Kiss the Girls (Alex Cross #2)(81)

“They think they’re smarter than everyone else,” Kate said. “At least Casanova does. He laughs at all of us. He’s a nasty son of a bitch.”

“And that’s why I’m here,” Sampson told her, “to catch him, and put him in a cage, and lock the cage on a far mountaintop. And by the way, he’d be stone dead in the cage, anyway.”

The time passed like that, flashed by real quickly. Finally, it was getting late and we had to leave. I tried to talk Kate into staying at a hotel for the night. We had been over this subject repeatedly, and her answer was always the same.

“Thanks for the concern, but no thanks,” she said as she brought us out onto the porch. “I can’t let him chase me out of my own house. That will not happen. He comes back, we tangle.”

“Alex is right about the hotel,” Sampson said to her in the gentle voice he reserves for friends. There it was a double recommendation from two of the sharpest cops around.

Kate shook her head, and I knew there was no sense in arguing with her anymore. “Absolutely not. I’ll be just fine, I promise,” she said.

I didn’t ask Kate if I could stay, but I wanted to. I didn’t know if Kate even wanted me to stay. It was a little complicated with Sampson there. I suppose I could have given him my car to drive back, but it was already after two-thirty. We all needed to get some sleep, anyway. Sampson and I finally left.

“ Very nice. Very interesting woman. Very smart. Not your type,” Sampson said as we pulled away from the house. From him, it was a rare, rave review. “ My type,” he added.

When we reached the end of the block, I turned and looked back at the house. It was cooler now, in the low seventies, and Kate had already turned off the porch light and gone in. She was stubborn, but she was smart. It had gotten her through med school. It had gotten her past the deaths of people she loved. She would be okay; she always had been.

I called Kyle Craig when I got back to the hotel, though. “How’s our man Sachs?” I asked him.

“He’s just fine. He’s all tucked in for the night. Not to worry.”





Chapter 92


A FTER THE good ship Alex and Sampson left, Kate carefully checked and double-checked all the doors and windows to her apartment. They were securely locked. She had liked Sampson right away. He was huge and scary, nice and scary, sweet and scary. Alex had brought his closest friend to see her, and she liked that.

As she did her rounds, her safety check of home sweet home, she ruminated about a new life, far away from Chapel Hill, far away from everything terrifying and bad that had happened here. Hell, I’m living a Hitchcock movie, she thought, if Alfred Hitchcock had stayed alive long enough to see and react to the madness and horror of the 1990s.

Exhausted, she finally climbed into bed. Yuk. She felt stale bread or cake crumbs against her legs. She hadn’t made the bed that morning.

She wasn’t accomplishing much lately, and that made her angry, too. She’d been on a proper schedule to complete her intern year this spring. Now she didn’t know if she’d make it by the end of summer.

Kate pulled the covers up under her chin in early June. She was getting soooo buggy. Her anxiety wasn’t going to stop while the monster Casanova was on the loose out there, she knew. She thought about killing him. Her first and only violent fantasy. She imagined going to Wick Sachs’s house. An eye for an eye. She remembered the appropriate passage from the Book of Exodus. Eidetic memory, right.

She really wished that Alex had stayed, but she didn’t want to embarrass him in front of Sampson. She wanted to talk to Alex the way they always did, and she wished he was with her now. She wanted to be in his arms tonight. Maybe more than just in Alex’s arms. Maybe she was ready for more. One night at a time.

She wasn’t sure what she believed anymore, or if she believed in anything at all. She was praying lately, so maybe she did believe. Rote prayers, but prayers all the same. Our Father who art… Hail Mary full of… She wondered if a lot of people did the same thing. “I do love the idea of you, God,” she finally whispered. “Please love the idea of me back.”

She couldn’t stop obsessing about Casanova, about Dr. Wick Sachs, about the mysterious, disappearing house of horror, and the poor women still trapped there. But she was so used to the continuous, terrifying nightmares that she finally drifted off to sleep, anyway.

Kate never heard him come into the house.





Chapter 93


T ICK-COCK. Tick-cock.

Tickory, dickory, cock.

Kate finally heard a noise. A floorboard creaked on the right side of the bedroom.

Tiny, tiny sound… but unmistakable.

That wasn’t her imagination, wasn’t a dream. She sensed that he was there in her bedroom again.

Let it be a crazy thought; let it be a scene in a nightmare; let this whole past month be a nightmare I’m having.

Oh Jesus, oh God, no! she thought.

He was in her room. He’d come back! This was so bad that she couldn’t make herself believe it was happening.

Kate held her breath until her chest ached and threatened to cave in. She never really believed he would come back.

Now she realized that was a terrible mistake. The worst of her life, but not the last one she was allowed, she hoped.

Who was this extraordinary madman? Did he hate her so much that he would risk everything? Or did he think he loved her so much, the sick, pathetic bastard?