James Patterson - Cat & Mouse

“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.”

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.

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.