Alex Cross 02 - Kiss the Girls Read online

  I finally went off to my room. I hit the bed and thought about Kyle Craig for a while. He’d been able to sell my unorthodox style to his confrères for one reason: it had worked before. I already had one monster’s scalp on my belt. I hadn’t played according to the rules to get it. Kyle understood and respected results. In general, so did the Bureau. They were certainly playing according to their own rules here in Los Angeles.

  My last semiconscious thought was of Kate in those khaki shorts. Take your breath away. I had a passing thought that she might come down the hall and knock, knock, knock on my door. We were in Hollywood, after all. Wasn’t that the way it happened in the movies?

  But Kate didn’t come knocking on my hotel door. So much for Clint Eastwood and Rene Russo fantasies.

  Chapter 63

  THIS WAS going to be a big day in Tinseltown. The manhunt of manhunts was playing in Beverly Hills. Just like the day they finally caught the killer-strangler Richard Ramirez out here.

  Today we get Beavis.

  It was a few minutes past eight in the morning. Kate and I were sitting in an arctic-blue Taurus parked half a block from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. There was an electrical sound in the air, as if the city were being run on a single, huge generator. A play on an old line ran through my head: Hell is a city much like Los Angeles.

  I was nervous and tense; my body felt numb, and my stomach was queasy. The burnout factor. Not enough sleep. Too much stress for too long a stretch. Chasing monsters from sea to shining sea.

  “That’s Dr. Will Rudolph climbing out of the BMW,” I said to Kate. I was so wound up, I felt as if strong hands were squeezing me.

  “Good-looking,” Kate muttered. “Real sure of himself, too. The way he moves. Doctor Rudolph.”

  Kate didn’t say another word as she intently watched Rudolph. Was he the Gentleman Caller? Was he also Casanova? Or were we being set up for some sick, psychopathic reason that I did’t understand yet?

  The morning’s temperature hovered in the low sixties. The air had a crisp snap, like fall in the Northeast. Kate had on an old college sweatsuit, high-topped running shoes, dimestore sunglasses. Her long brown hair was bunched back in a ponytail. Sensible stakeout attire and grooming.

  “Alex, the FBI’s all around him now?” she asked me without looking away from the binoculars. “They’re here right now? That scum can’t possibly get away?”

  I nodded. “If he does anything, anything that shows us he’s the Gentleman, they’ll grab him. They want this arrest for themselves.”

  But the FBI was also giving me whatever rope I needed. Kyle Craig had kept his promise. So far, anyway.

  Kate and I watched as Dr. Will Rudolph slid out of the BMW coupe, which he’d just parked in a private lot on the west side of the hospital. He wore a European-style charcoal-gray suit. It was cut well and looked expensive. It probably cost as much as my house in D.C. His brown hair was held back in a fashionable ponytail. He had on dark glasses with round tortoiseshell frames.

  A doctor in an exclusive Beverly Hills hospital. Smug as hell. The goddamn Gentleman Caller who was setting this city on fire?

  I ached to run across the parking lot and hit him, take him down right now. I ground my teeth until my jaw was stiff. Kate wouldn’t take her eyes away from Dr. Will Rudolph. Was he Casanova, too? Were they one and the same monster? Was that it?

  We both watched Rudolph as he crossed the hospital lot. His stride was long and quick and buoyant. Nothing bothering him today. Finally, he disappeared inside a gray metal side door of the hospital.

  “A doctor,” Kate said and shook her head back and forth. “This is so weird, Alex. I’m shaking on the inside.”

  The static on the car radio startled us, but we could hear agent John Asaro’s deep, raspy voice.

  “Alex, did you guys see him? Get a good look? What does Ms. McTiernan think? What’s the verdict on our Dr. Squirrel?”

  I looked across the front seat at Kate. She looked all of her thirty-one years right now. Not quite so confident and assured, a little gray around the gills. The prime witness. She understood the deadly seriousness of the moment perfectly.

  “I don’t think he’s Casanova,” Kate finally said. She shook her head. “He’s not the same physical type. He’s thinner… carries himself differently. I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I don’t think it’s him, goddammit.” She sounded a little disappointed.

  Kate continued to shake her head. “I’m almost sure he isn’t Casanova, Alex. There must be two of them. Two Mr. Squirrels.” Her brown eyes were intense, as she looked at me.

  So there were two of them. Were they competing? What the hell was their coast-to-coast game all about?

  Chapter 64

  SMALL TALK, surveillance talk; it was familiar territory for me. Sampson and I had a saying about surveillance back in D.C.: They do the crime; we do the time.

  “How much could he make with a successful Beverly Hills medical practice? Ballpark number, Kate,” I asked my partner. We were still watching the doctors’ private parking lot of Cedars-Sinai. There was nothing to do but eyeball Rudolph’s spiffy new BMW and wait, and talk like old friends on a front stoop in D.C.

  “He probably charges about a hundred and fifty to two a visit. He could gross five or six hundred thousand a year. Then there are surgery fees, Alex. That’s if he has a conscience about the prices he charges, and we know he doesn’t have a conscience.”

  I shook my head in disbelief as I rubbed my palm over my chin. “I have to get back into private practice. Baby needs new shoes.”

  Kate smiled. “You miss them, don’t you, Alex? You talk about your kids a lot. Damon and Jannie. Poolball-head and Velcro.”

  I smiled back. Kate knew my nicknames for the kids by now. “Yeah, I do. They’re my babies, my little pals.”

  Kate laughed some more. I liked to make her laugh. I thought of the bittersweet stories she’d told me about her sisters, especially her twin, Kristin. Laughter is good medicine.

  The black BMW coupe just sat there, shining brightly and expensively in the California sunlight. Surveillance sucks, I thought, no matter where you have to do it. Even in sunny L.A.

  Kyle Craig had gotten me a lot of rope here in Los Angeles. Certainly much more than I’d had in the South. He’d gotten rope for Kate, too. There was something in it for him, though. The old quid pro quo. Kyle wanted me to interview the Gentleman Caller once he was caught, and he expected me to report everything to him. I suspected that Kyle himself hoped to bag Casanova.

  “Do you really think the two of them are competing?” Kate asked me after a while.

  “It makes psychological sense out of some things for me,” I told her. “They might feel a need to ‘one up’ each other. The Gentleman’s diaries could be his way of saying: See, I’m better than you. I’m more famous. Anyway, I haven’t decided yet. Sharing their exploits is probably more for thrill purposes than intimacy, though. They both like to get turned on.”

  Kate stared into my eyes. “Alex, doesn’t it make you feel creepy as hell trying to figure this out?”

  I smiled. “That’s why I want to catch Butt-Head and Beavis. So the creepiness will finally stop.”

  Kate and I waited at the hospital until Rudolph finally reappeared. It was nearly two in the afternoon. He drove straight to his office on North Bedford, west of Rodeo Drive. Rudolph saw patients there. Mostly women patients. Dr. Rudolph was a plastic surgeon. As such, he could create and sculpt. Women depended on him. And… his patients all chose him.

  We followed Rudolph home at around seven. Five or six hundred thousand a year, I was thinking. It was more than I could make in a decade. Was it the money he needed to be the Gentleman Caller? Was Casanova wealthy, too? Was he a doctor also? Was that how they committed their perfect crimes?

  These questions were rolling around in my head.

  I fingered an index card in my trouser pocket. I had begun to keep a “shortlist” on both Casanova and the Gentlema
n. I would add or subtract what I considered key attributes to the profile. I carried the card with me at all times.

  CASANOVA

  Collector

  harem

  artist, organized

  different masks… to

  represent moods or personas? doctor?

  claims to “love” victims

  gaining a taste for violence

  knows about me

  competing with Gary Soneji?

  competing with the L.A. Gentleman?

  GENTLEMAN

  gives out flowers—sexual?

  extremely violent and dangerous

  takes beautiful young women of all types

  extremely organized

  not artistic in terms of his killing

  doctor

  cold and impersonal as a killer… a butcher

  craves recognition and fame—

  possibly wealthy—penthouse apartment

  graduated Duke Medical School, 1986

  raised in North Carolina

  I thought some more about the connection between Rudolph and Casanova as Kate and I twiddled our thumbs outside the apartment. A relevant psychological condition had occurred to me. It was called twinning, and it could be a key. Twinning just might explain the bizarre relationship between the monsters. Twinning was caused by an urge to bond, usually between two lonely people. Once they “twin,” the two become a “whole”; they become dependent on each other, often obsessively so. Sometimes the “twins” become highly competitive.

  Twinning was like an addiction to couple. To belong to a secret club. Just two people and no passwords. In its negative form, it was the fusing of two people for their own individual needs, which weren’t mutually healthy.

  I ran it by Kate. She was a twin, too.

  “Quite often, there’s a dominant figure in a twinning relationship,” I said. “Was that true of you and your sister?”

  “I probably was with Kristin,” Kate said. “I got the good grades in school. I was a little pushy sometimes. She even called me ‘Push’ in high school. Worse names than that, too.”

  “The dominant twin can act in a male role-model behavior structure,” I said to Kate. The two of us were talking doctor to doctor. “The dominant figure might not be the more skillful at manipulation, though.”

  “As you could imagine, I’ve read a little about the phenomenon,” Kate said and smiled. “Twinning creates a uniquely powerful structure within which the bonded pair can operate in complex ways. Something like that?”

  “That’s correct, Dr. McTiernan. In the case of Casanova and the Gentleman, each would have his own bodyguard-cum-supportive person. That could be why they achieve so well. Perfect crimes. They each have a built-in, and very effective, emotional support system.”

  The question ringing loudly in my mind was—how had they originally met? Was it at Duke? Had Casanova been a student there, too? It made some sense. It also reminded me of the Leopold-Loeb case in Chicago. Two very smart boys, special boys, committing forbidden acts together. Sharing evil thoughts and dirty secrets because they were lonely and had no one else to talk to… twinning at its most destructive.

  Was that the beginning of the solution to this puzzle? I wondered. Were the Gentleman and Casanova twinning? Were they actually working together? What was their nasty little game all about? What game were they playing?

  “Let’s go smash in his picture window with a tire iron,” Kate said. She was feeling it, too. We were both ready to rumble.

  We wanted to take down this grown-up Leopold and Loeb.

  Chapter 65

  EIGHT O’CLOCK came and went on the surveillance watch. Maybe Dr. Will Rudolph wasn’t the Gentleman Caller. The Los Angeles Times reporter Beth Lieberman could have been wrong. There was no way to ask her about it now.

  Kate and I had been gabbing about the Lakers without Magic Johnson and Kareem, about Aaron Neville’s latest album, Hillary and Bill Clinton’s life together, the merits of Johns Hopkins versus University of North Carolina medical school.

  Strange sparks were still flying between us. I’d had some unofficial therapy sessions with Kate McTiernan and I had hypnotized her once. I also understood that I was afraid of any kind of fire starting between us. What was wrong with me? It was time to start my life again, to get over the loss of my wife, Maria. I thought I had something good with a woman named Jezzie Flanagan, but she had left an emptiness in me that I could barely get over.

  Kate and I finally began to cover subjects a little closer to the heart. She asked why I was shying away from relationships (because my wife had died; because my last relationship had imploded; because of my two kids). I asked her why she was wary of meaningful relationships (she was afraid she was going to die of ovarian or breast cancer like her sisters; she was afraid her lovers might die, or leave her—that she would keep on losing people).

  “We’re quite the pair.” I finally shook my head and smiled.

  “Maybe we’re both terrified of losing someone again,” Kate said. “Maybe it’s better to love and lose than be afraid.”

  Before we could really get into that thorny subject, Dr. Will Rudolph finally appeared. I looked at the time on the dashboard clock. It was 10:20.

  Rudolph was decked out in all-black party clothes. Form-fitting blazer, turtleneck, clinging slacks, snazzy cowboy boots. He got into a white Range Rover this time instead of the BMW sedan. He looked freshly showered. Probably had taken a nap. I envied him that.

  “Black on black for the good doctor,” Kate said with a tight smile. “Dressed to kill?”

  “Maybe he has a dinner date,” I said. “Now there’s a scary idea. He sups with the women, then kills them.”

  “That could get him inside their apartments at least. What a terrible creep. Two unbelievable creeps on the loose.”

  I started up our car and we followed Rudolph. I didn’t see any FBI coverage, but I was sure they were there.

  The Bureau still hadn’t brought in the LAPD on this. It was a dangerous game, but not an unusual one for the FBI. They considered themselves the best policemen for any job, and the ultimate authority. They had decided this was an interstate crime spree, so it was theirs to solve. Somebody at the Bureau had a hard-on for this case.

  “Vampires always hunt at night, huh,” Kate said as we headed south through L.A. “That’s what this feels like, Alex. Bram Stoker’s The Gentleman Caller. A real-life horror story.”

  I knew what Kate was feeling. I felt it too. “He is a monster. Only he’s created himself. So has Casanova. It’s another similarity they share. Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, they wrote only about human monsters roaming the earth. Now we have sickos living out their elaborate fantasies. What a country.”

  “Love it or leave it, bub,” Kate said with a drawl and a wink.

  I had done enough surveillance early in my career to get reasonably good at it. I figured I had earned a graduate degree in tracking during the Soneji/Murphy manhunt. So far, I’d noticed that the West Coast FBI was good, too.

  Agents Asaro and Cosgrove checked in on the radio as soon as we started to move again. They were in charge of the tracking unit on Will Rudolph. We still didn’t know if he was the Gentleman. We had no proof. We couldn’t move on Dr. Rudolph yet.

  We followed the Range Rover west through Los Angeles. Rudolph finally turned onto Sunset Drive and took it all the way to the Pacific Coast Highway. Then he headed north on U.S. Highway 1. I noticed that he was careful to keep the Range Rover at the speed limit inside L.A. But once he hit the open road, he started to fly.

  “Where the heck is he going? My heart’s in my throat,” Kate finally admitted.

  “We’ll be okay. It seems scary chasing him at night,” I said. It did feel as if we were alone with him. Where the hell was he going? Was he hunting? If his pattern held, he was due for another killing soon. He had to be in heat.

  It turned out to be a very long ride. We watched the stars brighten the coastal California night. Six
hours later, we were still tacking on Highway 1. The Range Rover finally pulled off at a quaint, wooden signpost that read Big Sur State Park, among other things.

  As if to validate that we were really in Big Sur, we passed an antique van with a bumper sticker: VISUALIZE INDUSTRIAL COLLAPSE.

  “Visualize Dr. Will Rudolph having a massive stroke,” Kate growled softly.

  I checked my watch as we left the main highway. “It’s past three. Getting late for him to get into any serious trouble tonight.” I hoped that was the case.

  “If there was ever any doubt, this may prove he’s a bloodsucking vampire,” Kate muttered. Her arms were crossed tightly across her chest and had been for most of the long ride. “He’s going off to sleep in his favorite coffin.”

  “Right. That’s when we drive a wooden stake through his heart,” I told her. We were both a little groggy. I had taken a pill during the ride. Kate declined. She said she knew too much about drugs and was leery of most of them.

  We passed a complex of directional signs: Point Sur, Pfeiffer Beach, Big Sur Lodge, Ventana, the Esalen Institute. Will Rudolph headed in the direction of Big Sur Lodge, Sycamore Canyon, Bottchers Gap Campgrounds.

  “I was hoping he would go to Esalen,” Kate quipped. “Learn to meditate, deal with his inner turmoil.”

  “What in hell is he up to tonight?” I wondered out loud. What were he and Casanova doing? So far it was impossible to figure out. “His hideaway might be up here in the woods, Kate,” I offered a thought. “Maybe he has a house of horror just like Casanova’s.”

  Twinning, I thought again. It made a lot of sense. They would be providing support systems for each other. Parallel tracks for the two monsters. Where did they meet, though? Did the two of them ever hunt together? I suspected that they had.

  The white Range Rover was winding along a hilly and rather rambunctious side road that branched east from the ocean. Ancient, somber redwoods flashed on either side of the narrow ribbon of highway. A pale full moon seemed to be moving directly above the Rover, following it.

  I let him get a safe distance ahead—so that he was actually out of our sight. The huge fir trees seemed to float past out car on either road shoulder. Dark shadows in real life. A bright yellow sign in the headlights read: Impassable in wet weather.