Alex Cross 02 - Kiss the Girls

by James Patterson

  “Don’t even say it.” I dialed up a smile. “I’m not going to a hospital now. I think we’re done here for the night, though, We lost him, goddammit, we lost them both.”

  Chapter 74

  WE LEFT Will Rudolph’s penthouse apartment at just past two in the morning. That made it 5:00 A.M. our time. I was reeling. So was Kate. We called ourselves “the bruise brothers.” We were both out of it.

  Grogginess, exhaustion, possible internal injuries, they were one and the same. If I had ever felt this badly before, I couldn’t remember the time, and didn’t want to. We collapsed into the first of our rooms when we reached the Holiday Inn on Sunset.

  “Are you all right? You don’t look so good to me.” Not unexpectedly, Kate resumed her advertisement for the McTiernan Medical Group. She was a compelling spokeswoman, actually. She had a way of crinkling her forehead that made her look thoughtful and wise, and highly professional.

  “I’m not dying, I’m just dead tired.” I groaned and slowly lowered myself onto the edge of the comfy bed. “Just another tough day at the office.”

  “You’re so damn stubborn, Alex. Always the macho big-city detective. All right, I’m going to examine you myself. Don’t try to stop me or I’ll break your arm, which I’m entirely capable of doing.”

  Kate pulled a stethoscope and sphygmomanometer out of one of her travel bags. She wasn’t taking “no,” “absolutely not,” or “no way” as an answer.

  I sighed. “I’m not having a physical exam now, and especially here,” I told her with as much resolve as I could muster under the circumstances.

  “I’ve seen it all before.” Kate rolled her eyes and frowned. Then she smiled. No, actually she laughed. A doctor with a smile and a nice sense of humor. Imagine that.

  “Take your shirt off, Detective Cross,” Kate said to me. “Make my day. My night, anyway.”

  I started to pull my shirt over my head. I half moaned, half yelled. Just taking the shirt off hurt like hell. Maybe I was seriously hurt.

  “Oh, you’re just fine and dandy,” Dr. McTiernan pronounced with a wicked chuckle. “Can’t even get your shirt off.”

  She bent in close, extremely close, and listened to my breathing with the stethoscope. I could hear her breathing without the help of any machine. I liked the sound of her heartbeat up close like this.

  Kate probed my shoulder blade. Then she moved my arm back and forth, and it hurt. Maybe I was banged up a lot worse than I thought. More likely, she wasn’t using her gentlest touch while she examined me.

  She poked my abdomen and ribs next. I saw stars, but not a peep came from me in protest.

  “That hurt at all?” she asked. Doctor-to-patient talk. Detached, professional.

  “No. Maybe. Yes, a little. Okay, quite a lot. Ow! That wasn’t so bad. Ow!”

  “Getting hit by a train isn’t the way to keep the average human body in excellent running shape,” she said. She touched my ribs again, gentler this time.

  “That wasn’t my plan,” I said, offering the only defense I had.

  “What was your plan?”

  “My fleeting thought up at Big Sur was that maybe he knew where Naomi was, and I couldn’t let him get away. My ultimate plan was to find Naomi. It still is.”

  Kate used both her hands to feel my rib cage. She applied pressure, but nothing too extreme. She asked me if it hurt to take a breath.

  “To tell the truth, I kind of like this part,” I told her. “You have a nice touch.”

  “Uh-huh. Now the trousers, Alex. You can keep your drawers on if it makes you feel better.” A little of her drawl was creeping into her speech.

  “My drawers?” I grinned.

  “Your bikini underwear from Gentlemen’s Quarterly. Whatever you’re wearing today. Let’s see the goodies, Alex. I’d like to see a little skin.”

  “You don’t have to show such obvious damn glee about this.” I was very much awake all of a sudden. I did like the way Kate touched me, though. I liked it a lot, in fact. Different kinds of sparks were starting to fly.

  I pulled off my pants. I could not get to my socks, not even close.

  “Mmm. Not so bad, actually,” she offered her opinion of something or other. I began to feel hot, uncomfortably warm, in the hotel room. Under these circumstances, anyway.

  Kate applied gentle pressure against my hips, then against my pelvis. She asked me to slowly raise my feet off the bed, one at a time, while she kept her hands firmly on my hip joints. Very carefully, she felt my legs from my groin area, all the way down to my feet. I mostly liked that, too.

  “Lots of abrasions,” she said. “I wish I had some bacitracin ointment on hand. It’s an antibiotic.”

  “I was just thinking the same thing.”

  Finally, Kate stopped all the probing and poking and pulled away from me. She frowned and wrinkled her nose, nibbled her upper lip. She looked smart, academic, professional as the surgeon general.

  “Blood pressure’s a little high, borderline, but I don’t think anything’s broken,” she pronounced. “I don’t like the discoloration on your abdomen and your left hip, though. Tomorrow you’ll feel sore and stiff, and we have to go over to Cedars-Sinai and get a few X rays taken. Do we have a deal?”

  Actually, I felt a little better after Kate examined me and pronounced that I wouldn’t die suddenly during the night. “Yes. It wouldn’t be a complete day without one of our deals. Thank you for the examination, Doctor… thank you, Kate,” I said.

  “You’re quite welcome. It was an honor.” She finally smiled. “You look a little like Muhammad Ali, you know. The Great One.”

  So I have been told. “In his prime,” I joked. “I do dance like a butterfly.”

  “I’ll bet. I sting like a bee.” She winked and crinkled her nose again. A nice tic of hers.

  Kate lay back on the bed. I stayed there beside her. Close, but not close enough to touch. We were at least a foot apart. Very strange, but nice strange. I missed her touch already.

  We were quiet for the next minute or so. I glanced over at her. Maybe it was more than a glance. Kate had on a black skirt with black tights, a red peasant blouse. The bruises on her face had faded. I wondered about the rest of her. I held in a sigh.

  “I’m not Nanu the ice queen,” she said softly. “Trust me, I’m normal as they come. Frisky, fun, a little crazy. At least I was a month ago.”

  I was surprised that Kate thought I might be feeling that way about her. She was the opposite, warm and compassionate. “I think you’re great, Kate. Truth be told, I like you an awful lot.” There, it was out. Probably an understatement at that.

  We kissed gently. Just the briefest kiss. There was something right about it. I liked the feel of Kate’s lips, her mouth on mine. We kissed again, maybe to prove that the first one hadn’t been a mistake, or maybe to prove that it had been.

  I felt as if I could kiss Kate all night, but we both gently pulled away. This was probably more than either of us could handle right now.

  “Don’t you admire my self-control?” Kate smiled and said.

  “Yes and no,” I told her.

  I pulled on my hair shirt again. It took some effort, and produced hellacious pain. I would definitely go for X rays tomorrow. Kate started to cry and buried her face in the pillow. I turned toward her and put my hand on her shoulder.

  “You okay? Hey?”

  “I’m sorry. Shoot,” she whispered, trying to stop the tears. “I just… I know I don’t seem like it most of the time, but I’m freaking out, Alex. I’ve been freaking out. I’ve seen so many horrible things. Is this case as bad as your last one—the child kidnappings in D.C.?” she asked me.

  I held Kate very gently in my arms. I hadn’t seen her quite so vulnerable, so open about it, anyway. Everything suddenly became more relaxed between us.

  I whispered into her hair. “This case is as bad as anything I’ve seen. It’s actually worse because of Naomi, and because of what happened to you. I want him more than I wante
d Gary Soneji. I want both of these monsters.”

  “When I was a very little girl back home,” Kate said, still in a whisper, “I was just learning to talk. I was probably four months old.” She smiled at the exaggeration. “No, I was around two. When I would get cold, and I wanted to be held, I’d combine the two ideas. I used to say, ‘Cold me.’ It meant, ‘Hold me, I’m cold.’ Friends can do that. Cold me, Alex.”

  “Friends should,” I whispered back.

  We cuddled on top of the covers and kissed a little more, until we both finally fell asleep. Merciful sleep.

  I was the one who woke up first. It was 5:11 A.M. on the hotel room clock.

  “You awake? Kate?” I whispered.

  “Mmm hmmm. I’m awake now.”

  “We’re going back to the Gentleman’s apartment,” I told her.

  I called ahead and talked to the FBI agent in charge. I told him where to look, and what to look for.

  Chapter 75

  DR. WILL Rudolph’s once orderly and pristine penthouse apartment had ceased to exist as such. The three-bedroom penthouse looked like a state-of-the-art crime lab. It was a little past six when Kate and I arrived back there. I was pumped about my hunch.

  “Did you dream about the Gentleman?” Kate wanted to know. “Your hunch?”

  “Uh huh. I was processing information. It’s all processed now.”

  A half-dozen or so FBI techies and LAPD homicide detectives were still on the scene. The latest Pearl Jam played from somebody’s radio. The lead singer seemed to be in terrible pain. Dr. Rudolph’s wide-screen Mitsubishi TV was on, but with the sound turned off. One of the techies was eating an egg sandwich off greasy paper.

  I went searching for an agent named Phil Becton, the FBI’s suspect profiler. The Man. He had been called down from Seattle to gather all the available information on Rudolph, then match it against known data on other psychopaths. A profiler, if he or she is good, is actually invaluable in an investigation of this kind. I’d heard from Kyle Craig that Becton was “spooky good.” He had been a sociology professor at Stanford before he joined the Bureau.

  “You fully awake? Ready for this?” Becton asked when I finally located him in the master bedroom. He was at least six four, with another three inches of wiry red hair. Plastic evidence pouches and manila evidence envelopes were spread all around the bedroom. Becton wore one pair of eyeglasses, and had another pair on a chain around his neck.

  “I’m not sure if I’m awake,” I told Becton. “This is Dr. Kate McTiernan.”

  “Nice to meet you.” Becton shook hands with her, studying Kate’s face at the same time. She was data for him. He seemed a weird man, perfect for his job.

  “See there,” he said, pointing across the bedroom. The FBI had already taken apart the Gentleman’s clothes closet. “You were right on the money. We found a fake wall that Dr. Will Rudolph Hess built behind his skinny clothes closet. There’s about a foot and a half of extra space in there.”

  The clothes closet for his suits had been too skinny and peculiar. I’d made the connection in that strange region of the edge of sleep. The closet had to be his hiding spot. It was a shrine, but not to his expensive suits.

  “That’s where he kept his souvenirs?” I made an educated guess.

  “You got it. Little waist-high refrigerator-freezer back there. It’s where he kept the body parts he collected.” Becton pointed to the sealed containers. “Sunny Ozawa’s feet. Fingers. Two ears with different earrings, two separate victims.”

  “What else was in his collection?” I asked Phil Becton. I wasn’t in a hurry to look at feet, ears, fingers. His trophies from the murders of young girls around L.A.

  “Well, as you’d expect from reading the murder-scene briefs, he liked to collect their underwear as well. Freshly worn panties, bras, pantyhose, a woman’s T-shirt that says Dazed and Confused and still smells of Opium perfume. He likes to keep photographs, a few locks of auburn hair. He’s so neat. He kept each specimen in its own plastic bag. One through thirty-one. He’s labeled them with numbers.”

  “Preserve the smells,” I muttered. “The sandwich bags.”

  Becton nodded, and he also grinned like a gawky, goofy teenager. Kate looked at the two of us as if we were both a little nuts, which we were.

  “There’s something else I think you should see, though. This, you’re going to appreciate. Come over to my office.”

  On a plain wooden table next to the bed were some of the Gentleman’s treasures and souvenirs. Most of the paraphernalia had already been marked. It takes an organized task force to catch an organized killer.

  “Spooky good” Phil Becton emptied out one of the five-by-seven-inch envelopes so I could see the contents. A single photograph fell out of the envelope. It was of a young male, probably in his early twenties. The condition of the photo, as well as the male’s clothing, suggested it had been taken years earlier. Eight to ten years was my quick guess.

  The hair on my neck was starting to rise. I cleared my throat. “Who’s this supposed to be?”

  “Do you know this man, Dr. McTiernan?” Phil Becton turned to Kate. “Ever see this man before?”

  “I… I don’t know,” Kate answered Phil Becton. She swallowed hard. The Gentleman’s bedroom was quiet. Outside on the streets of Los Angeles, the orangish-red glow of morning had fallen over the city.

  Becton handed me metal tweezers that he kept handy in his breast pocket. “Flip it over for all the vital stats. Just like those Topps baseball cards we used to collect as kids. At least we did in Portland.”

  I figured that Becton had collected a lot more than baseball cards in his life and times. I carefully turned over the photo.

  A neatly handwritten legend was on the back. It reminded me of the way Nana Mama identified every single old photo in our house. “Sometimes you forget who people are, Alex. Even people in photographs with you,” she told me. “You don’t believe me, but you’ll see as time passes you by.”

  I didn’t think that Will Rudolph was likely to forget the person in the picture, but he had handwritten a legend all the same. My head was spinning a little. We finally had an unbelievable break in the case. I was holding it right under my nose with crime-scene tweezers.

  Dr. Wick Sachs, the handwriting on the photo read.

  A doctor, I thought. Another doctor. Imagine that.

  Durham, North Carolina, the legend continued.

  He was from the Research Triangle area. He was from the South.

  Casanova, Rudolph had written.

  Part Four

  Twinning

  Chapter 76

  NAOMI CROSS was awakened by rock music blaring from the wall speakers. She recognized the Black Crowes. The overhead lights flashed on and off. She jumped out of bed and quickly pulled on wrinkled jeans and a turtleneck and ran to the door of her room.

  The loud music and boldly flashing lights signaled a meeting. Something terrible has happened, she thought. Her heart was in free fall.

  Casanova kicked open the door. He had on tight jeans, engineering boots, a black leather jacket. His mask was painted with chalky streaks that resembled lightning. He was in a frenzy. Naomi had never seen him look this angry.

  “Living room! Now!” he shouted as he grabbed her arm and yanked her out of the room.

  The floor of the narrow corridor felt damp and cold under Naomi’s bare feet. She had forgotten to put on her sandals. It was too late to go back for them.

  She fell in step with a young woman. The two of them walked nearly parallel to each other. Naomi was surprised when the woman quickly turned her head and stared at her. The eyes were large and deep green. Naomi had given her the name Green Eyes.

  “I’m Kristen Miles.’ The woman spoke in a hurried whisper. “We have to do something to help ourselves. We have to take a chance. And soon.”

  Naomi said nothing in response, but she reached out and lightly grazed the back of Green Eyes’s hand.

  Contact was forbidden, but j
ust to touch another human inside the horrifying prison was necessary now. Naomi looked into the woman’s eyes and saw only defiance. No fear. That made her feel so good. Both of them had kept themselves together—somehow.

  The captive women in the hallway glanced furtively at Naomi as they shuffled in silence toward the living room in the strange house. Their eyes were dark and hollow. Some of them didn’t wear makeup anymore and their appearance frightened Naomi. It was getting worse every day, ever since Kate McTiernan had managed to escape somehow.

  Casanova had brought a new girl to the house. Anna Miller. Anna was breaking the house rules, just as Kate McTiernan had done. Naomi had heard the woman’s cries for help and Casanova might have heard them, too. It was difficult to figure out when he would be away. He kept very odd hours.

  Lately, Casanova was leaving them without any contact for longer and longer periods. He wasn’t going to let them go. That was one of his lies. Naomi knew it was getting dangerous for all the women.

  Naomi sensed something desperate in the air. She could hear cries of alarm up ahead, and she tried to calm her own mounting fears and panic. She had lived in the projects of Washington. She’d seen horror before. Two of her friends had been murdered by the time she was sixteen.

  Then she heard him. His voice was strange and high-pitched. He was a madman. “Come right in, ladies. Don’t be shy. Don’t stop in the doorway! Come in, come in. Join the party, the swinging soiree.”

  Casanova was yelling above the testosterone rock ‘n’ roll that blared through the halls. Naomi closed her eyes for a brief moment. She tried to collect herself. I don’t want to see this, whatever it is, but I have to.

  She finally entered the room. Her body began to shake. What she saw was worse than anything she remembered from the projects. She had to push her fist into her mouth to keep from screaming out.

  A long, slender body twirled in lazy circles from the ceiling beams. The woman was naked except for silver-blue stockings running up her long legs. A blue high-heeled shoe dangled from one foot. The other shoe had dropped to the floor and lay on its side.