Alex Cross 02 - Kiss the Girls (11 page)

“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.
”

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.

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.”

I talked with Keesha some more, and I liked her very much. She was smart and pretty, but this wasn’t the time for any of that
stuff. I looked for Seth and found him off by himself on the second floor. The bedroom window was open, and he was sitting
outside on the gently sloping roof. Robert Johnson was singing his haunting blues somewhere in the dark.

“Mind if I come out and join you? This old roof hold us both?” I said from the window.

Seth smiled. “If it doesn’t and we both crash through to the front porch, it’ll be a good story for everybody. Worth the fall
and the broken neck. C’mon out, you got a mind to.” He spoke in a sweet, almost musical, drawl. I could see why Naomi would
like him.

I climbed out and sat with Seth Samuel in the darkness settling over Durham. We heard a smaller-town version of the police
sirens and excited shouts of the inner city.

“We used to sit out here,” Seth muttered in a low voice. “Naomi and I.”

“You okay?” I asked him.

“Nah. Never been any worse in my life. You?”

“Never worse.”

“After you called,” Seth said, “I was thinking about this visit, about this talk that we’d eventually have. I tried to think
the way that you might be thinking. You know, like a police
detective.
Please, don’t have any more thoughts that there’s some chance that I could have anything to do with Naomi’s disappearance.
Don’t waste time on that.”

I looked over at Seth Samuel. He was hunched over, and his head rested on his chest. Even in the dark I could see that his
eyes were shiny-wet. His grief was a palpable thing. I wanted to tell him that we were going to find her and that everything
would work out, but I knew no such thing.

We finally held on to each other. We were both missing Naomi in our own way, mourning together, on the dark roof.

A
FRIEND of mine from the FBI finally returned one of my phone calls that night. I was doing some reading when he called:
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
I was working on Casanova’s profile and still not getting very far.

I had originally met Special Agent Kyle Craig during the long, difficult manhunt for the serial kidnapper Gary Soneji. Kyle
had always been a straight shooter. He wasn’t territorial like most FBI agents, and not too uptight by Bureau standards, either.
Sometimes I thought that he didn’t
belong
in the FBI. He was too much of a human being.

“Thanks for finally returning my calls, stranger,” I said over the phone. “Where are you working out of these days?”

Kyle surprised me with his answer. “I’m here in Durham, Alex. To be a little more precise, I’m in the lobby of your hotel.
C’mon down for a drink or three in the infamous Bull Durham Room. I need to talk to you. I’ve got a special message for you
from J. Edgar himself.”

“I’ll be right down. I’ve been wondering what the Hoove’s been up to since he faked his own death.”

Kyle was seated at a table for two beside a large bay window. The window faced directly onto the putting green of the university
golf course. A lank man who looked like a schoolboy was teaching a Duke coed how to putt in the dark. The jock was standing
behind his lady, showing her his best putt-putt moves.

Kyle was watching the lesson of the links with obvious amusement. I watched Kyle with obvious amusement. He turned as if he
could sense my presence.

“Man, you have a nose for bad trouble,” he said by way of a greeting. “I was sorry to hear that your niece is missing. It’s
good to see you, in spite of the particularly vile and shitty circumstances.”

I sat down across from the agent, and we started to talk shop. As always, he was extremely upbeat and positive without sounding
naïve. It’s a gift he has. Some people feel that Kyle could wind up at the top of the Bureau, and that it would be the best
thing that ever happened.

“First, the honorable Ronald Burns appears in Durham. Now you show up. What gives?” I asked Kyle.

“Tell me what
you
have so far,” he said. “I’ll try to reciprocate as much as I can.”

“I’m doing psych profiles on the murdered women,” I told Kyle. “The so-called
rejects.
In two of the cases, the rejected women had very strong personalities. They probably gave him a lot of trouble. That could
be why he killed them, to get rid of them. The exception was Bette Anne Ryerson. She was a mother, in therapy, and she might
have had a nervous breakdown.”

Kyle massaged his scalp with one hand. He was also shaking his head. “You’ve been given no information, no help whatsoever.
But
zip-a-dee-doo-dah
” —he smiled at me— “you’re still a half-step ahead of our people. I haven’t heard that theory about the ‘rejects.’ It’s pretty
good, Alex,
especially
if he’s a control freak.”

“He could definitely be a control freak, Kyle. There has to be a damn good reason why he got rid of those three women. Now,
I thought you were going to tell me some things I didn’t know.”