Alex Cross 02 - Kiss the Girls (13 page)

Kate was terrified and disgusted, but trying not to show it. She had to do something, say something, that would keep him away
from her for now.

“I’m not in the mood, honey,” Kate shot back an answer. “I don’t feel up to getting dressed.” She couldn’t keep the sarcasm
completely out of her voice. “I have a headache. What kind of day is it, anyway? I haven’t been outside yet.”

He laughed. An almost-normal laugh; a nice-enough laugh from behind his nasty mask. “Sunny Carolina blue skies, Kate. Temperature
in the high seventies. One of the ten best days of the year.”

With one hand, he suddenly yanked her to her feet. He pulled her arm hard—as if he were trying to tear it from its socket.
Kate yelled as violent pain shot up her arm. It exploded in the soft space, the hollow behind her eyes.

In a fury, in panic, she reached out and pulled down on the mask

“Stupid!
Stupid!
” he yelled into her face. “And you’re
not
a stupid woman!”

Kate saw the stun gun in his hand and realized she had made a terrible mistake. He leveled it at her chest and shot her.

She tried to keep standing, willed herself to stay up, but her body didn’t work anymore, and she slumped to the floor.

He was going crazy now. She stared at him in muted horror as he raised his boot and began to kick out at her. A
tooth
spun in slow motion, spun over and over on its trail across the wooden floor.

The revolving tooth fascinated her. It took her a moment to realize that it was
her tooth.

She could taste blood, and feel her lips swelling.

There was a hollow ringing in Kate’s ears, and she knew she was slipping into unconsciousness. She clung to what she had seen
behind the mask.

Casanova knew she had seen a part of his face.

A smooth pink cheek; no beard or mustache visible.

His left eye—
blue.

N
AOMI CROSS was trembling as she pressed herself hard against the bolted door that sealed off her room. Somewhere in the house
of horror a woman was screaming.

The sound was muffled by the walls, by the soundproofing he’d built into the house, but it was still terrifying. Naomi realized
that she was biting down on her hand. Hard. She felt sure he was killing someone. It wouldn’t be the first time.

The screams stopped.

Naomi pressed harder against the door, straining to hear some sound.

“Oh, no, please,” she whispered, “don’t let her be dead.”

Naomi listened to the electric silence for a long time. Finally, she moved away from the door. There was nothing she could
do for the poor woman. Nothing anyone could do.

Naomi knew she had to be very good right now. If she broke any of his rules, he would beat her. She couldn’t let that happen.

He seemed to know everything about her. What clothes she liked to wear, all her underwear sizes, her favorite colors, even
the shades she preferred. He knew about Alex, and Seth Samuel, and even about her friend Mary Ellen Klouk. “The tall, pretty
blond thing,” he called her.
Thing.

Casanova was very kinky; he was into playacting and fantasy psychodramas. He loved to talk to her about pornographic acts:
sex with prepubescent girls and animals; nightmarish sadism; masochism; gynecocracy; enema torture. He talked about everything
so casually. At times he would even be poetic, in a sick way. He quoted from Jean Genet, John Rechy, Durrell, de Sade. He
was well read, probably well educated.

“You’re smart enough to understand me when I talk,” he had told Naomi on one of his visits. “That’s why I picked you, sweet
darling.”

Naomi was startled by the sound of more screaming. She ran to the door and placed her cheek against the cool thick wood.
Was it the same woman, or was he killing someone else?
she wondered.

“Somebody please help me!” she heard. The woman was screaming at the top of her voice. She was breaking the house rules.

“Somebody help! I’m being held captive in here. Somebody help… my name is Kate… Kate McTiernan. Somebody help!”

Naomi shut her eyes. This was so bad. The woman had to stop. But over and over again the calls for help were repeated. That
meant Casanova wasn’t in the house. He must have gone out.

“Somebody please help me. My name is Kate McTiernan. I’m a doctor from the University of North Carolina hospital.” The screams
continued… ten times, twenty times. Not in panic, Naomi began to realize. In rage!

He couldn’t be in the house.
He wouldn’t let her go on this long. Naomi finally summoned up her courage and shouted as loud as she could. “
Stop
it! You must
stop
calling for help. He’ll kill you! Shut up!
That’s all I’m going to say!
”

There was silence… blessed silence, finally. Naomi thought she could
hear
the tension all around her. She certainly
felt
it.

Kate McTiernan didn’t stop for long. “What’s your name? How long have you been here? Please, talk to me… hey, I’m talking
to
you!
” she shouted.

Naomi wouln’t answer her. What was wrong with the woman? Had she lost it after the last beating?

Kate McTiernan called out again. “Listen, we can help each other. I’m sure we can. Do you know where you’re being kept?”

The woman was definitely brave… but she was being foolish, too. Her voice was strong, but it was beginning to sound hoarse.
Kate.

“Please talk to me. He isn’t here now, or he would have come with his stun gun.
You know I’m right!
He won’t know if you talk to me. Please… I have to hear your voice again.

Please. For two minutes. That’s all. I promise you.
Two minutes.
Please. Just
one
minute?”

Naomi still refused to answer her. He could have come back by now. He might be in the house, listening to them. Even watching
them through the walls.

Kate McTiernan was back on the air. “All right, thirty seconds. Then we’ll stop. Okay? I promise I’ll stop…
otherwise,
I’ll keep this up until he does come back…”

Oh, God, please, stop talking,
a voice inside Naomi was screaming.
Stop it, right now.

“He’ll kill me,” shouted Kate. “But he’s going to do that, anyway! I saw part of his face.
Where are you from?
How long have you been here?”

Naomi felt as if she were suffocating. She couldn’t breathe, but she stayed at the door and listened to every word the woman
had to say. She wanted to talk to her so badly.

“He may have used a drug called Forane. Hospitals use it.
He might be a doctor.
Please. What do we have to fear—except torture and death?”

Naomi smiled. Kate McTiernan had guts, and also a sense of humor. Just hearing another voice was so unbelievably good.

The words tumbled out of Naomi’s mouth, almost against her will. “My name is Naomi Cross. I’ve been here for eight days, I
think.
He hides behind the walls. He watches all the time. I don’t think he ever sleeps. He raped me,” she said in a clear voice.
It was the first time she had said the words out loud.
He raped me.

Kate answered right back. “He raped me, too, Naomi. I know how you feel, terribly bad…
dirty
all over. It’s so good to hear your voice, Naomi. I don’t feel so alone anymore.”

“Me, too, Kate. Now please
shut up.
”

Downstairs in her room, Kate McTiernan felt so tired now. Tired, but hopeful. She was slumped against one of the walls when
she heard the voices around her.

“Maria Jane Capaldi. I think I’ve been here about a month.”

“My name is Kristen Miles. Hello.”

“Melissa Stanfield. I’m a student nurse. I’ve been here nine weeks.”

“Christa Akers, North Carolina State. Two months in hell.”

There were at least six of them.

Hide and Seek

A
TWENTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD
Los Angeles Times
reporter named Beth Lieberman stared at the tiny, blurred green letters on her computer terminal. She watched with tired
eyes as one of the biggest stories at the
Times
in years continued to unfold. This was definitely the most important story of her career, but she almost didn’t care anymore.

“This is so crazy and sick…
feet.
Jesus Christ,” Beth Lieberman groaned softly under her breath. “Feet.”

The sixth “diary” installment sent to her by the Gentleman Caller had arrived at her West Los Angeles apartment early that
morning. As had been the case with the previous diary entries, the killer supplied the precise location of a murdered woman’s
body before starting into his obsessive, psychopathic message for her.

Beth Lieberman had immediately called the FBI from her home, and then she drove quickly to the offices of the
Times
on South Spring Street. By the time she arrived, the Federal Bureau had verified the latest murder.

The Gentleman had left his signature: fresh flowers.

The body of a fourteen-year-old Japanese girl had been found in Pasadena. As was the case with the five other women, Sunny
Ozawa had disappeared without a trace two nights ago. It was as if she’d been sucked up into the damp, muggy smog.

To date, Sunny Ozawa was the Gentleman’s youngest reported victim. He’d arranged pink and white peonies on her lower torso.
Flowers, of course, remind me of a woman’s labia,
he’d written in one of the diary entries.
The isomorphism is obvious, no?

At quarter to seven in the morning, the
Times
offices were deserted and eerie.
Nobody should be up this early except head-bangers who haven’t been to bed yet,
Lieberman thought. The low hum from the central air conditioning, mingling with the faint roar of traffic outside, was annoying
to her.

“Why feet?” the reporter muttered.

She sat before her computer, almost comatose, and wished she had never written an article about mail-order pornography in
California. That was how the Gentleman claimed he had “discovered” her; how he had chosen her to be his “liaison with the
other citizens of the City of Angels.” He proclaimed that they were on the same ”wavelength.”

Following endless administrative meetings at the highest levels, the
Los Angeles Times
had decided to publish the killer’s diary entries. There was no doubt that they had actually been written by the Gentleman
Caller.

He knew where the murder victims’ bodies were before the police did. He also threatened “special bonus kills” if his diary
wasn’t published for everyone in Los Angeles to read over breakfast. “I am the latest, and I’m by far the greatest,” the Gentleman
had written in one diary entry. Who could argue with that? Beth wondered. Richard Ramirez? Caryl Chessman? Charles Manson?

Beth Lieberman’s job right now was to be his contact. She also got to make the first edit of the Gentleman’s words. There
was no way the intense, graphic diary entries could run intact. They were filled with obscene pornography and the most brutally
violent descriptions of the murders he had committed.

Lieberman could almost hear the madman’s voice as she typed the latest entry on her word processor. The Gentleman Caller was
speaking to her again, or
through
her:

Let me tell you about Sunny, as much as I know about Sunny, anyway. Listen to me, dear reader. Be there with me. She had small,
delicate, clever feet. That’s what I remember best; that’s what I will always remember about my beautiful Sunny night.

Beth Lieberman had to shut her eyes. She didn’t want to listen to this shit. One thing was certain: the Gentleman Caller had
definitely given Beth Lieberman her first break at the
Times.
Her byline appeared on each of the widely read front-page features. The murderer had made her a star, too.

Listen to me. Be there with me.

Think about fetishism, and all its amazing possibilities to liberate the psyche. Don’t be a snob. Open up your mind. Open
your mind right now! Fetishism holds a fascinating array of diverse pleasures that you may be missing out on.

Let us not become too sentimental about “young” Sunny. Sunny Ozawa was into the games of the night. She told me that, in confidence
of course. I had picked her up at the Monkey Bar. We’d gone to my place, my hideaway, where we began to experiment, to play
the night away.

She asked me if I’d ever done it with a Japanese woman before. I told her that I hadn’t, but I’d always wanted to. Sunny told
me that I was “quite the gentleman.” I was honored.

This night, it seemed to me that nothing was so libertine as to focus on a woman’s feet, to caress them as I made love to
Sunny. I’m talking about sunbrowned feet covered in luxurious nylon and semipricey high-heeled pumps from Saks. I’m talking
about clever little feet. Very sophisticated communicators.

Listen. To really appreciate the very erotic mime show of a beautiful woman’s feet, the woman should be on her back while
the man stands. That’s how it was with Sunny and me earlier tonight.

I lifted up her slender legs and watched closely where they joined together in such a way that the vulva puckered from her
buttocks. I kissed the top of her stockings repeatedly. I fixated on her well-formed ankle, the lovely lines leading to her
shiny black pump.

I concentrated all my attention on that flirtatious pump as our fevered action set her foot into rapid motion. Her little
feet were talking to me now. An absolutely manic excitement rose in my chest. It felt as if there were live birds tweeting
and twittering in there.

Beth Lieberman stopped typing and closed her eyes again. Tight! She had to stop the images that were flashing out at her.
He had murdered the young girl that he was talking about so blithely.

Soon the FBI and the Los Angeles police would come storming into the relatively sedate offices of the
Times.
They would ask the usual battery of questions. They had no answers yet themselves. No significant leads so far. They said
that the Gentleman committed “perfect crimes.”