“We’d just be stuck here in tunnel traffic if we stayed put.”
Sampson nodded. “Uh-huh. We’re in Boston. Don’t want to have to come back tomorrow, follow up on one of your hunches then. Best to do it now. Chase those wild geese while the chasing is good.”
I pulled out of the tight lane of stalled traffic. “There’s just one wild goose that I can think to chase.”
“You going to tell me where we’re headed? I need to put my vest back on?”
“Depends on what you think of my hunches.”
I followed forest green signs toward Storrow Drive, heading out of Boston the way we came. Traffic was heavy in that direction, too. There were too many people everywhere you went these days, too much crowding, and too much chaos, too much stress on everybody.
“Better put your vest back on,” I told Sampson.
He didn’t argue with me. Sampson reached into the backseat and fished around for our vests.
I wiggled into my own vest as I drove. “I think Thomas Pierce wants this to end. I think he’s ready now. I saw it in his eyes.”
“So, he had his chance back there in Concord. ‘Pull off the road. Pull over, Pierce!’ You remember any of that? Sound familiar, Alex?”
I glanced at Sampson. “He needs to be in control. S was for Straw, but S is also for Smith. He has it figured out, John. He knows how he wants it to end. He always knew. It’s important to him that he finish this.”
Out of the corner of my eye I could see Sampson staring. “And? So? What the hell is that supposed to mean? Do you know how it ends?”
“He wants to end on S. It’s magical for him. It’s the way he has it figured, the way it has to be. It’s his mind game, and he plays it obsessively. He can’t stop playing. He told us that. He’s still playing.”
Sampson was clearly having trouble with this. We had just missed capturing Pierce an hour ago. Would he put himself at risk again? “You think he’s that crazy?”
“I think he’s that crazy, John. I’m sure of it.”
Chapter 128
HALF A DOZEN police squad cars were gathered on Inman Street in Cambridge. The blue-and-white cruisers were outside the apartment where Thomas Pierce and Isabella Calais had once lived, where Isabella had been murdered four years before.
EMS ambulances were parked near the gray stone front stoop. Sirens bleated and wailed. If we hadn’t turned around at the Callahan Tunnel we would have missed it.
Sampson and I showed our detective shields and kept on moving forward in a hurry. Nobody stopped us. Nobody could have.
Pierce was upstairs.
So was Mr. Smith.
The game had come full circle.
“Somebody called in a homicide in progress,” one of the Cambridge uniforms told us on the way up the stone front stairs. “I hear they got the guy cornered upstairs. Wackadoo of the first order.”
“We know all about him,” Sampson said.
Sampson and I took the stairs to the second floor.
“You think Pierce called all this heat on himself?” Sampson asked as we hurried up the stairs. I was beyond being out of breath, beyond pain, beyond shock or surprise.
This is how he wants it to end.
I didn’t know what to make of Thomas Pierce. He had numbed me, and all the rest of us. I was drifting beyond thought, at least logical ideas. There had never been a killer like Pierce. Not even close. He was the most alienated human being I’d ever met. Not alien, alienated.
“You still with me, Alex?” I felt Sampson’s hand gripping my shoulder.
“Sorry,” I said. “At first, I thought Pierce couldn’t feel anything, that he was just another psychopath. Cold rage, arbitrary murders.”