XI + I = X
The problem was how to correct the equation without touching any of the matches. Without adding new matches. Without taking away any matches.
No easy way out.
No apparent solution.
The problem had been unsolvable to many students, but she had figured it out relatively quickly. A solution was there, where none seemed to be. She solved it by reversing the conventional assumptions. She turned the page upside down.
X = I + IX
But she couldn’t turn this prison room upside down. Or could she? Kate McTiernan examined every single floorboard and each two-by-four in the wall. The wood smelled new. Maybe he was a builder, a contractor, or perhaps an architect?
No way out.
No apparent solution.
She couldn’t, wouldn’t accept that answer.
She thought about seducing him—if she could force herself to do it. No. He was too clever. He would know. Worse than that, she would know.
There had to be a way. She would find it.
Kate stared down at the note on the bedside table.
You must never try to escape—or you will be executed within hours.
Chapter 27
THE FOLLOWING afternoon I visited the Sarah Duke Gardens, the place where Naomi had been abducted six days ago. I needed to go there, to visit the scene, to think about my niece, to grieve in private.
There were more than fifty acres of exquisitely landscaped woodland gardens adjacent to the Duke University Medical Center, literally miles of allees. Casanova couldn’t have hoped for a better site for his kidnapping. He had been thorough. Perfect, so far. How was that possible?
I talked to staff members and also to a few students who had been there the day Naomi disappeared. The picturesque gardens were officially open from early morning until dusk. Naomi had last been seen at around four o’clock. Casanova had taken her in broad daylight. I couldn’t figure out how he’d done it. Not yet. Neither could the Durham police or the FBI.
I walked around the woods and gardens for almost two hours. I was overwhelmed by the thought that Scootchie had been taken right here.
A spot called the Terraces was particularly beautiful. Visitors could enter through a wisteria-covered pergola. Lovely wooden stairways led down to an irregular-shaped fishpond with a rock garden stacked directly behind. Visually, the Terraces were horizontal bands of rock, accented by stripes of the most beautiful color. Tulips, azaleas, camellias, irises, and peonies were in bloom.
I knew instinctively that this was a place that Scootchie would love.
I knelt near a visually striking patch of bright red and yellow tulips. I was wearing a gray suit with an open-necked white shirt. The ground was soft and stained my trousers, but it didn’t matter. I bowed my head low. Finally, I wept for Scootchie.
Chapter 28
Tick-cock. Tick-cock.
Kate McTiernan thought that she’d heard something. She was probably imagining it. You could definitely get a little buggy in here.
There it was again. The slightest creak in the floorboards. The door opened and he walked into the room without saying a word.
There he was! Casanova. He had on another mask. He looked like some kind of dark god—slender and athletic. Was that his fantasy image of himself?
Physically, he would be considered a hunk at the university or even as a cadaver in an autopsy room, which was preferable to her.
She noted his clothes: tight, faded blue jeans, black cowboy boots edged with soil, no shirt. He was definitely a hardbody, proud of his rippling chest. She was trying to remember everything—for the time when she escaped.
“I read all your rules,” Kate said, trying to act as calm as possible. Her body was shivering, though. “They’re very thorough, very clear.”
“Thank you. No one likes rules, least of all me. But they’re necessary sometimes.”
The mask hid his face, and it held Kate’s attention. She couldn’t take her eyes away from it. It reminded her of the elaborate, decorative masks from Venice. It was hand-painted, ritualistic in its artistic detail, and weirdly beautiful. Was he trying to be seductive? Kate wondered. Was that it?
“Why do you wear the mask?” she said. She kept her voice subservient, curious, but not demanding.
“As I said in my note, one day you’ll go free. You’ll be released. It‘s all in my plan for you. I couldn’t bear to see you hurt.”
“If I’m good. If I obey.”
“Yes. If you’re good. It won’t be that hard. Kate. I like you so much.”
She wanted to hit him, to go after him. Not yet, she warned herself. Not until you’re sure. You’ll only get one try at him.
He seemed to read her mind. He was very quick, very bright.
“No karate,” he said, and she sensed that he was smiling behind the mask. “Please remember that, Kate. I’ve actually seen you perform at your dojo. I’ve watched you. You’re very quick and you’re strong. So am I. I’m no stranger to martial arts.”
“That wasn’t what I was thinking about.” Kate frowned and looked up at the ceiling. She rolled back her eyes. She thought it was pretty fair acting under the pressure circumstances. No threat to Emma Thompson or Holly Hunter, but decent.
“I’m sorry then. I apologize,” he said. “I shouldn’t put words in your mouth. I won’t do it again. That’s a promise.”
He seemed almost sane at times, and that terrified her more than anything else so far. It was as if they were having a nice normal chat in a nice normal house, not in his house of horrors.
Kate looked at his hands. The fingers were long, and might even be considered elegant. An architect’s? A doctor’s hands? An artist’s? Certainly not a workingman’s hands.
“Well, what do you have in mind for me?” Kate decided on the direct approach. “Why am I here? Why this room, the clothes? All my things?”
His voice remained gentle and clam. He was actually trying to seduce her. “Oh, I guess I want to fall in love, to stay in love for a while. I want to feel real romance every day that I possible can. I want to feel something special in my life. I want to experience intimacy with another person. I’m not that different from everyone else. Except that I act instead of daydream.”
“Don’t you feel anything?” she asked. She feigned concern for him. She knew that sociopaths couldn’t feel emotion, at least that was her understanding.
He shrugged. She sensed that he was smiling again, laughing at her. “Sometimes I feel a great deal. I think that I’m too sensitive. May I tell you how beautiful you are?”
“Under the present circumstances, I wish you wouldn’t.”
He laughed a nice laugh and shrugged his shoulders again. “Okay. That’s settled then, isn’t it? No sweet talk for the two of us. Not for now, anyway. Bear in mind, I can be romantic. I actually prefer it that way.”
She wasn’t prepared for his sudden movement, his quickness. The stun gun appeared and hit her with a vicious jolt. She recognized the gun’s crackling sound, smelled the ozone. Kate fell back hard against the bedroom wall and cracked her head. The impact shook the whole house—wherever she was being kept.
“Oh, Jee-sus no,” Kate moaned softly.
He was all over her. Flailing arms and legs, all of his weight pressing down on her. He was going to kill her now. Oh God, she didn’t want to die like this, to have her life end in this way. It was so pointless, absurd, sad.
She felt a fierce and explosive rage swelling up in her. With a desperate effort she managed to kick out one leg, but she couldn’t move her arms. Her chest was on fire. She could feel him ripping off her blouse, touching her all over. He was aroused. She could feel him rubbing against her.
“No, please no,” she moaned. Her own voice sounded very far away.
He was kneading her breasts with both hands. She could taste blood, and feel its warmth trickle from the corner of her mouth. Kate finally began to cry. She was choking, and she could hardly breathe.
“I tried to be nice,” he said through tightly gritted teeth.
He stopped suddenly. He got up and unzipped his blue jeans and yanked them down around his ankles. He didn’t bother to take them off.
Kate stared up at him. His penis was large. Fully erect, and bright with pulsing blood and thick veins. He threw himself down on her and rubbed it against her body, moving it slowly against her breasts, her throat, and then her mouth and eyes.
Kate began to drift in and out of consciousness, in and out of reality. She tried to hold on to each thought that came to her. She needed to feel some control, even if it was only over her thoughts.
“Keep your eyes open,” he warned her in a deep growl. “Look at me, Kate. Your eyes are so beautiful. You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. Do you know that? Do you know how desirable you are?”
He was in a trance now. It seemed like it to Kate. His powerful body danced, snaked, writhed, as he thrust himself in and out of her. He sat up and he played with her breasts again. He caressed her hair, different parts of her face. His touch became gentle after a while. That made it even worse for her. She felt such humiliation and horrible shame. She hated him.
“I love you so much, Kate. I love you more than I’m capable of saying. I’ve never felt this way before. I promise you I haven’t. Never like this.”
He wasn’t going to kill her, Kate realized. He was going to let her live. He was going to come back again and again, whenever he wanted her. The horror was overwhelming, and Kate finally passed out. She let her spirit fall far away.
She didn’t feel it when he gave her the softest kiss good-bye. “I love you, sweet Kate. And I’m truly sorry about this. I do feel… everything.”
Chapter 29
I RECEIVED an urgent phone call from a law student and classmate of Naomi’s. She said her name was Florence Campbell and that she had to talk to me as soon as possible. “I really must talk with you, Dr. Cross. It’s imperative,” she said.
I met her on the Duke campus near the Bryan University Center. Florence turned out to be a black woman in her early twenties. We walked among the mangolias and well-kept Gothic-style school buildings. Neither of us looked as if we particularly belonged in the setting.
Florence was tall and gawky and somewhat mystifying at first. She had a stiff, high hairstyle that made me think of Nefertiti. Her appearance was decidedly odd, or maybe old-fashioned, and it struck me that people like her might still exist in rural Mississippi or Alabama. Florence had done her undergraduate work at Mississippi State University, which was about as far away from Duke University as you could get.
“I’m very, very sorry, Dr. Cross,” she said as we sat on a stone-and-wood bench with student memorabilia etched into its rails. “I apologize to you and your family.”
“You apologize about what, Florence?” I asked her. I didn’t understand what she meant.
“I didn’t make the effort to talk to you when you came to campus yesterday. No one had made it clear that Naomi might actually have been kidnapped. The Durham police certainly didn’t. They were just rude. They didn’t seem to think Naomi was in any real trouble.”
“Why do you think that is?” I asked Florence a question that was bouncing around inside my own head.
She stared deeply into my eyes. “Because Naomi’s an Afro-American woman. The Durham police, the FBI, they don’t care about us as much as they do about the white women.”
“Do you believe that?” I asked her.
Florence Campbell rolled her eyes. “It’s the truth, so why wouldn’t I believe it? Frantz Fanon argued that racist superstructures are permanently embedded in the psychology, economy, and culture of our society. I believe that, too.”
Florence was a very serious woman. She had a copy of Albert Murray’s The Omni-Americans under her arm. I was beginning to like her style. It was time to find out what secrets she knew about Naomi.
“Tell me what’s going on around here, Florence. Don’t edit your thoughts because I’m Naomi’s uncle, or because I’m a police detective. I need somebody to help me out. I am resisting a superstructure down here in Durham.”
Florence smiled. She pulled a tangle of hair away from her face. She was part Immanuel Kant, part Prissy from Gone With the Wind. “Here’s what I know so far, Dr. Cross. This is why some girls in the dorm were upset with Naomi.”
She took a sip of the magnolia-fragrant air. “It started with a man named Seth Samuel Taylor. He’s a social worker in the projects of Durham. I introduced Naomi to Seth. He’s my cousin.” Florence suddenly looked a little uncertain as she talked.
“I don’t see a problem so far,” I told her.
“Seth Samuel and Naomi fell in love around December of last year,” she went on. “Naomi was walking around with a starry-night look in her eyes, and that’s not like her, as you know. He came to the dorm at first, but then she started staying at Seth’s apartment in Durham.”
I was a little surprised that Naomi had fallen in love and hadn’t mentioned it to Cilla. Why didn’t she tell any of us about it? I still didn’t understand the problem with the other girls at the dorm.
“I’m pretty sure Naomi wasn’t the first coed to fall in love at Duke. Or to have a man over for tea and crumpets and whatever,” I said.
“She wasn’t just having a man over for whatever, she was having a black man over for whatever. Seth would show up from the projects in his dusty overalls and dusty workboots, and his leather engineering jacket. Naomi started to wear an old sharecropper’s straw hat around campus. Sometimes, Seth wore a hard hat with ‘Slave Labor’ written on it. He dared to be a little caustic and ironic about the sisters’ social activity, and, heaven forbid, their social awareness. He scolded the black housekeepers when they tried to do their jobs.”
“What do you think about your cousin Seth?” I asked Florence.
“Seth has a definite chip on his shoulder. He’s angry about racial injustice, to the point where it gets in the way of his ideas sometimes. Other than that, he’s really great. He’s a doer, not afraid to get his hands dirty. If he wasn’t my distant cousin…,” Florence said with a wink.
I had to smile at Florence’s sneaky sense of humor. She was a little Mississippi-gawky, but she was a neat lady. I was even starting to like her high hairstyle.
“You and Naomi were fast friends?” I asked her.
“We weren’t at first. I think we both felt we were competing for Law Review. Probably only one black woman could make it, you understand. But as our first year wore on, we got very close. I love Naomi. She’s the greatest.”
I suddenly wondered if Naomi’s disappearance might be connected to her boyfriend, and maybe had nothing to do with the killer loose in North Carolina.
“He’s a real good person. Don’t go hurting him,” Florence warned me. “Don’t even think about it.”
I nodded. “I’ll only break one of his legs.”
“He’s strong as an ox,” she came back at me.
“I am an ox,” I told Florence Campbell, imparting a little secret of my own.
Chapter 30
I STARED into the dark eyes of Seth Samuel Taylor. He stared back. I kept on staring. His eyes looked like jet black marbles set in almonds.
Naomi’s boyfriend was tall, very muscular, and workingman-hard. He reminded me more of a young lion than an ox. He looked disconsolate, and it was hard for me to question him. I had the premonition that Naomi was gone forever.
Seth Taylor hadn’t shaved, and I could tell that he hadn’t slept in days. I don’t think he had changed his clothes, either. He had on a badly wrinkled blue plaid shirt over a T-shirt, and holey 501s. He still wore his dusty workboots. Either he was very upset, or Seth Taylor was a shrewd actor.
I put out my hand, and his handshake was powerful. I felt as if I had put it into a carpenter’s vise.
“You look like shit” were Seth Taylor’s first words to me. Digital Underground was blaring out the “Humpty Dance” somewhere
in the neighborhood. Just like it was D.C., only a little behind the times.
“You do, too.”
“Well, fuck y’all,” he said. It was a familiar greeting on the streets, and we both knew it and laughed.
Seth’s smile was warm, and somewhat contagious. He had an overconfident air about him, but it wasn’t too obnoxious. Nothing I hadn’t seen before.
I could see that his broad nose had been broken a few times, but he was still good-looking in a rough-hewn sort of way. His presence dominated a room as Naomi’s did. The detective in me wondered about Seth Taylor.
Seth lived in an old working-class area north of downtown Durham. At one time, the neighborhood had been filled with tobacco-factory workers. His apartment was a duplex in an old shingled house that had been converted into two apartments. Posters of Arrested Development and Ice-T were up on the hallway walls. One poster read: Not since slavery has so much ongoing catastrophe been visited on black males.
The living room was filled with his friends and neighborhood folks. Sad Smokey Robinson songs played from a blaster. The friends were there to help in the search for Naomi. Finally, maybe I had some allies in the South.
Everyone at the apartment was anxious to talk to me about Naomi. None of them had any suspicions about Seth Samuel.
I was struck in particular by a woman with wise, sensitive eyes and skin the color of coffee with cream. Keesha Bowie was in her early thirties, a postal worker in Durham. Naomi and Seth had apparently talked her into going back to college to get her degree in psychology. She and I hit it off right away.
“Naomi is educated, so articulate, but you already know that.” Keesha took me aside and talked seriously to me. “But Naomi never ever uses her abilities or her education to belittle someone else, or make herself seem superior. That struck every one of us when we met her. She’s so down-to-earth, Alex. She doesn’t have a phony bone inside her. That this could happen to her is the saddest thing.”
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