He’d watched other men hit on her—studly students and even the occasional jaunty and ridiculous professor. She didn’t hold it against them, and he saw how she deflected them, usually with some kindness, some small generosity.
But there was always that devilish, heartbreaking smile of hers. I’m not available, it said. You can never have me. Please, don’t even think about it. It’s not that I’m too good for you, I’m just… different.
Kate the Dependable, Kate the Nice Person, was right on time tonight. She always left the cancer annex between a quarter to eight and eight. She had her routines just as he did.
She was a first-year intern at North Carolina University Hospital in Chapel Hill, but she’d been working in a co-op program at Duke since January. The experimental cancer ward. He knew all about Katelya McTiernan.
She was going to be thirty-one in a few weeks. She’d had to work three years to pay for her college and medical-school expenses. She had also spent two years with a sick mother in Buck, West Virginia.
She walked at a determined pace along Flowers Drive, toward the multilevel Medical Center parking garage. He had to move quickly to keep up with her, all the while watching her long shapely legs, which were a little too pale for his liking. No time for the sun, Kate? Afraid of a little melanoma?
She carried thick medical volumes against one hip. Looks and brains. She planned to practice back in West Virginia, where she was born. Didn’t seem to care about making a lot of money. What for? So she could own ten pairs of black high-topped sneakers?
Kate McTiernan was wearing her usual university garb: a crisp white med-school jacket, khaki shirt, weathered tan trousers, her faithful black sneakers. It worked for her. Kate the Character. Slightly off-center. Unexpected. Strangely, powerfully alluring.
On Kate McTiernan, almost anything would have worked, even the most homespun interpretation of cheap chic. He particularly loved Kate McTiernan’s irreverence toward university and hospital life, and especially the holier-than-thou medical school. It showed in the way she dressed; the casual way she carried herself now; everything about her lifestyle. She seldom wore makeup. She seemed very natural, and there was nothing phony or stuck-up about her that he’d noticed yet.
There was even a little of the unexpected klutz in her. Earlier in the week, he had seen her flush the deepest red after she tripped on a guardrail outside Perkins Library and crashed into a bench with her hip. That warmed him tremendously. He could be touched, could feel human warmth. He wanted Kate to love him…. He wanted to love her back.
That was why he was so special, so different. It was what separated him from all the other one-dimensional killers and butchers he had ever heard or read about, and he had read everything on the subject. He could feel everything. He could love. He knew that.
Kate said something amusing to a fortyish-looking professor as she walked past him. Casanova couldn’t hear it from where he was watching. Kate turned for some quick repartee, but kept on walking, leaving the professor with her luminous smile to think about.
He saw a little jiggle action as Kate whirled around after her brief interchange with the prof. Her breasts weren’t too large or too small. Her long brown hair was thick and wavy, shiny in the early evening light, revealing just a touch of red. Perfect in every detail.
He had been watching her for more than four weeks, and he knew she was the one. He could love Dr. Kate McTiernan more than all the others. He believed it for a moment. He ached to believe it. He said her name softly—Kate….
Dr. Kate.
Tick-cock.
CHAPTER 11
SAMPSON AND I took shifts at the wheel on the four-hour haul from Washington, down into North Carolina. While I drove, the Man Mountain slept. He wore a black T-shirt that bluntly said SECURITY. Economy of words.
When Sampson was at the controls of my ancient Porsche, I put on a set of old Koss headphones. I listened to Big Joe Williams, thought about Scootchie, continued to feel hollowed-out.
I couldn’t sleep, hadn’t slept more than an hour the night before. I felt like a grief-stricken father whose only daughter was missing. Something seemed wrong about this case.
We entered the South at noon. I had been born around a hundred miles away, in Winston-Salem. I hadn’t been back there since I was ten years old, the year my mother died, and my brothers and I were moved to Washington.
I’d been to Durham before, for Naomi’s graduation. She had finished Duke undergraduate summa cum laude, and she received one of the loudest, cheeriest ovations in the history of the ceremony. The Cross family had been there in full force. It was one of the happiest, proudest days for all of us.
Naomi was the only child of my brother Aaron, who died of cirrhosis at thirty-three. Naomi had grown up fast after his death. Her mother had to work a sixty-hour week for years to support them, so Naomi was in charge of the house from around the time she was ten. She was the littlest general.
She was a precocious little girl, and read about Alice’s adventures in Through the Looking-Glass when she was only four. A family friend gave her violin lessons, and she played well. She loved music, and still played whenever she had time. She graduated number one in her class at John Carroll High School in D.C. As busy as she was with her studies, she found time to write graceful prose on what life was like growing up in the projects. She reminded me of a young Alice Walker.
Gifted.
Very special.
Missing for more than four days.
The welcome mat wasn’t out for us at Durham’s brand-new police headquarters building, not even after Sampson and I showed our badges and IDs from Washington. The desk sergeant wasn’t impressed.
He looked something like the TV weatherman Willard Scott. He had a full crewcut, long thick sideburns, and skin the color of fresh ham. After he found out who we were, it got a little worse. No red carpet, no Southern hospitality, no Southern comfort.
Sampson and I got to sit and cool our heels in the duty room of the Durham Police Department. It was all shiny glass and polished wood. We received the kind of hostile looks and blank stares usually reserved for drug dealers caught around grade schools.