Kiss the Girls (Alex Cross #2)(77)

“Assume the position?” Sampson said to his “suspect.” There was no merriment in his deep voice. “How many brothers you pull that shit on? How many young men you call ‘homes’ and humiliate like that? like you might fuckin’ understand what their life is about. Makes me sick. ”

“You know damn well the serial killer Casanova isn’t a black man,” I said to the two disarmed Chapel Hill cops. “You haven’t heard the last of this particular incident, gentlemen. Believe me on that one.”

“There been a lot of robberies in this neighborhood,” the deep-voiced one said. He was contrite all of a sudden, doing the Corporate America step’n’fetchit, the old two-step backstep.

“Save the sorry bullshit!” Sampson said, jabbing out with his own gun, letting the two detectives feel a little humiliation of their own.

Sampson and I got back into our car. We kept the detectives’ guns. Souvenirs of our day. Let them explain it to their bosses back at police headquarters.

“Son of a bitch!” Sampson said as we pulled away. I hit the steering wheel with the heel of my palm. I hit it a second time. The bad scene had shaken me more than I had realized, or maybe I was just too ragged and frayed right then.

“On the other hand,” Sampson said, “we did take those boys down like snap. Little bullshit racism gets my adrenaline flowing, blood boiling. Gets the demons going. That’s good. I have the proper edge now.”

“It’s nice to see your ugly face again,” I said to Sampson. I had to smile, finally. We both did. Then we were both laughing out loud in the car.

“Nice to see you, too, Brown Sugar. You’ll be happy to know you’ve still got your looks. Strain’s not showing too bad. Let’s go to work. You know, I pity the poor psycho if we catch him today which is likely, I might add.”

Sampson and I were twinning, too. It felt as good as ever.





Chapter 88


S AMPSON AND I found Dean Browning Lowell working out at the new faculty gym in Allen Hall on the Duke campus. The gym was filled with the latest and greatest muscle-building and toning equipment: shiny new rowing machines, StairMasters, treadmills, Gravitrons.

Dean Lowell was working with free weights. We needed to talk to him about Wick Sachs, doctor of pornography.

Sampson and I watched Browning Lowell do a tough set of lateral raises, then some leg curls and presses. It was an impressive workout, even by the standards of two dedicated gym rats like ourselves. Lowell was quite a physical specimen.

“So this is what an Olympian god looks like up close,” I said as we finally strolled across the gym floor toward him. Whitney Houston was playing from speakers in the gym’s walls. Whitney was getting all the professor types pumped up to the max.

“You’re walkin’ with an Olympian god,” Sampson reminded me.

“It’s easy to forget in the presence of the great, yet humble, ones,” I said and grinned.

Dean Lowell looked as he heard our street shoes tatooing on the gymnasium floor. His smile was friendly and welcoming. That nice guy Browning Lowell. Actually, he did seem like a nice man. He went out of his way to create that impression.

I needed as much insider’s detail as I could get from him in a hurry. Somewhere in North Carolina there had to be a missing puzzle piece that would begin to make sense out of all this murder and intrigue. I introduced Sampson and we skipped the polite small talk. I asked Lowell what he knew about Wick Sachs.

The dean was extremely cooperative, as he’d been on our first meeting. “Sachs is our campus skell, has been for a decade. Every university seems to have at least one,” Dean Lowell said and frowned deeply. I noticed that even his frown lines had muscles.

“Sachs is widely known as ‘Doctor Dirt.’ He’s got tenure, though, and he’s never been caught at anything completely untoward. I guess I should give Dr. Sachs the benefit of the doubt, but I won’t.”

“You ever hear about an exotic book and film collection that he owns, keeps at his house? Pornography masquerading as erotica?” Sampson decided to ask my next question for me.

Lowell stopped his vigorous exercises. He looked at both of us for a long moment before he spoke again. “Is Dr. Sachs a serious suspect in the disappearances of these young women?”

“There are a lot of suspects, Dean Lowell. I can’t say any more than that right now.” I told him the truth.

Lowell nodded. “I respect your judgment, Alex. Let me tell you some things about Sachs that might be important,” he said. He had stopped exercising by now. He began toweling off his thick neck and shoulders. His body looked like polished rock.

Lowell continued to talk as he dried himself meticulously. “Let me start at the beginning: There was an infamous murder of a young couple here a while back. This was in nineteen eighty-one. Wick Sachs was an undergrad at the time, a liberal arts student, very brilliant mind. I was in the graduate school then. When I became dean, I learned that Sachs had actually been one of the suspects in the murder investigation, but he was definitely cleared. There wasn’t any evidence that he was involved in any way. I don’t know every detail, but you can check it for yourself with the Durham police. It was in the spring of ’eighty-one. The murdered students were Roe Tierney and Tom Hutchinson. It was a huge scandal, I remember. In those days, a single murder case could still actually shock a community. Thing is, the case was never solved.”