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  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 hurt. 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.

  This was the place to terminate Thomas Pierce.

  Now was the time.

  “You know what we have to do,” Sampson said to me.

  He’s killed more than twenty people that we know of, I was thinking, trying to rationalize. He’ll never give up.

  “Pull over,” I yelled at Pierce again.

  “I murdered Isabella Calais,” he screamed at me. His face was crimson. “I can’t stop myself. I don’t want to stop. I like it! I found out I like it, Cross!”

  “Pull the hell over,” Sampson’s voice boomed. He had his Glock up and aimed at Pierce. “You butcher! You piece of shit!”

  “I murdered Isabella Calais and I can’t stop the killing. You hear what I’m saying, Cross? I murdered Isabella Calais, and I can’t stop the killing.”

  I understood the chilling message. I’d gotten it the first time.

  He was adding more letters to his list of victims. Pierce was creating a new, longer code: I murdered Isabella Calais, and I can’t stop the killing. If he got away, he’d kill again and again. Maybe Thomas Pierce wasn’t human, after all. He’d already intimated that he was his own god.

  Pierce had out an automatic. He fired at us.

  I yanked the steering wheel hard to the left, trying desperately to get us out of the line of fire. Our car leaned hard on its left front and rear wheels. Everything was blurred and out of focus. Sampson grabbed at the wheel. Excruciating pain shot through my wrist. I thought we were going over.

  Pierce’s Thunderbird shot off Route 2, rocketing down a side road. I don’t know how he made the turnoff at the speed he was traveling. Maybe he didn’t care whether he made it or not.

  I managed to set our sedan back down on all four wheels. The FBI cars following Pierce shot past the turn. None of us could stop. Next, came a ragged ballet of skidding stops and U-turns, the screech and whine of tires and brakes. We’d lost sight of Pierce. He was behind us.

  We raced back to the turnoff, then down a twisting, chevroned country road. We found the Thunderbird abandoned about two miles from Route 2.

  My heart was thudding hard inside my chest. Pierce wasn’t in the car. Pierce wasn’t here.

  The woods on both sides of the road were thick and offered lots of cover. Sampson and I climbed out of our car.

  We hurried back into the dense thicket of fir trees, Glocks out. It was almost impossible to get through the underbrush. There was no sign of Thomas Pierce anywhere.

  Pierce was gone.

  Chapter 127

  THOMAS PIERCE had vanished into thin air again. I was almost convinced he might actually live in a parallel world. Maybe he was an alien.

  Sampson and I were headed to Logan International Airport. We were going home to Washington. Rush-hour traffic in Boston wasn’t cooperating with the plan.

  We were still half a mile from the Callahan Tunnel, gridlocked in a line that was barely moving. Grunting and groaning cars and trucks surrounded us. Boston was rubbing our faces in our failure.

  “Metaphor for our case. The whole goddamn manhunt for Pierce,” Sampson said about the traffic jumble, the mess. A good thing about Sampson—he gets either stoic or funny when things go really badly. He refuses to wallow in shit. He swims right out of it.

  “I’m getting an idea,” I told him, giving him some warning.

  “I knew you were flying around somewhere in your private universe. Knew you weren’t really here, sitting in this car with me, listening to what I’m saying.”

  “We’d just be stuck here in tunnel traffic if we stayed put.”

  Sampson nodded. “Uh-huh. We’re in Boston. Don’t want to have to come back tomorrow, follow up on one of your hunches then. Best to do it now. Chase those wild geese while the chasing is good.”

  I pulled out of the tight lane of stalled traffic. “There’s just one wild goose that I can think to chase.”

  “You going to tell me where we’re headed? I need to put my vest back on?”

  “Depends on what you think of my hunches.”

  I followed forest green signs toward Storrow Drive, heading out of Boston the way we came. Traffic was heavy in that direction, too. There were too many people eve
rywhere you went these days, too much crowding, and too much chaos, too much stress on everybody.

  “Better put your vest back on,” I told Sampson.

  He didn’t argue with me. Sampson reached into the backseat and fished around for our vests.

  I wiggled into my own vest as I drove. “I think Thomas Pierce wants this to end. I think he’s ready now. I saw it in his eyes.”

  “So, he had his chance back there in Concord. ‘Pull off the road. Pull over, Pierce!’ You remember any of that? Sound familiar, Alex?”

  I glanced at Sampson. “He needs to be in control. S was for Straw, but S is also for Smith. He has it figured out, John. He knows how he wants it to end. He always knew. It’s important to him that he finish this.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I could see Sampson staring. “And? So? What the hell is that supposed to mean? Do you know how it ends?”

  “He wants to end on S. It’s magical for him. It’s the way he has it figured, the way it has to be. It’s his mind game, and he plays it obsessively. He can’t stop playing. He told us that. He’s still playing.”

  Sampson was clearly having trouble with this. We had just missed capturing Pierce an hour ago. Would he put himself at risk again? “You think he’s that crazy?”

  “I think he’s that crazy, John. I’m sure of it.”

  Chapter 128

  HALF A DOZEN police squad cars were gathered on Inman Street in Cambridge. The blue-and-white cruisers were outside the apartment where Thomas Pierce and Isabella Calais had once lived, where Isabella had been murdered four years before.

  EMS ambulances were parked near the gray stone front stoop. Sirens bleated and wailed. If we hadn’t turned around at the Callahan Tunnel we would have missed it.

  Sampson and I showed our detective shields and kept on moving forward in a hurry. Nobody stopped us. Nobody could have.

  Pierce was upstairs.

  So was Mr. Smith.

  The game had come full circle.

  “Somebody called in a homicide in progress,” one of the Cambridge uniforms told us on the way up the stone front stairs. “I hear they got the guy cornered upstairs. Wackadoo of the first order.”

  “We know all about him,” Sampson said.

  Sampson and I took the stairs to the second floor.

  “You think Pierce called all this heat on himself?” Sampson asked as we hurried up the stairs. I was beyond being out of breath, beyond pain, beyond shock or surprise.

  This is how he wants it to end.

  I didn’t know what to make of Thomas Pierce. He had numbed me, and all the rest of us. I was drifting beyond thought, at least logical ideas. There had never been a killer like Pierce. Not even close. He was the most alienated human being I’d ever met. Not alien, alienated.

  “You still with me, Alex?” I felt Sampson’s hand gripping my shoulder.

  “Sorry,” I said. “At first, I thought Pierce couldn’t feel anything, that he was just another psychopath. Cold rage, arbitrary murders.”

  “And now?”

  I was inside Pierce’s head.

  “Now I’m wondering whether Pierce maybe feels everything. I think that’s what drove him mad. This one can feel.”

  The Cambridge police were gathered everywhere in the hallway. The local cops looked shell-shocked and wild-eyed. A photograph of Isabella stared out from the foyer. She looked beautiful, almost regal, and so very sad.

  “Welcome to the wild, wacky world of Thomas Pierce,” Sampson said.

  A Cambridge detective explained the situation to us. He had silver-blond hair, an ageless hatchet face. He spoke in a low, confidential tone, almost a whisper. “Pierce is in the bedroom at the far end of the hall. Barricaded himself in there.”

  “The master bedroom, his and Isabella’s room,” I said.

  The detective nodded. “Right, the master bedroom. I worked the original murder. I hate the prick. I saw what he did to her.”

  “What’s he doing in the bedroom?” I asked.

  The detective shook his head. “We think he’s going to kill himself. He doesn’t care to explain himself to us peons. He’s got a gun. The powers that be are trying to decide whether to go in.”

  “He hurt anybody?” Sampson spoke up.

  The Cambridge detective shook his head. “No, not that we know of. Not yet.”

  Sampson’s eyes narrowed. “Then maybe we shouldn’t interfere.”

  We walked down the narrow hallway to where several more detectives were talking among themselves. A couple of them were arguing and pointing toward the bedroom.

  This is how he wants it. He’s still in control.

  “I’m Alex Cross,” I told the detective-lieutenant on the scene. He knew who I was. “What has he said so far?”

  The lieutenant was sweating. He was a bruiser, and a good thirty pounds over his fighting weight. “Told us that he killed Isabella Calais, confessed. I think we knew that already. Said he was going to kill himself.” He rubbed his chin with his left hand. “We’re trying to decide if we care. The FBI is on the way.”

  I pulled away from the lieutenant.

  “Pierce,” I called down the hallway. The talking going on outside the bedroom suddenly stopped. “Pierce! It’s Alex Cross,” I called again. “I want to come in, Pierce!”

  I felt a chill. It was too quiet. Not a sound. Then I heard Pierce from the bedroom. He sounded tired and weak. Maybe it was an act. Who knew what he would pull next?

  “Come in if you want. Just you, Cross.”

  “Let him go,” Sampson whispered from behind. “Alex, let it go for once.”

  I turned to him. “I wish I could.”

  I pushed through the group of policemen at the end of the hallway. I remembered the poster that hung there: Without God, We Are Condemned to Be Free. Was that what this was about?

  I took out my gun and slowly inched open the bedroom door. I wasn’t prepared for what I saw.

  Thomas Pierce was sprawled on the bed he had once shared with Isabella Calais.

  He held a gleaming, razor-sharp scalpel in his hand.

  Chapter 129

  THOMAS PIERCE’S CHEST was cut wide open. He had ripped himself apart as he would a corpse at an autopsy. He was still alive, but barely. It was incredible that he was conscious and alert.

  Pierce spoke to me. I don’t know how, but he did. “You’ve never seen Mr. Smith’s handiwork before?”

  I shook my head in disbelief. I had never seen anything like this, not in all my years in Violent Crimes or Homicide. Flaps of skin hung over Pierce’s rib cage, exposing translucent muscle and tendons. I was afraid, repulsed, shocked—all at the same time.

  Thomas Pierce was Mr. Smith’s victim. His last?

  “Don’t come any closer. Just stay there,” he said. It was a command.

  “Who am I talking to? Thomas Pierce, or Mr. Smith?”

  Pierce shrugged. “Don’t play shrink games with me. I’m smarter than you are.”

  I nodded. Why argue with him—with Pierce, or was it Mr. Smith?

  “I murdered Isabella Calais,” he said slowly. His eyes became hooded. He almost looked in a trance. “I murdered Isabella Calais.”

  He pressed the scalpel to his chest, ready to stab himself again, to pierce. I wanted to turn away, but I couldn’t.

  This man wants to cut into his own heart, I thought to myself. Everything has come full circle to this. Is Mr. Smith S? Of course he is.

  “You never got rid of any of Isabella’s things,” I said. “You kept her pictures up.”

  Pierce nodded. “Yes, Dr. Cross. I was mourning her, wasn’t I?”

  “That’s what I thought at first. It’s what the people at the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico believed. But then I finally got it.”

  “What did you get? Tell me all about myself.” Pierce mocked. He was lucid. His mind still worked quickly.

  “The other murders—you didn’t want to kill any of them, did you?”

  Thomas Pierce glared. He
focused on me with a sheer act of will. His arrogance reminded me of Soneji. “So why did I?”

  “You were punishing yourself. Each murder was a reenactment of Isabella’s death. You repeated the ritual over and over. You suffered her death each time you killed.”

  Thomas Pierce moaned. “Ohhh, ohhh. I murdered her here. In this bed!…Can you imagine? Of course you can’t. No one can.”

  He raised the scalpel above his body.

  “Pierce, don’t!”

  I had to do something. I rushed him. I threw myself at him, and the scalpel jammed into my right palm. I screamed in pain as Pierce pulled it out.

  I grabbed at the folded yellow-and-white-flowered comforter and pressed it against Pierce’s chest. He was fighting me, flopping around like a man having a seizure.

  “Alex, no. Alex, look out!” I heard Sampson call out from behind me. I could see him out of the corner of my eye. He was moving fast toward the bed. “Alex, the scalpel!” he yelled.

  Pierce was still struggling beneath me. He screamed obscenities. His strength was amazing. I didn’t know where the scalpel was, or if he still had it.

  “Let Smith kill Pierce!” he screeched.

  “No,” I yelled back. “I want you alive.”

  Then the unthinkable—again.

  Sampson fired from point-blank range. The explosion was deafening in the small bedroom. Thomas Pierce’s body convulsed on the bed. Both his legs kicked high in the air. He screeched like a badly wounded animal. He sounded inhuman—like an alien.

  Sampson fired a second time. A strange guttural sound came from Pierce’s throat. His eyes rolled way back in his head. The whites showed. The scalpel dropped from his hand.

  I shook my head. “No, John. No more. Pierce is dead. Mr. Smith is dead, too. May he rest in hell.”

  Epilogue

  Home Again, Home Again

  Chapter 130