Kiss the Girls

Just
one
minute?”
    Naomi still refused to answer her. He could have come back by now. He might be in the house, listening to them. Even watching them through the walls.
    Kate McTiernan was back on the air. “All right, thirty seconds. Then we’ll stop. Okay? I promise I’ll stop…
otherwise,
I’ll keep this up until he does come back…”
    Oh, God, please, stop talking,
a voice inside Naomi was screaming.
Stop it, right now.
    “He’ll kill me,” shouted Kate. “But he’s going to do that, anyway! I saw part of his face.
Where are you from?
How long have you been here?”
    Naomi felt as if she were suffocating. She couldn’t breathe, but she stayed at the door and listened to every word the woman had to say. She wanted to talk to her so badly.
    “He may have used a drug called Forane. Hospitals use it.
He might be a doctor.
Please. What do we have to fear—except torture and death?”
    Naomi smiled. Kate McTiernan had guts, and also a sense of humor. Just hearing another voice was so unbelievably good.
    The words tumbled out of Naomi’s mouth, almost against her will. “My name is Naomi Cross. I’ve been here for eight days, I
think.
He hides behind the walls. He watches all the time. I don’t think he ever sleeps. He raped me,” she said in a clear voice. It was the first time she had said the words out loud.
He raped me.
    Kate answered right back. “He raped me, too, Naomi. I know how you feel, terribly bad…
dirty
all over. It’s so good to hear your voice, Naomi. I don’t feel so alone anymore.”
    “Me, too, Kate. Now please
shut up.
”
    Downstairs in her room, Kate McTiernan felt so tired now. Tired, but hopeful. She was slumped against one of the walls when she heard the voices around her.
    “Maria Jane Capaldi. I think I’ve been here about a month.”
    “My name is Kristen Miles. Hello.”
    “Melissa Stanfield. I’m a student nurse. I’ve been here nine weeks.”
    “Christa Akers, North Carolina State. Two months in hell.”
    There were at least six of them.

Part Two

    Hide and Seek

Chapter 36

    A TWENTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD
Los Angeles Times
reporter named Beth Lieberman stared at the tiny, blurred green letters on her computer terminal. She watched with tired eyes as one of the biggest stories at the
Times
in years continued to unfold. This was definitely the most important story of her career, but she almost didn’t care anymore.
    “This is so crazy and sick…
feet.
Jesus Christ,” Beth Lieberman groaned softly under her breath. “Feet.”
    The sixth “diary” installment sent to her by the Gentleman Caller had arrived at her West Los Angeles apartment early that morning. As had been the case with the previous diary entries, the killer supplied the precise location of a murdered woman’s body before starting into his obsessive, psychopathic message for her.
    Beth Lieberman had immediately called the FBI from her home, and then she drove quickly to the offices of the
Times
on South Spring Street. By the time she arrived, the Federal Bureau had verified the latest murder.
    The Gentleman had left his signature: fresh flowers.
    The body of a fourteen-year-old Japanese girl had been found in Pasadena. As was the case with the five other women, Sunny Ozawa had disappeared without a trace two nights ago. It was as if she’d been sucked up into the damp, muggy smog.
    To date, Sunny Ozawa was the Gentleman’s youngest reported victim. He’d arranged pink and white peonies on her lower torso.
Flowers, of course, remind me of a woman’s labia,
he’d written in one of the diary entries.
The isomorphism is obvious, no?
    At quarter to seven in the morning, the
Times
offices were deserted and eerie.
Nobody should be up this early except head-bangers who haven’t been to bed yet,
Lieberman thought. The low hum from the central air conditioning, mingling with the faint roar of traffic outside, was annoying to her.
    “Why feet?” the reporter muttered.
    She sat before her computer, almost comatose, and wished she had never written an article about mail-order pornography in California. That was how the Gentleman claimed he had “discovered” her; how he had chosen her to be his “liaison with the other citizens of the City of Angels.” He proclaimed that they were on the same ”wavelength.”
    Following endless administrative meetings at the highest levels, the
Los Angeles Times
had decided to publish the killer’s diary entries. There was no doubt that they had actually