Violets Are Blue (Alex Cross #7)(68)
284
Chapter One Hundred and Six
I got home around one that afternoon. I needed to sleep, but I couldn't stay down for more than a couple of hours. I got up and paced through the empty house on Fifth Street. I kept walking from room to room. I felt the need to stop a terrible disaster from happening, but I didn't know where to start. The possible hit lists for Kyle were continually running through my head: my family, Sampson, Christine, Jamilla Hughes, Kate McTiernan, my niece Naomi, Kyle's own family. I couldn't get the image of Zach and Liz out of my head. They had been executed in the prime of their lives - because of me. Finally, I was able to throw up, and it was the best thing that had happened to me that day. I pushed out my guts. Then I slammed the bathroom mirror with the heel of my hand and nearly broke it. Kyle was always a fucking step ahead, right? It had been that way for so many years now. He was such an unbelievable bastard. He had complete confidence in his abilities, including his power to elude us any time he wanted to. What would be next? Who would he kill? Who? Who? How could he make himself disappear after the killings? How did he blend in and become invisible when so many people were looking for him? He had money; he had taken care of that when he'd played the role of the Mastermind. So what was next for him? I worked at my computer late into the night and early morning. The computer was beside my bedroom window. Was he outside -------------- 285 --------------
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watching? I didn't think even Kyle would take that kind of chance now. But hell, how could I rule anything out? He was capable of large-scale mass murder. If that was his plan, where would he strike? Washington? New York City? LA? Chicago? His old hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina? Maybe somewhere in Europe? London? Was his family safe - his wife and his two children? I had vacationed with them in Nags Head one summer. I'd stayed at their home in Virginia a few times over the years. His wife Louise was a dear friend. I had promised her I would try to bring Kyle in alive if I possibly could. But now I wondered - did I want to keep that promise? What would I do if I ever caught up with him? He might go after his own parents, especially since he put part of the heavy blame for his behavior on his father. William Hyland Craig had been a general in the army, then chairman of the board of two Fortune 500 companies in and around Charlotte. Nowadays, he gave lectures at ten to twenty thousand a pop; he was on half a dozen boards. He had beaten Kyle as a boy, disciplined him ruthlessly, taught him to hate. Sibling rivalry? Kyle had brought it up himself. He had been highly competitive with his younger brother until Blake's death in a hunting accident in 1991. Had Kyle actually killed Blake? What about the older brother, who still lived in North Carolina? Did he think of me as a younger brother? Did Kyle see Blake in me? He was competing with me, and he'd tried to control me from the start. The women in my life might have represented a threat to him, an extreme variant of sibling rivalry. Was that why he had killed Betsey Cavalierre? What about Maureen Cooke in New Orleans? And Jamilla? I made a note to think carefully and plot out one particular angle, a dysfunctional family triangle, with both Kyle and me a part of it. One step ahead. So far anyway. If he came after his family, or his parents, we would have him. They were being closely protected in Charlotte. The FBI was all over them.
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Kyle knew that. He wouldn't do anything stupid - just cruel and nasty. One step ahead. That seemed to be the key to Kyle's fantasy life, at least as I understood it so far. He wouldn't make the obvious move. He would go at least one move, maybe two, beyond that. But how did he stay a step ahead, especially now? A very bad thought had been running through my head lately. Maybe there was someone in the FBI helping him - maybe Kyle had a partner. I had finally drifted off to sleep when the phone in my bedroom woke me. It was three in the morning. Goddamn him. Doesn't he ever sleep? I picked it up, clicked it off, then unplugged the phone from the wall. No more phone tag, Kyle. Fuck you. I was setting the rules now. This was my game, not his.
287
Chapter One Hundred and Seven
In the morning, I drank too much black coffee and thought about our last case together: the Tiger, Daniel and Charles, Peter Westin, the Alexander brothers. What did it mean in Kyle's fantasy? The macabre story he was plotting out involved both of us. He had asked me into the investigation, then used it to control me. Was that where it ended for him, and me? I kept trying to piece together the puzzle from a psychologist's point of view. The rest might flow from that. Might. With Kyle, there was no knowing for sure. If he saw a clear pattern, he might reverse it; if he understood his own pathology, and maybe he did, he would use that in his favor too. Around noon, I called Kyle's older brother, Martin, a radiologist living outside Charlotte - where we had once believed that Daniel and Charles had begun their murder spree. Did Kyle have a previous connection with them? Was that a possibility? Martin Craig tried to help, but he finally admitted that he and his brother hadn't spoken during the past ten years. 'We saw one another at my brother Blake's funeral,'Martin said/That was the last time. I don't like my brother. Detective Cross. He doesn't like me. I don't know if he likes anybody.' 'Was your father especially rough on Kyle?' I asked Martin. 'Kyle always said so, but to tell the truth, I never saw much of it. Neither did my mother. Kyle liked to make up stories. He was always the big hero, or the pathetic victim. My mother used to say that Kyle had an ego second only to God's.'