Kiss the Girls

body, fabulous bone structure, a sensational torso, also. Yes, she had a crush on Alex Cross.
    Understandable; nice. Only maybe it was more than a crush. Kate wanted to call Alex at his hotel in Durham. She picked up the phone a couple of times.
No!
She wouldn’t let herself do it. Nothing was going to happen between her and Alex Cross.
    She
was an intern, and she wasn’t getting any younger.
He
lived in Washington with his two children and his grandmother. Besides, they were
too much
alike, and it wouldn’t work out. He was a willful black man; she was an extremely willful white woman. He was a homicide detective… but he was also sensitive and sexy and generous. She didn’t care whether he was black, green, or purple. He made her laugh; he made her as happy as a clam in deep wet sand.
    But nothing was going to happen between her and Alex.
    She would just sit here in her scary apartment. Drink her cheap Pinot Noir. Watch her bad, semiromantic Hollywood movie. Be afraid. Be a little horny. Let it get worse. That’s what she would do, dammit. Build her character.
    She had to admit she was frightened to be in her own house, though. She hated that feeling. She wanted all of this shitty madness to stop, but it wouldn’t. Not even close. There were still two horrifying monsters on the loose out there.
    She kept hearing creepy noises all around her in the house. Old creaking wood. Banging shutters. Wind chimes she had put on an old elm tree outside. The chimes reminded her of the cabin in Big Sur. They had to come down tomorrow—if not sooner.
    Kate finally fell asleep with the wineglass, which was really an old Flintstones jelly glass, balanced in her lap. The glass was a holy relic from the house in West Virginia. She and her sisters used to fight over it sometimes at breakfast.
    The glass tipped and spilled onto her bedcovers. It didn’t matter. Kate was dead to the world. For one night at least.
    She didn’t usually drink much. The Pinot Noir hit her like the freight trains that used to rumble through Birch when she was a kid. She woke up 3:00 A.M. with a throbbing headache, and hurried into her bathroom, where she got sick.
    Images of
Psycho
flashed through her mind as she bent over the sink. She thought of Casanova in the house again. He was in the bathroom, wasn’t he?
No—of course no one was there… please, make this stop. Make this end… right… now!
    She went back to bed and crawled under the covers. She heard the wind rattling the shutters. Heard those stupid chimes. She thought about death—her mother, Susanne, Marjorie, Kristin. All gone now. Kate McTiernan pulled the blanket over her head. She felt like a little girl again, afraid of the bogeyman. Okay, she could handle that.
    Trouble was, she could
see
Casanova and the horrifying death mask whenever she closed her eyes. She held a secret thought buried in the center of her chest:
He was coming for her again, wasn’t he?
    At seven in the morning her phone rang. It was Alex.
    “Kate, I was in his house,” he said.

Chapter 79

    A ROUND TEN the night we returned from California, I drove to the Hope Valley residential area of Durham. I went alone to see Casanova. Doctor Detective Cross was back in the saddle again.
    There were three clues that I considered essential to solving the case. I reviewed them again as I drove. There was the simple fact that they both committed “perfect crimes.” There was the aspect of twinning, the codependence of Casanova and the Gentleman. There was the mystery of the disappearing house.
    Something had to come from one, or all, of those bits of information. Maybe something was about to happen in the Hope Valley suburb of Durham. I hoped so.
    I drove slowly along Old Chapel Hill Road until I reached a formal, white-brick, protal-type entrance into the upscale Hope Valley estates. I got the feeling that I wasn’t supposed to intrude beyond the gate, that just maybe I was the first black man not in workingman’s overalls to pass through here.
    I knew I was taking a chance, but I had to see where Dr. Wick Sachs lived. I needed to
feel
things about him, needed to know him better, and in a big hurry.
    The streets of Hope Valley didn’t run in straight lines. The road I was on didn’t have curbs or gutters, and there were not many streetlamps. The neighborhood was unpleasantly hilly, and as I drove I began to have the sense of being lost, of moving in a great looping circle. The houses were mostly upscale