James Patterson - Cat & Mouse

“Buttes-Chaumont park,” she repeated the location. Then she added, “He says that I shouldn’t trust you. Ha, ha! Isn’t that the quaint sound we humans make when we laugh?”

THE HUGE, unwieldy search team swept across Paris to the northeast, heading toward the Buttes-Chaumont Park. The syncopated wail of police sirens was a disturbing, fearsome noise. Mr. Smith still had Paris in an uproar in the early-morning hours.

“He’s in control now,” I said to Sandy Greenberg as we sped along dark Parisian streets in the blue Citroën I had rented. The car tires made a ripping sound on the smooth road surface. The noise fit with everything else that was happening. “Smith is in his glory, however ephemeral it may turn out to be. This is his time, his moment,” I rattled on.

The English investigator frowned. “Thomas, you continue to ascribe human emotions to Smith. When are you going to get it through your skull that we’re looking for a little green man.”

“I’m an empirical investigator. I’ll believe it only when I see a little green man with blood dripping from his little green mouth.”

Neither of us had ever given a millisecond’s credence to the “alien” theories, but space-visitor jokes were definitely a part of the dark humor of this manhunt. It helped to keep us going, knowing that we would soon be at a particularly monstrous and disturbing murder scene.

It was nearly three in the morning when we arrived at the Buttes-Chaumont. What difference did the late hour make to me. I never slept anymore.

The park was deserted, but brightly lit with street-lamps and police and army searchlights. A low, bluish gray fog had settled in, but there was still enough visibility for our search. The Buttes-Chaumont is an enormous area, not unlike Central Park in New York. Back in the mid-1800s, a manmade lake was dug there and fed by the St. Martin ’s Canal. A mountain of rocks was then constructed, and it is full of caves and waterfalls now. The foliage is dense almost anywhere you choose to roam, or perhaps to hide a body.

It took only a few minutes before a police radio message came for us. Dr. Sante had been located not far from where we had entered the park. Mr. Smith was finished playing with us. For now.

Sandy and I got out of the patrol car at the gardener’s house near the temple, and we began to climb the steep stone steps. The flics and French soldiers around us weren’t just tired and shell-shocked, they looked afraid. The body-recovery scene would stay with all of them for the rest of their lives. I had read John Webster’s The White Devil while I was an undergrad at Harvard. Webster’s weird seventeenth-century creation was filled with devils, demons, and were-wolves-all of them human. I believed Mr. Smith was a human demon. The worst kind.

We pushed our way forward through thick bushes and brush. I could hear the low, pitiful whine of search dogs nearby. Then I saw four high-strung, shivering animals leading the way.

Predictably, the new crime scene was a unique one. It was quite beautiful, with an expansive view of Montmartre and Saint-Denis. During the day, people came here to stroll, climb, walk pets, live life as it should be lived. The park closed at 11:00 P.M. for safety reasons.

“Up ahead,” Sandy whispered. “There’s something.”

I could see soldiers and police loitering in small groups. Mr. Smith had definitely been here. A dozen or more “packets,” each wrapped in newspaper, were carefully laid out on a sloping patch of grass.

“Are we sure this is it?” one of the inspectors asked me in French. His name was Faulks. “What the hell is this? Is he making a joke?”

“It is not a joke, I can promise you that. Unwrap one of the bundles. Any one will do,” I instructed the French policeman. He just looked at me as if I were mad.

“As they say in America,” Faulks said in French, “this is your show.”

“Do you speak English?” I spit out the words.

“Yes, I do,” he answered brusquely.

“Good. Go fuck yourself,” I said.

I walked over to the eerie pile of “packages,” or perhaps “gifts” was the better word. There were a variety of shapes, each packet meticulously wrapped in newspaper. Mr. Smith the artiste. A large round packet looked as if it might be a head.

“French butcher shop. That’s his motif for tonight. It’s all just meat to him,” I muttered to Sandy Greenberg. “He’s mocking the French police.”

I carefully unwrapped the newspaper with plastic gloves. “Christ Jesus, Sandy.”

It wasn’t quite a head-only half a head.

Dr. Abel Sante’s head had been cleanly separated from the rest of the body, like an expensive cut of meat. It was sliced in half. The face was washed, the skin carefully pulled away. Only half of Sante’s mouth screamed at us-a single eye reflected a moment of ultimate terror.

“You’re right. It is just meat to him,” Sandy said. “How can you stand being right about him all the time?”

“I can’t,” whispered. “I can’t stand it at all.”

OUTSIDE WASHINGTON, an FBI sedan stopped to pick up Christine Johnson at her apartment. She was ready and waiting, standing vigil just inside the front door. She was hugging herself, always hugging herself lately, always on the edge of fear. She’d had two glasses of red wine and had to force herself to stop at two.

As she hurried to the car she kept glancing around to see if a reporter was staking out her apartment. They were like hounds on a fresh trail. Persistent, sometimes unbelievably insensitive and rude.

A black agent whom she knew, a smart, nice man named Charles Dampier, hopped out and held the car’s back door open for her. “Good evening, Ms. Johnson,” he said as politely as one of her students at school. She thought that he had a little crush on her. She was used to men acting like that, but tried to be kind.

“Thank you,” she said as she got into the gray-leather backseat. “Good evening, guys,” She said to Charles and the driver, a man named Joseph Denjeau.

During the ride, no one spoke. The agents had obviously been instructed not to make small talk unless she initiated it. Strange, cold world they live in, Christine thought to herself. And now I guess I live there, too. I don’t think I like it at all.

She had taken a bath before the agents arrived. She sat in the tub with her red wine and reviewed her life. She understood the good, bad, and ugly about herself pretty well. She knew she had always been a little afraid to jump off the deep end in the past, but she’d wanted to, and she’d gotten oh-so-close. There was definitely a streak of wildness inside her, good wildness, too. She had actually left George for six months during the early years of their marriage. She’d flown to San Francisco and studied photography at Berkeley, lived in a tiny apartment in the hills. She had loved the solitude for a while, the time for thinking, the simple act of recording the beauty of life with her camera every day.

She had come back to George, taught, and eventually got the job at the Sojourner Truth School. Maybe it was being around the children, but she absolutely loved it at the school. God, she loved kids, and she was good with them, too. She wanted children of her own so badly.

Her mind was all over the place tonight. Probably the late hour, and the second glass of merlot. The dark Ford sedan cruised along deserted streets at midnight. It was the usual route, almost always the same trail from Mitchellville to D.C. She wondered if that was wise, but figured they knew how to do their jobs.

Occasionally Christine glanced around, to see if they were being followed. She felt a little silly doing it. Couldn’t help it, though.