Kiss the Girls (Alex Cross 2)

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.”

The FBI agents would want to talk for hours about the gruesome details of the murder scene. The feet! The Gentleman had cut off Sunny Ozawa’s feet with some kind of razor-sharp knife. Both her feet were missing from the crime scene in Pasadena.

Brutality was his trademark, but that was the only consistent pattern so far. He had mutilated genitalia in the past. He had sodomized one victim, then cauterized her. He had cut open a woman investment banker’s chest and removed her heart. Was he experimenting? He was no gentleman once he selected his victim. He was a Jekyll and Hyde in the 1990s.

Beth Lieberman finally opened her eyes and saw a tall, slender man standing very close to her in the newsroom. She sighed loudly and she held back a frown.

It was Kyle Craig, the special investigator from the FBI.

Kyle Craig knew something that she desperately needed to know, but he wouldn’t tell her squat. He knew why the deputy director of the FBI had flown to Los Angeles the previous week. He knew secrets that she needed to know.

“Hello, Ms. Lieberman. What do you have for me?” he asked.

CHAPTER 37

TICK-COCK, dickory dock.

This was the way he hunted for the women. This was how it really happened, time after time. There was never any danger for him personally. He fit in wherever he chose to hunt. He did his best to avoid any kind of complication or human error. He had a passion for orderliness and, most of all, perfection.

That afternoon, he waited patiently in a crowded arcade of a trendy shopping mall in Raleigh, North Carolina. He watched attractive women enter and leave the local Victoria’s Secret across a long marble transverse. Most of the women were well dressed. A copy of Time magazine and also USA Today were folded on the marble bench beside him. The newspaper headline read: Gentleman Calls for 6th Time in LA.

He was thinking to himself that the “Gentleman” was zooming out of control in southern California. He was taking gruesome souvenirs, doing two women a week sometimes, playing stupid mind games with the Los Angeles Times, the LAPD, and the FBI. He was going to get caught.

Casanova’s blue eyes moved back across the crowded shopping mall. He was a handsome man, as the original Casanova had been. Nature had equipped the eighteenth-century adventurer with beauty, sensuality, and great enthusiasm for women—and so it was with him as well.

Now where was the lovely Anna? She had slipped into Victoria’s Secret—to buy something campy for her boyfriend, no doubt. Anna Miller and Chris Chapin had been in law school together at North Carolina State. Now Chris was an associate in a law firm. They liked to dress in each other’s clothes. Cross-dress to get their kicks. He knew all about them.

He had watched Anna whenever he could for almost two weeks. She was a startling, dark-haired twenty-three-year-old beauty, maybe not another Dr. Kate McTiernan, but close enough.

He watched Anna finally leave Victoria’s Secret and walk almost directly toward him. The click of her high heels made her sound so wonderfully haughty. She knew she was an extraordinary young beauty. That was the very best thing about her. Her supreme confidence nearly matched his own.

She had such a nicely arrogant, long-legged stride. Perfect slender lines up and down her body. Legs wrapped in dark nylons; heels for her part-time job in Raleigh as a paralegal. Sculptured breasts that he wanted to caress. He could see the subtle lines of her underwear under a clinging tan skirt. Why was she so provocative? Because she could be.

She seemed intelligent, too. Promising, anyway. She had just missed Law Review. Anna was warm, sweet, nice to be around. A keeper. Her lover called her “Anna Banana.” He loved the sweet, stupid intimacy of the nickname.

All he had to do was take her. It was that easy.

Another very attractive woman suddenly broke into his field of vision. She smiled at him, and he smiled back. He stood up and stretched, then walked toward her. She had store packages and bags piled high in both arms.

“Hi there, beautiful,” he said when he got close. “Can I take some of those? Ease your heavy load, sweet darlin’?”

“You’re such a sweet, handsome thing yourself,” the woman said to him. “But then you always were. Always the romantic, too.”

Casanova kissed his wife on the cheek and helped her with the packages. She was an elegant-looking woman, self-possessed. She had on jeans, a loose-fitting workshirt, a brown, tweed jacket. She wore clothes well. She was effective in many ways. He had picked her with the greatest care.

As he took some bags, he held the nicest, warmest thought: They couldn’t catch me in a thousand years. They wouldn’t know where to start to look. They couldn’t possibly see past this wonderful, wonderful disguise, this mask of sanity. I am above suspicion.

“I saw you watching the young chippie. Nice legs,” his wife said with a knowing smile and a roll of her eyes. “Just as long as all you do is watch.”

“You caught me,” Casanova said to his wife. “But her legs aren’t as nice as yours.”

He smiled in his easy and charming way. Even as he did so, a name exploded inside his brain. Anna Miller. He had to have her.

CHAPTER 38