He had returned “home” when he went to Point Pleasant Beach. The opportunity to catch him was there-if we were smart enough, if we were as good as he was.
What were we missing, the FBI and me?
I played more word games with the assortment of clues.
He always “pierces” his victims. I wondered if he was impotent or had become impotent, unable to have a sexual relationship with Isabella.
Mr. Smith operates like a doctor-which Pierce nearly was-which his father and his siblings are. He had failed as a doctor.
I went to bed early, around eleven, but I couldn’t sleep. I guess I’d just wanted to try and turn the case off. I finally called Christine and we talked for about an hour. As we talked and I listened to the music of her voice, I couldn’t help thinking about Pierce and Isabella Calais.
Pierce had loved her. Obsessive love. What would happen if I lost Christine now? What happened to Pierce after the murder? Had he gone mad?
After I got off the phone, I went back at the case again. For a while, I thought his pattern might have something to do with Homer’s Odyssey. He was heading home after a series of tragedies and misfortunes? No, that wasn’t it.
What the hell was the key to his code? If he wanted to drive all of us mad, it was working.
I began to play with the names of the victims, starting with Isabella and ending with Inez. I goes full circle to I? Full circle? Circles? I looked at the clock on the desk-it was almost one-thirty in the morning, but I kept at it.
I wrote-I.
I. Was that something? It could be a start. The personal pronoun I? I tried a few combinations with the letters of the names.
I-S-U…R
C-A-D…
I-A-D…
I stopped after the next three letters: IMU. I stared at the page. I remembered pierced, the obviousness of it. The simplest wordplay.
Isabella, Michaela, Ursula. Those were names of the first three victims-in order. Jesus Christ!
I looked at the names of all the victims-in order of the murders. I looked at the first, last, and middle names. I began mixing and matching the names. My heart was pounding. There was something here. Pierce had left us another clue, a series of clues, actually.
It was right there in front of us all the time. No one got it, because Smith’s crimes appeared to be without any pattern. But Pierce had started that theory himself.
I continued to write, using either the first or last or middle names of the victims. It started IMU. Then R, for Robert. D for Dwyer. Was there a subpattern for selecting the name? It could be an arithmetic sequence.
There was a pattern to Pierce-Smith, after all. His mission began that very first night in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was insane, but I had caught on to his pattern. It started with his love of wordplay.
Thomas Pierce wanted to be caught! But then something changed. He had become ambivalent about his capture. Why?
I looked at what I had assembled. “Son of a bitch,” I muttered. “Isn’t this something. He has a ritual.”
I Isabella Calais.
M Stephanie Michaela Apt.
U Ursula Davies.
R Robert Michael Neel.
D Brigid Dwyer.
E Mary Ellen Klauk.
R Robin Anne Schwartz.
E Clark Daniel Ebel.
D David Hale.
I Isadore Morris.
S Theresa Anne Secrest.
A Elizabeth Allison Gragnano.
B Barbara Maddalena.
E Edwin Mueller.
L Laurie Garnier.
L Lewis Lavine.
A Andrew Klauk.
C Inspector Drew Cabot.
A Dr. Abel Sante.
L Simon Lewis Conklin.
A Anthony Bruno.
I Inez Marquez.
S ____________________?
It read: I MURDERED ISABELLA CALAIS.
He had made it so easy for us. He was taunting us from the very beginning. Pierce wanted to be stopped, wanted to be caught. So why the hell hadn’t he stopped himself? Why had the string of brutal murders gone on and on?
I MURDERED ISABELLA CALAIS.
The murders were a confession, and maybe Pierce was almost finished. Then what would happen? And who was S?
Was it Smith himself? Did S stand for Smith?
Would he symbolically murder Smith? Then Mr. Smith would disappear forever?
I called Kyle Craig and then Sampson, and I told them what I had found. It was past two in the morning, and neither of them was overjoyed to hear my voice or the news. They didn’t know what to do with the word jumble and neither did I.
“I’m not sure what it gives us,” Kyle said, “what it proves, Alex.”
“I don’t either. Not yet. It does tell us he’s going to kill someone with an S in his name.”
“George Steinbrenner,” Kyle mumbled. “Strom Thurmond. Sting.”
“Go back to sleep,” I said.
My head was doing loops. Sleep wasn’t an option for me. I half expected to get another message from Pierce, maybe even that night. He was mocking us. He had been from the beginning.
I wanted to get a message to him. Maybe I ought to communicate with Pierce through the newspapers or TV? We needed to get off the defensive and attack instead.
I lay in the darkness of my bedroom. Could S be Mr. Smith? I wondered. My head was throbbing. I was past being exhausted. I finally drifted off toward sleep. I was falling off the edge-when I grabbed hold.
I bolted up in bed. I was wide-awake now.
“S isn’t Smith.”
I knew who S was.
Chapter 125
THOMAS PIERCE was in Concord, Massachusetts.
Mr. Smith was here, too.
I was finally inside his head.
Sampson and I were ready on a cozy, picturesque side street near the house of Dr. Martin Straw, the man who had been Isabella’s lover. Martin Straw was S in the puzzle.
The FBI had a trap set for Pierce at the house. They didn’t bring huge numbers of agents this time. They were afraid of tipping off Pierce. Kyle Craig was gun-shy and he had every reason to be. Or maybe there was something else going on.
We waited for the better part of the morning and early afternoon. Concord was a self-contained, somewhat constrained town that seemed to be aging gracefully. The Thoreau and Alcott homes were here somewhere nearby. Every other house seemed to have a historical-looking plaque with a date on it.
We waited for Pierce. And then waited some more. The dreaded stakeout in Podunk dragged on and on. Maybe I was wrong about S.
A voice finally came over the radio in our car. It was Kyle. “We’ve spotted Pierce. He’s here. But something’s wrong, Alex. He’s headed back toward Route Two,” Kyle said. “He’s not going to Dr. Straw’s. He saw something he didn’t like.”
Sampson looked over at me. “I told you he was careful. Good instincts. He is a goddamn Martian, Alex.”
“He spotted something,” I said. “He’s as good as Kyle always said. He knows how the Bureau works, and he saw something.”
Kyle and his team had wanted to let Pierce enter the Straw house before they took him down. Dr. Straw, his wife, and children had been moved from the place. We needed solid evidence against Pierce, as much as we could get. We could lose the case if we got Thomas Pierce to court without it. We definitely could lose.
A message crackled over the shortwave. “He’s headed toward Route Two. Something spooked him. He’s on the run!”
“He has a shortwave! He’s intercepting us!” I grabbed the mike and warned Kyle. “No more talk on the radio. Pierce is listening. That’s how he spotted us.”
I started the engine and gunned the sedan away from the curb. I pushed the speed up to sixty on heavily populated Lowell Road. We were actually closer to Route 2 than the others. We still might be able to cut Pierce off.
A shiny, silver BMW passed us, coming from the opposite direction on the road. The driver sat on her horn as we sped by. I couldn’t blame her. Sixty was a dangerous speed on the narrow village street. Everything was going crazy again, caroming out of control at the whim of a madman.