Kiss the Girls

alive.
    “I want to be in on this,” I told Burns, holding eye contact with him. “Why don’t you tell me everything?” I gave him my terms. “I need to see the whole picture before I start giving out any theories. Why does he reject some of the women? If that’s what he’s doing.”
    “Alex, I can’t tell you any more right now. I’m sorry.” Burns shook his head and closed his eyes for a second. I realized that he was exhausted.
    “But you wanted to see how I would react to your collector theory?”
    “I did,” Burns admitted, and finally had to smile.
    “A modern-day harem would be possible, I guess. It’s a common enough male fantasy,” I told him. “Strangely, it’s a prevalent female fantasy, too. Don’t rule that out yet.”
    Burns catalogued what I’d said and left it at that. He asked me to help again, but was unwilling to tell me everything he knew. He finally walked back to be with his own people.
    Sampson came up beside me. “What did His Rigidness have to say? What brings him to this unholy forest with us mere mortals?”
    “He said something interesting. Said that Casanova might be a collector, maybe creating his own private harem somewhere near here,” I told Sampson. “He said the case is
large.
His choice of words.”
    “Large” meant it was a very bad case, probably worse than it already seemed. I wondered how that could be, and I almost didn’t want to know the answer.

Chapter 16

    K ATE MCTIERNAN was lost in an odd, but nicely illuminating, thought.
When the strike of a hawk breaks the body of its prey,
she considered,
it’s only because of timing.
    That was the insight from her latest kata in black-belt class. Exquisite timing was everything in karate, and also in so many other things. It also helped if you could bench-press almost two hundred pounds, which she could.
    Kate dawdled along busy, funky, rambunctious Franklin Street in Chapel Hill. The street ran north and south, bordering the picturesque campus of the University of North Carolina. She passed bookstores, pizza shops, Rollerblade rentals, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. The rock group White Zombie was blaring from the icecream store. Kate wasn’t a dawdler by nature, but the evening was warm and pleasant, so she stopped to window-shop for a change.
    The college-town crowd was familiar, friendly, and very comfortable. She loved her life here, first as a medical student and now as an intern. She never wanted to leave Chapel Hill, never wanted to go back and be a doctor in West Virginia.
    But she would go. It was her promise to her mother—just before Beadsie McTiernan died. Kate had given her word, and her word was good. She was old-fashioned about things like that. A small-town mensch.
    Kate’s hands were thrust into the deep pockets of a slightly wrinkled hospital medical jacket. She thought that her hands were her bad feature. They were gnarled, and she had no fingernails to speak of. There were two reasons for that: her job as slave labor at the cancer ward and her avocation as a second-degree black belt, a Nidan. It was the one tension releaser she allowed herself; karate class was her R & R.
    The name pin on the upper left pocket of her jacket said
K. McTiernan, M.D.
She liked the tiny irreverence of wearing that symbol of status and prestige with her baggy pants and the sneakers. She didn’t want to seem like a rebel, and she really wasn’t, but she needed to keep some small individuality inside the large hospital community.
    Kate had just picked up a paperback copy of Cormac McCarthy’s
All the Pretty Horses
at the Intimate Book Shop. First-year interns weren’t supposed to have time to read novels, but she made time. At least she promised to make time tonight.
    The late April night was so fine, so perfect in every way, that Kate considered stopping off at Spanky’s on the corner of Columbia and Franklin. She might sit at the bar and just read her book.
    There was absolutely no way she would let herself meet somebody on a “school night” —which meant most nights for her. She usually had Saturdays off, but by then she was too bushed to deal with pre- and post-mating rituals.
    It had been that way ever since she and Peter McGrath had severed their on-again, off-again relationship. Peter was thirty-eight, a doctor of history and close to brilliant. He was handsome as sin and way too self-absorbed for her taste. The breakup had been messier than she had expected. They weren’t even friends