Kiss the Girls (Alex Cross 2)

I shook my head in disbelief as I rubbed my palm over my chin. “I have to get back into private practice. Baby needs new shoes.”

Kate smiled. “You miss them, don’t you, Alex? You talk about your kids a lot. Damon and Jannie. Poolball-head and Velcro.”

I smiled back. Kate knew my nicknames for the kids by now. “Yeah, I do. They’re my babies, my little pals.”

Kate laughed some more. I liked to make her laugh. I thought of the bittersweet stories she’d told me about her sisters, especially her twin, Kristin. Laughter is good medicine.

The black BMW coupe just sat there, shining brightly and expensively in the California sunlight. Surveillance sucks, I thought, no matter where you have to do it. Even in sunny L.A.

Kyle Craig had gotten me a lot of rope here in Los Angeles. Certainly much more than I’d had in the South. He’d gotten rope for Kate, too. There was something in it for him, though. The old quid pro quo. Kyle wanted me to interview the Gentleman Caller once he was caught, and he expected me to report everything to him. I suspected that Kyle himself hoped to bag Casanova.

“Do you really think the two of them are competing?” Kate asked me after a while.

“It makes psychological sense out of some things for me,” I told her. “They might feel a need to ‘one up’ each other. The Gentleman’s diaries could be his way of saying: See, I’m better than you. I’m more famous. Anyway, I haven’t decided yet. Sharing their exploits is probably more for thrill purposes than intimacy, though. They both like to get turned on.”

Kate stared into my eyes. “Alex, doesn’t it make you feel creepy as hell trying to figure this out?”

I smiled. “That’s why I want to catch Butt-head and Beavis. So the creepiness will finally stop.”

Kate and I waited at the hospital until Rudolph finally reappeared. It was nearly two in the afternoon. He drove straight to his office on North Bedford, west of Rodeo Drive. Rudolph saw patients there. Mostly women patients. Dr. Rudolph was a plastic surgeon. As such, he could create and sculpt. Women depended on him. And… his patients all chose him.

We followed Rudolph home at around seven. Five or six hundred thousand a year, I was thinking. It was more than I could make in a decade. Was it the money he needed to be the Gentleman Caller? Was Casanova wealthy, too? Was he a doctor also? Was that how they committed their perfect crimes?

These questions were rolling around in my head.

I fingered an index card in my trouser pocket. I had begun to keep a “shortlist” on both Casanova and the Gentleman. I would add or subtract what I considered key attributes to the profile. I carried the card with me at all times.

I thought some more about the connection between Rudolph and Casanova as Kate and I twiddled our thumbs outside the apartment. A relevant psychological condition had occurred to me. It was called twinning, and it could be a key. Twinning just might explain the bizarre relationship between the monsters. Twinning was caused by an urge to bond, usually between two lonely people. Once they “twin,” the two become a “whole”; they become dependent on each other, often obsessively so. Sometimes the “twins” become highly competitive.

CASANOVAGENTLEMAN

collector gives out flowers—sexual?

harem extremely violent and dangerous

artist, organized takes beautiful young women of all types

different masks… to represent moods or personas? extremely organized

not artistic in terms of his killing

doctor? doctor

doctor? cold and impersonal as a killer… a butcher

gaining a taste for violence craves recognition and fame—possibly wealthy—penthouse apartment

knows about me

competing with Gary Soneji? graduated Duke Medical School, 1986 raised in North Carolina

competing with the L.A. Gentleman?

Twinning was like an addiction to couple. To belong to a secret club. Just two people and no passwords. In its negative form, it was the fusing of two people for their own individual needs, which weren’t mutually healthy.

I ran it by Kate. She was a twin, too.

“Quite often, there’s a dominant figure in a twinning relationship,” I said. “Was that true of you and your sister?”