Kiss the Girls (Alex Cross #2)(39)

Kate turned away from him, turned her back on the death mask. She peered down at the steep valley of rocks and trees. It must be a hundred feet, maybe more than that, she thought. The dizziness she felt was almost as terrifying as the deadly alternative rushing up behind her.

She heard him scream her name. “Kate, no!”

She didn’t look behind her again.

Kate McTiernan jumped.

She tucked in her knees and held on to them. Just your regular swimming-hole cannonball leap, she thought to herself.

There was a stream down below. The silver-blue ribbon of water was coming at her unbelievably fast. The roar was getting louder in her ears.

She had no idea how deep it was, but how deep could a small stream like that be? Two feet? Maybe four feet? Ten feet deep if these were the luckiest few seconds of her life, which she sincerely doubted.

“Kate!” She heard his screams from high above. “You’re dead! ’

She saw tiny whitecaps which meant rocks beneath the rippling water. Oh, dear God, I don’t want to die.

Kate hit a wall of freezing cold water hard.

She hit bottom so quickly it was as if there hadn’t been any water in the fast-running stream. Kate felt shooting pain, terrible pain, everywhere. She swallowed water. She realized she going to drown. She was going to die, anyway. She had no strength left God’s will be done.





Chapter 46


D URHAM HOMICIDE detective Nick Ruskin called and informed me that they had just found another woman, and that it wasn’t Naomi. A thirty-one-year-old intern from Chapel Hill had been fished out of the Wykagil River by two young boys playing hooky for the day and caught by cruel fate instead.

Ruskin’s flashy green Saab Turbo picked me up in front of the Washington Duke Inn. He and Davey Sikes were trying to be more cooperative lately. Sikes was taking a day off, his first in a month, according to his detective partner.

Ruskin actually seemed glad to see me. He hopped out of the car in front of the hotel and pumped my hand as if we were friends. As always, Ruskin was dressed for success. Black Armani rip-off sportcoat. Black pocket T-shirt.

Things were picking up a little for me in the new South. I got the feeling that Ruskin knew I had connections with the FBI, and that he wanted to use them, too. Detective Nick Ruskin was definitely a mover and shaker. This was a career-making case for him.

“Our first big break,” Ruskin said to me.

“What do you know about the intern so far?” I asked en route to the University of North Carolina Hospital.

“She’s hanging in there. Apparently, she came down the Wykagil like a slippery fish. They’re saying it’s a miracle. Not even a major broken bone. But she’s in shock, or something worse. She can’t talk, or she won’t talk. The docs are using words like catatonic and posttraumatic shock. Who knows at this point? At least she’s alive.”

Ruskin had a lot of enthusiasm, and he could also be charismatic. He definitely wanted to use my connections. Maybe I could use his.

“Nobody knows how she got into the river. Or how she got away from him,” Ruskin told me as we entered the college town of Chapel Hill. The thought of Casanova stalking female students here was terrifying. The town was so pretty and seemed so vulnerable.

“Or whether she actually was with Casanova,” I added a thought. “We don’t know that for sure.”

“We don’t know shit from Shinola, do we?” Nick Ruskin complained as he turned down a side street marked HOSPITAL. “I’ll tell you one thing, though, this story is about to go public in a big way. The circus just came to town. See, up ahead.”

Ruskin had that right. The scene outside North Carolina University Hospital was already media bedlam. Television and press reporters were camped out in the parking lot, the front lobby, and all over the serene, sloping green lawns of the university.

Photographers snapped my picture, as well as Nick Ruskin’s, when we arrived. Ruskin was still the local star detective. People seemed to like him. I was becoming a minor celebrity, at least a curiosity, in the case. My involvement in the Gary Soneji kidnapping had already been broadcast by the local wags. I was Dr. Detective Cross, an expert on human monsters from up North.

“Tell us what’s going on,” a woman reporter called out. “Give us a break, Nick. What’s the real story with Kate McTiernan?”

“If we’re lucky, maybe she can tell us.” Ruskin smiled at the reporter, but he kept on walking until we were safely inside the hospital.

Ruskin and I were far from first in line, but we were allowed to see the intern later that night. Kyle Craig pulled the necessary strings for me. A determination had been made that Katelya McTiernan wasn’t psychotic, but that she was suffering from posttraumatic stress syndrome. It seemed a reasonable diagnosis.

There was absolutely nothing that I could do that night. Anyway, I stayed after Nick Ruskin left, and I read all the medical charts, the nursing notes, and write-ups. I perused the local police reports describing how she had been found by two twelve-year-old boys who had skipped school to fish and smoke cigarettes down by the riverside.

I suspected I knew why Nick Ruskin had called me, too. Ruskin was smart. He understood that Kate McTiernan’s current state might involve me in the case as a psychologist, especially since I had dealt with this kind of poststress trauma before.

Katelya McTiernan. Survivor. But just barely. I stood beside her bed for a full thirty minutes that first night. Her IV was hooked up to a drip monitor. The bed’s siderails were up high and tight around her. There were already flowers in the room. I remembered a sad, powerful Sylvia Plath poem called “Tulips.” It was about Plath’s decidedly unsentimental reaction to flowers sent to her hospital room after a suicide attempt.