“Smith contacted me about thirty minutes ago. He does this just before he makes a kill. He gives me a location and challenges me to stop the murder.”
Sampson’s nostrils flared. He was shaking his head from side to side. There was only one case in his mind.
“So you’re just dropping what we’re working on here? You weren’t even going to tell me, were you? Just leave Princeton in the dead of night.” His eyes were cold and unfriendly. I had lost his trust.
“John, I left a message explaining everything to you. It’s at the front desk. I already spoke to Kyle. I’ll surely be back in a few days. Smith never takes long. He knows it’s too dangerous. I need time to think about this case anyway.”
Sampson frowned and he continued to shake his head. “You said it was important to visit Lorton Prison. You said Lorton is the one place where Soneji could have gotten somebody to do his dirty work. His partner probably came from Lorton.”
“I still plan to visit Lorton Prison. Right now, I have to try and prevent a murder. Smith abducted a doctor in Paris. He’s dedicating the kill to me.”
John Sampson wasn’t impressed with anything I’d said.
I didn’t get a chance to tell him the other thing, the part that bothered me the most. I hadn’t told Kyle Craig either.
Isabella had come from Paris. Paris was her home. I hadn’t been there since her murder.
Mr. Smith knew that.
Chapter 91
IT WAS a beautiful spot, and Mr. Smith wanted to spoil it, to ruin it forever inside his mind. The small stone house with its earth-grouted walls and white-shuttered windows and country-lace curtains was peaceful and idyllic. The garden was surrounded by twig fencing. Under a lone apple tree sat a long wooden table, where friends, family, and neighbors might gather to eat and talk.
Smith carefully spread out pages from Le Monde across the linoleum floor of the spacious farmhouse kitchen. Patti Smith-not a relation-was screeching from his CD player. She sang “Summer Cannibals,” and the blatant irony wasn’t lost on him.
The newspaper front page screamed as well-Mr. Smith Takes Surgeon Captive in Paris!
And so he had, so he had.
The idée fixe that had captured the public’s fancy and fear was that Mr. Smith might be an alien visitor roaming and ravaging the earth for dark, unknown, perhaps unknowable reasons. He didn’t share any traits with humans, the lurid news stories reasoned. He was described as “not of the earth,” “incapable of any human emotion.”
His name-Mr. Smith-came from “Valentine Michael Smith,” a visitor from Mars in Robert Heinlein’s science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. The book had always been a cult favorite. Stranger was the single book in Charles Manson’s backpack when he was captured in California.
He studied the French surgeon lying nearly unconscious on the kitchen floor. One FBI report stated that “Mr. Smith seems to appreciate beauty. He has a human artist’s eye for composition. Observe the studied way in which he arranges the corpses.”
A human artist’s eye for beauty and composition. Yes, that was true enough. He had loved beauty once, lived for it, actually. The artful arrangements were one of the clues he left for…his followers.
Patti Smith finished her song, and the Doors immediately came on. “People Are Strange.” The moldy oldie was wonderful mood music as well.
Smith let his gaze wander around the country kitchen. One entire wall was a stone fireplace. Another wall was white tile, with antique shelves that held copper pots, white cafi au lait bowls, antique jam jars, or confitures fines, as they were called here. He knew that, knew just about everything about everything. There was an antique black cast-iron stove with brass knobs. And a large white porcelain sink. Adjacent to the sink, just above a butcher-block worktable, hung an impressive array of kitchen knives. The knives were beautiful, absolutely perfect in every way.
He was avoiding looking at the victim, wasn’t he?
He knew that he was. He always did.
Finally, he lowered his eyes and looked into the victim’s.
So this was Abel Sante.
This was lucky number nineteen.
Chapter 92
THE VICTIM was a very successful thirty-five-year-old surgeon. He was good-looking in a Gallic sort of way, in excellent shape even without very much meat left on his bones. He seemed a nice person, an “honorable” man, a “good” doctor.
What was human? What exactly, was human-ness? Mr. Smith wondered. That was the fundamental question he still had, after physical exams like this, in nearly a dozen countries around the world.
What was human? What, exactly, did the word mean?
Could he finally find an answer here in this French country kitchen? The philosopher Heidegger believed the self is revealed by what we truly care about. Was Heidegger onto something? What was it that Mr. Smith truly cared about? That was a fair question to ask.
The French surgeon’s hands were tightly tied behind his back. The ankles were bound to the hands; the knees were bent back toward the head. The remaining length of rope was attached to the neck in a noose.
Abel Sante had already realized that any struggling, any thrashing about, created intense strangulation pressure. As the legs eventually tired, they would become numb and painful. The urge to straighten them would be overpowering. If he did this, it would induce self-strangulation.
Mr. Smith was ready. He was on a schedule. The autopsy would start at the top of the body, then work its way down. The correct order: neck, spine, chest. Then abdomen, pelvic organs, genitalia. The head and brain would be examined last, in order to allow the blood to drain as much as possible-for maximum viewing.
Dr. Sante screamed, but no one could hear him out here. It was an ungodly sound and almost made Smith scream, too.
He entered the chest via a classic “Y” incision. The first cut went across the chest from shoulder to shoulder, continued over the breasts, then traveled from the tip of the sternum. He cut down the entire length of the abdomen to the pubic area.
The brutal murder of an innocent surgeon named Abel Sante.
Absolutely inhuman, he thought to himself.
Abel Sante-he was the key to everything, and none of the police masterminds could figure it out. None of them were worth shit as detectives, as investigators, as anything. It was so simple, if only they would use their minds.
Abel Sante.
Abel Sante.
Abel Sante.
The autopsy finished, Mr. Smith lay down on the kitchen floor with what was left of poor Dr. Sante. He did this with every victim. Mr. Smith hugged the bleeding corpse against his own body. He whispered and sighed, whispered and sighed. It was always like this.
And then, Smith sobbed loudly. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. Please forgive me. Somebody forgive me,” he moaned in the deserted farmhouse.
Abel Sante.
Abel Sante.
Abel Sante.
Didn’t anyone get it?
Chapter 93
ON THE American Airlines flight to Europe, I noticed that mine was the only overhead lamp glaring as the flight droned over the Atlantic.
Occasionally, one of the stewardesses stopped to offer coffee or liquor. But for the most part, I just stared into the blackness of the night.
There had never been a mass killer to match Mr. Smith’s unique approach to violence, not from a scientific vantage point anyway. That was one thing the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico and I agreed on. Even the contrarians at Interpol, the international clearinghouse for police information, agreed with us.