Alex Cross 02 - Kiss the Girls Read online

  Rudolph had felt a powerful connection immediately. The first real human connection of his life. Perhaps that was what love was? Did ordinary people feel so much more than he did? Or were they deluding themselves? Creating grandiose romantic fantasies around the mundane exchange of seminal fluids?

  He was at his final destination before he knew it. He stopped the car under a towering, old elm and switched off the headlamps. Two black men were standing on the porch of Kate McTiernan’s house.

  One of them was Alex Cross.

  Chapter 91

  AT A little past ten, Sampson and I rode down a dark, winding street on the outskirts of Chapel Hill. It had been a long day in the tank for both of us.

  I’d taken Sampson to meet Seth Samuel Taylor earlier that evening. We had also spoken to one of Seth’s former teachers, Dr. Louis Freed. I gave Dr. Freed my theory about the “disappearing house”; he agreed to help me with some important research for the investigation on where it might be located.

  I hadn’t told Sampson too much about Kate McTiernan yet. It was time for them to meet, though. I didn’t know exactly what our friendship was about, and neither did Kate. Maybe Sampson could add a few thoughts after he saw her. I was sure he would.

  “You working late hours like this every night?” Sampson wanted to know as we eased down Kate’s street, Old Ladies Lane, as she called it.

  “Until I find Scootchie, or admit that I can’t,” I told him. “Then I plan to take a whole night off.”

  Sampson chortled. “You devil, you.”

  We hopped out of the car and went to the door. I rang the bell. “No key?” Sampson deadpanned.

  Kate flipped on the outdoor light for us. I wondered why she didn’t keep it on all the time. Because she would save five cents a month if she didn’t use the light? Because the light would attract bugs? Because she was stubborn, and maybe wanted another shot at Casanova? That was more like it, knowing Kate the way I was starting to. She wanted Casanova as badly as I did.

  She came to the door in an old gray sweatshirt, tatered, holey jeans, bare feet with playfully red toenails. Her dark hair was bobbed at shoulder length, and she looked beautiful. No getting away from that.

  “It’s like a damn bughouse out here,” Kate commented as she looked around her porch.

  She hugged me and gave me a kiss on the cheek. I had a thought about the two of us holding each other the night before. Where was this going? I wondered. Did it have to be going anywhere?

  “Hi, John Sampson,” she greeted him with a pumping handshake. “I know a few things about you, ever since you two met when you were ten. You can fill me in on the rest over a cold beer or two. Tell your side.” She smiled then. It always felt good to be on the other side of one of her smiles.

  “So you’re the famous Kate.” Sampson held on to her hand, and stared into the deep pools of her brown eyes. “I hear you worked your way through medical school at a truck stop, or some such apocryphal nonsense. Second degree black belt, too. A Nidan.” He started to smile and bowed respectfully.

  Kate grinned at Sampson as she bowed back. “Come in out of the eternal bugs and the infernal heat. Looks like Alex has been talking behind our backs. We’ll get him for that. Let’s both gang up on him.”

  “That’s Kate,” I said to Sampson as I followed him inside. “What do you think?”

  He looked back at me. “She likes you for some strange reason. She even likes me, which makes a lot more sense.”

  We sat in her kitchen and the talk was easy and comfortable, the way it usually was around her. Sampson and I drank beer, and Kate had several ice teas. I could tell that Kate and Sampson liked each other fine. There was nothing not to like about either of them. They were both independent spirits, very smart, generous.

  I filled her in on our latest day of detective work, our disappointing meeting with Ruskin and Sikes, and she told us about her day at the hospital, even some verbatims from her off-service notes.

  “Sounds like you have an eidetic memory to go with the black belt,” Sampson said with a raised eyebrow about the size of a boomerang. “No wonder Dr. Alex is so impressed with you.”

  “You are?” Kate gave me a look. “Well, you never told me that.”

  “Kate, believe it or not, is not self-centered enough,” I told Sampson. “Rare, rare disease in our quarter-century. It’s because she doesn’t watch much TV. She reads too many books instead.”

  “It’s not polite to analyze your friends in front of your other friends,” Kate said to me with a little slap on the arm.

  We talked about the case some more. About Dr. Wick Sachs and his head-games. About harems. The masks. The “disappearing” house. My newest theory involving Dr. Louis Freed.

  “I was doing some light reading before you got here,” Kate told us. “An essay on the male sexual urge, the natural beauty and power of it. It’s about modern men trying to distance themselves from their mothers, from the smothering cosmological mom. If proposes that many men want the freedom to assert their masculine identities, but contemporary society continually frustrates that. Comments, gentlemen?”

  “Men will be men.” Sampson showed his big white teeth. “Good case in point. We’re still lions and tigers at heart. Never met a cosmological mom, so I won’t comment on that part of your essay.”

  “What do you think, Alex?” Kate asked me. “Are you a lion or a tiger?”

  “I’ve never liked certain things about most men,” I said. “We are incredibly repressed. Monochromatic because of it. Insecure, defensive. Rudolph and Sachs are asserting their masculinity to the extreme. They refuse to be repressed by society’s mores or laws.”

  “Ba dum bun.” Sampson did a talk-show drumbeat for me.

  “They think they’re smarter than everyone else,” Kate said. “At least Casanova does. He laughs at all of us. He’s a nasty son of a bitch.”

  “And that’s why I’m here,” Sampson told her, “to catch him, and put him in a cage, and lock the cage on a far mountaintop. And by the way, he’d be stone dead in the cage, anyway.”

  The time passed like that, flashed by real quickly. Finally, it was getting late and we had to leave. I tried to talk Kate into staying at a hotel for the night. We had been over this subject repeatedly, and her answer was always the same.

  “Thanks for the concern, but no thanks,” she said as she brought us out onto the porch. “I can’t let him chase me out of my own house. That will not happen. He comes back, we tangle.”

  “Alex is right about the hotel,” Sampson said to her in the gentle voice he reserves for friends. There it was—a double recommendation from two of the sharpest cops around.

  Kate shook her head, and I knew there was no sense in arguing with her anymore. “Absolutely not. I’ll be just fine, I promise,” she said.

  I didn’t ask Kate if I could stay, but I wanted to. I didn’t know if Kate even wanted me to stay. It was a little complicated with Sampson there. I suppose I could have given him my car to drive back, but it was already after two-thirty. We all needed to get some sleep, anyway. Sampson and I finally left.

  “Very nice. Very interesting woman. Very smart. Not your type,” Sampson said as we pulled away from the house. From him, it was a rare, rave review. “My type,” he added.

  When we reached the end of the block, I turned and looked back at the house. It was cooler now, in the low seventies, and Kate had already turned off the porch light and gone in. She was stubborn, but she was smart. It had gotten her through med school. It had gotten her past the deaths of people she loved. She would be okay; she always had been.

  I called Kyle Craig when I got back to the hotel, though. “How’s our man Sachs?” I asked him.

  “He’s just fine. He’s all tucked in for the night. Not to worry.”

  Chapter 92

  AFTER THE good ship Alex and Sampson left, Kate carefully checked and double-checked all the doors and windows to her apartment. They were securely locked. She had liked Sampson
right away. He was huge and scary, nice and scary, sweet and scary. Alex had brought his closest friend to see her, and she liked that.

  As she did her rounds, her safety check of home sweet home, she ruminated about a new life, far away from Chapel Hill, far away from everything terrifying and bad that had happened here. Hell, I’m living a Hitchcock movie, she thought, if Alfred Hitchcock had stayed alive long enough to see and react to the madness and horror of the 1990s.

  Exhausted, she finally climbed into bed. Yuk. She felt stale bread or cake crumbs against her legs. She hadn’t made the bed that morning.

  She wasn’t accomplishing much lately, and that made her angry, too. She’d been on a proper schedule to complete her intern year this spring. Now she didn’t know if she’d make it by the end of summer.

  Kate pulled the covers up under her chin—in early June. She was getting soooo buggy. Her anxiety wasn’t going to stop while the monster Casanova was on the loose out there, she knew. She thought about killing him. Her first and only violent fantasy. She imagined going to Wick Sachs’s house. An eye for an eye. She remembered the appropriate passage from the Book of Exodus. Eidetic memory, right.

  She really wished that Alex had stayed, but she didn’t want to embarrass him in front of Sampson. She wanted to talk to Alex the way they always did, and she wished he was with her now. She wanted to be in his arms tonight. Maybe more than just in Alex’s arms. Maybe she was ready for more. One night at a time.

  She wasn’t sure what she believed anymore, or if she believed in anything at all. She was praying lately, so maybe she did believe. Rote prayers, but prayers all the same. Our Father who art… Hail Mary full of… She wondered if a lot of people did the same thing. “I do love the idea of you, God,” she finally whispered. “Please love the idea of me back.”

  She couldn’t stop obsessing about Casanova, about Dr. Wick Sachs, about the mysterious, disappearing house of horror, and the poor women still trapped there. But she was so used to the continuous, terrifying nightmares that she finally drifted off to sleep, anyway.

  Kate never heard him come into the house.

  Chapter 93

  TICK-COCK. Tick-cock.

  Tickory, dickory, cock.

  Kate finally heard a noise. A floorboard creaked on the right side of the bedroom.

  Tiny, tiny sound… but unmistakable.

  That wasn’t her imagination, wasn’t a dream. She sensed that he was there in her bedroom again.

  Let it be a crazy thought; let it be a scene in a nightmare; let this whole past month be a nightmare I’m having.

  Oh Jesus, oh God, no! she thought.

  He was in her room. He’d come back! This was so bad that she couldn’t make herself believe it was happening.

  Kate held her breath until her chest ached and threatened to cave in. She never really believed he would come back.

  Now she realized that was a terrible mistake. The worst of her life, but not the last one she was allowed, she hoped.

  Who was this extraordinary madman? Did he hate her so much that he would risk everything? Or did he think he loved her so much, the sick, pathetic bastard?

  She sat tensely on the edge of the bed and listened intently for another sound. She was ready to spring at him. There it was again… a tiny creak. It was coming from the right side of the room.

  Finally, she could see the full, dark silhouette of his body. She gulped air greedily and almost gagged.

  There he was, goddamn him to hell.

  A powerful, hateful energy, like currents of electricity, surged between them. Their eyes finally met. Even in the darkness his eyes seemed to burn through her. She remembered his eyes so well.

  Kate tried to roll away from him, from his first strike.

  The blow came fast and hard. He hadn’t lost his quickness. Excruciating pain ripped through her shoulder and down her left side.

  Karate training kept her moving somehow. Sheer stubbornness. A will to live that was becoming her trademark. She was off the bed. Up on her feet. Ready for him.

  “Mistake,” she whispered. “Yours, this time.”

  She saw the outline of a body again. This time against the moonlight streaming in a bedroom window. Fear and loathing gripped Kate. Her heart felt as if it might stop, just pack it in on her.

  She fired a powerful kick. Hit him hard in the face and heard the crunch of bone. It was horrifying yet wonderful to hear.

  A high-pitched voice shrieked out in pain. She’d hurt him!

  Now do it again, Kate. She bobbed, moved, kicked hard at the dark, shifting body, striking the stomach area. Again he grunted in pain.

  “How do you like it?” Kate screamed at him. “How do you like it?”

  She had him, and Kate vowed that she wasn’t going to lose this time. She was going to capture Casanova all by herself. He was ripe for the catching. First, she was going to hurt him, though.

  She punched him again. Short, compact, lightning fast, and powerful. Satisfying beyond anything she could imagine. He was staggering, moaning out loud.

  His head snapped back hard. His hair flew out. She wanted him down on the floor. Maybe unconscious. Then she would turn on a light. Then she just might kick him while he was down.

  “That was a love tap,” she told him. “Just a start.”

  She watched him stumble in front of her. He was going down.

  Woof—something, someone, struck her square in the back. The blow knocked all the breath out of her.

  She couldn’t believe she’d been blindsided. Pain rushed through her body as if she’d been shot.

  Woof

  It happened again.

  There were two of them in her bedroom.

  Chapter 94

  KATE WAS in shocking pain, but she stayed on her feet, and finally she saw the second man in her bedroom. He swung hard and struck her in the forehead. She heard a metallic ring, and felt herself falling, toppling. Felt herself vaporizing, actually. Then her body bounced off the wooden floorboards.

  Two voices were floating above her. Two monsters inside her bedroom. Stereo nightmares.

  “You shouldn’t be here.” She recognized Casanova’s voice. He was talking to the second intruder. The demon behind door number two. Dr. Will Rudolph?

  “Yes, I’m the one who should be here. I’m not involved with this stupid bitch, am I? I couldn’t care less about her. Think it through. Be smart.”

  “All right, all right, Will. What do you want to do with her?” Casanova spoke again. “This is your show. Isn’t that what you want?”

  “Personally, I’d like to eat her, a nibble at a time,” said Dr. Will Rudolph. “Is that too extreme?”

  They kept laughing like two buddies talking at a sports bar. Kate felt herself fading away from the scene. She was leaving. Where was she going?

  Will Rudolph said that he bought her flowers. They both began to laugh at the joke. They were hunting together again. No one could stop them. Kate could smell their body odor, a strong male musk that seemed to combine into an overpowering presence.

  She stayed conscious for a long time. She fought with all her strength. She was stubborn, willful, proud as hell. The light finally went out for her like a tube in an old-fashioned TV set. A blurry picture, then a small dot of light, then blackness. It was that simple, that prosaic.

  They turned on the bedroom lights when they were finished, so that all of Kate McTiernan’s admirers could have a last good look at her.

  Murdered beyond cold blood.

  Chapter 95

  MY ARMS and legs were shaking uncontrollably as I tried to drive the five miles or so from Durham to Chapel Hill. Even my teeth were chattering, hitting together hard.

  I finally had to pull off Chapel Hill-Durham Boulevard, or I thought I would probably crash the car.

  I sat slumped in the front seat with the car headlamps shining across dancing dust motes and light-crazed insects that hovered in the early-morning air.

  I took deep breath after dee
p breath, trying to suck in some sanity. It was past five in the morning and the birds were already singing away. I put my hands over my ears to shut out their songs. Sampson was still asleep back at the hotel. I’d forgotten that he was there.

  Kate had never been afraid of Casanova. She trusted in her ability to take care of herself, even after her abduction.

  I knew that it was irrational and crazy to blame myself, but I did. Somewhere, at some time during the past few years, I had stopped behaving like a professional police detective. There was some good in that, but, in a way, it was bad. There was too much pain on The Job, if you let yourself feel it. That was the surest, fastest way to burnout.

  I eventually eased the car back onto the road. About fifteen minutes later, I was at the familiar clapboard house in Chapel Hill.

  “Old Ladies Lane,” Kate had dubbed the street. I could see her face, her sweet, easy smile, her enthusiasm and conviction about things that mattered to her. I could still hear her voice.

  Sampson and I had been at this house less than three hours ago. My eyes were tearing, my brain screaming. I was losing control.

  I rembered one of the last things she’d said to me. I could hear Kate’s voice. “He comes back, we tangle.”

  Black-and-white police cruisers, somber-looking EMS vans, and TV trucks were already parked everywhere on the narrow two-lane blacktop street. They were filling every available space. I was sick to death of the sight of crime scenes. It looked as if half the town of Chapel Hill was congregated outside Kate’s apartment.

  In the early-morning light all the faces looked pale and grim. They were shocked and angry. This was supposed to be a gentle college town, liberal-thinking, a safe haven from the whirling chaos and madness of the rest of the world. That was why most people chose to live here, but it wasn’t like that anymore. Casanova had changed that forever.