Kiss the Girls

curly brown hair framed her narrow face nicely. Her eyes were dark brown, and sparkled when she smiled. Her laugh was catchy, irresistible. She had an all-American look, but not banal. She was a hardbody, but she appeared so soft and feminine.
    He’d watched other men hit on her—studly students and even the occasional jaunty and ridiculous professor. She didn’t hold it against them, and he saw how she deflected them, usually with some kindness, some small generosity.
    But there was always that devilish, heartbreaking smile of hers.
I’m not available,
it said.
You can never have me. Please, don’t even think about it. It’s not that I’m too good for you, I’m just… different.
    Kate the Dependable, Kate the Nice Person, was right on time tonight. She always left the cancer annex between a quarter to eight and eight. She had her routines just as he did.
    She was a first-year intern at North Carolina University Hospital in Chapel Hill, but she’d been working in a co-op program at Duke since January. The experimental cancer ward. He knew all about Katelya McTiernan.
    She was going to be thirty-one in a few weeks. She’d had to work three years to pay for her college and medical-school expenses. She had also spent two years with a sick mother in Buck, West Virginia.
    She walked at a determined pace along Flowers Drive, toward the multilevel Medical Center parking garage. He had to move quickly to keep up with her, all the while watching her long shapely legs, which were a little too pale for his liking.
No time for the sun, Kate? Afraid of a little melanoma?
    She carried thick medical volumes against one hip. Looks and brains. She planned to practice back in West Virginia, where she was born. Didn’t seem to care about making a lot of money. What for? So she could own
ten
pairs of black high-topped sneakers?
    Kate McTiernan was wearing her usual university garb: a crisp white med-school jacket, khaki shirt, weathered tan trousers, her faithful black sneakers. It worked for her. Kate the Character. Slightly off-center. Unexpected. Strangely, powerfully alluring.
    On Kate McTiernan, almost anything would have worked, even the most homespun interpretation of cheap chic. He particularly loved Kate McTiernan’s irreverence toward university and hospital life, and especially the holier-than-thou medical school. It showed in the way she dressed; the casual way she carried herself now; everything about her lifestyle. She seldom wore makeup. She seemed very natural, and there was nothing phony or stuck-up about her that he’d noticed yet.
    There was even a little of the unexpected klutz in her. Earlier in the week, he had seen her flush the deepest red after she tripped on a guardrail outside Perkins Library and crashed into a bench with her hip. That warmed him tremendously. He
could
be touched, could feel human warmth.
He wanted Kate to love him…. He wanted to love her back.
    That was why he was so special, so different. It was what separated him from all the other one-dimensional killers and butchers he had ever heard or read about, and he had read everything on the subject. He could feel everything. He could love. He knew that.
    Kate said something amusing to a fortyish-looking professor as she walked past him. Casanova couldn’t hear it from where he was watching. Kate turned for some quick repartee, but kept on walking, leaving the professor with her luminous smile to think about.
    He saw a little jiggle action as Kate whirled around after her brief interchange with the prof. Her breasts weren’t too large or too small. Her long brown hair was thick and wavy, shiny in the early evening light, revealing just a touch of red. Perfect in every detail.
    He been watching her for more than four weeks, and he knew she was the one. He could love Dr. Kate McTiernan more than all the others. He
believed
it for a moment. He
ached
to believe it. He said her name softly—
Kate….
    Dr. Kate.
    Tick-cock.

Chapter 11

    S AMPSON AND I took shifts at the wheel on the four-hour haul from Washington, down into North Carolina. While I drove, the Man Mountain slept. He wore a black T-shirt that bluntly said SECURITY. Economy of words.
    When Sampson was at the controls of my ancient Porsche, I put on a set of old Koss headphones. I listened to Big Joe Williams, thought about Scootchie, continued to feel hollowed-out.
    I couldn’t sleep, hadn’t slept more than an hour the night before. I felt like a grief-stricken father