Kiss the Girls

might be. I thought that I’d seen Casanova without his mask.
    I kept drifting in and out of strange, private thoughts at the dizzying crime scene. I was burnt toast, but that didn’t matter anymore; it hadn’t mattered for a while.
    Casanova, the territorial killer, I was thinking. He was probably still in the area around Durham and Chapel Hill. He had met Will Rudolph around the time of the golden couple murders. So far, he’d thought everything through with almost perfect clarity. He had finally made a mistake during the shootout two days before. A small mistake, but that was all it took sometimes… I
thought
I knew who Casanova might be. But I couldn’t share it with the FBI. I was their “loose cannon,” right? The “outsider” on this case. So be it.
    Kyle Craig and I watched the same distant spot in the high waving grass and honeysuckle, out where the digging was taking place.
Mass graves,
I thought as I watched the horrific scene.
What a concept for the nineties.
    A tall balding man stood up from his deep hole in the soft earth. He waved long arms high over his head, which was shiny with sweat. “Bob Shaw here!” He called out his name in a loud, clear voice.
    The digger’s name was the verbal signal that another woman’s body had been found. An entire corps of North Carolina medical examiners was at the dreamlike, unbearably grisly scene. One of the MEs ran over to the digger in a strange, lopsided waddle that would have made Kyle and me laugh under different circumstances. He gave Shaw a hand out of the grave.
    The TV cameras at the scene moved in on Shaw, who was U.S. Army from Fort Bragg. An attractive woman reporter nearby received a dab of makeup before she spoke into the lens of a camera.
    “They’ve just found victim number twenty-three,” the reporter said with appropriate solemnity. “All the victims so far appear to have been young women. The grisly murders—”
    I turned away from the TV coverage and I had to sigh out loud.
    I thought of children like my own Damon and Jannie, watching this spectacle in their homes. This was a world they were inheriting. Human monsters roaming the earth, a majority of them in America and Europe. Why was that? Something in the water? In the high-fat fast food? On Saturday morning TV?
    “Go the hell home, Alex,” Kyle said to me. “It’s over now. You won’t catch him, I promise you.”

Chapter 115

    N EVER SAY never. That’s one of my few mottos as a cop. My body was bathed in a cold sweat. My pulse was jumpy and irregular. This was it, wasn’t it? I needed to believe that it was.
    I waited in the hot, still darkness outside a small wood-shingled house in the Edgemont section of Durham. It was a typical middle-class Southern neighborhood. Nice middle-class houses, American and Japanese cars in about equal numbers, mower-striped lawns, familiar cooking smells. It was where Casanova had chosen to live for the past seven years.
    I had spent the early part of that night at the offices of the
Herald Sun.
I had reread everything written in the newspaper about the unsolved murders of Roe Tierney and Tom Hutchinson. A name mentioned in the
Herald Sun
helped put it together for me, confirmed my suspicions and fears, anyway. Hundreds of hours of investigating. Reading and rereading Durham police briefs. Then, pay dirt on a single line of newsprint.
    The name was in a story lost in the Durham newspaper’s middle pages. It appeared just once. I found it, anyway.
    I had stared for a long time at the familiar name in the news article. I thought about something I’d noticed during the shootout in Chapel Hill. I thought about the whole subject of “perfect crimes.” It all fit together for me now. Game, match, set, bingo.
    Casanova had blinked just once. I had seen it with my own eyes, though. The name in the news article was verification. It materially linked Will Rudolph and Casanova for the first time. It also explained to me how they had met, and
why
they had talked.
    Casanova was sane and completely responsible for his actions. He had planned every step in cold blood. That was the most horrifying and unusual thing about the long trail of crimes. He knew what he was doing. He was a slime who had
chosen
to abduct beautiful young students in their prime. He’d
chosen
to rape and murder again and again. He was obsessed with perfect young women, with
loving
them as he called it.
    I conducted imaginary interview with Casanova as I waited outside his