Cat and Mouse

wonderful book!
    The time I spent in the room passed like a snap of the fingers, almost a mind fugue. I drank several cups of coffee. I remembered a line from the offbeat TV show
Twin Peaks,
“Damn fine cup of coffee, and hot!”
    I had been inside Cross’s bedroom for almost an hour and a half, lost in forensic detail, hooked on the case in spite of myself. It was a nasty and disturbing puzzle, but a very intriguing one. Everything about the case was intense, and highly unusual.
    I heard footsteps thumping outside in the hallway and looked up, my concentration interrupted. The bedroom door suddenly swung open and thudded against the wall.
    Kyle Craig popped his head inside. He looked concerned. His face was white as chalk. Something had happened. “I have to go right now. Alex has gone into cardiac arrest!”

Chapter 76

    “ I ’LL GO with you,” I said to Kyle. I could tell that Kyle badly needed company. I wanted to see Alex Cross before he died, if that was what it had come to, and it sounded like it, felt like it to me.
    On the ride over to St. Anthony’s I gently questioned Kyle about the extent of Dr. Cross’s injuries and the tenor of concern at the hospital. I also made a guess about the cause of the cardiac arrest.
    “It sounds like it’s due to blood loss. There’s a lot of blood in the bedroom. It’s all over the sheets, the floor, the walls. Soneji was obsessed with blood, right? I heard that at Quantico before I left this morning.”
    Kyle was quiet for a moment in the car, and then he asked the question I expected. I’m sometimes a step or two ahead in conversations.
    “Do you ever miss it, not being a doctor anymore?”
    I shook my head, frowned a little. “I really don’t. Something delicate and essential broke inside me when Isabella died. It will never be repaired, Kyle, at least I don’t think so. I couldn’t be a doctor now. I find it hard to believe in healing anymore.”
    “I’m sorry,” he whispered solemnly.
    “And I’m sorry about your friend. I’m sorry about Alex Cross,” I said to him.
    In the spring of 1993, I had just graduated from Harvard Medical School. My life seemed to be spiraling upward at dizzying speed, when the woman I loved more than life itself was murdered in our apartment in Cambridge. Isabella Calais was my lover, and she was my best friend. She was one of the first victims of “Mr. Smith.”
    After the murder, I never showed up at Massachusetts General, where I’d been accepted as an intern. I didn’t even contact them. I knew I would never practice medicine. In an odd way, my life had ended with Isabella’s, at least that was how I saw it.
    Eighteen months after the murder, I was accepted into the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, what some wags call the “b.s. group.” It was what I wanted to do, what I needed to do. Once I had proven myself in the BSU, I asked to be put on the Mr. Smith case. My superiors fought the move at first, but finally they gave in.
    “Maybe you’ll change your mind one day,” Kyle said. I had a feeling that he personally believed I would. Kyle likes to believe that everyone thinks as he does: with perfectly clear logic and a minimum of emotional baggage.
    “I don’t think so,” I told him, without sounding argumentative, or even too firm on the point. “Who knows, though?”
    “Maybe after you finally catch Smith,” he persisted with his point.
    “Yes, maybe then,” I said.
    “You don’t think Smith—” he started to say, but then backed off from the absurd notion that Mr. Smith could be involved with the attack here in Washington.
    “No,” I said, “I do not Smith couldn’t have made this attack. They would all be dead and mutilated if he had.”

Chapter 77

    A T ST. Anthony’s Hospital, I left Kyle and roamed about playing “Doc.” It didn’t feel too bad to be working in a hospital, contemplating what it might have been like. I tried to find out as much as I could about Alex Cross’s condition, and his chances of surviving his wounds.
    The staff nurses and doctors were surprised that I understood so much about trauma and gunshot wounds, but no one pressed me as to how or why. They were too busy trying to save Alex Cross’s life. He had done pro bono work at the hospital for years and no one there could bear to let him die. Even the porters liked and respected Cross, calling him a “regular brother.”
    I learned that the cardiac arrest had been caused by the loss of blood, as I had