Cat and Mouse

back home — the Southern California artifacts: Flogo sandals, Stussy T’s, neroprene gloves and wet suits, beach boots, the unmistakable smell of board wax.
    He was physically strong — had a workingman’s build. He carried Anthony Bruno over one shoulder without much effort. He had cut out all the vital parts, so there wasnt’t much of Anthony anymore. Anthony was a shell. No heart, liver, intestines, lungs, or brain.
    Thomas Pierce thought about the FBI’s continuing search. The Bureau’s fabled “manhunts” were overrated — a holdover from the glory days of John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde. He knew this to be so after years of observing the Bureau chase Mr. Smith. They would never have caught Smith, not in a hundred years.
    The FBI was looking for him in all the wrong places. They would surely have “numbers,” meaning excessive force, their trademark maneuver. They would be all over the airports, probably expecting him to head back to Europe. And what about the wild cards in the search, people like Alex Cross? Cross had made his bones, no doubt about that. Maybe Cross was more than he seemed to be. At any rate, he relished the thought of Dr. Cross being in on this, too. He liked the competition.
    The dead weight on his back and shoulder was starting to get heavy. It was almost morning, close to daybreak. I wouldn’t do to be found lugging a disemboweled corpse across Point Pleasant Beach.
    He carried Anthony Bruno another fifty yards to a glistening white lifeguard’s chair. He climbed the creaking rungs of the chair, and propped the body in the seat.
    The remains of the corpse were naked and exposed for the world to see. Quite a sight.
Anthony was a clue.
If anybody on the search team had half a brain and was using it properly.
    “I’m not an alien. Do any of you follow that?” Pierce shouted above the ocean’s steady roar.
    “I’m human. I’m perfectly normal. I’m just like you.”

Chapter 114

    I T WAS all a mind game, wasn’t it — Pierce against the rest of us.
    While I had been at his apartment in Cambridge, a team of FBI agents went out to Southern California to meet with Thomas Pierce’s family. The mother and father still lived on the same farm, between Laguna and EI Toro, where Thomas Pierce had grown up.
    Henry Pierce practiced medicine, mostly among the indigent farmworkers in the area. His lifestyle was modest and the reputation of the family impeccable. Pierce had an older brother and sister, doctors in Northern California, who were also well regarded and worked with the poor.
    Not a person the profilers spoke to could imagine Thomas a murderer. He’d always been a good son and brother, a gifted student who seemed to have close friends and no enemies.
    Thomas Pierce fit no brief for a pattern killer that I was familiar with. He was an original.
    “Impeccable”
was a word that jumped out of the FBI profiler reports. Maybe Pierce didn’t want to be impeccable.
    I re-reviewed the news articles and clippings about Pierce from the time of Isabella Calais’s gruesome murder. I was keeping track of the more perplexing notions on three-by-five index cards. The packet was growing rapidly.
    Laguna Beach — commercial shore town. Parts similar to point Pleasant and Bay Head. Had Pierce killed in Laguna in the past? Had the disease now spread to the Northeast?
    Pierce’s father was a doctor. Pierce didn’t “Make it” to Dr. Pierce, but as a med student he had performed autopsies.
    Looking for his humanity when he kills? Studying humans because he fears he has no human qualities himself?
    He had a dual major as an undergrad: biology and philosophy. Fan of the linguist Noam Chomsky. Or is it Chomsky’s political writings that turn Pierce on? Plays word and much games on his PowerBook.
    What were we all missing so far?
    What was I missing?
    Why was Thomas Pierce killing all of these people?
    He was “impeccable,” wasn’t he.

Chapter 115

    P IERCE STOLE a forest green BMW convertible in the expensive, quaint, quite lovely shore town of Bay Head, New Jersey. On the corner of East Avenue and Harris Street, a prime location, he hot-wired and grabbed the vehicle as slickly as a pickpocket working the boardwalks down at Point Pleasant Beach. He was so good at this, overqualified for the scut work.
    He drove west through Brick Town at moderate speeds, to the Garden State Parkway. He played music all the way — Talking Heads, Alanis Morissette, Melissa Etheridge, Blind