He was heading out now, hitting the road. Was he going to visit his girls?

CHAPTER 82

WE FOLLOWED Wick Sachs’s sporty Jaguar onto Old Chapel Hill Road. We eased through Hope Valley, passing very substantial houses that had been built in the twenties and thirties. Sachs didn’t seem to be in a hurry.

So far, this was his game. We didn’t know the rules, or even what game he was playing.

Casanova.

The Beast of the Southeast.

Kyle Craig was still working on a financial investigation of Sachs with Internal Revenue. Kyle also had half-a-dozen agents filling in all the dots that might connect Sachs and Will Rudolph in the past. The two had definitely been classmates at Duke. High honor students. Phi Beta Kappa. They had known each other but weren’t close friends in school, at least they didn’t seem to have been. Actually, Kyle had been at Duke then, too, in the Law School. Phi Beta himself.

When had the actual twinning taken place? How had the strong, freakish bond occurred? Something wasn’t making sense to me about Rudolph and Sachs yet.

“What if he lets that XJS out?” Kate said as we discreetly followed the monster to what we hoped was his lair in the woods, his harem, his “disappearing house.” We were tailing Sachs in my old Porsche.

“I doubt he wants to draw a lot of attention to himself,” I told her. Although the XJS and the Mercedes kind of worked against that theory. “Besides, a Jaguar isn’t much of a test for a Porsche.”

“Even a Porsche from another century?” Kate asked.

“Ho,” I answered her, “ho.”

Sachs drove down Interstate 85, then turned onto 40. He got off at the exit for Chapel Hill. We followed him for another two miles through town. He finally stopped and parked near the University of North Carolina campus on Franklin Street.

“All of this is making me feel so weird, Alex. A professor at Duke University. A wife and two beautiful children,” Kate said. “The night he grabbed me, he probably followed me off the campus. He watched me. I think he chose me right here.”

I glanced over at Kate. “You okay?” I asked her. “Tell me if you’re not up to this.”

Kate looked at me. Her eyes were intense, troubled. “Let’s get this the hell over with. Let’s get him today. Deal?”

“Deal,” I agreed.

“We’ve got you, Butt-head,” Kate muttered into the car windshield.

The quaint and pretty Chapel Hill street was already busy at quarter to twelve. College kids and profs were sliding in and out of the Carolina Coffee Shop, Peppers Pizza, the newly rebuilt Intimate Bookstore. All the favorite Franklin Street haunts were doing a pretty good business. The college-town atmosphere was appealing; it took me back to my days at Johns Hopkins. Cresmont Avenue in Baltimore.

Kate and I were able to follow Wick Sachs from about a block and a half away. It would be easy for him to lose us now, I knew. Would he run to the house in the woods? Would he go to see his girls? Was Naomi still there?

He could easily duck into the Record Bar, or into Spanky’s restaurant on the corner. Come out a side door and disappear. A game of cat and mouse had begun. His game; his rules. Always his rules, so far.

“He seems too smug, too self-satisfied,” I said as we tailed along at a reasonable distance. He hadn’t even turned to see if he was being followed. He looked like a tweedy, jaunty prof on a lunchtime errand. Maybe that was all this was.

“You still okay?” I checked on Kate again.

She was watching Sachs like a scrapyard dog with a grudge to settle. I remembered that she took karate lessons somewhere near here in Chapel Hill. “Mmm, hmm. Lot of bad memories stirred up, though. Scene of the crime and all that,” Kate muttered.

Wick Sachs finally stopped in front of the nicely retro Varsity Theatre in downtown Chapel Hill. He stood next to a community billboard covered with all sorts of handwritten notices and posters, mostly aimed at university students and faculty members.

“Why would that scum be going to a movie?” Kate whispered, sounding more incensed than ever.

“Maybe because he likes to escape, as in sublimate. This is the secret life of Wick Sachs. We’re watching it.”

“I’d kind of like to go after him right now. Rumble,” Kate said.

“Yeah, me too. Me too, Kate.”

I had noticed the cluttered community billboard on one of my walks here before. There were several notices about missing persons in the Chapel Hill area. Missing students. All of them were women. It struck me that this was a cruel plague that had come to the community, and no one had been able to do anything to stop it. No one had the cure.

Tags: James Patterson Alex Cross Mystery
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