Kiss the Girls

in the woods. A house had actually disappeared! How could that happen?
    Casanova’s harem of special women—but even more than that, the “rejects.”
    Dr. Wick Sachs was a college professor with questionable morals and actions. But was he a stone-cold murderer without a conscience? Was he the animal who had imprisoned a dozen or more young women somewhere near Durham and Chapel Hill? Was he a modern-day de Sade?
    I didn’t think so. I believed, I was almost certain, that the Durham police had arrested the wrong man, and that the real Casanova was out there laughing at all of us. Maybe it was even worse than that. Maybe he was stalking another woman.
    Later that morning, I made my usual visit to Kate at Duke Medical Center. She was still deep in a coma, still listed as grave. The Durham police no longer had an officer on guard outside her room.
    I sat vigil beside her and tried not to think about the way she had been. I held her hand for an hour and quietly talked to her. Her hand was limp, almost lifeless. I missed Kate so much. She couldn’t respond, and that created a gaping, painful hole in my chest.
    Finally, I had to leave. I needed to lose myself in my work.
    From the hospital, Sampson and I drove to the home of Louis Freed in Chapel Hill. I had asked Dr. Freed to prepare a special map of the Wykagil River area for us.
    The seventy-seven-year-old history professor had done his job well. I hoped the map might help Sampson and me find the “disappearing house.” The idea came to me after reading several newspaper accounts of the golden couple murder case. Over twelve years ago, Roe Tierney’s body had been found near “an abandoned farm where runaway slaves had once been hidden in large underground cellars. These cellars were like small houses under the earth, some with as many as a dozen rooms or compartments.”
    Small houses under the earth?
    The disappearing house?
    There
was
a house out there somewhere. Houses didn't disappear.

Chapter 104

    S AMPSON AND I drove to Brigadoon, North Carolina. We planned to hike through the woods to where Kate had been found in the Wykagil River. Ray Bradbury had once written that “living at risk is jumping off a cliff, and building your wings on the way down.” Sampson and I were getting ready to jump.
    As we trudged into the foreboding woods, the towering oaks and Carolina pines began to shut out all light. A chorus of cicadas was thick as molasses around us. The air wasn’t moving.
    I could imagine, I could
see,
Kate running through these same dark green woods only a few weeks earlier, fighting for her life. I thought of her now, surviving on life-support systems. I could hear the machine’s
whoosh-click, whoosh-click.
Just the thought hurt my heart.
    “I don’t like it in the deep dark woods,” Sampson confessed as we passed under a thick umbrella of twisted vines and tent-like treetops. He had on a Cypress Hill T-shirt, his Ray-Ban sunglasses, jeans, workboots. “Reminds me of Hansel and Gretel. Melodramatic bullshit, man. Hated that story when I was a little kid.”
    “You were never a little kid,” I reminded him. “You were six foot when you were eleven, and you already had your cold stare down to a fine art.”
    “Maybe so, but I hated those Grimm Brothers. Dark side of the German mind, turning out nasty fantasies to warp the minds of little German children. Must have worked, too.”
    Sampson had me smiling again with his warped theories of our warped world. “You’re not afraid going through the D.C. projects at night, but a nice walk in these woods gets you? Nothing can hurt you here. Pine trees. Muscadine grapevines. Brier brambles. Looks sinister, maybe, but it’s harmless.”
    “Looks sinister. Is sinister. That’s my motto.”
    Sampson was struggling to get his statuesque body through closely bunched saplings and honeysuckle at the edge of the woods. The honeysuckle was actually like a mesh curtain in places. It seemed to
grow
tangled.
    I wondered if Casanova might be watching us. I suspected that he was a very patient watcher. Both he and Will Rudolph were very clever, organized, and careful. They had been doing this for a lot of years and hadn’t been caught yet.
    “How’s your history on the slaves in this area?” I asked Sampson as we walked. I wanted his mind off poisonous snakes and dangling snakelike vines. I needed him concentrating on the killer, or maybe the killers, who might be cohabitating these woods with