Kiss the Girls (Alex Cross #2)(68)

She had to admit she was frightened to be in her own house, though. She hated that feeling. She wanted all of this shitty madness to stop, but it wouldn’t. Not even close. There were still two horrifying monsters on the loose out there.

She kept hearing creepy noises all around her in the house. Old creaking wood. Banging shutters. Wind chimes she had put on an old elm tree outside. The chimes reminded her of the cabin in Big Sur. They had to come down tomorrow if not sooner.

Kate finally fell asleep with the wineglass, which was really an old Flintstones jelly glass, balanced in her lap. The glass was a holy relic from the house in West Virginia. She and her sisters used to fight over it sometimes at breakfast.

The glass tipped and spilled onto her bedcovers. It didn’t matter. Kate was dead to the world. For one night at least.

She didn’t usually drink much. The Pinot Noir hit her like the freight trains that used to rumble through Birch when she was a kid. She woke up 3:00 A.M. with a throbbing headache, and hurried into her bathroom, where she got sick.

Images of Psycho flashed through her mind as she bent over the sink. She thought of Casanova in the house again. He was in the bathroom, wasn’t he? No of course no one was there… please, make this stop. Make this end… right… now!

She went back to bed and crawled under the covers. She heard the wind rattling the shutters. Heard those stupid chimes. She thought about death her mother, Susanne, Marjorie, Kristin. All gone now. Kate McTiernan pulled the blanket over her head. She felt like a little girl again, afraid of the bogeyman. Okay, she could handle that.

Trouble was, she could see Casanova and the horrifying death mask whenever she closed her eyes. She held a secret thought buried in the center of her chest: He was coming for her again, wasn’t he?

At seven in the morning her phone rang. It was Alex.

“Kate, I was in his house,” he said.





Chapter 79


A ROUND TEN the night we returned from California, I drove to the Hope Valley residential area of Durham. I went alone to see Casanova. Doctor Detective Cross was back in the saddle again.

There were three clues that I considered essential to solving the case. I reviewed them again as I drove. There was the simple fact that they both committed “perfect crimes.” There was the aspect of twinning, the codependence of Casanova and the Gentleman. There was the mystery of the disappearing house.

Something had to come from one, or all, of those bits of information. Maybe something was about to happen in the Hope Valley suburb of Durham. I hoped so.

I drove slowly along Old Chapel Hill Road until I reached a formal, white-brick, protal-type entrance into the upscale Hope Valley estates. I got the feeling that I wasn’t supposed to intrude beyond the gate, that just maybe I was the first black man not in workingman’s overalls to pass through here.

I knew I was taking a chance, but I had to see where Dr. Wick Sachs lived. I needed to feel things about him, needed to know him better, and in a big hurry.

The streets of Hope Valley didn’t run in straight lines. The road I was on didn’t have curbs or gutters, and there were not many streetlamps. The neighborhood was unpleasantly hilly, and as I drove I began to have the sense of being lost, of moving in a great looping circle. The houses were mostly upscale Southern Gothic, old and expensive. The notion of the killer next door had never been more powerful.

Dr. Wick Sachs lived in a stately red-brick house set back on one of the highest hills.

The shutters were painted white, matching the gutters. The house looked too expensive for a university professor, even one at Duke, the “Harvard of the South.”

The windows were all dark and looked as shiny as slate. The only lights came from a single brass carriage lamp dangling over the front door.

I already knew that Wick Sachs had a wife and two small children. His wife was a registered nurse at Duke University Hospital. The FBI had checked her credentials. She had an excellent reputation, and everyone spoke very highly of her. The Sachses’ daughter, Faye Anne, was seven; and their son, Nathan, was ten.

I figured that the FBI was probably watching me as I drove up to the Sachses’ house, but I didn’t much care. I wondered if Kyle Craig was with them… he was deeply involved in the grisly case, almost as much as I was. Kyle had also gone to Duke. Was this case personal for him, too? How personal?

My eyes very slowly ran up and down the front of the house, then along the well-tended grounds. Everything was extremely orderly, actually quite beautiful, perfect as could be.

I had already learned that human monsters can live anywhere; that some of the clever ones chose ordinary all-American-looking houses. Just like the house I was examining now. The monsters are literally everywhere. There is an epidemic running out of control in America, and the statistics are frightening. We have nearly seventy-five percent of the human hunters. Europe has almost all the rest, led by England, Germany, and France. Mass murderers are changing the face of modern homicide investigations in every American city, village, and town.

I studied everything I could about the house’s exterior. The southeast side had what was known as a “Florida room.” There was a patio, which was living-room size. The lawn was fescue, and it was extremely well kept. There was no moss, no crabgrass, no weeds.

The cobbled-brick walkway from the driveway was carefully edged, and not a single stray blade of grass peeked through the stones. The bricks of the walk perfectly matched the bricks of the house.