Alex Cross 02 - Kiss the Girls

by James Patterson

  The question had stung Mary Ellen. She took a deep breath before she answered me. “Six days ago, Alex. We drove down to Chapel Hill together. We were doing work there for Habitat for Humanity.”

  Habitat for Humanity was a community-service group that rebuilt houses for the poor. Naomi didn’t mention that she did volunteer work for them. “Did you see Naomi after that?” I asked.

  Mary Ellen shook her head. The gold dancing bells around her neck jangled softly. I suddenly got the feeling that she didn’t want to look at me.

  “That was the last time, I’m afraid. I was the one who went to the police. I found out they have a twenty-four-hour rule on most disappearances. Naomi was gone almost two and a half days before they put out any all-points bulletins. Do you know why?” she asked.

  I shook my head, but didn’t want to make a big deal out of it in front of Mary Ellen. I still didn’t know exactly why there was such a band of secrecy surrounding the case. I’d put in calls to Detective Nick Ruskin that morning, but he hadn’t returned any of them.

  “Do you think Naomi’s disappearance has anything to do with the other women who have disappeared lately?” Mary Ellen asked. Her blue eyes were pierced with pain.

  “There could be a connection. There was no physical evidence at the Sarah Duke Gardens, though. Honestly, there’s very little to go on, Mary Ellen.” If Naomi was abducted at a public garden right on the campus, there were no witnesses. She had been seen in the gardens half an hour before she missed a class in Contracts. Casanova was scarily good at what he did. He was like a ghost.

  We finished our walk, ending up full circle where we had begun. The dormitory house was set back twenty to thirty yards from a graveled path. It had high white columns, and the large veranda was crowded with shiny white wicker rockers and tables. The antebellum period, one of my favorites.

  “Alex, Naomi and I really haven’t been as close lately,” Mary Ellen suddenly confided in me. “I’m sorry. I thought you should know that.”

  Mary Ellen was crying as she leaned in and kissed me on the cheek. Then she ran up the polished whitewashed stairs and disappeared inside.

  Another troubling mystery to solve.

  Chapter 22

  CASANOVA WATCHED Dr. Alex Cross. His quick, sharp mind was whizzing about like a sophisticated computer—possibly the fastest computer in whole Research Triangle.

  Look at Cross, he muttered. Visiting Naomi’s old friend! There’s nothing to be found there, Doctor. You’re not even warm yet. You’re getting colder, actually.

  He followed Alex Cross at a safe distance as he walked across the Duke campus. He had read extensively about Cross. He knew all about the psychologist and detective who’d made his reputation tracking down a kidnapper-killer in Washington. The so-called crime of the century, which was a lot of media hype and horseshit.

  So who’s better at this game? he wanted to shout out to Dr. Cross. I know who you are. You don’t know dogshit about me. You never will.

  Cross stopped walking. He took a pad from the back pocket of his trousers and made a note.

  What’s this, Doctor? Had a thought of some consequence? I rather doubt that. I honestly do.

  The FBI, the local police, they’ve all been trailing me for months. I suppose they make notes, too, but none of them has a clue….

  Casanova watched Alex Cross continue to walk along the campus until he finally disappeared from sight. The idea that Cross would actually track and capture him was unthinkable. It simply wasn’t going to happen.

  He started to laugh, and had to catch himself since the Duke campus was fairly crowded on a Sunday afternoon.

  No one has a clue, Dr. Cross. Don’t you get it?… That’s the clue!

  Chapter 23

  I WAS a street detective again.

  I spent most of Monday morning interviewing people who knew Kate McTiernan. Casanova’s latest victim was a first-year intern who’d been abducted from her apartment on the outskirts of Chapel Hill.

  I was attempting to put together a psych profile of Casanova, but there wasn’t enough information. Period. The FBI wasn’t helping. Nick Ruskin still hadn’t returned my phone calls.

  A professor at North Carolina med school told me that Kate McTiernan was one of the most conscientious students she’d taught in twenty years. Another professor at the school said that her commitment and intelligence were indeed high, but “her temperament is the truly extraordinary thing about Kate.”

  It was unanimous in that regard. Even competing interns at the hospital agreed that Kate McTiernan was something else. “She’s the least narcissistic woman I’ve ever met,” one of the woman interns told me. “Kate’s totally driven, but she knows it and she can laugh at herself,” said another. “She’s a really cool person. This is such a sad, numbing thing for everyone at the hospital.” “She’s a brain, who happens to be built like a brick shithouse.”

  I called Peter McGrath, a history professor, and he reluctantly agreed to see me. Kate McTiernan had dated him for almost four months, but their relationship had ended abruptly. Professor McGrath was tall, athletic-looking, a bit imperious.

  “I could say that I fucked up royally by losing her,” McGrath admitted to me. “And I did. But I couldn’t have held on to the Katester. She’s probably the strongest-willed person, man or woman, that I’ve ever met. God, I can’t believe this has happened to Kate.”

  His face was pale, and he was obviously shaken up by her disappearance. At least he appeared to be.

  I ended up eating by myself in a noisy bar in the college town of Chapel Hill. There were hordes of university students, and a busy pool table, but I sat alone with my beers, a greasy, rubbery cheeseburger, and my early thoughts on Casanova.

  The long day had drained me. I missed Sampson, my kids, my home in D.C. A comfortable world without any monsters. Scootchie was still missing, though. So were several other young women in the Southeast.

  My thoughts kept drifting back to Kate McTiernan, and what I’d heard about her today.

  This is the way cases got solved—at least it was the way I had always solved them. Data got collected. Data ran loose in the brain. Eventually, connections were made.

  Casanova doesn’t just take physically beautiful women, I suddenly realized in the bar. He takes the most extraordinary women he can find. He’s taking only the heartbreakers… the women that everybody wants but nobody ever seems to get.

  He’s collecting them somewhere out there.

  Why extraordinary women? I wondered.

  There was one possible answer. Because he believes he’s extraordinary, too.

  Chapter 24

  I ALMOST went back to see Mary Ellen Klouk again, but I changed my mind and returned to the Washington Duke Inn. A couple of messages were waiting for me.

  The first was from a friend in the Washington PD. He was processing information I needed for a meaningful profile on Casanova. I’d brought a laptop with me and I hoped I would be in business soon.

  A reporter by the name of Mike Hart had called four times. I recognized his name, and I knew his newspaper—a tabloid out of Florida called the National Star. The reporter’s nickname was No-Heart’s Hart. I didn’t return No-Heart’s calls. I’d been featured on the front page of the Star once, and once was enough for this lifetime.

  Detective Nick Ruskin had finally returned one of my calls. He left a short message. Nothing new on our end. Will let you know. I found that hard to believe. I didn’t trust Detective Ruskin or his faithful sidekick Davey Sikes.

  I drifted off to a restless sleep in a cozy armchair in my room and had the most vivid, nightmarish dreams. A monster right out of an Edvard Munch painting was chasing Naomi. I was powerless to help her; all I could do was watch the macabre scene in horror. Not much need for a trained psychotherapist to interpret that one.

  I woke up sensing that someone was in the hotel room with me.

  I quietly placed my hand on the butt of my revolver and stayed very still. My
heart was pounding. How could someone have gotten into the room?

  I stood up slowly, but stayed low in a shooting crouch. I peered around as best I could in the semidarkness.

  The chintz window drapes weren’t completely drawn, so there was enough light from outside for me to make out shapes. Shadows of tree leaves danced on the hotel room wall. Nothing else seemed to be moving.

  I checked the bathroom, Glock pistol first. Then the closets. I began to feel a little silly stalking the hotel room with my gun drawn, but I had definitely heard a noise!

  I finally spotted a piece of paper under the door, but I waited a few seconds before I flipped on the light. Just to be sure.

  A black-and-white photograph was staring up at me. Instant associations and connections jumped to mind. It was a colonial British postcard, probably from the early 1900s. At that time the postcards had been collected by Westerners as pseudoart, but mostly as soft pornography. They had been a racy turn-on for male collectors in the early part of the century.

  I bent down to get a better look at the old-fashioned photo.

  The card showed an odalisque smoking a Turkish cigarette, in a startling acrobatic posture. The woman was dark, young, and beautiful; probably in her mid-teens. She was naked to the waist, and her full breasts hung upside down in the posed photograph.

  I flipped the card over with a pencil.

  There was a printed caption near where a stamp could be placed: Odalisques with great beauty and high intelligence were carefully trained to be concubines. They learned to dance quite beautifully, to play musical instruments, and to write exquisitely lyrical poetry. They were the most valuable part of the harem, perhaps the emperor’s greatest treasure.

  The caption was signed in ink with a printed name. Giovanni Giacomo Casanova de Seignalt.

  He knew that I was here in Durham. He knew who I was.

  Casanova had left a calling card.

  Chapter 25

  I’M ALIVE.

  Kate McTiernan slowly forced open her eyes inside a dimly lit room… somewhere.

  For a couple of blinks of her eyes, she believed she was in a hotel that she couldn’t for the life of her remember checking into. A really weird hotel in an even weirder Jim Jarmusch art movie. It didn’t matter, though. At least she wasn’t dead.

  Suddenly, she remembered being shot point-blank in the chest. She remembered the intruder. Tall… long hair… gentle, conversational voice… sixth-degree animal.

  She tried to get up, but thought better of it immediately. “Whoa there,” she said out loud. Her throat was dry, and her voice sounded raspy as it echoed unpleasantly inside her head. Her tongue felt as if it needed a shave.

  I’m in hell. In a circle from Dante’s Inferno, with a very low number, she thought, and she began to shiver. Everything about the moment was terrifying, but it was so horrible, and so unexpected, she couldn’t orient herself to it.

  Her joints were stiff and painful; she ached all over. She doubted that she could press a hundred pounds right now. Her head felt huge, bloated like aging fruit, and it hurt, but she could vividly remember the attacker. He was tall, maybe six two, youngish, extremely powerful, articulate. The images were hazy, but she was absolutely certain they were true.

  She remembered something else about the monstrous attack in her apartment. He’d used a stun gun, or something like it, to immobilize her. He’d also used chloroform, or maybe it was halothane. That could account for her bruising headache.

  The lights had purposely been left on in the room. She noticed they were coming from modern-looking dimmers built into the ceiling. The ceiling was low, possibly under seven feet.

  The room looked as if it had recently been built, or remodeled. It was actually decorated tastefully, the way she might have done her own apartment if she had the money and time…. A real brass bed. Antique white dresser with brass handles. A dressing table with a silver brush, comb, mirror. There were colorful scarves tied on the bedposts, just the way she did them at home. That struck her as strange. Very odd.

  There were no windows in the room. The only way out appeared to be through a heavy wooden door.

  “Nice decor,” Kate muttered softly. “Early psycho. No, it’s late psycho.”

  The door to a small closet was open halfway and she could see inside. What she saw made her feel physically ill.

  He’d brought her clothes to this horrible place, this bizarre prison cell. All of her clothes were here.

  Using her remaining strength, Kate McTiernan forced herself to sit upright in the bed. The effort made her heart race, and the pounding in her chest frightened her. Her arms and legs felt as if heavy weights were tied to them.

  She concentrated hard, trying to focus her eyes on the incredible scene. She continued to stare into the closet.

  Those weren’t actually her clothes, she realized. He’d gone out and bought clothes just like hers! Exactly to her taste and style. The clothes displayed in the closet were brand-new. She could see some of the store tags dangling from the blouses and skirts. The Limited. The Gap in Chapel Hill. Stores she actually shopped in herself.

  Her eyes darted to the top of the antique white dresser across the room. Her perfume was there, too. Obsession. Safari. Opium.

  He’d bought all of it for her, hadn’t he?

  Next to the bed was a copy of All the Pretty Horses, the same book she had bought on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill.

  He knows everything about me!

  Chapter 26

  DR. KATE McTiernan slept. Awoke. Slept some more. She made a joke of it. Called herself “lazybones.” She never slept in. Not since before med school, anyway.

  She was begining to feel more clearheaded and alert, more in command of herself, except that she had lost track of time. She didn’t know if it was morning, noon, or night. Or even which day it was.

  The man, whoever the bastard was, had been inside the mysterious, despicable room while she slept. The thought made her physically ill. There was a note propped on the bedside table, where she was sure to see it.

  The note was handwritten. Dear Dr. Kate, it said. Her hands were trembling as she read her own name.

  I wanted you to read this, so that you understand me better, and also the rules of the house. This is probably the most important letter you’ll ever receive, so read it carefully. And please take it very seriously.

  No, I am not crazy or out of control. Actually, I’m quite the opposite. Apply your obviously high intelligence to the concept that I’m relatively sane, and that I know exactly what I want. Most people don’t know what they want.

  Do you, Kate? We’ll talk about that later. It’s a subject worthy of much lively and interesting discussion. Do you know what you want? Are you getting it? Why not? For the good of society? Whose society? Whose life are we living, anyway?

  I won’t pretend that you are happy to be here, so no false-sounding welcomes. No cellophaned basket of fresh fruit and champagne. As you will soon see, or have already, I’ve tried to make your stay as comfortable as possible. Which brings up an important point, perhaps the most important point of this first attempt at communication between us.

  Your stay will be temporary. You will leave—if, Big If—you listen to what I tell you… so listen carefully, Kate.

  Are you listening now? Please listen, Kate. Chase away the justifiable anger and the white noise in your head. I am not crazy or out of control.

  That’s the whole point: I am in control! See the distinction? Of course you do. I know how very bright you are. National Merit Scholar and all that.

  It is important that you know how special you are to me. That’s why you are completely safe here. It is also why you’ll leave, eventually.

  I picked you from thousands and thousands of women at my disposal, so to speak. I know, you’re saying “lucky me.” I know how funny and cynical you can be. I even know that laughter has gotten you through difficult times. I’m beginning to know you better than anyone has ever known
you. Almost as well as you know yourself, Kate.

  Now for the bad parts. And Kate, these next points are as important as any of the good news I’ve stated above.

  These are the house rules, and they are to be strictly observed:

  The most important rule: You must never try to escape—or you will be executed within hours, however painful that would be for both of us. Believe me, there is precedent for this. There can be no reprieve following an escape attempt.

  Just for you, Kate, a special rule: You must never try to use your karate skills on me. (I almost brought your gi, your crisp white karate suit, but why encourage you to temptation.)

  You must never call out for help—I’ll know if you do—and you will be punished with facial and genital disfigurement.

  You want to know more—you want to know everything at once. But it doesn’t work that way. Don’t bother trying to figure out where you are. You won’t guess, and will only give yourself an unnecessary headache.

  That’s all for now. I’ve given you more than enough to think about. You are totally safe here. I love you more than you can imagine. I can’t wait for us to talk, really talk.

  Casanova

  And you are hopelessly out of your mind! Kate McTiernan thought as she paced the eleven-by-fifteen-foot room. Her claustrophobic prison. Her hell on this earth.

  Her body felt as if it were floating, as if warm viscous fluid were flowing over her. She wondered if she’d suffered a head injury during the attack.

  She had only one thought: how to escape. She began to analyze her situation in every possible way. She reversed the conventional assumptions, and broke down each to its component parts.

  There was a single, double-locked, thick wooden door.

  There was no way out other than through that door.

  No! That was the conventional assumption. There had to be another way.

  She remembered a problem-solution puzzle from some heretofore useless undergrad logics course she had taken. It began with ten matchsticks arranged as Roman numerals in a math equation: