Cat & Mouse

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, cinnamon gum-all there on the floor.

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 planning a trip to California. Two air tanks, weight belts, wet suits, two sets of rubber fins clutter the hallway.

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.