Alex Cross 04 - Cat & Mouse Page 21

  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 g
otten 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 re
d 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.