Kiss the Girls

by James Patterson

  Kate continued to shake her head. “I’m almost sure he isn’t Casanova, Alex. There must be two of them. Two Mr. Squirrels.” Her brown eyes were intense, as she looked at me.

  So there were two of them. Were they competing? What the hell was their coast-to-coast game all about?

  CHAPTER 64

  SMALL TALK, surveillance talk; it was familiar territory for me. Sampson and I had a saying about surveillance back in D.C.: They do the crime; we do the time.

  “How much could he make with a successful Beverly Hills medical practice? Ballpark number, Kate,” I asked my partner. We were still watching the doctors’ private parking lot of Cedars-Sinai. There was nothing to do but eyeball Rudolph’s spiffy new BMW and wait, and talk like old friends on a front stoop in D.C.

  “He probably charges about a hundred and fifty to two a visit. He could gross five or six hundred thousand a year. Then there are surgery fees, Alex. That’s if he has a conscience about the prices he charges, and we know he doesn’t have a conscience.”

  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?”

  “I probably was with Kristin,” Kate said. “I got the good grades in school. I was a little pushy sometimes. She even called me ‘Push’ in high school. Worse names than that, too.”

  “The dominant twin can act in a male role-model behavior structure,” I said to Kate. The two of us were talking doctor to doctor. “The dominant figure might not be the more skillful at manipulation, though.”

  “As you could imagine, I’ve read a little about the phenomenon,” Kate said and smiled. “Twinning creates a uniquely powerful structure within which the bonded pair can operate in complex ways. Something like that?”

  “That’s correct, Dr. McTiernan. In the case of Casanova and the Gentleman, each would have his own bodyguard-cum-supportive person. That could be why they achieve so well. Perfect crimes. They each have a built-in, and very effective, emotional support system.”

  The question ringing loudly in my mind was—how had they originally met? Was it at Duke? Had Casanova been a student there, too? It made some sense. It also reminded me of the Leopold-Loeb case in Chicago. Two very smart boys, special boys, committing forbidden acts together. Sharing evil thoughts and dirty secrets because they were lonely and had no one else to talk to… twinning at its most destructive.

  Was that the beginning of the solution to this puzzle? I wondered. Were the Gentleman and Casanova twinning? Were they actually working together? What was their nasty little game all about? What game were they playing?

  “Let’s go smash in his picture window with a tire iron,” Kate said. She was feeling it, too. We were both ready to rumble.

  We wanted to take down this grown-up Leopold and Loeb.

  CHAPTER 65

  EIGHT O’CLOCK came and went on the surveillance watch. Maybe Dr. Will Rudolph wasn’t the Gentleman Caller. The Los Angeles Times reporter Beth Lieberman could have been wrong. There was no way to ask her about it now.

  Kate and I had been gabbing about the Lakers without Magic Johnson and Kareem, about Aaron Neville’s latest album, Hillary and Bill Clinton’s life together, the merits of Johns Hopkins versus University of North Carolina medical school.

  Strange sparks were still flying between us. I’d had some unofficial therapy sessions with Kate McTiernan and I had hypnotized her once. I also understood that I was afraid of any kind of fire starting between us. What was wrong with me? It was time to start my life again, to get over the loss of my wife, Maria. I thought I had something good with a woman named Jezzie Flanagan, but she had left an emptiness in me that I could barely get over.

  Kate and I finally began to cover subjects a little closer to the heart. She asked why I was shying away from relationships (because my wife had died; because my last rela
tionship had imploded; because of my two kids). I asked her why she was wary of meaningful relationships (she was afraid she was going to die of ovarian or breast cancer like her sisters; she was afraid her lovers might die, or leave her—that she would keep on losing people).

  “We’re quite the pair.” I finally shook my head and smiled.

  “Maybe we’re both terrified of losing someone again,” Kate said. “Maybe it’s better to love and lose than be afraid.”

  Before we could really get into that thorny subject, Dr. Will Rudolph finally appeared. I looked at the time on the dashboard clock. It was 10:20.

  Rudolph was decked out in all-black party clothes. Form-fitting blazer, turtleneck, clinging slacks, snazzy cowboy boots. He got into a white Range Rover this time instead of the BMW sedan. He looked freshly showered. Probably had taken a nap. I envied him that.

  “Black on black for the good doctor,” Kate said with a tight smile. “Dressed to kill?”

  “Maybe he has a dinner date,” I said. “Now there’s a scary idea. He sups with the women, then kills them.”

  “That could get him inside their apartments at least. What a terrible creep. Two unbelievable creeps on the loose.”

  I started up our car and we followed Rudolph. I didn’t see any FBI coverage, but I was sure they were there.

  The Bureau still hadn’t brought in the LAPD on this. It was a dangerous game, but not an unusual one for the FBI. They considered themselves the best policemen for any job, and the ultimate authority. They had decided this was an interstate crime spree, so it was theirs to solve. Somebody at the Bureau had a hard-on for this case.

  “Vampires always hunt at night, huh,” Kate said as we headed south through L.A. “That’s what this feels like, Alex. Bram Stoker’s The Gentleman Caller. A real-life horror story.”

  I knew what Kate was feeling. I felt it too. “He is a monster. Only he’s created himself. So has Casanova. It’s another similarity they share. Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, they wrote only about human monsters roaming the earth. Now we have sickos living out their elaborate fantasies. What a country.”

  “Love it or leave it, bub,” Kate said with a drawl and a wink.

  I had done enough surveillance early in my career to get reasonably good at it. I figured I had earned a graduate degree in tracking during the Soneji/Murphy manhunt. So far, I’d noticed that the West Coast FBI was good, too.

  Agents Asaro and Cosgrove checked in on the radio as soon as we started to move again. They were in charge of the tracking unit on Will Rudolph. We still didn’t know if he was the Gentleman. We had no proof. We couldn’t move on Dr. Rudolph yet.

  We followed the Range Rover west through Los Angeles. Rudolph finally turned onto Sunset Drive and took it all the way to the Pacific Coast Highway. Then he headed north on U.S. Highway 1. I noticed that he was careful to keep the Range Rover at the speed limit inside L.A. But once he hit the open road, he started to fly.

  “Where the heck is he going? My heart’s in my throat,” Kate finally admitted.

  “We’ll be okay. It seems scary chasing him at night,” I said. It did feel as if we were alone with him. Where the hell was he going? Was he hunting? If his pattern held, he was due for another killing soon. He had to be in heat.

  It turned out to be a very long ride. We watched the stars brighten the coastal California night. Six hours later, we were still tacking on Highway 1. The Range Rover finally pulled off at a quaint, wooden signpost that read Big Sur State Park, among other things.

  As if to validate that we were really in Big Sur, we passed an antique van with a bumper sticker: VISUALIZE INDUSTRIAL COLLAPSE.

  “Visualize Dr. Will Rudolph having a massive stroke,” Kate growled softly.

  I checked my watch as we left the main highway. “It’s past three. Getting late for him to get into any serious trouble tonight.” I hoped that was the case.

  “If there was ever any doubt, this may prove he’s a bloodsucking vampire,” Kate muttered. Her arms were crossed tightly across her chest and had been for most of the long ride. “He’s going off to sleep in his favorite coffin.”

  “Right. That’s when we drive a wooden stake through his heart,” I told her. We were both a little groggy. I had taken a pill during the ride. Kate declined. She said she knew too much about drugs and was leery of most of them.

  We passed a complex of directional signs: Point Sur, Pfeiffer Beach, Big Sur Lodge, Ventana, the Esalen Institute. Will Rudolph headed in the direction of Big Sur Lodge, Sycamore Canyon, Bottchers Gap Campgrounds.

  “I was hoping he would go to Esalen,” Kate quipped. “Learn to meditate, deal with his inner turmoil.”

  “What in hell is he up to tonight?” I wondered out loud. What were he and Casanova doing? So far it was impossible to figure out. “His hideaway might be up here in the woods, Kate,” I offered a thought. “Maybe he has a house of horror just like Casanova’s.”

  Twinning, I thought again. It made a lot of sense. They would be providing support systems for each other. Parallel tracks for the two monsters. Where did they meet, though? Did the two of them ever hunt together? I suspected that they had.

  The white Range Rover was winding along a hilly and rather rambunctious side road that branched east from the ocean. Ancient, somber redwoods flashed on either side of the narrow ribbon of highway. A pale full moon seemed to be moving directly above the Rover, following it.

  I let him get a safe distance ahead—so that he was actually out of our sight. The huge fir trees seemed to float past our car on either road shoulder. Dark shadows in real life. A bright yellow sign in the headlights read: Impassable in wet weather.

  “He’s right there, Alex.” Kate’s warning came a little too late. “He’s stopped!”

  The Gentleman’s hooded eyes glared at our car as we passed him and the Range Rover.

  He had seen us.

  CHAPTER 66

  DR. WILL RUDOLPH had turned into a rutted, dirt-and-gravel driveway hidden from the main road. He was stooped down inside the Rover, and was gathering an armful of who-knew-what from the backseat. He stared up at our passing car with a cold, questioning look in his eyes.

  I kept speeding along on the blacktop road that was accentuated by overhanging, gnarled black branches. A few hundred yards farther, just around a curve, I eased over onto the narrow shoulder. I stopped in front of a dented metal road sign that promised more dangerous twists and turns in the road up ahead.

  “He’s stopped at a cabin,” I said into the FBI car’s two-way radio. “He’s on foot, out of the Rover.”

  “We saw that. We’ve got him, Alex.” John Asaro’s voice came back over the two-way radio. “We’re on the other side of the cabin now. Looks dark inside. He’s turning on lights. El pais grande del sur. That’s what the Spanish called this place way back when. Beautiful spot to catch this fucker.”

  Kate and I got out of the car. She looked a little pale, understandably so. The temperature was probably in the forties, maybe even the thirties, and the mountain air was bracing. But Kate wasn’t shivering just from the damp cold.

  “We’re going to get him soon,” I said to her. “He’s starting to make mistakes.”

  “It could be another house of horror. You were right,” she said in a low voice. Her eyes stared straight ahead. I hadn’t seen her this unsettled since I’d first met her in the hospital. “It feels like it, Alex… feels almost the same. Feels creepy. I’m not being very brave, am I?”

  “Believe me, Kate, I’m not feeling particularly brave right now, either.”

  The thick coastal fog seemed to roll on forever. My stomach felt icy and sour. We had to get moving.

  Kate and I went into the dark screen of woods, heading toward the cabin. The north wind whistled and howled loudly through the towering redwood and fir trees. I had no idea what to expect from here on.

  “Shit,” Kate whispered her summation of the night’s experience. “I’m not kidding, Alex.”

  “
You’ve got that right.”

  El pais grande del sur at three o’clock in the morning. Rudolph had come to a lonely outpost on the edge of the earth. Casanova had a house in the South, in the deep woods, too. A “disappearing” house where he kept a collection of young women.

  I thought of the spooky diaries in the Los Angeles Times. Could Naomi have been moved out here for some crazy, psychopathic reason? Maybe she was being kept in the cabin, or somewhere nearby?

  I stopped walking suddenly. I could hear wind chimes, which sounded particularly creepy under the circumstances. Up ahead, a small cabin was visible. It was pink, with white doors and white window trim. It looked like a pleasant-enough summer place.

  “He left a light for us,” Kate whispered behind me. “I remember that Casanova used to play loud rock ’n’ roll music when he was in the house.”

  I could tell it was painful for her to be thinking about her captivity again, to be reliving it. “You see any similarities to this cabin?” I asked her. I was trying to be very still inside, trying to get ready for the Gentleman.

  “No. I only saw the inside of the other place, Alex. Let’s hope it won’t disappear on us.”

  “I’m hoping for a lot of things right now. I’ll put that on the list.”

  The cabin was an A-frame, and probably built to be a vacation home or weekend retreat. There were three or four bedrooms from the look of it.

  I took out my Glock as we got closer. The Glock was the weapon of choice these days in the inner city; it weighed a little over a pound when loaded and was easily concealed. It would probably work fine in el pais grande del sur, too.

  Kate kept behind me as we moved toward a clearing in the trees that served as a backyard. There were actually two lights glittering and drawing bugs to the house. One was the front-porch lamp. The second was in the back of the cabin. I made my way toward the second, dimmer light in back. I gestured for Kate to stay back, which she did.