I finally walked into the living room and asked the question that was beating against the inside of my head. “It’s nice to see everyone—Charles, Cilla, Aunt Tia—but would someone please tell me what’s going on here?”
They all stared at me.
I still had Jannie cradled in my arms. Sampson had Damon tucked like a hairy football under his massive right arm.
Nana spoke for the assembled group. Her almost inaudible words sent the sharpest pain right through me.
“It’s Naomi,” she said quietly. “Scootchie is missing, Alex.” Then Nana Mama started to weep for the first time in years.
CHAPTER 6
CASANOVA SCREAMED, and the loud sound coming from deep inside his throat turned into a raspy howl.
He was crashing through the deep woods, thinking about the girl he had abandoned back there. The horror of what he had done. Again.
Part of him wanted to go back for the girl—save her—an act of mercy.
He was experiencing spasms of guilt now, and he began to run faster and faster. His thick neck and chest were covered with perspiration. He felt weak, and his legs were rubbery and undependable.
He was fully conscious of what he had done. He just couldn’t stop himself.
Anyway, it was better this way. She had seen his face. It was stupid of him to think she would ever be able to understand him. He had seen the fear and loathing in her eyes.
If only she’d listened when he’d tried to talk to her. After all, he was different from other mass killers—he could feel everything he did. He could feel love… and suffer loss… and…
He angrily swept away the death mask. It was all her fault. He would have to change personas now. He needed to stop being Casanova.
He needed to be himself. His pitiful other self.
CHAPTER 7
IT’S NAOMI. Scootchie is missing, Alex.
We held the most intense Cross family emergency conference in our kitchen, where they’ve always been held. Nana made more coffee, and also herbal tea for herself. I put the kids to bed first. Then I cracked open a bottle of Black Jack and poured stiff drinks of whiskey all around.
I learned that my twenty-two-year-old niece had been missing in North Carolina for four days. The police down there had waited that long to contact our family in Washington. As a policeman, I found that hard to understand. Two days was pretty standard in missing-person cases. Four days made no sense.
Naomi Cross was a law student at Duke University. She’d made Law Review and was near the top of her class. She was the pride of everyone in our family, including myself. We had a nickname for her that went back to when she was three or four years old. Scootchie. She always used to “scootch” up close to everybody when she was little. She loved to “scootch,” and hug, and be hugged. After my brother Aaron died, I helped Cilla to raise her. It wasn’t hard—she was always sweet and funny, cooperative, and so very smart.
Scootchie was missing. In North Carolina. Four days now.
“I talked to a detective named Ruskin,” Sampson told the group in the kitchen. He was trying not to act like a street cop, but he couldn’t help it. He was on the case now. Flat-faced and serious. The Sampson stare.
“Detective Ruskin sounded knowledgeable about Naomi’s disappearance. Seemed like a straight-ahead cop on the phone. Something strange, though. Told me that a law-school friend of Naomi’s reported her missing. Her name’s Mary Ellen Klouk.”
I had met Naomi’s friend. She was a future lawyer, from Garden City, Long Island. Naomi had brought Mary Ellen home to Washington a couple of times. We’d gone to hear Handel’s Messiah together one Christmas at the Kennedy Center.
Sampson took off his dark glasses, and kept them off, which is rare for him. Naomi was his favorite, and he was as shook up as the rest of us. She called Sampson “His Grimness,” and “Darth One,” and he loved it when she teased him.
“Why didn’t this Detective Ruskin call us before now? Why didn’t those university people call me?” my sister-in-law asked. Cilla is forty-one. She has allowed herself to grow to ample proportions. I doubted that she was five feet four, but she had to be close to two hundred pounds. She’d told me that she didn’t want to be attractive to men anymore.
“Don’t know the answer to that yet,” Sampson told Cilla and the rest of us. “They told Mary Ellen Klouk not to call us.”
“What exactly did Detective Ruskin have to say about the delay?” I asked Sampson.
“Detective said there were extenuating circumstances. He wouldn’t elaborate for me, persuasive as I can be.”
“You tell him we could have the conversation in person?”