Kiss the Girls (Alex Cross #2)(10)

Nothing could be finer, Casanova thought, whistling a bar of the beamish old tune about a life of leisure in the Carolinas.

He casually sipped an icy Coca-Cola as he watched the students at play. He was playing a game of skill himself several complicated games at once, actually. The games had become his life. The fact that he had a “respectable” job, another life, no longer mattered.

He checked each passing woman who even looked like a faint possibility for his collection. He studied shapely young coeds, older women professors, and female visitors in the Duke Blue Devils T-shirts that seemed de rigueur for outsiders.

He licked his lips in anticipation. Here was something splendid up ahead…

A tall, slender, exquisite black woman leaned against a shapely old oak in the Edens Quad. She was reading the Duke Chronicle, which she’d folded into thirds. He loved the smooth shine of her brown skin, her artistically braided hair. But he moved on.

Yes, men are hunters by nature, he was thinking. He was off in his own world again. “Faithful” husbands were oh-so-careful and furtive with their looks. Fresh-eyed boys of eleven and twelve appeared very innocent and playful. Grandfathers pretended to be above the fray, and were just “cute” with their affection. But Casanova knew they were all watching, constantly selecting, obsessed with mastering the hunt from puberty to the grave.

It was a biological necessity, no? He was quite certain of that. Women nowadays were demanding that men accept the fact that their female biological clocks were ticking… well, with men, it was their biological cocks that were ticking.

Constantly ticking, those cocks.

That was a fact of nature, too. Everywhere he went, at virtually any time of day or night, he could feel the pulsing beat inside. Tick-cock. Tick-cock.

Tick-cock!

Tick-cock!

A beautiful honey-blond coed sat crosslegged on the grass intersecting his path. She was reading a paperback, Karl Jasper’s Philosophy of Existence. The rock group Smashing Pumpkins was contributing mantralike riffs from a portable CD player. Casanova smiled to himself.

Tick-cock!

The hunt was relentless for him. He was Priapus for the nineties. The difference between him and so many gutless modern men was that he acted on his natural impulses.

He relentlessly searched out a great beauty and then he took her! What an outrageously simple idea. What a compellingly modern horror story.

He watched two petite Japanese coeds chowing down on greasy North Carolina barbecue from the new Crooks Corner II restaurant in Durham. They looked so delicious eating their dinner, wolfing their barbecue like small animals. North Carolina BBQ consisted of pork cooked over a fire, seasoned with a vinegar-laced sauce, then finely chopped. You couldn’t eat BBQ without slaw and hush puppies.

He smiled at the unlikely scene. Yum.

Still, he moved on. Sights and scenes caught his eye. Pierced eyebrows. Tattooed ankles. Lalapalooza T-shirts. Lovely flowing breasts, legs, thighs everywhere he looked.

He finally came to a small Gothic-style building near the Duke University Hospital, North Division. This was a special annex where terminally ill cancer patients from all over the South were cared for during their final days. His heart began to pound, and a series of small tremors shook his body.

There she was!





Chapter 10


T HERE WAS the most beautiful woman in the South! Beautiful in all ways. Not only was she physically desirable she was extremely smart. She might be able to understand him. Maybe she was as special as he was.

He almost said the words out loud, and believed them to be absolutely true. He had done a great deal of homework on his next victim. Blood began to pump and rush into his forehead. He could feel a throbbing all through his body.

Her name was Kate McTiernan. Katelya Margaret McTiernan, to be as precise as he liked to be.

She was just walking out of the terminal cancer wing, where she had worked to help pay her way through medical school. She was all by her lonesome, as usual. Her last boyfriend had warned her that she was going to “end up a beautiful old maid.”

Fat chance of that. Obviously, it was Kate McTiernan’s decision to be alone as much as she was. She could have been with nearly anyone she chose. She was stunningly beautiful, highly intelligent, and compassionate, from what he could tell so far. Kate was a grind, though. She was incredibly dedicated to her medical studies and hospital duties.

Nothing was overdone about her, and he appreciated that. Her long, curly brown hair framed her narrow face nicely. Her eyes were dark brown, and sparkled when she smiled. Her laugh was catchy, irresistible. She had an all-American look, but not banal. She was a hardbody, but she appeared so soft and feminine.

He’d watched other men hit on her studly students and even the occasional jaunty and ridiculous professor. She didn’t hold it against them, and he saw how she deflected them, usually with some kindness, some small generosity.

But there was always that devilish, heartbreaking smile of hers. I’m not available, it said. You can never have me. Please, don’t even think about it. It’s not that I’m too good for you, I’m just… different.

Kate the Dependable, Kate the Nice Person, was right on time tonight. She always left the cancer annex between a quarter to eight and eight. She had her routines just as he did.

She was a first-year intern at North Carolina University Hospital in Chapel Hill, but she’d been working in a co-op program at Duke since January. The experimental cancer ward. He knew all about Katelya McTiernan.