Kiss the Girls (Alex Cross #2)(21)

I ended up eating by myself in a noisy bar in the college town of Chapel Hill. There were hordes of university students, and a busy pool table, but I sat alone with my beers, a greasy, rubbery cheeseburger, and my early thoughts on Casanova.

The long day had drained me. I missed Sampson, my kids, my home in D.C. A comfortable world without any monsters. Scootchie was still missing, though. So were several other young women in the Southeast.

My thoughts kept drifting back to Kate McTiernan, and what I’d heard about her today.

This is the way cases got solved at least it was the way I had always solved them. Data got collected. Data ran loose in the brain. Eventually, connections were made.

Casanova doesn’t just take physically beautiful women, I suddenly realized in the bar. He takes the most extraordinary women he can find. He’s taking only the heartbreakers… the women that everybody wants but nobody ever seems to get.

He’s collecting them somewhere out there.

Why extraordinary women? I wondered.

There was one possible answer. Because he believes he’s extraordinary, too.





Chapter 24


I ALMOST went back to see Mary Ellen Klouk again, but I changed my mind and returned to the Washington Duke Inn. A couple of messages were waiting for me.

The first was from a friend in the Washington PD. He was processing information I needed for a meaningful profile on Casanova. I’d brought a laptop with me and I hoped I would be in business soon.

A reporter by the name of Mike Hart had called four times. I recognized his name, and I knew his newspaper a tabloid out of Florida called the National Star. The reporter’s nickname was No-Heart’s Hart. I didn’t return No-Heart’s calls. I’d been featured on the front page of the Star once, and once was enough for this lifetime.

Detective Nick Ruskin had finally returned one of my calls. He left a short message. Nothing new on our end. Will let you know. I found that hard to believe. I didn’t trust Detective Ruskin or his faithful sidekick Davey Sikes.

I drifted off to a restless sleep in a cozy armchair in my room and had the most vivid, nightmarish dreams. A monster right out of an Edvard Munch painting was chasing Naomi. I was powerless to help her; all I could do was watch the macabre scene in horror. Not much need for a trained psychotherapist to interpret that one.

I woke up sensing that someone was in the hotel room with me.

I quietly placed my hand on the butt of my revolver and stayed very still. My heart was pounding. How could someone have gotten into the room?

I stood up slowly, but stayed low in a shooting crouch. I peered around as best I could in the semidarkness.

The chintz window drapes weren’t completely drawn, so there was enough light from outside for me to make out shapes. Shadows of tree leaves danced on the hotel room wall. Nothing else seemed to be moving.

I checked the bathroom, Glock pistol first. Then the closets. I began to feel a little silly stalking the hotel room with my gun drawn, but I had definitely heard a noise!

I finally spotted a piece of paper under the door, but I waited a few seconds before I flipped on the light. Just to be sure.

A black-and-white photograph was staring up at me. Instant associations and connections jumped to mind. It was a colonial British postcard, probably from the early 1900s. At that time the postcards had been collected by Westerners as pseudoart, but mostly as soft pornography. They had been a racy turn-on for male collectors in the early part of the century.

I bent down to get a better look at the old-fashioned photo.

The card showed an odalisque smoking a Turkish cigarette, in a startling acrobatic posture. The woman was dark, young, and beautiful; probably in her mid-teens. She was naked to the waist, and her full breasts hung upside down in the posed photograph.

I flipped the card over with a pencil.

There was a printed caption near where a stamp could be placed: Odalisques with great beauty and high intelligence were carefully trained to be concubines. They learned to dance quite beautifully, to play musical instruments, and to write exquisitely lyrical poetry. They were the most valuable part of the harem, perhaps the emperor’s greatest treasure.

The caption was signed in ink with a printed name. Giovanni Giacomo Casanova de Seignalt.

He knew that I was here in Durham. He knew who I was.

Casanova had left a calling card.





Chapter 25


I ’M ALIVE.

Kate McTiernan slowly forced open her eyes inside a dimly lit room… somewhere.

For a couple of blinks of her eyes, she believed she was in a hotel that she couldn’t for the life of her remember checking into. A really weird hotel in an even weirder Jim Jarmusch art movie. It didn’t matter, though. At least she wasn’t dead.

Suddenly, she remembered being shot point-blank in the chest. She remembered the intruder. Tall… long hair… gentle, conversational voice… sixth-degree animal.

She tried to get up, but thought better of it immediately. “Whoa there,” she said out loud. Her throat was dry, and her voice sounded raspy as it echoed unpleasantly inside her head. Her tongue felt as if it needed a shave.

I’m in hell. In a circle from Dante’s Inferno, with a very low number, she thought, and she began to shiver. Everything about the moment was terrifying, but it was so horrible, and so unexpected, she couldn’t orient herself to it.

Her joints were stiff and painful; she ached all over. She doubted that she could press a hundred pounds right now. Her head felt huge, bloated like aging fruit, and it hurt, but she could vividly remember the attacker. He was tall, maybe six two, youngish, extremely powerful, articulate. The images were hazy, but she was absolutely certain they were true.