Kiss the Girls (Alex Cross 2)

I was attempting to put together a psych profile of Casanova, but there wasn’t enough information. Period. The FBI wasn’t helping. Nick Ruskin still hadn’t returned my phone calls.

A professor at North Carolina med school told me that Kate McTiernan was one of the most conscientious students she’d taught in twenty years. Another professor at the school said that her commitment and intelligence were indeed high, but “her temperament is the truly extraordinary thing about Kate.”

It was unanimous in that regard. Even competing interns at the hospital agreed that Kate McTiernan was something else. “She’s the least narcissistic woman I’ve ever met,” one of the woman interns told me. “Kate’s totally driven, but she knows it and she can laugh at herself,” said another. “She’s a really cool person. This is such a sad, numbing thing for everyone at the hospital.” “She’s a brain, who happens to be built like a brick shithouse.”

I called Peter McGrath, a history professor, and he reluctantly agreed to see me. Kate McTiernan had dated him for almost four months, but their relationship had ended abruptly. Professor McGrath was tall, athletic- looking, a bit imperious.

“I could say that I fucked up royally by losing her,” McGrath admitted to me. “And I did. But I couldn’t have held on to the Katester. She’s probably the strongest-willed person, man or woman, that I’ve ever met. God, I can’t believe this has happened to Kate.”

His face was pale, and he was obviously shaken up by her disappearance. At least he appeared to be.

I ended up eating by myself in a noisy bar in the college town of Chapel Hill. There were hordes of university students, and a busy pool table, but I sat alone with my beers, a greasy, rubbery cheeseburger, and my early thoughts on Casanova.

The long day had drained me. I missed Sampson, my kids, my home in D.C. A comfortable world without any monsters. Scootchie was still missing, though. So were several other young women in the Southeast.

My thoughts kept drifting back to Kate McTiernan, and what I’d heard about her today.

This is the way cases got solved—at least it was the way I had always solved them. Data got collected. Data ran loose in the brain. Eventually, connections were made.

Casanova doesn’t just take physically beautiful women, I suddenly realized in the bar. He takes the most extraordinary women he can find. He’s taking only the heartbreakers… the women that everybody wants but nobody ever seems to get.

He’s collecting them somewhere out there.

Why extraordinary women? I wondered.

There was one possible answer. Because he believes he’s extraordinary, too.

CHAPTER 24

I ALMOST went back to see Mary Ellen Klouk again, but I changed my mind and returned to the Washington Duke Inn. A couple of messages were waiting for me.

The first was from a friend in the Washington PD. He was processing information I needed for a meaningful profile on Casanova. I’d brought a laptop with me and I hoped I would be in business soon.

A reporter by the name of Mike Hart had called four times. I recognized his name, and I knew his newspaper—a tabloid out of Florida called the National Star. The reporter’s nickname was No-Heart Hart. I didn’t return No-Heart’s calls. I’d been featured on the front page of the Star once, and once was enough for this lifetime.

Detective Nick Ruskin had finally returned one of my calls. He left a short message. Nothing new on our end. Will let you know. I found that hard to believe. I didn’t trust Detective Ruskin or his faithful sidekick Davey Sikes.

I drifted off to a restless sleep in a cozy armchair in my room and had the most vivid, nightmarish dreams. A monster right out of an Edvard Munch painting was chasing Naomi. I was powerless to help her; all I could do was watch the macabre scene in horror. Not much need for a trained psychotherapist to interpret that one.

I woke up sensing that someone was in the hotel room with me.

I quietly placed my hand on the butt of my revolver and stayed very still. My heart was pounding. How could someone have gotten into the room?

I stood up slowly, but stayed low in a shooting crouch. I peered around as best I could in the semidarkness.

The chintz window drapes weren’t completely drawn, so there was enough light from outside for me to make out shapes. Shadows of tree leaves danced on the hotel room wall. Nothing else seemed to be moving.

I checked the bathroom, Glock pistol first. Then the closets. I began to feel a little silly stalking the hotel room with my gun drawn, but I had definitely heard a noise!

I finally spotted a piece of paper under the door, but I waited a few seconds before I flipped on the light. Just to be sure.

A black-and-white photograph was staring up at me. Instant associations and connections jumped to mind. It was a colonial British postcard, probably from the early 1900s. At that time the postcards had been collected by Westerners as pseudoart, but mostly as soft pornography. They had been a racy turn-on for male collectors in the early part of the century.

I bent down to get a better look at the old-fashioned photo.

The card showed an odalisque smoking a Turkish cigarette, in a startling acrobatic posture. The woman was dark, young, and beautiful; probably in her mid-teens. She was naked to the waist, and her full breasts hung upside down in the posed photograph.

I flipped the card over with a pencil.