Kyle gave a hand signal and we fanned out, hurrying through the house. Everything was tense and unsettling.

“See no evil, hear no evil,” Sampson muttered at my side, “but it’s here all the same.”

I wanted to Pierce to go down, but I wanted to get Simon Conklin even more. I figured it was Conklin who had come into my house and attacked my family. I needed five minutes alone with Conklin. Therapy time-for me. Maybe we could talk about Gary Soneji, about the “great ones,” as they called themselves.

An agent called out-“The basement! Down here! Hurry!”

I was out of breath and hurting already. My right side burned like hell. I followed the others down the narrow, twisting stairs. “Awhh Jesus,” I heard Kyle say from his position up ahead.

I saw Simon Conklin lying spread-eagled across an old striped-blue mattress on the floor. The man who had attacked me and my family had been mutilated. Thanks to countless anatomy classes at John Hopkins, I was better prepared than the others for the gruesome murder scene. Simon Conklin’s chest, stomach, and pelvic area had been cut open, as if a crackerjack medical examiner had just performed an on-the-scene autopsy.

“He’s been gutted,” an FBI agent muttered, and turned away from the body. “Why in the name of God?”

Simon Conklin had no face. A bold incision had been made at the top of his skull. The cut went through the scalp and clear down to the bone. Then the scalp had been pulled down over the front of the face.

Conklin’s long black hair hung from his scalp to where the chin should have been. It looked like a beard. I suspected that this meant something to Pierce. What did obliterating a face mean to him, if anything.

There was an unpainted wooden door in the cellar, another way out, but none of the agents stationed outside had seen him leave. Several agents were trying to chase down Pierce. I stayed inside with the mutilated corpse. I couldn’t have run down Nana Mama right then. For the first time in my life, I understood what it would be like to be physically old.

“He did this in just a couple of minutes?” Kyle Craig asked. “Alex, could he work this fast?”

“If he’s crazy as I think he is, yeah, he could have. Don’t forget he did this in med school, not to mention his other victims. He has to be incredibly strong, Kyle. He didn’t have morgue tools, no electric saws. He used a knife, and his hands.”

I was standing close to the mattress, staring down at what remained of Simon Conklin. I thought of the cowardly attack on me, on my family. I’d wanted him caught, but not like this. Nobody deserved this. Only in Dante were such fierce punishments imposed on the damned.

I leaned in closer and peered at the remains of Simon Conklin. Why was Thomas Pierce so angry at Conklin? Why had he punished Conklin like this?

The basement of the house was eerily quiet. Sondra Greenberg looked pale, and was leaning against a cellar wall. I would have thought she’d be used to the murder scenes, but maybe that wasn’t possible for anybody.

I had to clear my throat before I could speak again. “He cut away the front quadrant of the skull,” I said. “He performed a frontal craniotomy. It looks like Thomas Pierce is practicing medicine again.”

Chapter 109

I HAD KNOWN Kyle Craig for ten years, and been his friend for nearly that long. I had never seen him so troubled and disconsolate about a case before, no matter how difficult of gruesome. The Thomas Pierce investigation had ruined his career, or at least he thought so, and maybe he was right.

“How the hell does he keep slipping away?” I said. We were still in Princeton the next morning, having breakfast at PJ’s Pancake House. The food was excellent, but I just wasn’t hungry.

“That’s the worst part of it-he knows everything we would do. He anticipates our actions and procedures. He was one of us.”

“Maybe he is an alien,” I said to Kyle, who nodded wearily.

Kyle ate the remainder of his soft, runny eggs in silence. His face was bent low over his plate. He wasn’t aware of how comically depressed he looked.

“Those eggs must be real good.” I finally broke the silence with something other than the scraping sound of Kyle’s fork on the plate.

He looked up at me with his usual deadpan look. “I really messed this up, Alex. I should have taken Pierce in when I had the chance. We talked about it down in Quantico.”

“You would have had to let him go, release him in a few hours. Then what would you do? You couldn’t keep Pierce under surveillance forever.”

“Director Burns wanted to sanction Pierce, take him out, but I strongly disagreed. I thought I could get him. I told Burns I would.”

I shook my head. I couldn’t believe what I’d just heard. “The director of the FBI approved a sanction on Pierce? Jesus.”

Kyle ran his tongue back and forth over his teeth. “Yes, and not just Burns. This went all the way to the attorney general’s office. God knows where else. I had them convinced Pierce was Mr. Smith. Somehow the idea of an FBI field agent who’s also a multiple killer didn’t sit very well with them. We’ll never catch him now. There’s no real pattern, Alex, at least nothing to follow. No way to trace him. He’s laughing at us.”

“Yeah, he probably is,” I agreed. “He’s definitely competitive on some level. He likes to feel superior. There’s a whole lot more to this, though.”

I had been thinking about the possibility of some kind of abstract or artistic pattern since I’d first heard about the complicated case. I was well aware of the theory that each of the murders was different, and worse, seemed arbitrary. That would make Pierce almost impossible to catch. The more I thought about the series of murders, though, and especially about Thomas Pierce’s history, the more I suspected that there had to be pattern, a mission behind all of this. The FBI had simply missed it. Now I was missing it, too.

“What do you want to do, Alex?” Kyle finally asked. “I understand if you’re not going to work this one, if you’re not up to it.”

I thought about my family back home, about Christine Johnson and the things we’d talked over, but I didn’t see how I could step away from this awful case right now. I was also somewhat afraid of retribution from Pierce. There was no way to predict how he might react now.

“I’ll stay with you for a few days. I’ll be around, Kyle. No promises beyond that. Shit, I hate that I said that. Damn it!” I pounded that table and the plates and flatware jumped.

For the first time that morning, Kyle offered up half a smile. “So, what’s your plan? Tell me what you’re going to do.”

I shook my head back and forth. I still couldn’t believe I was doing this. “My plan is as follows. I’m going home to Washington, and that’s nonnegotiable. Tomorrow or the next day, I’ll fly up to Boston. I want to see Pierce’s apartment. He wanted to see my house, didn’t he? Then, we’ll see, Kyle. Please keep your evidence gatherers on a leash before I get to his apartment. Look, photograph, but don’t move anything around. Mr. Smith is a very orderly man. I want to see how Pierce’s place looks, how he arranged it for us.”

Kyle was back to the deadpan look, superserious, which I actually prefer. “We’re not going to get him, Alex. He’s been given a warning. He’ll be more careful from now on. Maybe he’ll disappear like some killers do, just vanish off the face of the earth.”

“That would be nice,” I said, “but I don’t think it’s going to happen. There is a pattern, Kyle. We just haven’t found it.”