Chapter 112

THE FBI provided me with a helicopter out of Logan International Airport to fly me to Brielle, New Jersey. I was on board the Disorient Express and there was no getting off.

I spent the flight obsessing about Pierce, his apartment, Isabella Calais, their apartment, his studies in biology and modern philosophy, Noam Chomsky. I wouldn’t have thought it possible, wouldn’t have dreamed it possible, but Pierce was already eclipsing Gary Soneji and Simon Conklin. I despised everything about Pierce. Seeing the pictures of Isabella Calasis had done it for me.

Alien? I wrote on the foolscap pad lying across my lap. He identifies with descriptor.

Alienated? Alienated from what? Idyllic upbringing in California. Doesn’t fit any of the psychopathic profiles we used before. He’s an original. He secretly enjoys that, doesn’t he?

No discernible pattern to murders that link with a psychological motive.

Murders seem haphazard and arbitrary! He revels in his own originality.

Dr. Sante, Simon Conklin, now Anthony Bruno. Why them? Does Conklin count?

Seems impossible to predict Thomas Pierce’s next move. His next kill.

Why go south toward the New Jersey Shore?

It had occurred to me that he was originally from a shore town. Pierce had grown up near Laguna Beach in Southern California. Was he going home, in a manner of speaking? Was the New Jersey Shore as close to home as he could get-as close as he dared go?

I now had a reasonable amount of information about his background in California before he came east. He had lived on a working farm not far from the famous Irvine Ranch properties. Three generations of doctors in the family. Good, hardworking people. His siblings were all dong well, and not one of them believed that Thomas was capable of any of this mayhem and murder he was accused of committing.

FBI says Mr. Smith is disorganized, chaotic, unpredictable, I scribbled in my pad.

What if they’re wrong? Pierce is responsible for much of their data about Smith. Pierce created Mr. Smith, then did the profile on him.

I kept revisiting his and Isabella’s apartment in my mind. The place was so very neat and organized. The home had a definite organizing principle. It revolved around Isabella-her pictures, clothes, even her perfume bottles had been left in place. The smell of L’Air du Temps and Je Reviens permeated their bedroom to this day.

Thomas Pierce had loved her. Pierce had loved. Pierce had felt passion and emotion. That was another thing the FBI was wrong about. He’d killed because he thought he was losing her, and he couldn’t bear it. Was Isabella the only person who had ever loved Pierce?

Another small piece of the puzzle suddenly fell into place! I was so struck by it that I said it aloud in the helicopter. “Her heart on a spear!”

He had “pierced” her heart! Jesus Christ! He had confessed to the very first murder! He had confessed!

He’d left a clue, but the police missed it. What else were we missing? What was he up to now? What did “Mr. Smith” represent inside his mind? Was everything representational for him? Symbolic? Artistic? Was he creating a kind of language for us to follow? Or was it even simpler? He had “pierced” her heart. Pierce wanted to be caught. Caught and punished.

Crime and punishment.

Why couldn’t we catch him?

I landed in New Jersey around five at night. Kyle Craig was waiting for me. Kyle was sitting on the hood of a dark blue Town Car. He was drinking Samuel Adams beer out of a bottle.

“You find Anthony Bruno yet?” I called out as I walked toward him. “You find the body?”

Chapter 113

MR. SMITH goes to the seashore. Sounded like an unimaginative children’s story.

There was enough moonlight for Thomas Pierce to make his way along the long stretch of glowing White sand at Point Pleasant Beach. He was carrying a corpse, what was left of it. He had Anthony Bruno loaded on his back and shoulders.

He walked just south of popular Jenkinson’s Pier and the much newer Seaquarium. The boarded-up arcades of the amusement part were tightly packed along the beach shoulder. The small, grayish buildings looked forlorn and mute in their shuttered state.

As usual, music ran through his head-first Elvis Costello’s “Clubland,” then Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 21, then “Mother Mother” by Tracy Bonham. The savage beast inside him wasn’t calmed, not even close, but at least he could feel a beat.

It was quarter to four in the morning and even the surfcasting fishermen weren’t out yet. He’d seen only one police patrol car so far. The police in the tiny beach town were a joke anyway.

Mr. Smith against the Keystone Kops.

This whole funky seashore area reminded him of Laguna Beach, at least the tourista parts of Laguna. He could still picture the surf shops that dotted the Pacific Coast Highway 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

IT WAS all a mind game, was’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.