Kiss the Girls (Alex Cross 2)

My last semiconscious thought was of Kate in those khaki shorts. Take your breath away. I had a passing thought that she might come down the hall and knock, knock, knock on my door. We were in Hollywood, after all. Wasn’t that the way it happened in the movies?

But Kate didn’t come knocking on my hotel door. So much for Clint Eastwood and Rene Russo fantasies.

CHAPTER 63

THIS WAS going to be a big day in Tinseltown. The manhunt of manhunts was playing in Beverly Hills. Just like the day they finally caught the killer-strangler Richard Ramirez out here.

Today we get Beavis.

It was a few minutes past eight in the morning. Kate and I were sitting in an arctic-blue Taurus parked half a block from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. There was an electrical sound in the air, as if the city were being run on a single, huge generator. A play on an old line ran through my head: Hell is a city much like Los Angeles.

I was nervous and tense; my body felt numb, and my stomach was queasy. The burnout factor. Not enough sleep. Too much stress for too long a stretch. Chasing monsters from sea to shining sea.

“That’s Dr. Will Rudolph climbing out of the BMW,” I said to Kate. I was so wound up, I felt as if strong hands were squeezing me.

“Good-looking,” Kate muttered. “Real sure of himself, too. The way he moves. Doctor Rudolph.”

Kate didn’t say another word as she intently watched Rudolph. Was he the Gentleman Caller? Was he also Casanova? Or were we being set up for some sick, psychopathic reason that I didn’t understand yet?

The morning’s temperature hovered in the low sixties. The air had a crisp snap, like fall in the Northeast. Kate had on an old college sweatsuit, high-topped running shoes, dimestore sunglasses. Her long brown hair was bunched back in a ponytail. Sensible stakeout attire and grooming.

“Alex, the FBI’s all around him now?” she aske

d me without looking away from the binoculars. “They’re here right now? That scum can’t possibly get away?”

I nodded. “If he does anything, anything that shows us he’s the Gentleman, they’ll grab him. They want this arrest for themselves.”

But the FBI was also giving me whatever rope I needed. Kyle Craig had kept his promise. So far, anyway.

Kate and I watched as Dr. Will Rudolph slid out of the BMW coupe, which he’d just parked in a private lot on the west side of the hospital. He wore a European-style charcoal-gray suit. It was cut well and looked expensive. It probably cost as much as my house in D.C. His brown hair was held back in a fashionable ponytail. He had on dark glasses with round tortoiseshell frames.

A doctor in an exclusive Beverly Hills hospital. Smug as hell. The goddamn Gentleman Caller who was setting this city on fire?

I ached to run across the parking lot and hit him, take him down right now. I ground my teeth until my jaw was stiff. Kate wouldn’t take her eyes away from Dr. Will Rudolph. Was he Casanova, too? Were they one and the same monster? Was that it?

We both watched Rudolph as he crossed the hospital lot. His stride was long and quick and buoyant. Nothing bothering him today. Finally, he disappeared inside a gray metal side door of the hospital.

“A doctor,” Kate said and shook her head back and forth. “This is so weird, Alex. I’m shaking on the inside.”

The static on the car radio startled us, but we could hear agent John Asaro’s deep, raspy voice.

“Alex, did you guys see him? Get a good look? What does Ms. McTiernan think? What’s the verdict on our Dr. Squirrel?”

I looked across the front seat at Kate. She looked all of her thirty-one years right now. Not quite so confident and assured, a little gray around the gills. The prime witness. She understood the deadly seriousness of the moment perfectly.

“I don’t think he’s Casanova,” Kate finally said. She shook her head. “He’s not the same physical type. He’s thinner… carries himself differently. I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I don’t think it’s him, goddammit.” She sounded a little disappointed.

Kate continued to shake her head. “I’m almost sure he isn’t Casanova, Alex. There must be two of them. Two Mr. Squirrels.” Her brown eyes were intense, as she looked at me.

So there were two of them. Were they competing? What the hell was their coast-to-coast game all about?

CHAPTER 64

SMALL TALK, surveillance talk; it was familiar territory for me. Sampson and I had a saying about surveillance back in D.C.: They do the crime; we do the time.

“How much could he make with a successful Beverly Hills medical practice? Ballpark number, Kate,” I asked my partner. We were still watching the doctors’ private parking lot of Cedars-Sinai. There was nothing to do but eyeball Rudolph’s spiffy new BMW and wait, and talk like old friends on a front stoop in D.C.

“He probably charges about a hundred and fifty to two a visit. He could gross five or six hundred thousand a year. Then there are surgery fees, Alex. That’s if he has a conscience about the prices he charges, and we know he doesn’t have a conscience.”