Alex Cross 02 - Kiss the Girls

by James Patterson

  I fumbled on a pair of dusty and stained sunglasses that had been sitting on the dash of the car for months. They were Sampson’s shades, originally. He’d given them to Damon, so he could look as tough as Sampson whenever I gave him any trouble. I needed to look tough right now.

  Chapter 96

  I BEGAN to walk toward Kate’s house on unsure, rubbery legs. Maybe I looked like the toughest mother-fucker around, but my heart was heavy and incredibly fragile.

  News photographers snapped my picture again and again. The camera flashes sounded like hollow, muffled gunshots. Reporters approached, but I waved them off.

  “Keep back, man,” I finally warned a couple of them. Serious warning. “This is not the time. Not now!”

  But I noticed that even the reporters and cameramen looked dazed and confused and shocked.

  Both the FBI and the Chapel Hill PD were at the scene of the unspeakable, cowardly attack. I saw a lot of local policemen. Nick Ruskin and Davey Sikes had come down from Durham. Sikes gave me the evil eye—like what did I think I was doing here?

  Kyle Craig was already at the scene. He had personally called me at the hotel to give me the terrible news.

  Kyle came up to me and he put his arm around my shoulder, spoke to me in a low whisper. “She’s very bad, Alex, but she’s hanging in somehow. She must want to live very, very much. They should be bringing her out any minute now. Stay out here with me. Don’t go inside. Trust me on this, will you?”

  I listened to Kyle’s words and I was afraid I was going to break down in front of all the cameras, all the strangers, and the few people I knew. My head, my heart—it was all whirling chaos. I finally went inside the house, and I looked at as much as I could bear.

  He had come into her bedroom again… he had been right there.

  Something was wrong, though… something didn’t track in straight lines for me. Something… what was wrong here?

  The emergency team from Duke Medical Center put Kate on a stretcher, the kind used for broken backs and severe head injuries. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone carried so delicately, under any tragic circumstances. The doctors looked ashen as they began to carry her out of the house. The crowd became suddenly hushed when the EMS crew appeared outside.

  “They’re bringing her to the Duke Medical Center. You’ll get some arguments from the university people, but that’s the best facility in the state,” Kyle told me. He was trying to be reassuring in his soothing, mechanical-man way. Actually, he was surprisingly good at it.

  Something was wrong… something was all out of kilter…. Think. Focus your thoughts somehow. This could be important… but I couldn’t think in straight lines. Not yet, I couldn’t.

  “What about Wick Sachs?” I asked Kyle.

  “He got home before ten o’clock. He’s there now…. We don’t know that he didn’t go out for sure, I suppose. He could have slipped out past us somehow. Maybe he has a way out of the house. I don’t think so, though.”

  I moved away from Kyle Craig and went over to one of the white-coated Duke University doctors near the ambulance. Camera flashes were erupting everywhere around us. Hundreds of “memorable” pictures were being taken by the nightcrawlers at the crime scene.

  “Can I ride with her?”

  The EMS doctor very gently shook his head at me. “No, sir,” he said. He seemed to be talking in slow motion. “No, sir, only the family can ride in the ambulance. I’m sorry, Dr. Cross.”

  “I’m her family tonight,” I said. I pushed past him and climbed into the rear of the ambulance. He didn’t try to stop me. He couldn’t have, anyway.

  I felt numb all over. Kate lay amid the solemn monitoring and resuscitation equipment in the close quarters of the rescue ambulance. I was afraid that she had died as I was getting into the ambulance, or when they were carrying her outside.

  I sat beside Kate and held just the tips of her fingers. “It’s Alex. I’m here for you,” I whispered to her. “Be strong right now. You’re so strong, anyway. Be strong now.”

  The same doctor who had told me I couldn’t get into the ambulance came in and sat next to me. He felt obliged to tell me the rules, but he didn’t care to enforce them. His name tag said Dr. B. Stringer, Duke University EMS Team. I owed him a big favor.

  “Can you tell me anything about Kate’s chances?” I asked as the emergency ambulance slowly pulled away from the nightmare scene in Chapel Hill.

  “That’s a tough question, I’m afraid. She’s alive, and that’s a miracle in itself.” He spoke in a low, respectful voice. “There are multiple fractures and contusions, some with open gashes in them. Both cheekbones are fractured. She may have a sprained neck. She must have played dead on him. Somehow, she had the presence of mind to trick him.”

  Kate’s face was swollen badly and cut. She was almost unrecognizable. I knew the same was true all over her body. I clung gently to Kate’s hand as the ambulance sped toward Duke Medical Center. She had the presence of mind to trick him? That was Kate, all right. I wondered, though.

  I held on to another mind-blowing thought. It had hit me hard outside the house. I thought I knew what had been wrong in Kate’s bedroom.

  Will Rudolph had been in the bedroom, hadn’t he? The Gentleman Caller had been there for the attack. He had to be the one. It was his style. Extreme, graphic violence. Rage.

  There was little evidence of Casanova. No artistic touches. There was such extraordinary violence, though…. They were twinning! Two monsters bonding to make one. Perhaps Rudolph resented Kate because Casanova had loved her. Maybe she had come between them in his twisted perception. Maybe they had left Kate alive on purpose—so she could be a vegetable for the rest of her life.

  They were working together now, weren’t they? There were two of them to catch, to stop.

  Chapter 97

  THE FBI and Durham police decided to bring Dr. Wick Sachs in for questioning early the next morning. This was a big deal; a pivotal decision in the case.

  A special investigator was flown down from Virginia to do the delicate interrogation. He was one of the FBI’s best, a man named James Heekin. He questioned Sachs throughout most of the morning.

  I sat with Sampson, Kyle Craig, and detectives Nick Ruskin and Davey Sikes. We watched the interrogation through a two-way mirror inside Durham Police Headquarters. I felt like a starving man with his nose pressed against the window of an expensive restaurant. But there was no food being served inside.

  The FBI interrogator was good, very patient, and as crafty as a star district attorney. But so was Wick Sachs. He was articulate; extremely cool under verbal fire; even smug.

  “This fucker is going down,” Davey Sikes finally said inside the quiet observation room. It was good to see that he and Ruskin cared at least. In a way, I could empathize with them in their role as local detectives: they had been on the outside looking in for most of the frustrating investigation.

  “What do you have on Sachs? Tell me if you’re holding anything back,” I said to Nick Ruskin at the coffee machine.

  “We brought him in because our chief of police is an asshole,” Ruskin told me. “We don’t have anything on Sachs yet.” I wondered if I could believe Ruskin, or anyone else connected with this case.

  After nearly two hours of tense parrying back and forth, Agent Heekin’s interrogation had established little more than that Sachs was a collector of erotica, and that he’d been promiscuous with consenting students and professors over the last eleven years at the university.

  As much as I had wanted to bust Sachs, I couldn’t really understand why he’d been brought in at this time. Why now?

  “We found out where his money comes from.” Kyle told me part of the answer that morning. “Sachs is the owner of an escort service working out of Raleigh and Durham. The service is called Kissmet. Interesting name. They advertise ‘lingerie modeling’ in the Yellow Pages. At the least, Dr. Sachs will have some serious problems with Internal Revenue. Washington decided we should app
ly pressure now. They’re afraid he’s going to run soon.”

  “I don’t agree with your people in Washington,” I told Kyle. I knew that some agents called headquarters up there Disneyland East. I could see why. They could be risking the investigation right now, and by remote control.

  “Who does agree with Washington?” Kyle said and shrugged his wide, bony shoulders. It was his way of admitting that he wasn’t in full control anymore. The case was too big now. “By the way, how is Kate McTiernan doing?” he asked.

  I had already been on the phone three times with Duke Medical Center that morning. They had a number for me at the Durham station, in case Kate’s condition changed. “She’s listed as grave, but she’s still hanging in there,” I told Kyle.

  I got the chance to talk to Wick Sachs just before eleven o’clock that morning. It was Kyle’s concession to me.

  I tried to put Kate out of my mind before I had to be in the same room with Sachs. Anger thundered and roared inside my body all the same. I didn’t know if I could control myself. I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to anymore.

  “Let me do this one, Alex. Let me go in there with him.” Sampson held my arm before I went inside. I broke away from him and went to meet Dr. Wick Sachs.

  “I’m going to do him.”

  Chapter 98

  HELLO, DR. Sachs.”

  The lighting in the small, impersonal interrogation room was even brighter and harsher than it had looked from behind the two-way mirror. Sachs was red-eyed, and I could tell he was as tense as I was. His skin looked stretched taut over his skull. But he was as confident and smug with me as he’d been with James Heekin of the FBI.

  Was I looking into the eyes of Casanova? I wondered. Could he possibly be the human monster?

  “My name is Alex Cross,” I said as I slumped down on a shopworn metal chair. “Naomi Cross is my niece.”

  Sachs spoke through gritted teeth. He had a mild drawl. According to Kate, Casanova had no noticeable accent.

  “I know who the hell you are. I read the newspapers, Dr. Cross. I don’t know your niece. I read that she was abducted.”

  I nodded. “If you read the papers, you must also be aware of the handiwork of the scum who calls himself Casanova.”

  Sachs smirked, at least it looked like that to me. His blue eyes were filled with contempt. It was easy to see why he was widely disliked at the university. His blond hair was slicked back, not a strand out of place. His horn-rimmed glasses helped make him seem officious and condescending.

  “There is no record of violence anywhere in my past. I could never commit those horrifying murders. I can’t even kill palmetto bugs in my house. My aversion to violence is well documented.”

  I’ll bet it is, I thought. All of your clever fronts and façades are neatly, perfectly in place, aren’t they? Your devoted wife, the nurse. Your two children. Your well-documented “aversion to violence.”

  I rubbed my face with both my hands. It took all my strength to keep from hitting him. He remained haughty and unapproachable.

  I leaned across the table and spoke in a whisper. “I looked through your erotic book collection. I was there in your basement, Dr. Sachs. The collection’s full of perverse, sexual violence. The physical degradation of men, women, and children. That might not constitute a ‘record of violence,’ but it gives me some subtle hints about your true character.”

  Sachs dismissed what I said with a wave of his hand. “I’m a noted philosopher and sociologist. Yes, I study eroticism—just as you study the criminal mind. I don’t suffer from libertine dementia, Dr. Cross. My erotic collection is the key to my understanding the fantasy life of Western culture, the escalating war between men and women.” His voice level went up. “I also don’t have to explain any of my private affairs to you. I’ve broken no laws. I’m here voluntarily. You, on the other hand, entered my house without a search warrant.”

  I tried to keep Sachs off balance by asking him about something else. “Why do you think you’re so successful with young women? We already know of your sexual conquests of students at the university. Eighteen-, nineteen-, twenty-year-olds. Beautiful young women; your own students, in some cases. There’s a record of that, certainly.”

  For a moment his anger surfaced. Then he caught himself and did something odd, and maybe very revealing. Sachs showed his need to exert power and control, to be the star of the show, even to me. Insignificant as I was to him.

  “Why am I successful with women, Dr. Cross?” Sachs smiled and he let his tongue play between his teeth. The message was subtle, but also clear. Sachs was telling me that he knew how to sexually control most women.

  He continued to smile. An obscene smile from an obscene man. “Many women want to be freed from their sexual inhibitions, especially young women, the modern women on campuses. I free them. I free as many women as I possibly can.”

  That did it. I was across the table in a second. Sachs’s chair tumbled over backwards. I landed heavily on top of him. He grunted in pain.

  I pressed my body down hard on his. My arms and legs were shaking. I held back from actually throwing a punch. He was absolutely powerless to stop me, I realized. He didn’t know how to fight back. He wasn’t very strong or athletic.

  Nick Ruskin and Davey Sikes were inside the interrogation room in a flash, and Kyle and Sampson were right behind them. They jammed into the room and tried to pull me off Sachs.

  Actually, I pulled myself away from Wick Sachs. I didn’t hurt him, never intended to. I whispered to Sampson. “He isn’t physically strong. Casanova is. He isn’t the monster. He isn’t Casanova.”

  Chapter 99

  THAT NIGHT, Sampson and I had dinner together at a pretty good spot in Durham. Ironically, it was called Nana’s.

  Neither of us was especially hungry. The overly large steaks with shallots and mountains of garlic mashed potatoes went to waste. It was late in the game with Casanova, and we seemed to be falling all the way back to square one.

  We talked about Kate. I had been told by hospital officials that her condition was still poor. If she lived, the doctors believed that she had little chance of full recovery, of ever being a doctor again.

  “You two were more than, you know, good friends?” Sampson finally asked. He was gentle with his probing, the way he can be when he wants to.

  I shook my head. “No, we were friends, John. I could talk to her about anything, and in ways I’d mostly forgotten. I’ve never been so comfortable with a woman so quickly, except maybe for Maria.”

  Sampson nodded a lot, and mostly listened to me air it all out. He knew who I was, past and present.

  My beeper sounded while we were still pushing around the generous portions of food on our plates. I called Kyle Craig from a phone downstairs in the restaurant. I reached him in his car. He was on his way to Hope Valley.

  “We’re about to arrest Wick Sachs for the Casanova murders,” he said. I almost dropped the receiver. “You’re about to what” I shouted into the phone. I couldn’t believe what I had just heard.

  “When the hell is this going to happen?” I asked. “When was the decision made? Who made it?”

  Kyle kept his cool as always. The Iceman. “We’re going into the house in the next couple of minutes. This time it’s the Durham police chief’s game. Something he found in the house. Physical evidence. It will be a joint arrest, the Bureau in cooperation with the Durham PD. I wanted you to know, Alex.”

  “He’s not Casanova,” I said to Kyle. “Don’t take him down. Don’t arrest Wick Sachs.” The level of my voice was high. The pay phone was in a narrow corridor of the restaurant, and people were filing in and out of the nearby restrooms. I was drawing stares, both angry and fearful looks.

  “It’s a done deal,” Kyle said. “I’m sorry about it myself.” Then he hung up the car phone on me. End of discussion.

  Sampson and I rushed to Sachs’s house in the Durham suburbs. Man Mountain was quiet at first, then he asked the sixty-four-thousand-dolla
r question: “Could they have enough to convict, without you knowing anything?” It was a tough question for me. His meaning: How out of the loop was I?

  “I don’t think Kyle has enough for an arrest now. He would have told me. The Durham PD? I don’t know what the hell they’re up to. Ruskin and Sikes have been off doing their own thing. We’ve been in their position ourselves.”

  When we arrived in Hope Valley, I found out that we weren’t the only ones who had been called to the arrest scene. The quiet suburban street was blocked off. Several TV station trucks and minivans were already there. Police cruisers and FBI sedans were parked everywhere.

  “This is really fucked up. Looks like a block party,” Sampson said as we got out of the car. “Worst I’ve seen, I think. Worst screwup.”

  “It has been from the beginning,” I agreed. “A multijurisdictional nightmare.” I was shaking like a wino in winter on a D.C. street. I had taken one body blow after another. Nothing completely made sense to me anymore. How out of the loop was I?

  Kyle Craig saw me coming. He walked up to me and firmly grabbed my arm. I had the feeling he was ready to body-block me if necessary.

  “I know how damn upset you are. So am I” were his first words. He seemed apologetic, but Kyle also appeared angry as hell. “This wasn’t our doing, Alex. Durham blindsided us this time. The chief of police made the decision himself. There’s political pressure right up to the statehouse on this thing. Something smells so bad I want to put a handkerchief over my nose and mouth.”

  “What the hell did they find in the house?” I asked Kyle. “What physical evidence? Not the dirty books?”

  Kyle shook his head. “Women’s underwear. He had a large cache of clothes hidden in the house. There was a University of North Carolina T-shirt that belonged to Kate McTiernan. Casanova apparently kept souvenirs too. Just like the Gentleman in L.A.”

  “He wouldn’t do that. He’s different from the Gentleman,” I said to Kyle. “He has the girls and plenty of their clothes at his hideaway. He’s careful, and obsessive about it. Kyle, this is fucking crazy. This isn’t the answer. This is a huge mess-up”