James Patterson - Cat & Mouse

I WAS ON the hunt again, the loneliest road on this earth. Truthfully, there wasn’t much else that had sustained me during the past four years, not since Isabella’s death.

The moment I awoke in the morning, I called St. Anthony’s Hospital. Alex Cross was alive, but in a coma. His condition was listed as grave. I wondered if John Sampson had remained at his bedside. I suspected he had.

By nine in the morning, I was back at the Cross house. I needed to study the scene in much greater depth, to gather every fact, every splinter and fragment. I tried to organize everything I knew, or thought I knew at this early stage of the investigation. I was reminded of a maxim that was frequently used at Quantico -All truths are half-truths and possibly not even that.

A fiendish “ghoul” had supposedly struck back from the grave and attacked a well-known policeman and his family in their home. The ghoul had warned Dr. Cross that he would come. There was no way to stop it from happening. It was the ultimate in cruel and effective revenge.

For some reason, though, the assailant had failed to execute. None of the family members, or even Alex Cross, had been killed. That was the perplexing and most baffling part of the puzzle for me. That was the key!

I arrived at the cellar in the Cross house just before eleven in the morning. I had asked the Metro police and FBI technicians not to mess around down there until I was finished with my survey of the other floors. My data gathering, my science, was a methodical, step-by-step process.

The attacker had hidden himself (herself?) in the basement while a party had been in progress upstairs and in the backyard. There was a partial footprint near the entryway to the cellar. It was a size nine. It wasn’t much to go on, not unless the perpetrator had wanted us to find the print.

One thing struck me right away. Gary Soneji had been locked in a cellar as a child. He’d been excluded from family activities in the rest of the house. He’d been physically abused in the cellar. Just like the one in the Cross house.

The attacker had definitely hidden in the cellar. That couldn’t be a coincidence.

Had he known about Gary Soneji’s explicit warning to Cross? That possibility was disturbing as hell. I didn’t want to settle on any theories or premature conclusions yet. I just needed to collect as much raw data and information as I could. Possibly because I’d been to medical school, I approached cases as a clinical scientist would.

Collect all the data first. Always the data.

It was quiet in the cellar, and I could focus and concentrate all my attention on my surroundings. I tried to imagine the attacker lurking here during the party, and then afterward, as the house grew quiet, until Alex Cross finally went to bed.

The attacker was a coward.

He wasn’t in a rage state. He was methodical.

It was not a crime of passion.

The intruder had struck out at each of the children first, but not fatally. He had beaten Alex Cross’s grandmother, but had spared her. Why? Only Alex Cross was meant to die, and so far even that hadn’t happened.

Had the attacker failed? Where was the intruder now?

Was he still in Washington? Checking out the Cross house right now? Or at St. Anthony’s Hospital, where the Metro police were guarding Alex Cross.

As I passed an ancient coal stove, I noticed the metal door was slightly ajar. I poked it open with my handkerchief and peered inside. I couldn’t see very well and took out a penlight. There were inches of ash that were light gray in color. Someone had burned a flammable substance recently, possibly newspapers or magazines.

Why start a fire in the middle of summer? I wondered.

A small hand shovel was on a worktable near the stove. I used the shovel to sift through the ashes.

I carefully scraped along the stove’s bottom.

I heard a clink. A metal-against-metal noise.

I scooped out a shovelful of ash. Something came with the ash. It was hard, heavier. My expectations weren’t high. I was still just collecting data, anything and everything, even the contents of an old stove. I emptied the ashes onto the worktable in a pile, then smoothed it out.

I saw what the small shovel had struck. I flipped over the new evidence with the tip of the shovel. Yes, I said to myself. I finally had something, the first bit of evidence.

It was Alex Cross’s detective shield, and it was burned and charred.

Someone wanted us to find the shield.

The intruder wants to play! I thought. This is cat and mouse.

Ile-de-France

DR. ABEL SANTE was normally a calm and collected man. He was widely known in the medical community to be erudite, but surprisingly down-to-earth. He was a nice man, too, a gentle physician.

Now he desperately tried to put his mind somewhere other than where his body was. Just about anywhere else in the universe would do just fine.

He had already spent several hours remembering minute details from his pleasant, almost idyllic, boyhood in Rennes; then his university years at the Sorbonne and L’Ecole Pratique de Médecine; he had replayed tennis and golf sporting events; he had relived his seven-year love affair with Regina Becker-dear, sweet Regina.

He needed to be somewhere else, to exist anywhere else but where he actually was. He needed to exist in the past, or even in the future, but not in the present. He was reminded of The English Patient-both the book and the movie. He was Count Almasy now, wasn’t he? Only his torture was even worse than Almasy’s horribly burned flesh. He was in the grasp of Mr. Smith.

He thought about Regina constantly now, and he realized that he loved her fiercely, and what a fool he’d been not to marry her years ago. What an arrogant bastard, and what a huge fool!

How dearly he wanted to live now, and to see Regina again. Life seemed so damned precious to him at this moment, in this terrible place, under these monstrous conditions.

No, this wasn’t a good way to be thinking. It brought him down-it brought him back to reality, to the present. No, no no! Go somewhere else in your mind. Anywhere but here.

The present line of thought brought him to this tiny compartment, this infinitesimal X on the globe where he was now a prisoner, and where no one could possibly find him. Not the flics, not Interpol, not the entire French Army, or the English, or the Americans, or the Israelis!

Dr. Sante could easily imagine the furor and outrage, the panic continuing in Paris and throughout France. NOTED PHYSICIAN AND TEACHER ABDUCTED! The headline in Le Monde would read something like that. Or, NEW MR. SMITH HORROR IN PARIS.

He was the horror! He was certain that tens of thousands of police, as well as the army, were searching for him now. Of course, every hour he was missing, his chances for survival grew dimmer. He knew that from reading past articles about Mr. Smith’s unearthly abductions, and what happened to the victims.

Why me? God Almighty, he couldn’t stand this infernal monologue anymore.

He couldn’t stand this nearly upside-down position, this terribly cramped space, for one more second.

He just couldn’t bear it. Not one more second!

Not one more second!

Not one more second!

He couldn’t breathe!

He was going to die in here.

Right here, in a goddamn dumbwaiter. Stuck between floors, in a godforsaken house in Ile-de-France somewhere on the outskirts of Paris.

Mr. Smith had put him in the dumbwaiter, stuffed him inside like a bundle of dirty laundry, and then left him there-for God only knew how long. It seemed like hours, at least several hours, but Abel Sante really wasn’t sure anymore.

The excruciating pain came and went, but mostly it rushed through his body in powerful waves. His neck, his shoulders, and his chest ached so badly, beyond belief, beyond his tolerance for pain. The feeling was as if he’d been slowly crushed into a squarish heap. If he hadn’t been claustrophobic before, he was now.