Kiss the Girls

About Dr. Wick Sachs and his head-games. About harems. The masks. The “disappearing” house. My newest theory involving Dr. Louis Freed.
    “I was doing some light reading before you got here,” Kate told us. “An essay on the male sexual urge, the natural beauty and power of it. It’s about modern men trying to distance themselves from their mothers, from the smothering cosmological mom. If proposes that many men want the freedom to assert their masculine identities, but contemporary society continually frustrates that. Comments, gentlemen?”
    “Men will be men.” Sampson showed his big white teeth. “Good case in point. We’re still lions and tigers at heart. Never met a cosmological mom, so I won’t comment on that part of your essay.”
    “What do you think, Alex?” Kate asked me. “Are you a lion or a tiger?”
    “I’ve never liked certain things about most men,” I said. “We
are
incredibly repressed. Monochromatic because of it. Insecure, defensive. Rudolph and Sachs are asserting their masculinity to the extreme. They refuse to be repressed by society’s mores or laws.”
    “Ba dum bun.” Sampson did a talk-show drumbeat for me.
    “They think they’re smarter than everyone else,” Kate said. “At least Casanova does. He laughs at all of us. He’s a nasty son of a bitch.”
    “And that’s why I’m here,” Sampson told her, “to catch him, and put him in a cage, and lock the cage on a far mountaintop. And by the way, he’d be stone dead in the cage, anyway.”
    The time passed like that, flashed by real quickly. Finally, it was getting late and we had to leave. I tried to talk Kate into staying at a hotel for the night. We had been over this subject repeatedly, and her answer was always the same.
    “Thanks for the concern, but no thanks,” she said as she brought us out onto the porch. “I can’t let him chase me out of my own house. That will not happen. He comes back, we tangle.”
    “Alex is right about the hotel,” Sampson said to her in the gentle voice he reserves for friends. There it was—a double recommendation from two of the sharpest cops around.
    Kate shook her head, and I knew there was no sense in arguing with her anymore. “Absolutely not. I’ll be just fine, I promise,” she said.
    I didn’t ask Kate if I could stay, but I wanted to. I didn’t know if Kate even wanted me to stay. It was a little complicated with Sampson there. I suppose I could have given him my car to drive back, but it was already after two-thirty. We all needed to get some sleep, anyway. Sampson and I finally left.
    “
Very
nice.
Very
interesting woman.
Very
smart. Not your type,” Sampson said as we pulled away from the house. From him, it was a rare, rave review. “
My
type,” he added.
    When we reached the end of the block, I turned and looked back at the house. It was cooler now, in the low seventies, and Kate had already turned off the porch light and gone in. She was stubborn, but she was smart. It had gotten her through med school. It had gotten her past the deaths of people she loved. She would be okay; she always had been.
    I called Kyle Craig when I got back to the hotel, though. “How’s our man Sachs?” I asked him.
    “He’s just fine. He’s all tucked in for the night. Not to worry.”

Chapter 92

    A FTER THE good ship Alex and Sampson left, Kate carefully checked and
double-checked
all the doors and windows to her apartment. They were securely locked. She had liked Sampson right away. He was huge and scary, nice and scary, sweet and scary. Alex had brought his closest friend to see her, and she liked that.
    As she did her rounds, her safety check of home sweet home, she ruminated about a new life, far away from Chapel Hill, far away from everything terrifying and bad that had happened here.
Hell, I’m living a Hitchcock movie,
she thought,
if Alfred Hitchcock had stayed alive long enough to see and react to the madness and horror of the 1990s.
    Exhausted, she finally climbed into bed.
Yuk.
She felt stale bread or cake crumbs against her legs. She hadn’t made the bed that morning.
    She wasn’t accomplishing much lately, and that made her angry, too. She’d been on a proper schedule to complete her intern year this spring. Now she didn’t know if she’d make it by the end of summer.
    Kate pulled the covers up under her chin—in early June. She was getting
soooo
buggy. Her anxiety wasn’t going to stop while the monster Casanova was on the loose out