Cat & Mouse - James Patterson [86]
Perhaps the tabloids were right about Mr. Smith, and he was an alien. He wasn’t like any other human. I knew that. He had murdered Isabella.
This was really why I couldn’t sleep on the flight to Paris. It was why I could never sleep anymore.
CHAPTER 94
WHO COULD ever begin to forget the cold-blooded murder of a loved one? I couldn’t. Nothing has diminished its vividness or unreality in four years. It goes like this, exactly the way I told it to the Cambridge police.
It is around two in the morning, and I use my key to open the front door of our two-bedroom apartment on Inman Street in Cambridge. Suddenly, I stop. I have the sense that something is wrong in the apartment.
Details inside are particularly memorable. I will never forget any of it. A poster in our foyer: Language is more than speech. Isabella is a closet linguist, a lover of words and word games. So am I. It’s an important connection between us.
A favorite Noguchi rice paper lamp of Isabella’s.
Her treasured paperbacks from home, most of them Folio. White uniformed spines with black lettering, so perfect and neat.
I’d had a few glasses of wine at Jillian’s with some other medical students, recent graduates like myself. We were letting off steam after too many days and nights and weeks and years in the Harvard pressure cooker. We were comparing notes about the hospitals each of us would be working at in the fall. We were promising to stay in touch, knowing that we probably wouldn’t.
The group included three of my best friends through medical school. Maria Jane Ruocco, who would be working at Children’s Hospital in Boston; Chris Sharp, who was soon off to Beth Israel; Michael Fescoe, who had landed a prize internship at NYU. I had been fortunate, too. I was headed to Massachusetts General, one of the best teaching hospitals in the world. My future was assured.
I was high from the wine, but not close to being drunk, when I got home. I was in a good mood, unusually carefree. Odd, guilty detail—I was horny for Isabella. Free. I remember singing “With or Without You” on the way back in my car, a ten-year-old Volvo befitting my economic status as a med student.
I vividly remember standing in the foyer, seconds after I flicked on the hall lights. Isabella’s Coach purse is on the floor. The contents are scattered about in a three-or four-foot radius. Very, very strange.
Loose change, her favorite Georg Jensen earrings, lipstick, assorted makeup containers, compact, cinnamon gum—all there on the floor.
Why didn’t Isabella pick up her purse? Is she pissed at me for going out with my med-school chums?
That wouldn’t be like Isabella. She is an open woman, liberal-minded to a fault.
I start back through the narrow, long apartment, looking for her everywhere. The apartment is laid out railroad-style, small rooms on a tight track leading to a single window that looks onto Inman Street.
Some of our secondhand scuba equipment is sitting in the hall. We had been planning a trip to California. Two air tanks, weight belts, wet suits, two sets of rubber fins clutter the hallway.
I grab a speargun—just in case. In case of what? I have no idea. How could I?
I become more and more frantic, and then afraid. “Isabella!” I call at the top of my voice. “Isabella? Where are you?”
Then I stop, everything in the world seems to stop. I let go of the speargun, let it fall, crash and clatter against the bare hardwood floor.
What I see in our bedroom will never leave me. I can still see, smell, even taste, every obscene detail. Maybe this is when my sixth sense is born, the strange feeling that is so much a part of my life now.
“Oh God! Oh Jesus, no!” I scream loud enough for the couple who live above us to hear. This isn’t Isabella, I remember thinking. Those words of total disbelief. I may have actually spoken them aloud. Not Isabella.