Alex Cross 02 - Kiss the Girls (4 page)

Sampson pulled in behind a dented ten-year-old Toyota that belonged to the wife of my late brother Aaron. Cilla Cross was
good friend. She was tough and smart. I had ended up liking her more than my brother. What was Cilla doing here?

“What
the hell
is going on at the house?” I asked Sampson again. I was starting to get a little concerned.

“Invite me in for a cold beer,” he said as he pulled the key from the ignition. “Least you can do.”

Sampson was already up and out of the car. He moves like a slick winter wind when he wants to. “Let’s go inside, Alex.”

I had the car door open, but I was still sitting inside. “I live here. I’ll go in when I feel like it.” I didn’t feel like
it suddenly. A sheen of cold sweat was on the back of my neck. Detective paranoia? Maybe, maybe not.

“Don’t be difficult,” Sampson called back over his shoulder, “for once in your life.”

A long icy shiver ran through my body. I took a deep breath. The thought of the human monster I had recently helped put away
still gave me nightmares. I deeply feared he would escape one day. The mass killer and kidnapper had already been to Fifth
Street once.

What in hell was going on inside my house?

Sampson didn’t knock on the front door, or ring the bell, which dangled on red-and-blue wires. He just waltzed inside as if
he lived there. Same as it’s always been.
Mi casa es su casa.
I followed him into my own house.

My boy, Damon, streaked into Sampson’s outstretched arms, and John scooped up my son as if he were made of air. Jannie came
skating toward me, calling me “Big Daddy” as she ran. She was already in her slipper-sock pajamas, smelling of fresh talcum
after her bath. My little lady.

Something was wrong in her big brown eyes. The look on her face froze me.

“What is it, my honeybunch?” I asked as I nuzzled against Jannie’s smooth, warm cheek. The two of us nuzzle a lot. “What’s
wrong? Tell your Daddy all your troubles and woes.”

In the living room I could see three of my aunts, my two sisters-in-law, my one living brother, Charles. My aunts had been
crying; their faces were all puffy and red. So had my sister-in-law Cilla, and she isn’t one to get weepy without a good reason.

The room had the unnatural, claustrophobic look of a wake.
Somebody has died,
I thought.
Somebody we all love has died.
But everybody I love seemed to be there, present and accounted for.

Nana Mama, my grandmother, was serving coffee, iced tea, and also cold chicken pieces, which no one seemed to be eating. Nana
lives on Fifth Street with me and the kids. In her own mind, she’s raising the three of us.

Nana had shrunk to around five feet by her eightieth year. She is still the most impressive person I know in our nation’s
capital, and I know most of them—the Reagans, the Bush people, and now the Clintons.

My grandmother was dry-eyed as she did her serving. I have rarely seen her cry, though she is a tremendously warm and caring
person. She just doesn’t cry anymore. She says she doesn’t have that much of life left, and she won’t waste it on tears.

I finally walked into the living room and asked the question that was beating against the inside of my head. “It’s nice to
see everyone—Charles, Cilla, Aunt Tia—
but would someone please tell me what’s going on here?
”

They all stared at me.

I still had Jannie cradled in my arms. Sampson had Damon tucked like a hairy football under his massive right arm.

Nana spoke for the assembled group. Her almost inaudible words sent the sharpest pain right through me.

“It’s Naomi,” she said quietly. “Scootchie is missing, Alex.” Then Nana Mama started to weep for the first time in years.

C
ASANOVA SCREAMED, and the loud sound coming from deep inside his throat turned into a raspy howl.

He was crashing through the deep woods, thinking about the girl he had abandoned back there. The horror of what he had done.
Again.

Part of him wanted to go back for the girl—
save her
—an act of mercy.

He was experiencing spasms of guilt now, and he began to run faster and faster. His thick neck and chest were covered with
perspiration. He felt weak, and his legs were rubbery and undependable.

He was fully conscious of what he had done. He just couldn‘t stop himself.

Anyway, it was better this way. She had seen his face. It was stupid of him to think she would ever be able to understand
him. He had seen the fear and loathing in her eyes.

If only she’d listened when he’d tried to talk to her. After all, he was different from other mass killers—
he could feel everything
he did. He could feel love… and suffer loss… and…

He angrily swept away the death mask. It was all her fault. He would have to change personas now. He needed to stop being
Casanova.

He needed to be
himself.
His pitiful other self.

I
T’S NAOMI.
Scootchie is missing, Alex.

We held the most intense Cross family emergency conference in our kitchen, where they’ve always been held. Nana made more
coffee, and also herbal tea for herself. I put the kids to bed first. Then I cracked open a bottle of Black Jack and poured
stiff drinks of whiskey all around.

I learned that my twenty-two-year-old niece had been missing in North Carolina for four days. The police down there had waited
that long to contact our family in Washington. As a policeman, I found that hard to understand. Two days was pretty standard
in missing-person cases. Four days made no sense.

Naomi Cross was a law student at Duke University. She’d made Law Review and was near the top of her class. She was the pride
of everyone in our family, including myself. We had a nickname for her that went back to when she was three or four years
old.
Scootchie.
She always used to “scootch” up close to everybody when she was little. She loved to “scootch,” and hug, and
be
hugged. After my brother Aaron died, I helped Cilla to raise her. It wasn’t hard—she was always sweet and funny, cooperative,
and so very smart.

Scootchie was missing. In North Carolina. Four days now.

“I talked to a detective named Ruskin,” Sampson told the group in the kitchen. He was trying not to act like a street cop,
but he couldn’t help it. He was on the case now. Flat-faced and serious. The Sampson stare.

“Detective Ruskin sounded knowledgeable about Naomi’s disappearance. Seemed like a straight-ahead cop on the phone. Something
strange, though. Told me that a law-school friend of Naomi’s reported her missing. Her name’s Mary Ellen Klouk.”

I had met Naomi’s friend. She was a future lawyer, from Garden City, Long Island. Naomi had brought Mary Ellen home to Washington
a couple of times. We’d gone to hear Handel’s
Messiah
together one Christmas at the Kennedy Center.

Sampson took off his dark glasses, and kept them off, which is rare for him. Naomi was his favorite, and he was as shook up
as the rest of us. She called Sampson “His Grimness,” and “Darth One,” and he loved it when she teased him.

“Why didn’t this Detective Ruskin call us before now? Why didn’t those university people call me?” my sister-in-law asked.
Cilla is forty-one. She has allowed herself to grow to ample proportions. I doubted that she was five feet four, but she had
to be close to two hundred pounds. She’d told me that she didn’t want to be attractive to men anymore.

“Don’t know the answer to that yet,” Sampson told Cilla and the rest of us. “They told Mary Ellen Klouk
not
to call us.”

“What exactly did Detective Ruskin have to say about the delay?” I asked Sampson.

“Detective said there were extenuating circumstances. He wouldn’t elaborate for me, persuasive as I can be.”

“You tell him we could have the conversation in person?”

Sampson nodded slowly. “Uh-huh. He said the result would be the same. I told him I doubted that. He said okay. Man seemed
to have no fears.”

“Black man?” Nana asked. She is a racist, and proud of it. She says she’s too old to be socially or politically correct. She
doesn’t so much dislike white people as distrust them.

“No, but I don’t think that’s the problem, Nana. Something else is going on.” Sampson looked across the kitchen table at me.
“I don’t think he
could
talk.”

“FBI?” I asked. It was the obvious guess when things get overly secretive. The FBI understands better than Bell Atlantic,
the
Washington Post,
and the
New York Times
that information is power.

“That could be the problem. Ruskin wouldn’t admit it on the phone.”

“I better talk to him,” I said. “In person would probably be best, don’t you think?”

“
I
think that would be good, Alex.” Cilla spoke up from her end of the table.

“Maybe I’ll tag along,” Sampson said, grinning like the predatory wolf that he is.

There were sage nods and at least one hallelujah in the overcrowded kitchen. Cilla came around the table and hugged me tight.
My sister-in-law was shaking like a big, spreading tree in a storm.

Sampson and I were going South. We were going to bring back Scootchie.

I
HAD to tell Damon and Jannie about their “Auntie Scootch,” which is what the kids have always called her. My kids sensed
something bad had happened. They knew it, just as they somehow know my most secret and vulnerable places. They had refused
to go to sleep until I came and talked to them.

“Where’s Auntie Scootch at? What happened to her?” Damon demanded as soon as I entered the kids’ bedroom. He had heard enough
to understand that Naomi was in some kind of terrible trouble.

I have a need always to tell the kids the truth, if it’s possible. I’m committed to truth-telling between us. But every once
in a while, it is so hard to do,

“We haven’t heard from Aunt Naomi in a few days,” I began. “That’s why everybody is worried tonight, and why they came over
to our house,” I said.

I went on. “Daddy’s on the case now. I’m going to do my best to find Aunt Naomi in the next couple of days. You know that
your daddy usually solves problems. Am I right?”

Damon nodded to the truth in that, and seemed reassured by what I had told them, but mostly by my serious tone. He came into
my arms and gave me a kiss, which he hasn’t been doing as much lately. Jannie gave me the softest kiss, too. I held them both
in my arms. My sweet babies.

“Daddy’s on the case now,” Jannie whispered. That warmed my spirits some. As Billie Holiday put it, “God bless the child who’s
got his own.”

By eleven the kids were sleeping peacefully, and the house was beginning to clear. My elderly aunts had already gone home
to their quirky old-lady nests, and Sampson was getting ready to leave.

He usually lets himself in and out, but this time, Nana Mama walked Sampson to the door, which is a rarity. I went with them.
Safety in numbers.

“Thank you for going down South with Alex tomorrow,” Nana said to Sampson in confidential tones. I wondered who she thought
might be listening, trying to overhear her intimacies. “You see now, John Sampson, you
can
be civilized and somewhat useful when you want to be. Didn’t I always tell you that?” She pointed a curled, knobby finger
at his massive chin. “Didn’t I?”

Sampson grinned down at her. He revels in his physical superiority even to a woman who is eighty. “I let Alex go by himself,
I’d only have to come later, Nana. Rescue him
and
Naomi,” he said.

Nana and Sampson cackled like a pair of cartoon crows on an old familiar fencepost. It was good to hear them laugh. Then she
somehow managed to wrap her arms around Sampson and me. She stood there—like some little old lady holding on to her two favorite
redwood trees. I could feel her fragile body tremble. Nana Mama hadn’t hugged the two of us like that in twenty years. I knew
that she loved Naomi as if she were her own child, and she was very afraid for her.

It can’t be Naomi. Nothing bad could happen to her, not to Naomi.
The words kept drifting through my head. But something had happened to her, and now I would have to start thinking and acting
like a policeman. Like a homicide detective.
In the South.

“Have faith and pursue the unknown end.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes said that. I have faith. I pursue the unknown. That’s my job description.

S
EVEN O’CLOCK in the evening was a busy time in late April on the stunningly beautiful campus of Duke University. The physical
impressiveness of the students was visible everywhere at the self-proclaimed “Harvard of the South.” The magnolia trees, especially
along Chapel Drive, were plentiful and in full bloom. The well-kept and striking orderliness of the grounds made it one of
the most visually satisfying campuses in the United States.

Casanova found the fragrant air intoxicating as he strolled between tall graystone gates and onto the university’s West Campus.
It was a few minutes past seven. He had come for one reason only—to hunt. The entire process was exhilarating and irresistible.
Impossible to stop once he had begun. This was foreplay. Lovely in every way.

I’m like a killer shark, with a human brain, and even a heart,
Casanova thought, as he walked.
I am a predator without peer, a thinking predator.

He believed that men loved the hunt—lived for it, in fact—though most wouldn’t admit it. A man’s eyes never stopped searching
for beautiful, sensual women, or for sexy men and boys, for that matter. All the more at a prime location like the Duke campus,
or the campuses at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, or North Carolina State University at Raleigh, or many
others he’d visited throughout the Southeast.

Just look at them!
The slightly uppity Duke coeds were among the very finest and most
“contemporary”
American women. Even in dirty cutoffs, or ridiculous holey 501s, or baggy hobo’s pants, they were something to see, to watch,
occasionally to photograph, to fantasize about endlessly.