Cat & Mouse

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 co

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, ci

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 pla

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.