Kiss the Girls

blindsided. Pain rushed through her body as if she’d been shot.
    Woof
    It happened again.
    There were
two
of them in her bedroom.

Chapter 94

    K ATE WAS in shocking pain, but she stayed on her feet, and finally she saw the second man in her bedroom. He swung hard and struck her in the forehead. She heard a metallic
ring,
and felt herself falling, toppling. Felt herself vaporizing, actually. Then her body bounced off the wooden floorboards.
    Two voices were floating above her. Two monsters inside her bedroom. Stereo nightmares.
    “You shouldn’t be here.” She recognized Casanova’s voice. He was talking to the second intruder. The demon behind door number two. Dr. Will Rudolph?
    “Yes, I’m the one who
should
be here. I’m not involved with this stupid bitch, am I? I couldn’t care less about her. Think it through. Be smart.”
    “All right, all right, Will. What do you want to do with her?” Casanova spoke again. “This is your show. Isn’t that what you want?”
    “Personally, I’d like to eat her, a nibble at a time,” said Dr. Will Rudolph. “Is that too extreme?”
    They kept laughing like two buddies talking at a sports bar. Kate felt herself fading away from the scene.
She was leaving. Where was she going?
    Will Rudolph said that he bought her
flowers.
They both began to laugh at the joke. They were hunting together again. No one could stop them. Kate could smell their body odor, a strong male musk that seemed to combine into an overpowering presence.
    She stayed conscious for a long time. She fought with all her strength. She was stubborn, willful, proud as hell. The light finally went out for her like a tube in an old-fashioned TV set. A blurry picture, then a small dot of light, then blackness. It was that simple, that prosaic.
    They turned on the bedroom lights when they were finished, so that all of Kate McTiernan’s admirers could have a last good look at her.
    Murdered
beyond
cold blood.

Chapter 95

    M Y ARMS and legs were shaking uncontrollably as I tried to drive the five miles or so from Durham to Chapel Hill. Even my teeth were chattering, hitting together hard.
    I finally had to pull off Chapel Hill-Durham Boulevard, or I thought I would probably crash the car.
    I sat slumped in the front seat with the car headlamps shining across dancing dust motes and light-crazed insects that hovered in the early-morning air.
    I took deep breath after deep breath, trying to suck in some sanity. It was past five in the morning and the birds were already singing away. I put my hands over my ears to shut out their songs. Sampson was still asleep back at the hotel. I’d forgotten that he was there.
    Kate had never been afraid of Casanova. She trusted in her ability to take care of herself, even after her abduction.
    I knew that it was irrational and crazy to blame myself, but I did. Somewhere, at some time during the past few years, I had stopped behaving like a professional police detective. There was some good in that, but, in a way, it was bad. There was too much pain on The Job, if you let yourself feel it. That was the surest, fastest way to burnout.
    I eventually eased the car back onto the road. About fifteen minutes later, I was at the familiar clapboard house in Chapel Hill.
    “Old Ladies Lane,” Kate had dubbed the street. I could see her face, her sweet, easy smile, her enthusiasm and conviction about things that mattered to her. I could still hear her voice.
    Sampson and I had been at this house less than three hours ago. My eyes were tearing, my brain screaming. I was losing control.
    I rembered one of the last things she’d said to me. I could hear Kate’s voice. “He comes back, we tangle.”
    Black-and-white police cruisers, somber-looking EMS vans, and TV trucks were already parked everywhere on the narrow two-lane blacktop street. They were filling every available space. I was sick to death of the sight of crime scenes. It looked as if half the town of Chapel Hill was congregated outside Kate’s apartment.
    In the early-morning light all the faces looked pale and grim. They were shocked and angry. This was supposed to be a gentle college town, liberal-thinking, a safe haven from the whirling chaos and madness of the rest of the world. That was why most people chose to live here, but it wasn’t like that anymore. Casanova had changed that forever.
    I fumbled on a pair of dusty and stained sunglasses that had been sitting on the dash of the car for months. They were