Cat and Mouse

at the Buttes-Chaumont Park. He’s up near the temple. I swear it. I promise you.

Trust me. Ha, ha! Isn’t that the quaint sound you humans make when you laugh? I can’t quite make the sound myself. You see, I’ve never actually laughed

Always
,
Mr. Smith

    Sandy Greenberg was shaking her head, muttering curses in the night air. She had gotten a message, too.
    “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?”

Chapter 96

    T HE 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