Kiss the Girls (Alex Cross #2)(98)

“I feel sorry for these local people dragged out here for this,” I said to Kyle. My eyes passed slowly over the ghoulish crime scene. “They won’t be able to forget this until the day they die. They’ll dream of it for years.”

“How about you, Alex?” Kyle asked. His intense, grayish-blue eyes leveled mine. Sometimes, he almost seemed to care about me.

“Oh, I have so many nightmare images now, it’s hard to pick out just one favorite,” I confessed with a thin smile. “I’ll go home soon. I’ll make my kids sleep in with me for a while. They love to, anyway. They won’t understand the real reason why. I’ll be able to sleep okay with the kids there to protect me. They pound on my chest if I have a nightmare.”

Kyle finally smiled. “You’re an unusual man, Alex. You’re both incredibly open and secretive.”

“Getting more unusual every day,” I said to Kyle. “You come on a new monster one of these days, don’t bother to call. I’m monstered out.” I stared into his eyes, trying to make contact and not completely succeeding. Kyle was secretive too, not very open with anybody that I knew of.

“I’ll try not to call,” Kyle said. “You rest up, though. There’s a monster working in the city of Chicago right now. Another in Lincoln and Concord, Massachusetts. Someone very evil is taking children in Austin, Texas. Little babies, actually. Repeat killers in Orlando and Minneapolis.”

“We’ve still got work here,” I reminded Kyle.

“Do we?” still got asked, his voice dripping with irony. “What work is that, Alex? You mean spadework?”

Kyle Craig and I watched the terrifying scene that was unfolding near the underground house. Seventy to eighty men were busy digging up the meadow west of the “disappearing” house. They were working with heavy pickaxes and shovels. Searching for bodies of murder victims. Spadework.

Since 1981, beautiful and intelligent women from all over the South had been abducted by the two monsters and murdered. It was a thirteen-year reign of horror. First, I fall in love with a woman. Then, I simply take her. Will Rudolph had written that in his diaries out in California. I wondered if the sentiment was his or his twin’s. I wondered how badly Casanova was missing his friend now. How he grieved. How he planned to cope with his loss. Did he already have a plan?

I believed that Casanova had met Rudolph sometime back around 1981. They had shared their forbidden secret: They liked to kidnap, to rape, and, sometimes to torture, women. Somehow, they came up with the idea of keeping a harem of very special women, women who were bright and fascinating enough to hold their interest. They never had anyone to share their secrets with before. Then suddenly they had each other. I tried to imagine never having anyone to confide in never once in your life and then finding someone to talk to when you are twenty-one or twenty-two years old.

The two of them had played their wicked games, gathered their harem of beauties in the Research Triangle area and throughout the Southeast. My theory on twinning had been close to the truth. They enjoyed kidnapping and holding beautiful women captive. They also competed. So much so, that Will Rudolph finally had to go off on his own for a while. To Los Angeles. He had become the Gentleman Caller out there. He’d tried to make it on his own. Casanova, the more territorial of the two, continued to work in the South, but they communicated. They shared stories. They needed to share. Sharing their exploits was part of the thrill for both of them. Rudolph eventually told stories to a reporter at the Los Angeles Times. He tasted fame and notoriety, and he liked it. Not so Casanova. He was much more of a loner. He was the genius; the creative one, I believed.

I thought I knew who he might be. I thought that I’d seen Casanova without his mask.

I kept drifting in and out of strange, private thoughts at the dizzying crime scene. I was burnt toast, but that didn’t matter anymore; it hadn’t mattered for a while.

Casanova, the territorial killer, I was thinking. He was probably still in the area around Durham and Chapel Hill. He had met Will Rudolph around the time of the golden couple murders. So far, he’d thought everything through with almost perfect clarity. He had finally made a mistake during the shootout two days before. A small mistake, but that was all it took sometimes… I thought I knew who Casanova might be. But I couldn’t share it with the FBI. I was their “loose cannon,” right? The “outsider” on this case. So be it.

Kyle Craig and I watched the same distant spot in the high waving grass and honeysuckle, out where the digging was taking place. Mass graves, I thought as I watched the horrific scene. What a concept for the nineties.

A tall balding man stood up from his deep hole in the soft earth. He waved long arms high over his head, which was shiny with sweat. “Bob Shaw here!” He called out his name in a loud, clear voice.

The digger’s name was the verbal signal that another woman’s body had been found. An entire corps of North Carolina medical examiners was at the dreamlike, unbearably grisly scene. One of the MEs ran over to the digger in a strange, lopsided waddle that would have made Kyle and me laugh under different circumstances. He gave Shaw a hand out of the grave.

The TV cameras at the scene moved in on Shaw, who was U.S. Army from Fort Bragg. An attractive woman reporter nearby received a dab of makeup before she spoke into the lens of a camera.

“They’ve just found victim number twenty-three,” the reporter said with appropriate solemnity. “All the victims so far appear to have been young women. The grisly murders ”