Kiss the Girls (Alex Cross #2)(102)

“Yep.” She smiled again, that sweet smile of hers. She was talking so very slowly. “As a matter of fact, I did.”

“I brought you a little present,” I told her. I held up a teddy bear dressed to look like a doctor. Kate took the bear and she continued to grin. The magical smile almost made her look like her old self.

I put my head down close to Kate’s. I kissed her swollen head as if it were the most delicate flower ever put on the earth. Sparks flew, strange ones, but maybe the strongest ones yet.

“I missed you more than I can say,” I whispered against her hair.

“Say it,” she whispered back. Then she smiled again. We both did. Her speech was a little slow maybe, but not her mind.

Ten days later, Kate was up on a clumsy, four-legged metal walker. She was complaining that she hated the “mechanical contraption” and would be off it within a week. Actually, it took her almost four weeks, but even that was considered miraculous.

She had a half-moon indentation on the left side of her forehead from the terrible beating. So far, she had refused plastic surgery to repair it. She thought her dent added character.

In a way it did. It was pure, unadulterated Kate McTiernan. “It’s also part of my life story, so it stays,” she said. Her speech was closer to normal, getting a little clearer every week.

Whenever I saw Kate’s half-moon dent, I was reminded of Reginald Denny, the truck driver who was so savagely beaten during the Los Angeles riots. I remembered how he looked after the Rodney King verdict. Denny’s head was severely dented, actually staved in, on one side. It still looked that way when I saw him on TV a year after the incident. I also thought of a Nathaniel Hawthorne short story called “The Birthmark.” The dent was Kate’s one imperfection. With it, in my eyes, anyway, she was even more beautiful and special than she’d been before.

I spent most of July at home with my family in Washington. I took two short trips back to see Kate in Durham, but that was all. How many fathers get to spend a month with their kids, catching up with their wild-and-wooly run through childhood? Damon and Jannie were both playing organized baseball that summer. They were still music, movie, general noise, and hot chocolate-chip-cookie addicts. They both slept on the quilt with me for the first week or so while I was recuperating, while I was trying to forget my recent time spent in hell.

I worried that Casanova would come after me for killing his best friend, but so far there was no sign of him. No more beautiful women had been abducted in North Carolina. It was absolutely certain now that he wasn’t Davey Sikes. Several area policemen had been investigated; including his partner Nick Ruskin, and even Chief Hatfield. Every cop had alibis, and they all checked out. Who the hell was Casanova then? Was he going to just disappear, like his underground house? Had he gotten away with all those horrifying murders? Could he just stop killing now?

My grandmother still had volumes of psychological and other kinds of useful advice for me to follow. Much of it was directed at the subject of my love life, and my leading a normal life for a change. She wanted me to go into private practice, anything but police work.

“The children need a grandmother, and a mother, ” Nana Mama told me from the pulpit of her stove where she was fixing her breakfast one morning.

“So I should go out and look for a mother for Damon and Jannie? That what you’re telling me?”

“Yes, you should, Alex, and maybe you should do it before you lose your boyish good looks and charm.”

“I’ll get right on it,” I said. “Snare a wife and mother this summer.”

Nana Mama swatted me with her spatula. Swatted me again for good measure. “Don’t get smart with me,” she said.

She always had the last word.

The phone call came around one o’clock one morning in late July. Nana and the kids had gone up for the night. I was playing some jazz piano, amusing myself, keeping a few junkies out on Fifth Street up with the music of Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck.

Kyle Craig was on the phone line. I groaned when I heard Kyle’s calm subaltern voice.

I expected bad news, of course, but not the particular news that I got late that night.

“What the hell is it, Kyle?” I asked him right off, tying to make his unexpected call into a joke. “I told you not ever to call me again.”

“I had to call on this, Alex. You had to know,” he hissed over the long-distance lines. “Now listen to me closely.”

Kyle talked to me for almost half an hour, and it wasn’t what I had expected. It was much, much worse.

After I got off the phone with Kyle, I went back to the sun porch. I sat there for a long time, thinking about what I should do now. There was nothing I could do, not a thing. “It doesn’t stop,” I whispered to the four walls, “does it?”

I went and got my pistol. I hated carrying it inside the house. I checked all the doors and windows in our house. Finally, I went to bed.

I heard Kyle’s fateful words again as I lay in my darkened bedroom. I heard Kyle tell me his shocker. I saw a face I never wanted to see again. I remembered everything.

“Gary Soneji escaped from prison, Alex. He left a note. The note said he’d stop by and see you sometime soon.”

It doesn’t stop.

I lay in bed and thought about the fact that Gary Soneji still wanted to kill me. He’d told me so himself. He’d had time in prison to obsess about how, when, and where he was going to do it.