Kiss the Girls

by James Patterson

  When the nurse wheeled the bulky chair almost up to a stand of microphones, Kate surprised everyone. She slowly stood up and walked the rest of the way.

  “Hello, I’m Kate McTiernan. Obviously,” she said to the assembled reporters who now pushed in even closer to the prime witness. “I have a very brief statement to make, then I’ll get out of everybody’s hair.” Her voice was strong and vibrant. She was very much in control of herself, or so it seemed to all of us watching and listening.

  Her light touch and subtle humor drew smiles and laughter from the crowd. One or two of the reporters tried to ask questions, but the noise level had risen and it was hard to hear them. Cameras flashed and buzzed up and down the packed hospital corridor.

  Kate stopped speaking, and it became relatively quiet again. At first everyone thought the press conference was too much for her to handle. A nearby doctor stepped forward, but she waved him away.

  “I’m fine. I’m really okay, thanks. If I’m woozy or anything, I’ll sit right down in the chair like a model patient. I promise you I will. No false bravado from me.”

  She was definitely in control of this moment. She was older than most medical students or interns, and in fact she looked like a doctor.

  She peered around the room—she was curious, it seemed. Maybe a little amazed. Finally, she apologized for the momentary lapse. “I was just gathering my thoughts…. What I would like to do is tell you what I can about what happened to me—and I will tell you everything I can—but that will be it for today. I won’t answer any questions from the press. I’d like you all to respect that. Is that a fair deal?”

  She was poised and impressive in front of the TV cameras. Kate McTiernan was surprisingly relaxed under the circumstances, as if she could have done this for a living. I’d found her to be very self-assured and confident whenever she needed to be. At other times, she could be as vulnerable and afraid as the rest of us.

  “First, I would like to say something to all the families and friends who have someone missing. Please, don’t give up hope. The man known as Casanova strikes only if his explicit commands are disobeyed. I broke his rules, and I was badly beaten. But I did manage to escape. There are other women where I was kept captive. My thoughts are with them in ways you can’t imagine. I believe in my heart that they are still alive and safe.”

  The reporters pressed in closer and closer to Kate McTiernan. Even in her battered condition she was magnetic, her strength shone through. The TV cameras liked her. So would the public, I knew.

  For the next few moments, she did everything she could possibly do to allay the fears of the families of the missing women. She stressed again that she had been hurt only because she broke the house rules set down by Casanova. I thought that maybe she was sending a message to him, too. Blame me, not the other women.

  As I watched Kate speak, I asked myself some questions: Does he take only extraordinary women? Not just beauties, but women who are special in every way? What did that mean? What was Casanova really up to? What game was he playing?

  My suspicion was that the killer was obsessed with physical beauty, but that he couldn’t bear to be around women who weren’t as smart as he was. I sensed that he craved intimacy also.

  Finally, Kate stopped speaking. Tears were shining in her eyes, like perfect glass drops. “I’m through now,” she said in a soft voice. “Thank you for taking this message out to the families of the missing women. I hope that it helped a little bit. Please, no more questions for now. I still can’t remember everything that happened to me. I’ve told you what I can.”

  At first there was an unnatural silence. There wasn’t a single question. She had been clear about that. Then the reporters and the hospital personnel began to clap. They knew, just as Casanova knew, that Kate McTiernan was an extraordinary woman.

  I had one fear. Was Casanova there clapping, too?

  CHAPTER 53

  AT 4:00 A.M., Casanova packed a spanking-new, green-and-gray Lands’ End knapsack with necessary food and supplies. He headed out to his hideaway for a morning of long-awaited pleasures. He actually had a favorite catchphrase for his forbidden games: Kiss the girls.

  He fantasized about Anna Miller, his newest captive, on the car drive there, and then as he hiked through thick woods. He visualized over and over what he was going to do with Anna today. He remembered something, a quite wonderful and appropriate line, out of F. Scott Fitzgerald: The kiss originated when the first male reptile licked the first female, implying in a complimentary way that she was as succulent as the small reptile he had for dinner the night before. It was all biological, wasn’t it? Tick-cock.

  When he finally arrived at the hideaway, he turned on the Stones full volume. The incomparable Beggar’s Banquet album. He needed to hear loud, antisocial rock music today. Mick Jagger was fifty, right? He was only thirty-six himself. This was his moment.

  He posed naked in front of a floor-length mirror and admired his slender, well-muscled physique. He combed out his hair. Then he slipped into a shimmery hand-painted silk robe that he’d bought once upon a time in Bangkok. He left it open to expose himself.

  He selected a different costume mask, a beautiful one from Venice, originally purchased for just such a special occasion. A moment of mystery and love. At last he was ready to see Anna Miller.

  Anna was so haughty. Absolutely untouchable. Exquisite physically. He needed to break her quickly.

  Nothing could match this physical and emotional feeling: adrenaline pumping, heart beating loudly, total exhilaration in every part of his body. He brought warm milk in a glass pitcher. Also a small wicker basket with a special surprise for Anna.

  In truth, it was something he’d been planning for Dr. Kate. He’d wanted to share this moment with her.

  He had put on the loud rock ’n’ roll so that Anna would know it was time to get ready. It was a signal. He was certainly ready for her. Pitcher full of warm milk. Long rubber tubing with a nozzle. Cuddly present in the wicker basket. Let the games begin.

  CHAPTER 54

  CASANOVA COULDN’T take his eyes off Anna Miller. The air around him seemed to roar. Everything was charged with high expectations. He was feeling more than a little out of control. Not like himself. More like the Gentleman Caller.

  He looked down on his art—his creation. He held a thought: Anna has never looked like this for anyone else.

  Anna Miller lay on the bare wooden floor of the downstairs bedroom. She was naked, except for her jewelry, which he wanted her to wear. Her arms were bound with leather behind her back. A comfortable pillow was propped underneath her buttocks.

  Anna’s perfect legs hung from a rope tied to a ceiling beam. This was how he wanted her; this was exactly the way he’d imagined her so many times.

  You can do anything that you want to do, he thought.

  And so, he did.

  Most of the warm milk was already inside her. He’d used the rubber hose and nozzle to do that.

  She reminded him a little of Annette Bening, he was thinking, except that she was his now. She wasn’t a flickering image on some Cineplex movie screen. She would help him get over Kate McTiernan, and the sooner the better.

  Anna wasn’t so haughty anymore; she wasn’t supremely untouchable, either. He was always curious about how much it took to break someone’s will. Not so much, usually. Not in this age of cowards and spoiled brats.

  “Please take it away. Don’t do this to me. I’ve been good, haven’t I?” Anna pleaded convincingly. She had such a beautiful and interesting face—in happiness—and especially in sorrow.

  Her cheeks rose sharply whenever she spoke. He memorized the look, everything he could about this special moment. Details to dream about later on. Like the exact tilting angle of her derriere.

  “It can’t harm you, Anna,” he told her truthfully. “Its mouth is sewn shut. I sewed it myself. The snake is harmless. I would never hurt you.”

  “You’re sick and vile,” Anna suddenly snapped at hi
m. “You’re a sadist!”

  He merely nodded. He had wanted to see the real Anna, and there she was: another snapping dragon.

  Casanova watched the milk as it slowly dripped from her anus. So did the small black snake. The sweet fragrance of the milk drew it forward across the wooden two-by-fours of the bedroom floor. It was quite magnificent to observe. This truly was an image for beauty and the beast.

  The cautiously alert black snake paused, then suddenly jutted its head forward. The head smoothly slid inside Anna Miller. The black snake cleverly gathered itself in folds and slid farther inside.

  Casanova closely watched Anna’s beautiful eyes widen. How many other men had ever seen this, or felt anything like what he was experiencing now? How many of those men were still alive?

  He had first heard of this sexual practice for enlarging the anus on his trips to Thailand and Cambodia. Now he’d performed the ceremony himself. It made him feel so much better—about the loss of Kate, about other losses.

  That was the exquisite and surprising beauty of the games he chose to play at his hideaway. He loved them. He couldn’t possibly stop himself.

  And neither could anyone else. Not the police, not the FBI, and not Dr. Alex Cross.

  CHAPTER 55

  KATE STILL couldn’t remember much from the actual day of her escape from hell. She agreed to be hypnotized, at least to let me try, though she thought her natural defenses might be too strong. We decided to do it late at night in the hospital, when she was already tired and might be more susceptible.

  Hypnotism can be a relatively simple process. First, I asked Kate to close her eyes, then to breathe slowly and evenly. Maybe I would finally meet Casanova tonight. Maybe through Kate’s eyes I’d see how he worked.

  “In with the good air, out with the bad,” Kate said, keeping her good humor most of the time. “Something like that. Right, Dr. Cross?”

  “Clear your mind as much as you can, Kate,” I said.

  “I don’t know about the wisdom of that.” She smiled. “There’s an awful lot bumping around in there right now. Rather like an old, old attic filled with unopened dressers and portmanteaus.” Her voice was beginning to sound a little sleepy. That was a hopeful sign.

  “Now just count back slowly from a hundred. Begin whenever you feel like it,” I told her.

  She went under easily. That probably meant that she trusted me somewhat. With the trust came responsibility on my part.

  Kate was vulnerable now. I didn’t want to hurt her under any circumstances. For the first few minutes, we talked as we often did when she was fully conscious and awake. We had enjoyed talking to each other from the start.

  “Can you remember being kept in the house with Casanova?” I finally asked her a leading question.

  “Yes, I remember quite a lot now. I remember the night he came into my apartment. I can see him carrying me through some kind of woods, to wherever I was kept. He carried me like my weight was nothing.”

  “Tell me about the woods you went through, Kate.” This was our first dramatic moment. She was actually with Casanova again. In his power. A captive. I suddenly realized how quiet the hospital was all around us.

  “It was too dark, really. The woods were very thick, very creepy. He had a flashlight with him, kept it on a string or rope around his neck…. He’s unbelievably strong. I thought of him as an animal, physically. He compared himself to Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights. He has a very romantic view of himself and what he’s doing. That night… he whispered to me as if we were already lovers. He told me he loved me. He sounded… sincere.”

  “What else do you remember about him, Kate? Anything you recall is helpful. Take your time.”

  She turned her head, as if she were looking at someone off to my right. “He always wore a different mask. He wore a reconstructive mask one time. That was the scariest one. They’re called ‘death masks’ because hospitals and morgues sometimes use them to help identify accident victims who are unrecognizable.”

  “That’s interesting about the death masks. Please go on, Kate. You’re being incredibly helpful.”

  “I know that they can make them right from a human skull, pretty much any skull. They’ll take a photo of it… cover the photo with tracing paper… draw the features. Then they build an actual mask from the drawing. There was a death mask in the movie Gorky Park. They aren’t usually meant to be worn. I wondered how he’d gotten it.”

  Okay, Kate, I was thinking to myself, now keep going about Casanova. “What happened on the day that you escaped?” I asked her, leading her just a little.

  For the first time, she seemed uncomfortable with a question. Her eyes opened for a split second, as if she were in a light sleep and I had woken her, jarred her. Her eyes shut again. Her right foot was tapping very rapidly.

  “I don’t remember very much about that day, Alex. I think I was drugged out of my mind, off the planet.”

  “That’s okay. Anything you remember is very good for me to know. You’re doing beautifully. You told me once that you kicked him. Did you kick Casanova?”

  “I kicked him. About three-quarters speed. He yelled out in pain, and he went down.”

  There was another long pause. Suddenly, Kate started to cry. Tears welled up in her eyes, and then she was sobbing very, very hard.

  Her face was wet with perspiration as well. I felt that I should bring her out of the hypnosis. I didn’t understand what had just happened, and it scared me a little.

  I tried to keep my own voice very calm. “What’s the matter, Kate? What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

  “I left those other women there. I couldn’t find them at first. Then I was so unbelievably confused. I left the others.”

  Her eyes opened and they were filled with fear, but also tears. She had brought herself out. She was strong like that. “What made me so afraid?” she asked me. “What just happened?”

  “I don’t know for sure,” I told Kate. We would talk about it later, but not right now.

  She averted her eyes from mine. It wasn’t like her. “Can I be alone?” she whispered then. “Can I just be alone now? Thank you.”

  I left the hospital room feeling almost as if I had betrayed Kate. But I didn’t know if there was anything that I could have done differently. This was a multiple-homicide investigation. Nothing was working so far. How could that be?

  CHAPTER 56

  KATE WAS released from University Hospital later that week. She had asked if we could talk for a while each day. I readily agreed.

  “This isn’t therapy in any way, shape, or form,” she told me. She just wanted to vent with someone about some difficult subjects. Partly because of Naomi, we had formed a quick, strong bond.

  There was no further information, no more clues about Casanova’s link with the Gentleman Caller in Los Angeles. Beth Lieberman, the reporter at the Los Angeles Times, refused to talk to me. She was peddling her hot literary property in New York.

  I wanted to fly out to L.A. to see Lieberman, but Kyle Craig asked me not to. He assured me that I knew everything the Times reporter had on the case. I needed to trust someone; I trusted Kyle.

  On a Monday afternoon, Kate and I went for a walk in the woods surrounding the Wykagil River, where she’d been found by the two boys. It was still unspoken, but we seemed to be in this thing together now. Certainly no one knew more about Casanova than she did. If she could remember anything more it would be so useful. The smallest detail could be a clue that might open up everything.

  Kate became quiet and unusually subdued as we entered the dark, brooding woods east of the Wykagil River. The human monster could be lurking out here, maybe prowling in the woods right now. Maybe he was watching us.

  “I used to love walking in woods like these. Blackberry brambles and sweet sassafras. Cardinals and blue jays feeding everywhere. It reminds me of when I was growing up,” Kate told me as we walked. “My sisters and I used to go swimming every single day in a stream like this one. We swam ne
kkid, which was forbidden by my father. Anything my father strictly forbade, we tried to do.”

  “All that swimming experience came in handy,” I said. “Maybe it helped get you safely down the Wykagil.”

  Kate shook her head. “No, that was just pure stubbornness. I vowed I wasn’t going to die that day. Couldn’t give him the satisfaction.”

  I was keeping my own discomfort about being in the woods to myself. Some of my uneasiness had to do with the unfortunate history of these woods and the surrounding farmlands. Tobacco farms had been spotted all through here once upon a time. Slave farms. The blood and bones of my ancestors. The extraordinary kidnapping and subjugation of more than four million Africans who were originally brought to America. They had been abducted. Against their will.

  “I don’t remember any of this terrain, Alex,” Kate said. I had strapped on a shoulder holster before we left the car. Kate winced and shook her head at the sight of the gun. But she didn’t protest beyond the baleful look. She sensed that I was the dragonslayer. She knew there was a real dragon out here. She’d met him.

  “I remember I ran away, escaped into woods just like these. Tall Carolina pines. Not much light getting through, eerie as a bat cave. I remember clearly when the house disappeared on me. I can’t remember too much else. I’m blocking it. I don’t even know how I got into the river.”

  We were about two miles from where we’d left the car. Now we hiked north, staying close to the river Kate had floated down on her miraculous, “stubborn” escape. Every tree and bush reached out relentlessly toward the diminishing sunlight.

  “This reminds me of the Bacchae,” Kate said. Her upper lip curled in an ironic smile. “The triumph of dark, chaotic barbarism over civilized human reason.” It felt as if we were moving against a high, relentless tide of vegetation.