James Patterson - Cat & Mouse

He shook the bright red can, shook it up good, and popped it open. Then he pulled Conklin’s head back. Grabbed a handful of long, greasy hair. Pierce pushed the harmless-looking can under Conklin’s nostrils.

The soda exploded upward, fizz, bubbles, sugary-brown water. It shot up Conklin’s nose and toward the brain. It was an army interrogator’s trick. Excruciatingly painful, and it always worked.

Simon Conklin choked horribly. He couldn’t stop coughing, gagging.

“I hope you appreciate the kind of resourcefulness I’m showing. I can work with any household object. Are you ready to confess? Or would you like some more Coke?”

Simon Conklin’s eyes were wider than they had ever been before. “I’ll say whatever you want! Just please stop.”

Thomas Pierce shook his head back and forth. “I just want the truth. I want the facts. I want to know I solved the case that Alex Cross couldn’t.”

He turned on the tape recorder and held it under Conklin’s bearded chin. “Tell me what happened.”

“I was the one who attacked Cross and his family. Yes, yes, it was me,” Simon Conklin said in a choked voice that made each word sound even more emotional. “ Gary made me. He said if I didn’t, somebody would come for me. They’d torture and kill me. Somebody he knew from Lorton Prison. That’s the truth, I swear it is. Gary was the leader, not me!”

Thomas Pierce was suddenly almost tender, his voice soft and soothing. “I knew that, Simon. I’m not stupid. I knew that Gary made you do it. Now, when you got to the Cross house, you couldn’t kill him, could you? You’d fantasized about it, but then you couldn’t do it.”

Simon Conklin nodded. He was exhausted and frightened. He wondered if Gary had sent this madman and thought that maybe he had.

Pierce motioned with the Coke can for him to keep going. He took a hit of the Coke as he listened. “Go on, Simon. Tell me all about you and Gary.”

Conklin was crying, bawling like a child, but he was talking. “We got beat up a lot when we were kids. We were inseparable. I was there when Gary burned down his own house. His stepmother was inside with her two kids. So was his father. I watched over the two kids he kidnapped in D.C. I was the one at Cross’s house. You were right! It might as well have been Gary. He planned everything.”

Pierce finally took away the tape player and shut it off. “That’s much better, Simon. I do believe you.”

What Simon Conklin had just said seemed like a good break point-somewhere to end. The investigation was over. He’d proved he was better than Alex Cross.

“I’m going to tell you something. Something amazing, Simon. You’ll appreciate this, I think.”

He raised the scalpel and Simon Conklin tried to squirm away. He knew what was coming.

“Gary Soneji was a pussycat compared to me,” Thomas Pierce said. “I’m Mr. Smith.”

SAMPSON AND I rushed through Princeton, breaking just about every speed limit. The agents trailing Thomas Pierce had temporarily lost him. The elusive Pierce, or was it Mr. Smith-was on the loose. They thought they had him again, at Simon Conklin’s. Everything was chaos.

Moments after we arrived, Kyle gave the signal to move in on the house. Sampson and I were supposed to be a Jafos at the scene-just a fucking observer. Sondra Greenberg was there. She was a Jafo, too.

A half dozen FBI agents, Sampson, myself, and Sondra hurried through the yard. We split up. Some went in the front and others through the back of the ramshackle house. We were moving quickly and efficiently, handguns and rifles out. Everybody wore windbreakers with “FBI” printed large on the back.

“I think he’s here,” I told Sampson. “I think we’re about to meet Mr. Smith!”

The living room was darker and gloomier than I remembered from an earlier visit. We didn’t see anyone yet, neither Pierce nor Simon Conklin nor Mr. Smith. The house looked as if it had been ransacked and it smelled terrible.

Kyle gave a hand signal and we fanned out, hurrying through the house. Everything was tense and unsettling.

“See no evil, hear no evil,” Sampson muttered at my side, “but it’s here all the same.”

I wanted to Pierce to go down, but I wanted to get Simon Conklin even more. I figured it was Conklin who had come into my house and attacked my family. I needed five minutes alone with Conklin. Therapy time-for me. Maybe we could talk about Gary Soneji, about the “great ones,” as they called themselves.

An agent called out-“The basement! Down here! Hurry!”

I was out of breath and hurting already. My right side burned like hell. I followed the others down the narrow, twisting stairs. “Awhh Jesus,” I heard Kyle say from his position up ahead.

I saw Simon Conklin lying spread-eagled across an old striped-blue mattress on the floor. The man who had attacked me and my family had been mutilated. Thanks to countless anatomy classes at John Hopkins, I was better prepared than the others for the gruesome murder scene. Simon Conklin’s chest, stomach, and pelvic area had been cut open, as if a crackerjack medical examiner had just performed an on-the-scene autopsy.

“He’s been gutted,” an FBI agent muttered, and turned away from the body. “Why in the name of God?”

Simon Conklin had no face. A bold incision had been made at the top of his skull. The cut went through the scalp and clear down to the bone. Then the scalp had been pulled down over the front of the face.

Conklin’s long black hair hung from his scalp to where the chin should have been. It looked like a beard. I suspected that this meant something to Pierce. What did obliterating a face mean to him, if anything.

There was an unpainted wooden door in the cellar, another way out, but none of the agents stationed outside had seen him leave. Several agents were trying to chase down Pierce. I stayed inside with the mutilated corpse. I couldn’t have run down Nana Mama right then. For the first time in my life, I understood what it would be like to be physically old.

“He did this in just a couple of minutes?” Kyle Craig asked. “Alex, could he work this fast?”

“If he’s crazy as I think he is, yeah, he could have. Don’t forget he did this in med school, not to mention his other victims. He has to be incredibly strong, Kyle. He didn’t have morgue tools, no electric saws. He used a knife, and his hands.”

I was standing close to the mattress, staring down at what remained of Simon Conklin. I thought of the cowardly attack on me, on my family. I’d wanted him caught, but not like this. Nobody deserved this. Only in Dante were such fierce punishments imposed on the damned.

I leaned in closer and peered at the remains of Simon Conklin. Why was Thomas Pierce so angry at Conklin? Why had he punished Conklin like this?

The basement of the house was eerily quiet. Sondra Greenberg looked pale, and was leaning against a cellar wall. I would have thought she’d be used to the murder scenes, but maybe that wasn’t possible for anybody.

I had to clear my throat before I could speak again. “He cut away the front quadrant of the skull,” I said. “He performed a frontal craniotomy. It looks like Thomas Pierce is practicing medicine again.”

I HAD KNOWN Kyle Craig for ten years, and been his friend for nearly that long. I had never seen him so troubled and disconsolate about a case before, no matter how difficult of gruesome. The Thomas Pierce investigation had ruined his career, or at least he thought so, and maybe he was right.

“How the hell does he keep slipping away?” I said. We were still in Princeton the next morning, having breakfast at PJ’s Pancake House. The food was excellent, but I just wasn’t hungry.