor sociology, philosophy, and psychology: Marx, Jung, Bruno Bettelheim, Malraux, Jean Baudrillard. Three unpainted floor-to-ceiling bookcases were crammed with books piled horizontally. My initial impression of the place was that it had already been ransacked by someone.

All of this fit with what had really happened at Alex Cross’s house.

Over Conklin’s rumpled, unmade bed was a framed Vargas girl, signed by the model, with a lipstick kiss next to the butt.

A rifle was stashed under the bed. It was a BAR-the same model Browning Gary Soneji had used in Washington. A smile slowly broke across my face.

Simon Conklin knew the rifle was circumstantial evidence, that it proved nothing about his guilt or innocence. He wanted it found. He wanted Cross’s badge found. He liked to play games. Of course he did.

I climbed down creaking wooden stairs to the basement. I kept the house lights off and used only my penlight.

There were no windows in the cellar. There were dust and cobwebs, and a loudly dripping sink. Curled photographic prints were clipped to strings dangling from the ceiling.

My heart was beating in double time. I examined the dangling pictures. They were photos of Simon Conklin himself, different pics of the auteur cavorting in the buff. They appeared to have been taken inside the house.

I shined the light haphazardly around the basement, glancing everywhere. The floor was dirt and there were large rocks on which the old house was built. Ancient medical equipment was stored: a walker, an aluminum-framed potty, an oxygen tank with hoses and gauges still attached, a glucose monitor.

My eyes trailed over to the far side, the southern wall of the house. Gary Soneji’s train set!

I was in the house of Gray’s best friend, his only friend in the world, the man who had attacked Alex Cross and his family in Washington. I was certain of it. I was certain I had solved the case.

I was better than Alex Cross.

There, I’ve said it

The truth begins.

Who is the cat? Who is the mouse?