Alex Cross 02 - Kiss the Girls (30 page)

“Is the movie marquee a message, too? What is he telling us, Alex?”

“That this is all a ‘riotous comedy’ for him? It just might be,” I said.

“He does have a sense of humor, Alex. I can vouch for that. He was capable of laughing at his own bad jokes.”

I called Kyle Craig from a pay phone in a nearby Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. I told him about the
woman and children are starving
poster. He allowed that it could be a message for us. Anything was possible with Casanova.

When I came out of the store, Sachs and Suzanne Wellsley were still inside the Varsity Theatre, presumably laughing riotously
at the Italian actor Roberto Benigni. Or perhaps Sachs was laughing at us?
Women and children are starving.

Just past two-thirty, Sachs and Dr. Wellsley came out of the Varsity Theatre. They strolled back to the corner of Franklin
and Columbus. The half-block walk seemed to take ten minutes. They ducked inside the ever-popular Spanky’s, where they had
a late lunch.

“Isn’t this sweet. Young love,” Kate said with a hiss in her voice. “Damn him. And damn her, too. Damn Spanky’s for giving
them food and grog.”

They sat near the front window inside the restaurant. On purpose? They held hands at their table and kissed a few times. Casanova
the Lover? A lunchtime tryst with another professor? None of it made any sense yet.

At three-thirty they left Spanky’s restaurant and walked the half-block back to the message board. They kissed again, but
this time with more restraint, and finally parted. Sachs drove back to his house in Hope Valley. Wick Sachs was definitely
playing with us. His own game, for his own private pleasure.

Rat and cat.

K
ATE AND I decided to have a late supper at a place called Frog and the Redneck in downtown Durham. She said we had to have
a couple of hours’ break from the action. I knew she was right.

Kate wanted to go home first, and asked me to call for her in a couple of hours. I wasn’t prepared for the Kate who opened
the door of her apartment. It wasn’t Kate’s usual
bas couture
look. She had on a beige linen sheath with a flowered blouse worn as a jacket. Her long brown hair was tied back with a bright
yellow scarf.

“My Sunday-go-to-eatin’ clothes,” Kate said with a conspiratorial wink. “Except I can never afford to go out to eat on my
post-med-school budget. Occasionally KFC or Arby’s.”

“You have a hot date tonight?” I asked her in my usual kidding tone. I wondered who was kidding whom, though.

She casually took my arm in the crook of hers. “As a matter of fact, maybe I do. You look nice tonight. Very dashing, very
cool.”

I had abandoned my usual
bas couture
look, too. I’d decided on dashing and cool instead.

I don’t remember much about the car ride to the Durham restaurant, except that we talked all the way. We never had any trouble
talking. I don’t exactly remember the meal, except that it was very good regional/continental grub. I have the recollection
of Muscovy duck, of blueberries and plums in whipped cream.

What I remember most clearly is Kate sitting with one arm propped on the table, her face resting easily on the back of her
hand. A very nice picture-portrait. I remember Kate taking off the yellow scarf at one point during dinner. “Too much,” she
said and grinned.

“I have a new pet theory, theory du jour, about the two of us. I think it’s right. Do you want to hear it?” she asked me.
She was in a good mood, in spite of the harrowing and frustrating investigation. We both were.

“Nah,” said the wiseguy in me, the part afraid of too much in the way of emotions. Lately, anyway.

Kate wisely ignored me and went on with her theory. “I’ll start… Alex, we’re both really, really afraid of attachments right
now in our lives. That’s obvious. We’re both
too
afraid, I think.” She was carefully leading the way. She sensed this was difficult territory for me, and she was right.

I sighed. I didn’t know if I wanted to get into any of this right now, but I plunged ahead. “Kate, I haven’t told you much
about Maria…. We were very much in love when she died. It was like that between us for six years. This isn’t selective memory
on my part. I used to tell myself, ‘God I’m unbelievably lucky I found this person.’ Maria felt the same way.” I smiled. “Or
so she told me. So yes, I
am
afraid of attachments. Mostly I’m afraid of losing someone I love that much again.”

“I’m afraid of losing someone else, too, Alex,” Kate said in a soft voice. I could barely hear her words. Sometimes she seemed
shy, and it was touching. “There’s a magical line in
The Pawnbroker,
magical to me, anyway. ‘Everything I loved was taken away from me, and I did not die.’”

I took her hand and kissed it lightly. I felt an overwhelming tenderness toward Kate at that moment. “I know the line,” I
said.

I could see anxiety in her dark brown eyes. Maybe we both needed to take this thing forward, whatever was beginning to happen
between us, whatever the risk might be.

“Can I tell you something else? One more true confession that doesn’t come easily? This is a bad one,” she said.

“I want to hear it. Of course I do. Anything you want to tell me.”

“I’m afraid I’m going to die just like my sisters, that I’ll get cancer, too. At my age, I’m a medical time bomb. Oh, Alex,
I’m afraid to get close to someone, and then get sick on them.” Kate let out a long, deep breath. It was obviously a hard
thing for her to say.

We held hands for a long time in the restaurant. We sipped port wine. We were both a little quiet, letting powerful new feelings
wash over us, getting used to them.

After dinner we went back to her apartment in Chapel Hill. The first thing I did was to check around for uninvited houseguests.
I had tried to talk her into a hotel room during the car ride, but, as usual, Kate said no. I remained paranoid about Casanova
and his games.

“You’re so damn stubborn,” I told her as we both checked all the doors and windows.

“Fiercely independent is a much better description,” Kate countered. “It comes with the black belt in karate. Second degree.
Watch yourself.”

“I am.” I laughed. “I’ve also got eighty pounds on you.”

Kate shook her head. “Won’t be enough.”

“You’re probably right.” I laughed out loud.

No one was hiding in the apartment on Old Ladies Lane. No one was there except the two of us. Maybe that was the scariest
thing of all.

“Please don’t run off now. Stay for a while. Unless you want to or have to,” Kate said to me. I was still standing in her
kitchen. My hands were awkwardly jammed into my pockets.

“I’ve got nowhere I’d rather be,” I told her. I was feeling a little nervous and keyed up.

“I have a bottle of Château de la Chaize. I think that’s the name. It only cost nine bucks, but it’s decent wine. I bought
it just for tonight, even though I didn’t know it at the time.” Kate smiled. “Three months ago when I made the purchase.”

We sat on Kate’s couch in the living room. The place was neat but still funky. There were black-and-white photos on the walls
of her sisters and her mother. Happier times for Kate. There was an amazing picture of her in her pink uniform at the Big
Top Truck Stop, where she worked to pay her way through school. The waitressing job was part of the reason medical school
had meant so much to her.

Maybe the wine made me tell Kate more about Jezzie Flanagan than I wanted to. It had been my only attempt at a serious attachment
since Maria’s death. Kate told me about her friend, Peter McGrath. History professor at the University of North Carolina.
As she talked about Peter, I had the disturbing thought that maybe he was one suspect we had glossed over too quickly.

I couldn’t leave the case alone,
not even for one night. Maybe I was just trying to escape into my work again. Still, I made a mental note to check out Dr.
Peter McGrath a little more carefully.

Kate leaned in close to me on the couch. We kissed. Our mouths made a perfect fit. We had both done this before, kissed, but
maybe never as well.

“Will you stay tonight? Please stay,” Kate whispered. “Just this one night, Alex. We don’t have to be scared about this, do
we?”

“No, we don’t have to be scared,” I whispered back. I felt like a schoolboy. Maybe that was okay, though.

I didn’t know exactly what to do next, how to touch Kate, what to say, what
not
to do. I listened to the soft hum of her breathing. I let everything take its natural course.

We kissed again, as gently as I ever remember kissing anyone. We
were
both needy. But we were so vulnerable at that moment.

Kate and I went to her room. We held each other for a long time. We talked in whispers. We slept together. We didn’t make
love that night.

We were best friends. We didn’t want to ruin it.

NAOMI THOUGHT that she was finally losing the last pieces of her sanity. She had just
seen Alex kill Casanova,
even though she knew it hadn’t really happened. She’d seen the shooting with her own eyes. She was hallucinating, and she
couldn’t stop the waves of delusion anymore.

She talked to herself sometimes. The sound of her own voice was comforting.

Naomi became quiet and thoughtful as she sat on an armchair in the darkened prison cell. Her violin was there, but she hadn’t
played it in days. She was afraid for a whole new reason now.
Maybe he wasn’t coming back again.

Maybe Casanova had been caught, and he wouldn’t tell the police where he kept his captives. That was his ultimate leverage,
wasn’t it? That was his diabolical secret. His final edge and bargaining chip.

Maybe he’d already been killed in a shootout. How could the police hope to find her and the others if he was dead?
Something’s happened,
she thought.
He hasn’t been here in the last two days. Something has changed.

She desperately wanted to see sunny blue skies, grass, the Gothic spires of the university, the layered terraces at the Sarah
Duke Gardens, even the Potomac River in all of its muddy-gray glory back home in Washington.

She finally got up from the easy chair beside her bed. Very, very slowly, Naomi shuffled across the bare wooden floor, and
stood by the locked door with her cheek pressed against the cool wood.

Should I do this crazy thing?
she wondered.
Do I sign my own death warrant?

Naomi could barely catch her breath. She listened for sounds in the mysterious house, any tiny, insignificant sound at all.
The rooms had been soundproofed—but if you made enough noise, some sound carried through the eerie building.

She went over what she wanted to say, exactly what she would say.

My name is Naomi Cross. Where are you, Kristen? Green Eyes? I’ve decided that you’re right. We have to do something…. We have
to do something together…. He’s not coming back.

Naomi had thought this moment through clearly, intelligently, she hoped—but she
couldn’t say
the words out loud. She understood that plotting against him could mean her death.

Kristen Miles had called out to her a few times during the past twenty-four hours, but Naomi hadn’t answered back. It was
forbidden to talk, and she had seen his warning to them. The hanged woman a few days before. Poor Anna Miller. Another law
student.

She couldn’t hear anything,
right now. White noise, that was all. The static of silence. The gentle hum of eternity. There was never even the sound of
a car. Not a single backfire or a distant horn. Not even the boom of an airplane passing overhead.

Naomi had decided they must be underground, at least a couple of levels down into the earth. Had he built this underground
complex, this sinplex? Had he thought it all through, dreamed about it, and then done it in some burst of psychopathic fury
and energy? She thought that he had indeed.

She was getting herself ready to break the silence. She
had
to talk to Kristen, to Green Eyes. Her mouth was so dry. It felt like cotton wool. Naomi finally licked her lips.

“I would kill for a Coke, I would kill
him
for a Coke,” she, whispered to herself. “I
could
kill him given the chance.”

I could kill Casanova. I could commit a murder. I’m that far gone, aren’t I?
she thought and had to stifle a sob.

Naomi finally called out in a loud, strong voice. “Kristen, can you hear me? Kristen? It’s Naomi Cross!”

She was shivering, and warm tears streamed down her cheeks. She’d gone against him and his shitty, sacred rules.

Green Eyes called back immediately. The other woman’s voice sounded so good. “I can hear you, Naomi! I think I’m only a few
doors away from you. I hear you fine. Keep talking, I’m sure he’s not here, Naomi.”

Naomi didn’t think anymore about what she was doing. Maybe he wasn’t there; maybe he was. It didn’t matter now.

“He’s going to kill us,” she called back. “Something’s different about him! He’s going to kill us for sure. If we’re going
to do anything, we have to do it the first chance we get.”

“Naomi’s right!” Kristen’s voice was slightly muffled, as if she were talking from the bottom of a well. “Do you all hear
Naomi? Of course you do!”

“I have one idea for everyone to consider.” Naomi spoke even more loudly this time. She wanted to keep this communication
going now. They all had to hear her, all the trapped women. “The next time he gets us together—we have to go for it. If we
rush him all at once, he might hurt some of us. But he can’t stop all of us! What do you think?”

Just then the heavy wooden door to Naomi’s room opened a crack. Light streamed in.

Naomi watched in stark horror as the door swung open. She couldn’t move, couldn’t speak a word.

Her heart beat painfully in her chest,
pounding,
and she couldn’t get a breath. She felt as if she were about to die. He’d been there, waiting, listening all this time.