Kiss the Girls

you?” Kate bumped me hard with her hip. “You’re on vacation. Think vacation thoughts.”
    “Actually, I was thinking very good thoughts, but they made me feel bad,” I told her.
    “I know that crazy-ass song,” she said. She gave me a hug, to reassure me that we were in this thing together, whatever it was that we were in.
    “Let’s take a run. I’ll race you to Coquina Beach,” she said. “Ready, set, prepare yourself to lose.”
    We started to jog. Kate showed no signs of a limp. The pace picked up. She was so strong—in all ways. We both were. At the end, we were running nearly full-out and we collapsed in a wall of silver-blue surf. I didn’t want to lose Kate, I was thinking as I ran. I didn’t want this to end. I didn’t know what to do about it.
    On a warm, breezy Saturday night, Kate and I lay on an old Indian blanket on the beach. We were talking on half a hundred subjects at one sitting. We had already feasted on roast Carolina duckling with blackberry sauce that we’d made together. Kate had on a sweatshirt that read:
Trust me, I’m a doctor.
    “I don’t want this to end, either,” Kate said with a heavy sigh. Then, “Alex, let’s talk about some of the reasons we both believe this has to end.”
    I shook my head and smiled at her characteristic directness. “Oh, this will never really end, Kate. We’ll always have this time. It’s one of those special treasures you get every once in a while in life.”
    Kate grabbed and held my arm with both her hands. Her deep brown eyes were intense. “Then why does it have to end here?”
    We both knew some, though not all, of the reasons.
    “We’re
too much
alike. We’re both obsessively analytical. We’re both so logical that we
know
the half-dozen reasons this won’t work out. We’re stubborn and we’re strong-willed. Eventually, we would go
boom,
” I said in a half-teasing tone.
    “Sounds like the old self-fulfilling prophecy to me,” Kate said.
    We both knew I was telling the truth, though. Sad truth? Is there such a thing? I guess that there is.
    “We just might go boom,” Kate said, and she smiled sweetly. “Then we couldn’t even be friends. I couldn’t stand the idea of losing you as my friend. That’s still part of it for me. I can’t risk a big loss yet.”
    “We’re both physically too strong. We’d kill each other eventually, Nidan,” I told her. I was tying to lighten things up.
    She squeezed me a little tighter. “Don’t make jokes about it. Don’t make me laugh, damn you, Alex. I want this to be our sad time at least. It’s so sad I might cry. Now I am. See that?”
    “It is sad,” I said to Kate. “It’s the saddest thing.”
    We lay on the scratchy wool beach blanket and held each other until the morning. We slept under the stars and listened to the steady beat of the Atlantic. Everything seemed gently touched with the brush of eternity that night on the Outer Banks. Well, almost everything.
    Kate turned to me in between catnaps, in between dreams. “Alex, is he coming after us again? He is, isn’t he?”
    I didn’t know for sure, but that was the plan.

Chapter 121

    T ICK-COCK.
    Tick-cock.
    Tick-cock.
    He was still obsessed with Kate McTiernan, only it was much more disturbing and complex than just the fate of Doctor Kate now. She and Alex Cross had conspired to ruin his unique creation, his precious and very private art, his life as it had been. Nearly everything that he’d ever loved was gone now, or in disarray. It was time for a comeback. Time to show them once and for all. Time to show his true face.
    Casanova realized that he missed his “best friend” above all else. That was proof that he was sane, after all. He could love; he could feel things. He had watched in disbelief as Alex Cross shot down Will Rudolph on the streets of Chapel Hill. Rudolph had been worth ten Alex Crosses, and now Rudolph was dead.
    Rudolph had been a rare genius. Will Rudolph
was
Jekyll and Hyde, but only Casanova had been able to appreciate both sides of his personality. He remembered their years together, and couldn’t put them out of his thoughts anymore. They had both understood that exquisite pleasure intensified the more it was forbidden. That was a ruling principle behind the hunts, the collection of bright, beautiful, talented women, and eventually the long string of murders. The unbelievable,
matchless
thrill of breaking society’s sacred taboos, of living out elaborate fantasies, was