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  He stayed in Conklin’s face. “First, I want you to tell me that you’re the one who snuck into Alex Cross’s house. You did it! Now just tell me you did it. What you say here will not be held against you, and will not be used in a court of law. It’s just between us.”

  Simon Conklin looked at him as if he were a complete madman. How perceptive.

  “You’re crazy. You can’t do this. This won’t matter in court,” Conklin squealed.

  Pierce’s eyes widened in disbelief. He looked at Conklin as if he were the madman. “Didn’t I just say precisely that? Weren’t you listening? Am I talking to myself here? No, it won’t matter in their court. This is my court. So far, you’re losing your case, Simple Simon. You’re smart, though. I’m confident you can do a much better job over the next few hours.”

  Simon Conklin gasped. A shiny, stainless-steel scalpel was pointed at his chest.

  Chapter 107

  “ LOOK AT ME! Would you focus on what I’m saying, Simon. I’m not another gray suit from the FBI—I have important questions to ask. I want you to answer them truthfully. You were the one at Cross’s house! You attacked Cross. Let’s proceed from there.”

  With a swift move of his left arm, Pierce pulled Conklin roughly up off the cellar floor. His physical strength was a shock to Conklin.

  Pierce put his scalpel down and hog-tied Conklin to the cot with rope.

  Pierce leaned in close to Simon Conklin once he was tied down and helpless. “Here’s a news flash—I don’t like your superior attitude. Believe me, you aren’t superior. Somehow, and this amazes me, I don’t think I’ve made myself clear yet. You’re a specimen, Simon. Let me show you something creepy.”

  “Don’t!” Conklin screeched. He was helpless as Pierce made a sudden incision in the upper chest. He couldn’t believe what was happening. Simon Conklin screamed.

  “Can you concentrate better now, Simon? See what’s on the table here? It’s your tape recorder. I just want you to confess. Tell me what happened inside Dr. Cross’s house. I want to hear everything.”

  “Leave me alone,” Conklin whispered weakly.

  “No! That’s not going to happen. You will never be alone again. All right, forget the scalpel and the tape recorder. I want you to focus on this. Ordinary can of Coca-Cola. Your Coke, Simon.”

  He shook the bright red can, shook it up good, and popped it open. Then he pulled Conklin’s head back. Grabbed a handful of long, greasy hair. Pierce pushed the harmless-looking can under Conklin’s nostrils.

  The soda exploded upward, fizz, bubbles, sugary-brown water. It shot up Conklin’s nose and toward the brain. It was an army interrogator’s trick. Excruciatingly painful, and it always worked.

  Simon Conklin choked horribly. He couldn’t stop coughing, gagging.

  “I hope you appreciate the kind of resourcefulness I’m showing. I can work with any household object. Are you ready to confess? Or would you like some more Coke?”

  Simon Conklin’s eyes were wider than they had ever been before. “I’ll say whatever you want! Just please stop.”

  Thomas Pierce shook his head back and forth. “I just want the truth. I want the facts. I want to know I solved the case that Alex Cross couldn’t.”

  He turned on the tape recorder and held it under Conklin’s bearded chin. “Tell me what happened.”

  “I was the one who attacked Cross and his family. Yes, yes, it was me,” Simon Conklin said in a choked voice that made each word sound even more emotional. “Gary made me. He said if I didn’t, somebody would come for me. They’d torture and kill me. Somebody he knew from Lorton Prison. That’s the truth, I swear it is. Gary was the leader, not me!”

  Thomas Pierce was suddenly almost tender, his voice soft and soothing. “I knew that, Simon. I’m not stupid. I knew that Gary made you do it. Now, when you got to the Cross house, you couldn’t kill him, could you? You’d fantasized about it, but then you couldn’t do it.”

  Simon Conklin nodded. He was exhausted and frightened. He wondered if Gary had sent this madman and thought that maybe he had.

  Pierce motioned with the Coke can for him to keep going. He took a hit of the Coke as he listened. “Go on, Simon. Tell me all about you and Gary.”

  Conklin was crying, bawling like a child, but he was talking. “We got beat up a lot when we were kids. We were inseparable. I was there when Gary burned down his own house. His stepmother was inside with her two kids. So was his father. I watched over the two kids he kidnapped in D.C. I was the one at Cross’s house. You were right! It might as well have been Gary. He planned everything.”

  Pierce finally took away the tape player and shut it off. “That’s much better, Simon. I do believe you.”

  What Simon Conklin had just said seemed like a good break point—somewhere to end. The investigation was over. He’d proved he was better than Alex Cross.

  “I’m going to tell you something. Something amazing, Simon. You’ll appreciate this, I think.”

  He raised the scalpel and Simon Conklin tried to squirm away. He knew what was coming.

  “Gary Soneji was a pussycat compared to me,” Thomas Pierce said. “I’m Mr. Smith.”

  Chapter 108

  SAMPSON AND I rushed through Princeton, breaking just about every speed limit. The agents trailing Thomas Pierce had temporarily lost him. The elusive Pierce, or was it Mr. Smith—was on the loose. They thought they had him again, at Simon Conklin’s. Everything was chaos.

  Moments after we arrived, Kyle gave the signal to move in on the house. Sampson and I were supposed to be a Jafos at the scene —just a fucking observer. Sondra Greenberg was there. She was a Jafo, too.

  A half dozen FBI agents, Sampson, myself, and Sondra hurried through the yard. We split up. Some went in the front and others through the back of the ramshackle house. We were moving quickly and efficiently, handguns and rifles out. Everybody wore windbreakers with “FBI” printed large on the back.

  “I think he’s here,” I told Sampson. “I think we’re about to meet Mr. Smith!”

  The living room was darker and gloomier than I remembered from an earlier visit. We didn’t see anyone yet, neither Pierce nor Simon Conklin nor Mr. Smith. The house looked as if it had been ransacked and it smelled terrible.

  Kyle gave a hand signal and we fanned out, hurrying through the house. Everything was tense and unsettling.

  “See no evil, hear no evil,” Sampson muttered at my side, “but it’s here all the same.”

  I wanted to Pierce to go down, but I wanted to get Simon Conklin even more. I figured it was Conklin who had come into my house and attacked my family. I needed five minutes alone with Conklin. Therapy time—for me. Maybe we could talk about Gary Soneji, about the “great ones,” as they called themselves.

  An agent called out—“The basement! Down here! Hurry!”

  I was out of breath and hurting already. My right side burned like hell. I followed the others down the narrow, twisting stairs. “Awhh Jesus,” I heard Kyle say from his position up ahead.

  I saw Simon Conklin lying spread-eagled across an old striped-blue mattress on the floor. The man who had attacked me and my family had been mutilated. Thanks to countless anatomy classes at John Hopkins, I was better prepared than the others for the gruesome murder scene. Simon Conklin’s chest, stomach, and pelvic area had been cut open, as if a crackerjack medical examiner had just performed an on-the-scene autopsy.

  “He’s been gutted,” an FBI agent muttered, and turned away from the body. “Why in the name of God?”

  Simon Conklin had no face. A bold incision had been made at the top of his skull. The cut went through the scalp and clear down to the bone. Then the scalp had been pulled down over the front of the face.

  Conklin’s long black hair hung from his scalp to where the chin should have been. It looked like a beard. I suspected that this meant something to Pierce. What did obliterating a face mean to him, if anything.

  There was an unpainted wooden door in the cellar, a
nother way out, but none of the agents stationed outside had seen him leave. Several agents were trying to chase down Pierce. I stayed inside with the mutilated corpse. I couldn’t have run down Nana Mama right then. For the first time in my life, I understood what it would be like to be physically old.

  “He did this in just a couple of minutes?” Kyle Craig asked. “Alex, could he work this fast?”

  “If he’s crazy as I think he is, yeah, he could have. Don’t forget he did this in med school, not to mention his other victims. He has to be incredibly strong, Kyle. He didn’t have morgue tools, no electric saws. He used a knife, and his hands.”

  I was standing close to the mattress, staring down at what remained of Simon Conklin. I thought of the cowardly attack on me, on my family. I’d wanted him caught, but not like this. Nobody deserved this. Only in Dante were such fierce punishments imposed on the damned.

  I leaned in closer and peered at the remains of Simon Conklin. Why was Thomas Pierce so angry at Conklin? Why had he punished Conklin like this?

  The basement of the house was eerily quiet. Sondra Greenberg looked pale, and was leaning against a cellar wall. I would have thought she’d be used to the murder scenes, but maybe that wasn’t possible for anybody.

  I had to clear my throat before I could speak again. “He cut away the front quadrant of the skull,” I said. “He performed a frontal craniotomy. It looks like Thomas Pierce is practicing medicine again.”

  Chapter 109

  I HAD KNOWN Kyle Craig for ten years, and been his friend for nearly that long. I had never seen him so troubled and disconsolate about a case before, no matter how difficult of gruesome. The Thomas Pierce investigation had ruined his career, or at least he thought so, and maybe he was right.

  “How the hell does he keep slipping away?” I said. We were still in Princeton the next morning, having breakfast at PJ’s Pancake House. The food was excellent, but I just wasn’t hungry.

  “That’s the worst part of it—he knows everything we would do. He anticipates our actions and procedures. He was one of us.”

  “Maybe he is an alien,” I said to Kyle, who nodded wearily.

  Kyle ate the remainder of his soft, runny eggs in silence. His face was bent low over his plate. He wasn’t aware of how comically depressed he looked.

  “Those eggs must be real good.” I finally broke the silence with something other than the scraping sound of Kyle’s fork on the plate.

  He looked up at me with his usual deadpan look. “I really messed this up, Alex. I should have taken Pierce in when I had the chance. We talked about it down in Quantico.”

  “You would have had to let him go, release him in a few hours. Then what would you do? You couldn’t keep Pierce under surveillance forever.”

  “Director Burns wanted to sanction Pierce, take him out, but I strongly disagreed. I thought I could get him. I told Burns I would.”

  I shook my head. I couldn’t believe what I’d just heard. “The director of the FBI approved a sanction on Pierce? Jesus.”

  Kyle ran his tongue back and forth over his teeth. “Yes, and not just Burns. This went all the way to the attorney general’s office. God knows where else. I had them convinced Pierce was Mr. Smith. Somehow the idea of an FBI field agent who’s also a multiple killer didn’t sit very well with them. We’ll never catch him now. There’s no real pattern, Alex, at least nothing to follow. No way to trace him. He’s laughing at us.”

  “Yeah, he probably is,” I agreed. “He’s definitely competitive on some level. He likes to feel superior. There’s a whole lot more to this, though.”

  I had been thinking about the possibility of some kind of abstract or artistic pattern since I’d first heard about the complicated case. I was well aware of the theory that each of the murders was different, and worse, seemed arbitrary. That would make Pierce almost impossible to catch. The more I thought about the series of murders, though, and especially about Thomas Pierce’s history, the more I suspected that there had to be pattern, a mission behind all of this. The FBI had simply missed it. Now I was missing it, too.

  “What do you want to do, Alex?” Kyle finally asked. “I understand if you’re not going to work this one, if you’re not up to it.”

  I thought about my family back home, about Christine Johnson and the things we’d talked over, but I didn’t see how I could step away from this awful case right now. I was also somewhat afraid of retribution from Pierce. There was no way to predict how he might react now.

  “I’ll stay with you for a few days. I’ll be around, Kyle. No promises beyond that. Shit, I hate that I said that. Damn it!” I pounded that table and the plates and flatware jumped.

  For the first time that morning, Kyle offered up half a smile. “So, what’s your plan? Tell me what you’re going to do.”

  I shook my head back and forth. I still couldn’t believe I was doing this. “My plan is as follows. I’m going home to Washington, and that’s nonnegotiable. Tomorrow or the next day, I’ll fly up to Boston. I want to see Pierce’s apartment. He wanted to see my house, didn’t he? Then, we’ll see, Kyle. Please keep your evidence gatherers on a leash before I get to his apartment. Look, photograph, but don’t move anything around. Mr. Smith is a very orderly man. I want to see how Pierce’s place looks, how he arranged it for us.”

  Kyle was back to the deadpan look, superserious, which I actually prefer. “We’re not going to get him, Alex. He’s been given a warning. He’ll be more careful from now on. Maybe he’ll disappear like some killers do, just vanish off the face of the earth.”

  “That would be nice,” I said, “but I don’t think it’s going to happen. There is a pattern, Kyle. We just haven’t found it.”

  Chapter 110

  AS THEY say in the wild, Wild West, you have to get right back on the horse that threw you. I spent two days back in Washington, but it seemed more like a couple of hours. Everybody was mad at me for getting into the hunt. Nana, the kids, Christine. So be it.

  I took the first flight into Boston and was at Thomas Pierce’s apartment in Cambridge by nine in the morning. Reluctantly, the dragon slayer was back in play.

  Kyle Craig’s original plan to catch Pierce was one of the most audacious ever to come out of the usually conservative Bureau, but it probably had to be. The question now—had Thomas Pierce been able to get out of the Princeton area somehow? Or was he still down there?

  Had he circled back to Boston? Fled to Europe? Nobody knew for sure. It was also possible that we might not hear from Pierce, or from Mr. Smith, for a long time.

  There was a pattern. We just had to find it.

  Pierce and Isabella Calais had lived together for three years in the second-floor apartment of a building in Cambridge. The front door of the place opened onto the foyer and kitchen. Then came a long railroad-style hallway. The apartment was a revelation. There were memories and reminders of Isabella Calais everywhere.

  It was strange and overwhelming, as if she still lived here and might suddenly appear from one of the rooms.

  There were photographs of her in every single room. I counted more than twenty pictures of Isabella on my first pass, a quick sight-seeing tour of the apartment.

  How could Pierce bear to have this woman’s face everywhere, looking at him, staring silently, accusing him of the most unspeakable murder?

  In the pictures, Isabella Calais has the most beautiful auburn hair, worn long and perfectly shaped. She has a lovely face and the sweetest, natural smile. It was easy to see how he could have loved her. But her eyes had a far-off look in some of the pictures, as if she weren’t quite there.

  Everything about their apartment made my head spin, my insides, too. Was Pierce trying to tell us, or maybe tell himself, that he felt absolutely nothing—no guilt, no sadness, no love in his heart?

  As I thought about it, I was overwhelmed with sadness myself. I could imagine the torture that must be his life every day—never to experience real love or deep feelings. In his crazed mind
did Pierce think that by dissecting each of his victims he would find the answer to himself?

  Maybe the opposite was true.

  Was it possible that Pierce needed to feel her presence, to feel everything with the greatest intensity imaginable? Had Thomas Pierce loved Isabella Calais more than he’d thought he was capable of loving anyone? Had Pierce felt redeemed by their love? When he’d learned of her affair with a doctor named Martin Straw, had it driven him to madness and the most unspeakable of acts: the murder of the only person he had ever loved?

  Why were her pictures still looming everywhere in the apartment? Why had Thomas Pierce been torturing himself with this constant reminder?

  Isabella Calais was watching me as I moved through every room in the apartment. What was she trying to say?

  “Who is he, Isabella?” I whispered. “What is he up to?”

  Chapter 111

  I BEGAN a more detailed search of the apartment. I paid careful attention not just to Isabella’s things, but to Pierce’s, too. Since both had been students, I wasn’t surprised by the academic texts and papers lying about.

  I found a curious test-tube rack of corked vials of sand. Each vial was labeled with the name of a different beach: Laguna, Montauk, Normandy, Parma, Virgin Gorda, Oahu. I thought about the curious notion that Pierce had bottled something so vast, infinite, and random to give it order and substance.

  So what was his organizing principle for Mr. Smith’s murders? What would explain them?

  There were GT Zaskar mountain bikes stored inside the apartment and two GT Machete helmets. Isabella and Thomas biked together through New Hampshire and across into Vermont. More and more, I was sure that he had loved her deeply. Then his love had turned to a hatred so intense few of us could imagine it.

  I recalled that the first Cambridge police reports had convincingly described Pierce’s grief at the murder scene as “impossible to fake.” One of the detectives had written, “He is shocked, surprised, utterly heartbroken. Thomas Pierce not considered a suspect at this time.”