Kiss the Girls

The forest floor was soft and spongy, a carpet of pine straw and leaves. Long spindly briar brambles grew straight up from the ground, reaching for the sunlight. She felt like a bramble herself.
    Have to rest… hide… let the drugs wear off,
Kate mumbled to herself.
Then go get help… logical thing to do. Get the police.
    Then she heard him crashing about behind her. He
screamed
out her name. “Kate! Kate! Stop right now!” His voice echoed loudly through the forest.
    His bravado had to mean that nobody was around for miles; nobody to help her in the godforsaken woods. She was on her own out here.
    “Kate! I’m going to get you! It’s inevitable, so stop running!”
    She climbed a steep, rocky hill that seemed like Mount Everest in her exhausted state. A black snake was sunning itself on a smooth patch of rock. The snake looked
like a fallen tree limb,
and Kate almost stooped to pick it up. She thought she could use it as a support. The startled black snake slithered away, and she was afraid she was hallucinating again.
    “Kate! Kate! You’re doomed! I’m so angry now!”
    She went down hard in a mesh of honeysuckle and pointy rocks. Excruciating pain shot through her left leg, but she pushed herself up again.
Ignore the blood. Ignore the pain. Keep going.
    You have to get away. You have to bring help. Just keep running. You’re smarter, faster, more resourceful than you think you are. You’re going to make it!
    She heard him pounding up the steep hill—the mountainside—whatever she had just climbed herself. He was very close.
    “I’m right here, Kate! Hey, Katie, I’m coming up behind you! Here I am!”
    Kate finally turned around. Curiosity and terror got the best of her.
    He was climbing easily. She could see his white flannel shirt flashing through the almost-black trees below, and his long blond hair. Casanova! He was still wearing his mask. The stun gun, or
some kind of gun,
was in his hand.
    He was laughing loudly. Why was he laughing now?
    Kate stopped running. All hope of getting away suddenly left her. She experienced a jolting moment of shock and disbelief: she cried out in anguish. She was going to die right here, she knew.
    Kate whispered, “God’s will.” That was all there was now, nothing else.
    The top of the steep hill ended abruptly in a canyon. Steep, sheer rock dropped at least a hundred feet. Only a few bare scrub pines grew out of the rock. There was nowhere to hide, and nowhere to run. Kate thought it was such a sad, lonely place to die.
    “Poor Katie!’ Casanova screamed. “Poor
baby!
”
    She turned to see him again. There he was! Forty yards, thirty, then twenty yards away. Casanova watched her as he climbed up the steep hillside. He never took his eyes off her. The painted black mask seemed immobile, fixed on her.
    Kate turned away from him, turned her back on the death mask. She peered down at the steep valley of rocks and trees.
It must be a hundred feet, maybe more than that,
she thought. The dizziness she felt was almost as terrifying as the deadly alternative rushing up behind her.
    She heard him scream her name. “Kate, no!”
    She didn’t look behind her again.
    Kate McTiernan jumped.
    She tucked in her knees and held on to them.
Just your regular swimming-hole cannonball leap,
she thought to herself.
    There was a stream down below. The silver-blue ribbon of water was coming at her unbelievably fast. The roar was getting louder in her ears.
    She had no idea how deep it was, but how deep could a small stream like that be? Two feet? Maybe four feet? Ten feet deep if these were the luckiest few seconds of her life, which she sincerely doubted.
    “Kate!” She heard his screams from high above. “You’re
dead!
’
    She saw tiny whitecaps—which meant rocks beneath the rippling water.
Oh, dear God, I don’t want to die.
    Kate hit a wall of freezing cold water—hard.
    She hit bottom so quickly it was as if there hadn’t been
any
water in the fast-running stream. Kate felt shooting pain, terrible pain, everywhere. She swallowed water. She realized she going to drown. She was going to die, anyway. She had no strength left—
God’s will be done.

Chapter 46

    D URHAM HOMICIDE detective Nick Ruskin called and informed me that they had just found another woman, and that it wasn’t Naomi. A thirty-one-year-old intern from Chapel Hill had been fished out of the Wykagil River by two young boys playing hooky for the day and caught by cruel fate