Kiss the Girls (Alex Cross #2)(46)

“Yes, I remember quite a lot now. I remember the night he came into my apartment. I can see him carrying me through some kind of woods, to wherever I was kept. He carried me like my weight was nothing.”

“Tell me about the woods you went through, Kate.” This was our first dramatic moment. She was actually with Casanova again. In his power. A captive. I suddenly realized how quiet the hospital was all around us.

“It was too dark, really. The woods were very thick, very creepy. He had a flashlight with him, kept it on a string or rope around his neck…. He’s unbelievably strong. I thought of him as an animal, physically. He compared himself to Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights. He has a very romantic view of himself and what he’s doing. That night… he whispered to me as if we were already lovers. He told me he loved me. He sounded… sincere. ”

“What else do you remember about him, Kate? Anything you recall is helpful. Take your time.”

She turned her head, as if she were looking at someone off to my right. “He always wore a different mask. He wore a reconstructive mask one time. That was the scariest one. They’re called ‘death masks’ because hospitals and morgues sometimes use them to help identify accident victims who are unrecognizable.”

“That’s interesting about the death masks. Please go on, Kate. You’re being incredibly helpful.”

“I know that they can make them right from a human skull, pretty much any skull. They’ll take a photo of it… cover the photo with tracing paper… draw the features. Then they build an actual mask from the drawing. There was a death mask in the movie Gorky Park. They aren’t usually meant to be worn. I wondered how he’d gotten it.”

Okay, Kate, I was thinking to myself, now keep going about Casanova. “What happened on the day that you escaped?” I asked her, leading her just a little.

For the first time, she seemed uncomfortable with a question. Her eyes opened for a split second, as if she were in a light sleep and I had woken her, jarred her. Her eyes shut again. Her right foot was tapping very rapidly.

“I don’t remember very much about that day, Alex. I think I was drugged out of my mind, off the planet.”

“That’s okay. Anything you remember is very good for me to know. You’re doing beautifully. You told me once that you kicked him. Did you kick Casanova?”

“I kicked him. About three-quarters speed. He yelled out in pain, and he went down.”

There was another long pause. Suddenly, Kate started to cry. Tears welled up in her eyes, and then she was sobbing very, very hard.

Her face was wet with perspiration as well. I felt that I should bring her out of the hypnosis. I didn’t understand what had just happened, and it scared me a little.

I tried to keep my own voice very calm. “What’s the matter, Kate? What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

“I left those other women there. I couldn’t find them at first. Then I was so unbelievably confused. I left the others.”

Her eyes opened and they were filled with fear, but also tears. She had brought herself out. She was strong like that. “What made me so afraid?” she asked me. “What just happened?”

“I don’t know for sure,” I told Kate. We would talk about it later, but not right now.

She averted her eyes from mine. It wasn’t like her. “Can I be alone?” she whispered then. “Can I just be alone now? Thank you.”

I left the hospital room feeling almost as if I had betrayed Kate. But I didn’t know if there was anything that I could have done differently. This was a multiple-homicide investigation. Nothing was working so far. How could that be?





Chapter 56


K ATE WAS released from University Hospital later that week. She had asked if we could talk for a while each day. I readily agreed.

“This isn’t therapy in any way, shape, or form,” she told me. She just wanted to vent with someone about some difficult subjects. Partly because of Naomi, we had formed a quick, strong bond.

There was no further information, no more clues about Casanova’s link with the Gentleman Caller in Los Angeles. Beth Lieberman, the reporter at the Los Angeles Times, refused to talk to me. She was peddling her hot literary property in New York.

I wanted to fly out to L.A. to see Lieberman, but Kyle Craig asked me not to. He assured me that I knew everything the Times reporter had on the case. I needed to trust someone; I trusted Kyle.

On a Monday afternoon, Kate and I went for a walk in the woods surrounding the Wykagil River, where she’d been found by the two boys. It was still unspoken, but we seemed to be in this thing together now. Certainly no one knew more about Casanova than she did. If she could remember anything more it would be so useful. The smallest detail could be a clue that might open up everything.

Kate became quiet and unusually subdued as we entered the dark, brooding woods east of the Wykagil River. The human monster could be lurking out here, maybe prowling in the woods right now. Maybe he was watching us.

“I used to love walking in woods like these. Blackberry brambles and sweet sassafras. Cardinals and blue jays feeding everywhere. It reminds me of when I was growing up,” Kate told me as we walked. “My sisters and I used to go swimming every single day in a stream like this one. We swam nekkid, which was forbidden by my father. Anything my father strictly forbade, we tried to do.”