Cat and Mouse Page 27

  The following day, I worked at home again. I looked myself away with my computer, several books, and my crime-scene notepads. The only time I took off was to walk Damon and Jannie to school, and then have a quick breakfast with Nana.

  My mouth was full of poached egg and toast when she leaned across the kitchen table and launched one of her famous sneak attacks on me.

  “Am I correct in saying that you don’t want to discuss your murder case with me?” she asked.

  “I’d rather talk about the weather or just about anything else. Your garden looks beautiful. Your hair looks nice.”

  “We all like Christine very much, Alex. She’s knocked our socks off. In case you wanted to know but forgot to ask. She’s the best thing that’s happened to you since Maria. So, what are you going to do about it? What are your plans?”

  I rolled my eyes back, but I had to smile at Nana’s dawn offensive. “First, I’m going to finish this delicious breakfast you fixed. Then I have some dicey work to do upstairs. How’s that?”

  “You mustn’t lose her, Alex. Don’t do that,” Nana advised and warned at the same time. “You won’t listen to a decrepit old woman, though. What do I know about anything? I just cook and clean around here.”

  “And talk,” I said with my mouth full. “Don’t forget talk, old woman.”

  “Not just talk, sonny boy. Pretty sound psychological analysis, necessary cheerleading at times, and expert guidance counseling.”

  “I have a game plan,” I said, and left it at that.

  “You better have a winning game plan.” Nana got the last word in. “Alex, if you lose her, you will never get over it.”

  The walk with the kids and even talking with Nana revitalized me. I felt clear and alert as I worked at my old rolltop for the rest of the morning.

  I had started to cover the bedroom walls with notes and theories, and the beginnings of even more theories about Thomas Pierce. The pushpin parade had taken control. From the looks of the room, it seemed as if I knew what I was doing, but contrary to popular opinion, looks are almost always deceiving. I had hundreds of clues, and yet I didn’t have a clue.

  I remembered something Mr. Smith had written in one of his messages to Pierce, which Pierce had then passed on to the FBI. The god within us is the one that gives the laws and can change the laws. And God is within us.

  The words had seemed familiar to me, and I finally tracked down the source. The quote was from Joseph Campbell, the American mythologist and folklorist who had taught at Harvard when Pierce was a student there.

  I was trying different perspectives to the puzzle. Two entry points in particular interested me.

  First, Pierce was curious about language. He had studied linguistics at Harvard. He admired Noam Chomsky. What about language and words, then?

  Second, Pierce was extremely organized. He had created the false impression that Mr. Smith was disorganized. He had purposely misled the FBI and Interpol.

  Pierce was leaving clues from the start. Some of them were obvious.

  He wants to be caught. So why doesn’t he stop himself?

  Murder. Punishment. Was Thomas Pierce punishing himself, or was he punishing everybody else? Right now, he was certainly punishing the hell out of me. Maybe I deserved it.

  Around three o’clock, I took a stroll and picked up Damon and Jannie at the Sojourner Truth School. Not that they needed someone to walk them home. I just missed the hell out of them. I needed to see them, couldn’t keep myself away.

  Besides, my head ached and I wanted to get out of the house, away from all of my thoughts.

  I saw Christine in the schoolyard. She was surrounded by little children. I remembered that she wanted to have kids herself. She looked so happy, and I could see that the kids loved to be around her. Who in their right mind wouldn’t. She made it look so natural to be turning jump rope in a navy business suit.

  She smiled when she saw me approaching across the schoolyard full of kids. The smile warmed the cockles of my heart, and all my other cockles as well.

  “Look who’s taking a break for air,” she said, “three potato, four.”

  “When I was in high school,” I told her as she continued to turn her end of a Day-Glo pink jump rope, “I had a girlfriend over at John Carroll. This was in my sophomore and junior years.”

  “Mmm, hmmm. Nice Catholic girl? White blouse, plaid skirt, saddle shoes?”

  “She was very nice. Actually, she’s a botanist now. See, nice? I used to walk all the way over to South Carolina Avenue just on the off chance I might see Jeanne for a couple of minutes after she finished school. I was seriously smitten.”

  “Must have been the saddle shoes. Are you trying to tell me that you’re smitten again?” Christine laughed. The kids couldn’t quite hear us, but they were laughing anyway.

  “I am way beyond smitten. I am smote.”

  “Well that’s good,” she said and continued to turn the pink rope and smile at her kids, “because so am I. And when this case is over, Alex—”

  “Anything you want, just say the word.”

  Her eyes brightened even more than was usual. “A weekend away from everything. Maybe at a country inn, but anywhere remote will do just fine.”

  I wanted to hold Christine so much. I wanted to kiss her right there, but that wasn’t going to happen in the crowded schoolyard.

  “It’s a date,” I said. “It’s a promise.”

  “I’ll hold you to it. Smote, that’s good. We can try that on our weekend away.”

  Chapter 124

  BACK HOME, I worked on the Pierce case until supper time. I ate a quick meal of hamburgers and summer squash with Nana and the kids. I took some more heavy heat for being an incurable and unrepentant workaholic. Nana cut me a slice of pie, and I retreated to my room again. Well fed, but deeply unsatisfied.

  I couldn’t help it — I was worried. Thomas Pierce might already have grabbed another victim. He could be performing an “autopsy” tonight. He could send us a message at any time.

  I reread the notes I had plastered on the bedroom wall. I felt as if the answer were on the tip of my tongue and it was driving me crazy. People’s lives hung in the balance.

  He had “pierced” the heart of Isabella Calais.

  His apartment in Cambridge was an obsessive shrine to her memory.

  He had returned “home” when he went to Point Pleasant Beach. The opportunity to catch him was there — if we were smart enough, if we were as good as he was.

  What were we missing, the FBI and me?

  I played more word games with the assortment of clues.

  He always “pierces” his victims. I wondered if he was impotent or had become impotent, unable to have a sexual relationship with Isabella.

  Mr. Smith operates like a doctor — which Pierce nearly was — which his father and his siblings are. He had failed as a doctor.

  I went to bed early, around eleven, but I couldn’t sleep. I guess I’d just wanted to try and turn the case off. I finally called Christine and we talked for about an hour. As we talked and I listened to the music of her voice, I couldn’t help thinking about Pierce and Isabella Calais.

  Pierce had loved her. Obsessive love. What would happen if I lost Christine now? What happened to Pierce after the murder? Had he gone mad?

  After I got off the phone, I went back at the case again. For a while, I thought his pattern might have something to do with Homer’s Odyssey. He was heading home after a series of tragedies and misfortunes? No, that wasn’t it.

  What the hell was the key to his code? If he wanted to drive all of us mad, it was working.

  I began to play with the names of the victims, starting with Isabella and ending with Inez. I goes full circle to I? Full circle? Circles? I looked at the clock on the desk — it was almost one-thirty in the morning, but I kept at it.

  I wrote — I.

  I. Was that something? It could be a start. The personal pronoun I? I tried a few combinations with the letters
of the names.

  I-S-U…R

  C-A-D…

  I-A-D…

  I stopped after the next three letters: IMU. I stared at the page. I remembered pierced, the obviousness of it. The simplest wordplay.

  Isabella, Michaela, Ursula. Those were names of the first three victims — in order. Jesus Christ!

  I looked at the names of all the victims — in order of the murders. I looked at the first, last, and middle names. I began mixing and matching the names. My heart was pounding. There was something here. Pierce had left us another clue, a series of clues, actually.

  It was right there in front of us all the time. No one got it, because Smith’s crimes appeared to be without any pattern. But Pierce had started that theory himself.

  I continued to write, using either the first or last or middle names of the victims. It started IMU. Then R, for Robert. D for Dwyer. Was there a subpattern for selecting the name? It could be an arithmetic sequence.

  There was a pattern to Pierce-Smith, after all. His mission began that very first night in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was insane, but I had caught on to his pattern. It started with his love of wordplay.

  Thomas Pierce wanted to be caught! But then something changed. He had become ambivalent about his capture. Why?

  I looked at what I had assembled. “Son of a bitch,” I muttered. “Isn’t this something. He has a ritual.”

  I Isabella Calais.

  M Stephanie Michaela Apt.

  U Ursula Davies.

  R Robert Michael Neel.

  D Brigid Dwyer.

  E Mary Ellen Klauk.

  R Robin Anne Schwartz.

  E Clark Daniel Ebel.

  D David Hale.

  I Isadore Morris.

  S Theresa Anne Secrest.

  A Elizabeth Allison Gragnano.

  B Barbara Maddalena.

  E Edwin Mueller.

  L Laurie Garnier.

  L Lewis Lavine.

  A Andrew Klauk.

  C Inspector Drew Cabot.

  A Dr. Abel Sante.

  L Simon Lewis Conklin.

  A Anthony Bruno.

  I Inez Marquez.

  S — — — — —?

  It read: I MURDERED ISABELLA CALAIS.

  He had made it so easy for us. He was taunting us from the very beginning. Pierce wanted to be stopped, wanted to be caught. So why the hell hadn’t he stopped himself? Why had the string of brutal murders gone on and on?

  I MURDERED ISABELLA CALAIS.

  The murders were a confession, and maybe Pierce was almost finished. Then what would happen? And who was S?

  Was it Smith himself? Did S stand for Smith?

  Would he symbolically murder Smith? Then Mr. Smith would disappear forever?

  I called Kyle Craig and then Sampson, and I told them what I had found. It was past two in the morning, and neither of them was overjoyed to hear my voice or the news. They didn’t know what to do with the word jumble and neither did I.

  “I’m not sure what it gives us,” Kyle said, “what it proves, Alex.”

  “I don’t either. Not yet. It does tell us he’s going to kill someone with an S in his name.”

  “George Steinbrenner,” Kyle mumbled. “Strom Thurmond. Sting.”

  “Go back to sleep,” I said.

  My head was doing loops. Sleep wasn’t an option for me. I half expected to get another message from Pierce, maybe even that night. He was mocking us. He had been from the beginning.

  I wanted to get a message to him. Maybe I ought to communicate with Pierce through the newspapers or TV? We needed to get off the defensive and attack instead.

  I lay in the darkness of my bedroom. Could S be Mr. Smith? I wondered. My head was throbbing. I was past being exhausted. I finally drifted off toward sleep. I was falling off the edge — when I grabbed hold.

  I bolted up in bed. I was wide-awake now.

  “S isn’t Smith.”

  I knew who S was.

  Chapter 125

  THOMAS PIERCE was in Concord, Massachusetts.

  Mr. Smith was here, too.

  I was finally inside his head.

  Sampson and I were ready on a cozy, picturesque side street near the house of Dr. Martin Straw, the man who had been Isabella’s lover. Martin Straw was S in the puzzle.

  The FBI had a trap set for Pierce at the house. They didn’t bring huge numbers of agents this time. They were afraid of tipping off Pierce. Kyle Craig was gun-shy and he had every reason to be. Or maybe there was something else going on.

  We waited for the better part of the morning and early afternoon. Concord was a self-contained, somewhat constrained town that seemed to be aging gracefully. The Thoreau and Alcott homes were here somewhere nearby. Every other house seemed to have a historical-looking plaque with a date on it.

  We waited for Pierce. And then waited some more. The dreaded stakeout in Podunk dragged on and on. Maybe I was wrong about S.

  A voice finally came over the radio in our car. It was Kyle. “We’ve spotted Pierce. He’s here. But something’s wrong, Alex. He’s headed back toward Route Two,” Kyle said. “He’s not going to Dr. Straw’s. He saw something he didn’t like.”

  Sampson looked over at me. “I told you he was careful. Good instincts. He is a goddamn Martian, Alex.”

  “He spotted something,” I said. “He’s as good as Kyle always said. He knows how the Bureau works, and he saw something.”

  Kyle and his team had wanted to let Pierce enter the Straw house before they took him down. Dr. Straw, his wife, and children had been moved from the place. We needed solid evidence against Pierce, as much as we could get. We could lose the case if we got Thomas Pierce to court without it. We definitely could lose.

  A message crackled over the shortwave. “He’s headed toward Route Two. Something spooked him. He’s on the run!”

  “He has a shortwave! He’s intercepting us!” I grabbed the mike and warned Kyle. “No more talk on the radio. Pierce is listening. That’s how he spotted us.”

  I started the engine and gunned the sedan away from the curb. I pushed the speed up to sixty on heavily populated Lowell Road. We were actually closer to Route 2 than the others. We still might be able to cut Pierce off.

  A shiny, silver BMW passed us, coming from the opposite direction on the road. The driver sat on her horn as we sped by. I couldn’t blame her. Sixty was a dangerous speed on the narrow village street. Everything was going crazy again, caroming out of control at the whim of a madman.

  “There he is!” Sampson yelled.

  Pierce’s car was heading into Concord Center, the most congested area of town. He was moving way too fast.

  We sped past Colonial-style houses, then upscale shops, and finally approached Monument Square. I caught glimpses of the Town House, Concord Inn, the Masons Hall — then a sign for Route 62 — another for Route 2.

  Our sedan whisked by car after car on the village streets. Brakes screeched around us. Other cars honked, justifiably angry and afraid of the car chase in progress.

  Sampson was holding his breath and so was I. There’s a joke about black men being pulled over illegally in suburban areas. The DWB violation. Driving while black. We were up to seventy inside the city limits.

  We made it in one piece out of the town center — Walden Street — Main — then back onto Lowell Road approaching the highway.

  I whipped around onto Route 2 and nearly spun out of control. The pedal was down to the floor. This was our best chance to get Thomas Pierce, maybe our last chance. Up ahead, Pierce knew this was it, too.

  I was doing close to ninety now on Route 2, passing cars as if they were standing still. Pierce’s Thunderbird must have been pushing eighty-five. He’d spotted us early in the chase.

  “We’re catching this squirrelly bastard now!” Sampson hollered at me. “Pierce goes down!”

  We hit a deep pothole and the car momentarily left the road. We landed with a jarring thud. The wound in my side screamed. My head h
urt. Sampson kept hollering in my ear about Pierce going down.

  I could see his dark Thunderbird bobbing and weaving up ahead. Just a couple of car lengths separated us.

  He’s a planner, I warned myself. He knew this might happen.

  I finally caught up to Pierce and pulled alongside him. Both cars were doing close to ninety. Pierce took a quick glance over at us.

  I felt strangely exhilarated. Adrenaline powered through my body. Maybe we had him. For a second or two, I was as totally insane as Pierce.

  Pierce saluted with his right hand. “Dr. Cross,” he called through the open window, “we finally meet!”

  Chapter 126

  “I KNOW about the FBI sanction!” Pierce yelled over the whistle and roar of the wind. He looked cool and collected, oblivious to reality. “Go ahead, Cross. I want you to do it. Take me out, Cross!”

  “There’s no sanction order!” I yelled back. “Pull your car over! No one’s going to shoot you.”

  Pierce grinned — his best killer smile. His blond hair was tied in a tight ponytail. He had on a black turtleneck. He looked successful — a local lawyer, shop owner, doctor. “Doc.”

  “Why do you think the FBI brought such a small unit,” he yelled. “Terminate with prejudice. Ask your friend Kyle Craig. That’s why they wanted me inside Straw’s house!”

  Was I talking to Thomas Pierce?

  Or was this Mr. Smith?

  Was there a difference anymore?

  He threw his head back and roared with laughter. It was one of the oddest, craziest things I’ve ever seen. The look on his face, the body language, his calmness. He was daring us to shoot him at ninety miles an hour on Route 2 outside Concord, Massachusetts. He wanted to crash and burn.

  We hit a stretch of highway with thick fir woods on either side. Two of the FBI cars caught up. They were pinned on Pierce’s tail, pushing, taunting him. Had the Bureau come here planning to kill Pierce?

  If they were going to take him, this was a good place — a secluded pocket away from most commuter traffic and houses.