Alex Cross 02 - Kiss the Girls (36 page)

“We might come back to visit with Naomi,” the Gentleman said. He lightly kissed her hand.
“Enchantŭ.”

Rudolph nodded, then stopped at the sixth woman in the receiving line. He turned his head and checked out the final girl,
then his eyes returned to number six.

“You’re very special,” he spoke softly, almost shyly. “Extraordinary, actually.”

“This is Christa,” Casanova said with a knowing smile.

“Christa is my date for tonight,” the Gentleman exclaimed in an enthusiastic voice. He’d made his choice. Casanova had given
him a present—to do with as he pleased.

Christa Akers tried to smile. That was the house rule. But she couldn’t. That was what the Gentleman especially liked about
her:
the delicious fear in her eyes.

He was ready to play
kiss the eyes.

One last time.

Kiss the Girls

T
HE MORNING after the arrest of Dr. Wick Sachs, Casanova strolled the corridors of the Duke Medical Center. He calmly turned
into Kate McTiernan’s private room.

He could go anywhere now. He was free again.

“Hello, my darling. How goes the wars?” he whispered to Kate.

She was all by her lonesome, though there was still a Durham policeman stationed on the floor. Casanova sat on the straight–backed
chair beside her bed. He looked at the sad physical wreck that had once been such an outstanding beauty.

He wasn’t even angry with Kate anymore. There wasn’t much to be angry with now, was there?
The lights are still on,
he thought as he stared into the vacant blue
eyes, but there’s nobody home, is there, Katie?

He enjoyed being in her hospital room—it got his juices going, turned him on, moved his spirit toward great things. Actually,
just sitting beside Kate McTiernan’s bed made him feel at peace.

That was important now. There were decisions to be made. How, exactly, to handle the situation with Dr. Wick Sachs? Did more
tinder need to be thrown on that fire? Or would that be overkill, and therefore dangerous in itself?

Another tricky decision would have to be made soon. Did he and Rudolph still have to leave the Research Triangle area? He
didn’t want to—this was home—but maybe it had to be. And how about Will Rudolph? He had clearly been emotionally disturbed
in California. He had been taking Valium, Halcion, and Xanax—that Casanova
knew
of. Sooner or later he was going to blow it for both of them, wasn’t he? On the other hand, it had been so unbearably lonely
when Rudolph was away. He’d felt cut in half.

Casanova heard a noise behind him at the hospital room door. He turned—
and smiled at the man.

“I was just leaving, Alex,” he said, and got up from the chair. “No change here. What a damn shame.”

Alex Cross let Casanova slide by him and out the door.

He fit in anywhere,
Casanova thought to himself as he walked away and down the hospital corridor. He was never going to be caught. He had the
perfect mask.

T
HERE WAS a fine old upright piano inside the barroom at the Washington Duke Inn. I was there playing Big Joe Turner and Blind
Lemon Jefferson tunes between four and five one morning. I played the blues, the blahs, the doldrums, the grumps, the red
ass. The hotel maintenance staff sure was impressed.

I was trying to put everything I knew together. I kept circling back to the same big three or four points, my pillars to build
the investigation on.

Perfect crimes, both here and in California. The killers’ knowledge of crime scenes and police forensics.

Twinning between the monsters. Male bonding as it had never existed.

The disappearing house in the woods. A house had actually disappeared! How could that happen?

Casanova’s harem of special women—but even more than that, the “rejects.”

Dr. Wick Sachs was a college professor with questionable morals and actions. But was he a stone-cold murderer without a conscience?
Was he the animal who had imprisoned a dozen or more young women somewhere near Durham and Chapel Hill? Was he a modern-day
de Sade?

I didn’t think so. I believed, I was almost certain, that the Durham police had arrested the wrong man, and that the real
Casanova was out there laughing at all of us. Maybe it was even worse than that. Maybe he was stalking another woman.

Later that morning, I made my usual visit to Kate at Duke Medical Center. She was still deep in a coma, still listed as grave.
The Durham police no longer had an officer on guard outside her room.

I sat vigil beside her and tried not to think about the way she had been. I held her hand for an hour and quietly talked to
her. Her hand was limp, almost lifeless. I missed Kate so much. She couldn’t respond, and that created a gaping, painful hole
in my chest.

Finally, I had to leave. I needed to lose myself in my work.

From the hospital, Sampson and I drove to the home of Louis Freed in Chapel Hill. I had asked Dr. Freed to prepare a special
map of the Wykagil River area for us.

The seventy-seven-year-old history professor had done his job well. I hoped the map might help Sampson and me find the “disappearing
house.” The idea came to me after reading several newspaper accounts of the golden couple murder case. Over twelve years ago,
Roe Tierney’s body had been found near “an abandoned farm where runaway slaves had once been hidden in large underground cellars.
These cellars were like small houses under the earth, some with as many as a dozen rooms or compartments.”

Small houses under the earth?

The disappearing house?

There
was
a house out there somewhere. Houses didn't disappear.

S
AMPSON AND I drove to Brigadoon, North Carolina. We planned to hike through the woods to where Kate had been found in the
Wykagil River. Ray Bradbury had once written that “living at risk is jumping off a cliff, and building your wings on the way
down.” Sampson and I were getting ready to jump.

As we trudged into the foreboding woods, the towering oaks and Carolina pines began to shut out all light. A chorus of cicadas
was thick as molasses around us. The air wasn’t moving.

I could imagine, I could
see,
Kate running through these same dark green woods only a few weeks earlier, fighting for her life. I thought of her now, surviving
on life-support systems. I could hear the machine’s
whoosh-click, whoosh-click.
Just the thought hurt my heart.

“I don’t like it in the deep dark woods,” Sampson confessed as we passed under a thick umbrella of twisted vines and tent-like
treetops. He had on a Cypress Hill T-shirt, his Ray-Ban sunglasses, jeans, workboots. “Reminds me of Hansel and Gretel. Melodramatic
bullshit, man. Hated that story when I was a little kid.”

“You were never a little kid,” I reminded him. “You were six foot when you were eleven, and you already had your cold stare
down to a fine art.”

“Maybe so, but I hated those Grimm Brothers. Dark side of the German mind, turning out nasty fantasies to warp the minds of
little German children. Must have worked, too.”

Sampson had me smiling again with his warped theories of our warped world. “You’re not afraid going through the D.C. projects
at night, but a nice walk in these woods gets you? Nothing can hurt you here. Pine trees. Muscadine grapevines. Brier brambles.
Looks sinister, maybe, but it’s harmless.”

“Looks sinister. Is sinister. That’s my motto.”

Sampson was struggling to get his statuesque body through closely bunched saplings and honeysuckle at the edge of the woods.
The honeysuckle was actually like a mesh curtain in places. It seemed to
grow
tangled.

I wondered if Casanova might be watching us. I suspected that he was a very patient watcher. Both he and Will Rudolph were
very clever, organized, and careful. They had been doing this for a lot of years and hadn’t been caught yet.

“How’s your history on the slaves in this area?” I asked Sampson as we walked. I wanted his mind off poisonous snakes and
dangling snakelike vines. I needed him concentrating on the killer, or maybe the killers, who might be cohabitating these
woods with us.

“I’ve dabbled with some E. D. Genovese, some Mohamed Auad,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he was serious. Sampson is well read
for a man of action.

“The Underground Railroad was active in this area. Runaway slaves and whole families heading north were kept safe for days,
even weeks, at some of the local farms. They were called stations,” I said. “That’s what Dr. Freed’s map shows. That’s what
his book was written about.”

“I don’t see any farms, Dr. Livingstone. Just this muscadine grapevine shit,” Sampson complained and pushed away more branches
with his long arms.

“The big tobacco farms used to be west of here. They’ve been deserted for almost sixty years. Remember I told you that a student
from UNC was brutally raped and murdered back in nineteen eighty-one? Her decomposed body was found out here. I think Rudolph,
and possibly Casanova, killed her. That’s around the time they first met.

“Dr. Freed’s map shows the locations of the old Underground Railroad, most of the farms in the area where runaway slaves were
hidden. Some of the farms had expanded cellars, even underground living quarters. The farms themselves are gone now. There’s
nothing to see from aerial surveillance. The honeysuckle and brambles have grown thick, too. The cellars are still here, though.”

“Hmmph. Your handy-dandy map tell us where all the old-time tobacco farms used to be?”

“Yup. Got a map. Got a compass. Got my Glock pistol, too,” I said and patted my holster.

“Most important,” Sampson said, “you got me.”

“That too. God save the miscreants from the two of us.”

Sampson and I walked a long, long way into the hot, damp, buggy afternoon. We managed to find three of the farm sites where
tobacco leaf had once flourished; where terrified black men and women, sometimes whole families, had been taken in and hidden
in old cellars, as they tried to escape to freedom in the North, to cities like Washington, D.C.

Two of the cellars were located exactly where Dr. Freed said they would be. Antique wood planks and twisted, rusted metal
were the only signs left of the original farms. It was as if some angry god had come down and destroyed the scene of the old
slave-owning ways.

Around four in the afternoon, Sampson and I arrived at the once-proud-and-successful farm of Jason Snyder and his family.

“How do you know we’re
here?
” Sampson looked around at the small, desolate, and deserted area where I had stopped walking.

“Says so on Dr. Louis Freed’s hand-drawn map. Same compass points. He’s a famous historian, so it must be true.”

Sampson was right, though. There was nothing to see. Jason Snyder’s farm had completely disappeared. Just as Kate had said
it would.

“
P
LACE GIVES me the creeps,” Sampson said. “So-called tobacco farm.”

What was once the Snyder farm was particularly eerie and otherworldly, creepy as hell. There was almost no visible evidence
that anyone human had ever lived here. Still, I could feel the blood and bones of the slaves as I stood before the disturbing
ruins of the old tobacco farm.

Sassafras trees, arrowwood shrubs, honeysuckle, and poison ivy had grown up to the level of my chin. Red and white oaks, sycamores,
and a few sweet gum trees stood tall and mature where a prosperous farm had once been. But the farm itself
had
disappeared.

I felt a cold spot at the center of my chest. Was this the bad place, then? Could we be near the house of horror that Kate
had described?

We had worked our way north, and now east. We weren’t too far from the state highway, where I wished I had the car parked.
According to my rough calculations, we couldn’t be more than two or three miles from the state road.

“Search parties for Casanova never came all the way back in here,” Sampson said as he prowled around. “Undergrowth’s real
thick, real nasty. Not trampled down anywhere I can see.”

“Dr. Freed said he was probably the last person to come out and examine each of the old Underground Railroad sites. The woods
were getting too thick and overgrown for casual visitors,” I said.

Blood and bones of my ancestors.
That was a powerful, almost overwhelming, notion: to walk where slaves were once held captive
for years.

No one ever came to rescue them. No one cared. No detectives back then went looking for human monsters who stole entire black
families from their homes.

I used natural landmarks from the map to locate where the original Snyder cellar might have been. I was also trying to brace
myself—in case we found something I didn’t want to find.

“We’re probably looking for a very old trapdoor,” I told Sampson. “There isn’t anything specific marked on Freed’s map. The
cellar is supposed to be forty to fifty feet west of those sycamores. I think those are the right trees, and we should be
right over the cellar now. But where the hell is the door?”

“Probably where nobody would walk on it by mistake,” Sampson figured. He was making a path into the thicker, wilder undergrowth.

Beyond the tangle of vines there was an open field or meadow, where tobacco had once been planted and grown. Beyond that was
more thick woods. The air was hot and still. Sampson was getting impatient, and he knocked down honeysuckle with a vengeance.
He was stamping his feet, trying to locate the hidden door. He listened for a hollow sound, some kind of wood or metal under
the tall grass and thickly tangled weeds.

“This was originally a very large cellar on two levels. Casanova might have even expanded it. Built something grander for
his house of horror,” I said as I searched through the heavy undergrowth.