Kiss the Girls

told the hotel desk and the operator where I’d be until nine or so.”
    “Like I said, it wasn’t hard. Check out the look on Alex’s face, Kate. Now you see why he’s still a detective. He’s hooked on The Job, wants to solve all the great puzzles, even the not-so-great ones.”
    I smiled, and shook my head. Kyle was partly right. “I love my work,
mostly
because I get to spend time with sophisticated and high-minded individuals like yourself. What’s happened, Kyle? Tell me right now.”
    “The Gentleman made a personal call on Beth Lieberman. She’s dead. He cut off her fingers, Alex. After he killed her, he torched her studio apartment in West Los Angeles. He set half her building on fire.”
    Beth Lieberman hadn’t exactly endeared herself to me, but I was shocked and saddened to hear about her murder. I’d taken Kyle’s word that she had nothing worth traveling to Los Angeles for. “Maybe he knew there was something in her apartment that needed to be torched. Maybe she actually had something important.”
    Kyle glanced over at Kate again. “You see how good he is? He’s a machine. She
did
have something incriminating,” he said to both of us. “Only she had it on her computer at the
Times.
So now we have it.”
    Kyle handed me a long, curling fax. He pointed to some copy at the very bottom of the sheet. The fax was from the FBI’s office in Los Angeles.
    I glanced down the page and read the entry that was underscored.
    Possible Casanova!!!
it said.
Very possible suspect.
    Dr. William Rudolph. First-class creep.
    Home: the Beverly Comstock. Work: Ceders-Sinai Medical Center.
    Los Angeles.
    “We’ve finally got our break. We’ve got a first-class lead, anyway,” Kyle said. “The Gentleman could be this doctor. This creep, as she calls him.”
    Kate looked at me, then at Kyle. She had told both of us that Casanova might be a doctor.
    “Anything else in Lieberman’s notes?” I asked Kyle.
    “Not that we’ve been able to find so far,” Kyle said. “Unfortunately, we can’t ask Ms. Lieberman about Dr. William Rudolph, or why she made the note in her computer. Let me tell you two new theories that are making the rounds with our profilers out on the West Coast,” Kyle went on. “Are you ready for a little outrageous mind trip, my friend? Some profiler speculation?”
    “I’m ready. Let’s hear the latest and greatest theories from FBI West.”
    “The first theory is that he’s sending the diary entries to
himself.
That he’s Casanova
and
the Gentleman Caller. He could be
both
killers, Alex. They each specialize in ‘perfect’ crimes. There are other similarities, too. Maybe he’s a split personality. FBI West, as you call it, would like Dr. McTiernan to fly out to Los Angeles right away. They’d like to talk to her.”
    I didn’t like the first West Coast theory too much myself, but I couldn’t completely discount it. “What’s the other theory from the wild, wild West?” I asked Kyle.
    “The other theory,” he said, “is that there are two men. But that they aren’t just communicating, they’re
competing.
This could be a scary competition, Alex. This could all be a scary game they’ve invented.”

Part Three

    The Gentleman Caller

Chapter 60

    H E HAD been a Southern gentleman.
    A gentleman scholar.
    Now he was the very finest gentleman in Los Angeles. Always a gentleman, though. A hearts-and-flowers kind of guy.
    An orangish-red sun had begun its long, slow shimmy and slide toward the Pacific Ocean. Dr. William Rudolph thought it looked visually stunning as he strolled at a leisurely pace along Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles.
    The Gentleman Caller was “shopping” that afternoon, absorbing all the sights and sounds, the hectic flash-and-cash of his surroundings.
    The street scene reminded him of something one of the hard-boiled detective writers, maybe Raymond Chandler, had written:
“California, the department store.”
The description still worked pretty damn well.
    Most of the attractive women he observed were in their early and mid-twenties. They had just come from the stultifying workaday world of the ad agencies, money managers, and law firms in the entertainment district around Century Boulevard. Several of them wore high heels, platforms, clinging spandex miniskirts, here and there a form-fitting Rollo suit.
    He listened to the casually sexy rustle of crushed silk, the martial
click-click
of designer shoes, the sultry
scuff
of cowboy boots that cost