Kiss the Girls

imagined life of the French serial murderer, Gilles de Rais.

    I scanned the rows of wooden shelves directly behind the work desk. How long should I push my luck inside the house? It was getting late for Sachs and his family to be out. I stopped at a shelf behind his chair.
    My heart tightened when I saw several books on Casanova! I read the titles under my breath.
Memoirs by Casanova
Casanova 102 Erotic Engravings
The Most Wonderful Nights of Love of Casanova

    I thought of the two small children who lived in this house, Nathan and Faye Anne, and I felt badly for them. Their father, Dr. Wick Sachs, had his delirious, evil fantasies in this room. Stimulated by his dirty books, his collection of erotica, he decided which fantasy to act out in real life, didn’t he? I could feel Sachs’s presence in this room. I was getting to know him, finally.
    Was it possible that he kept the women somewhere nearby? Somewhere in town, where we would never expect to look? Was that why none of his searches had uncovered the house of horror? Was it somewhere right in suburban, highly respectable Durham?
    Was Naomi close by, waiting for someone to find her? The longer she was kept, the more dangerous her situation would become.
    I heard a noise, upstairs, and listened closely, but there was no sound. It might have been an electrical appliance, or just the wind, or a loose part in my skull.
    It was past time to get out of the house. I hurried upstairs and back out across the patio. I had been tempted to draw
a cross
on the pamphlet on Sachs’s desk, to leave my mark. I resisted the impulse. He knew who I was. He had contacted me as soon as I arrived in Durham. But I was the one in heat now!
    I was back in my hotel room at a little past midnight. I felt empty and numb. Adrenaline was pumping through my body at a furious rate.
    The phone rang almost as soon as I walked in the door. A nasty, insistent hotel phone ring that demanded to be picked up.
    “Who the
hell?
” I muttered. I was half crazed by now. I wanted to race out into the Southern night, to search helter-skelter for Naomi. I wanted to grab Dr. Wick Sachs and beat the truth out of him.
Whatever it takes.
    “Yes. Who is this?” I spoke a little too loudly into the phone.
    It was Kyle Craig.
    “Well?” he began. “What did you find out?”

Chapter 81

    M ORNING HAD BROKEN broken again; nothing had really changed about the ghoulish investigation. Kate was still my partner in crime. That was her choice, but I approved. She knew Casanova better than the rest of us combined.
    She and I spied on the big, beautiful Sachs house from the triangle of dense fir woods off Old Chapel Hill Road. We had already seen Wick Sachs once that morning. Our lucky day.
    The Beast was up bright and early. He was tall and professorial-looking, with sandy blond hair brushed straight back and horn-rimmed glasses. He appeared to have a very good build.
    He had ventured out to the porch at around seven to pick up the Durham paper. The headline read:
Casanova Watch Continues.
The local newspaper editors could have had no idea, no clue, how accurate those words were.
    Sachs glanced at the front page, then casually folded it under his arm. Nothing of interest for him today. Another ho-hum day at the serial-killer office.
    At a little before eight, he came out with his children in tow. He had a big toothy smile turned on for the kids. The good father was taking them to school.
    His little boy and girl were outfitted as if they belonged in the front window of Gap For Kids or Esprit. They looked like adorable little dolls. The FBI would follow Sachs and the children to the school.
    “Isn’t this a little unusual, Alex? Two surveillance jobs in a row like this?” Kate asked me. She was analytical and her mind never stopped working all the angles. She was as obsessive about the case as I was. That morning she was dressed down as usual. Tatty jeans, a navy blue T-shirt, sneakers. Her beauty shone through, anyway. She couldn’t hide it.
    “Investigations of repeat killers are almost always unusual. This one is stranger than most,” I talked about the twinning angle again. Two badly twisted men with no one to talk to, to share with. No one to understand, until they met each other. Then a powerful connection between the two killers. Kate was a twin, but she’d experienced a benign form of twinning. With Casanova and the Gentleman, it was something else.
    Wick Sachs came right back from the drop-off at