Alex Cross 02 - Kiss the Girls (19 page)

C
ASANOVA COULDN’T take his eyes off Anna Miller. The air around him seemed to roar. Everything was charged with high expectations.
He was feeling more than a little out of control. Not like himself. More like the Gentleman Caller.

He looked down on his art—his creation. He held a thought:
Anna has never looked like this for anyone else.

Anna Miller lay on the bare wooden floor of the downstairs bedroom. She was naked, except for her jewelry, which he wanted
her to wear. Her arms were bound with leather behind her back. A comfortable pillow was propped underneath her buttocks.

Anna’s perfect legs hung from a rope tied to a ceiling beam. This was how he wanted her; this was exactly the way he’d imagined
her so many times.

You can do anything that you want to do,
he thought.

And so, he did.

Most of the warm milk was already inside her. He’d used the rubber hose and nozzle to do that.

She reminded him a little of Annette Bening, he was thinking, except that she was his now. She wasn’t a flickering image on
some Cineplex movie screen. She would help him get over Kate McTiernan, and the sooner the better.

Anna wasn’t so haughty anymore; she wasn’t supremely untouchable, either. He was always curious about how much it took to
break someone’s will. Not so much, usually. Not in this age of cowards and spoiled brats.

“Please take it away. Don’t do this to me. I’ve been good, haven’t I?” Anna pleaded convincingly. She had such a beautiful
and interesting face—in happiness—and especially in sorrow.

Her cheeks rose sharply whenever she spoke. He memorized the look, everything he could about this special moment. Details
to dream about later on. Like the exact tilting angle of her derriere.

“It can’t harm you, Anna,” he told her truthfully. “Its mouth is sewn shut. I sewed it myself. The snake is harmless. I would
never hurt you.”

“You’re sick and vile,” Anna suddenly snapped at him. “You’re a sadist!”

He merely nodded. He had wanted to see the real Anna, and there she was: another snapping dragon.

Casanova watched the milk as it slowly dripped from her anus. So did the small black snake. The sweet fragrance of the milk
drew it forward across the wooden two-by-fours of the bedroom floor. It was quite magnificent to observe. This truly was an
image for beauty and the best.

The cautiously alert black snake paused, then suddenly jutted its head forward. The head smoothly slid inside Anna Miller.
The black snake cleverly gathered itself in folds and slid farther inside.

Casanova closely watched Anna’s beautiful eyes widen. How many other men had ever seen this, or felt anything like what he
was experiencing now? How many of those men were still alive?

He had first heard of this sexual practice for enlarging the anus on his trips to Thailand and Cambodia. Now he’d performed
the ceremony himself. It made him feel so much better—about the loss of Kate, about other losses.

That was the exquisite and surprising beauty of the games he chose to play at his hideaway. He loved them. He couldn’t possibly
stop himself.

And neither could anyone else. Not the police, not the FBI, and
not
Dr. Alex Cross.

K
ATE STILL couldn’t remember much from the actual day of her escape from hell. She agreed to be hypnotized, at least to let
me try, though she thought her natural defenses might be too strong. We decided to do it late at night in the hospital, when
she was already tired and might be more susceptible.

Hypnotism can be a relatively simple process. First, I asked Kate to close her eyes, then to breathe slowly and evenly. Maybe
I would finally meet Casanova tonight. Maybe through Kate’s eyes I’d see how he worked.

“In with the good air, out with the bad,” Kate said, keeping her good humor most of the time. “Something like that. Right,
Dr. Cross?”

“Clear your mind as much as you can, Kate,” I said.

“I don’t know about the wisdom of that.” She smiled. “There’s an awful lot bumping around in there right now. Rather like
an old, old attic filled with unopened dressers and portmanteaus.” Her voice was beginning to sound a little sleepy. That
was a hopeful sign.

“Now just count back slowly from a hundred. Begin whenever you feel like it,” I told her.

She went under easily. That probably meant that she trusted me somewhat. With the trust came responsibility on my part.

Kate was vulnerable now. I didn’t want to hurt her under any circumstances. For the first few minutes, we talked as we often
did when she was fully conscious and awake. We had enjoyed talking to each other from the start.

“Can you remember being kept in the house with Casanova?” I finally asked her a leading question.

“Yes, I remember quite a lot now. I remember the night he came into my apartment. I can see him carrying me through some kind
of woods, to wherever I was kept. He carried me like my weight was nothing.”

“Tell me about the woods you went through, Kate.” This was our first dramatic moment. She was actually with Casanova again.
In his power. A captive. I suddenly realized how quiet the hospital was all around us.

“It was too dark, really. The woods were very thick, very creepy. He had a flashlight with him, kept it on a string or rope
around his neck…. He’s
unbelievably
strong. I thought of him as an animal, physically. He compared himself to Heathcliff from
Wuthering Heights.
He has a very romantic view of himself and what he’s doing. That night… he whispered to me as if we were already lovers.
He told me he loved me. He sounded…
sincere.
”

“What else do you remember about him, Kate? Anything you recall is helpful. Take your time.”

She turned her head, as if she were looking at someone off to my right. “He always wore a different mask. He wore a reconstructive
mask one time. That was the scariest one. They’re called ‘death masks’ because hospitals and morgues sometimes use them to
help identify accident victims who are unrecognizable.”

“That’s interesting about the death masks. Please go on, Kate. You’re being incredibly helpful.”

“I know that they can make them right from a human skull, pretty much any skull. They’ll take a photo of it… cover the photo
with tracing paper… draw the features. Then they build an actual mask from the drawing. There was a death mask in the movie
Gorky Park.
They aren’t usually meant to be worn. I wondered how he’d gotten it.”

Okay, Kate,
I was thinking to myself,
now keep going about Casanova.
“What happened on the day that you escaped?” I asked her, leading her just a little.

For the first time, she seemed uncomfortable with a question. Her eyes opened for a split second, as if she were in a light
sleep and I had woken her, jarred her. Her eyes shut again. Her right foot was tapping very rapidly.

“I don’t remember very much about that day, Alex. I think I was drugged out of my mind, off the planet.”

“That’s okay. Anything you remember is very good for me to know. You’re doing beautifully. You told me once that you kicked
him. Did you kick Casanova?”

“I kicked him. About three-quarters speed. He yelled out in pain, and he went down.”

There was another long pause. Suddenly, Kate started to cry. Tears welled up in her eyes, and then she was sobbing very, very
hard.

Her face was wet with perspiration as well. I felt that I should bring her out of the hypnosis. I didn’t understand what had
just happened, and it scared me a little.

I tried to keep my own voice very calm. “What’s the matter, Kate? What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

“I left those other women there. I couldn’t find them at first. Then I was so unbelievably confused. I left the others.”

Her eyes opened and they were filled with fear, but also tears. She had brought herself out. She was strong like that. “What
made me so afraid?” she asked me. “What just happened?”

“I don’t know for sure,” I told Kate. We would talk about it later, but not right now.

She averted her eyes from mine. It wasn’t like her. “Can I be alone?” she whispered then. “Can I just be alone now? Thank
you.”

I left the hospital room feeling almost as if I had betrayed Kate. But I didn’t know if there was anything that I could have
done differently. This was a multiple-homicide investigation. Nothing was working so far. How could that be?

K
ATE WAS released from University Hospital later that week. She had asked if we could talk for a while each day. I readily
agreed.

“This isn’t therapy in any way, shape, or form,” she told me. She just wanted to vent with someone about some difficult subjects.
Partly because of Naomi, we had formed a quick, strong bond.

There was no further information, no more clues about Casanova’s link with the Gentleman Caller in Los Angeles. Beth Lieberman,
the reporter at the
Los Angeles Times,
refused to talk to me. She was peddling her hot literary property in New York.

I wanted to fly out to L.A. to see Lieberman, but Kyle Craig asked me not to. He assured me that I knew everything the
Times
reporter had on the case. I needed to trust someone; I trusted Kyle.

On a Monday afternoon, Kate and I went for a walk in the woods surrounding the Wykagil River, where she’d been found by the
two boys. It was still unspoken, but we seemed to be in this thing together now. Certainly no one knew more about Casanova
than she did. If she could remember anything more it would be so useful. The smallest detail could be a clue that might open
up everything.

Kate became quiet and unusually subdued as we entered the dark, brooding woods east of the Wykagil River. The human monster
could be lurking out here, maybe prowling in the woods right now. Maybe he was watching us.

“I used to love walking in woods like these. Blackberry brambles and sweet sassafras. Cardinals and blue jays feeding everywhere.
It reminds me of when I was growing up,” Kate told me as we walked. “My sisters and I used to go swimming every single day
in a stream like this one. We swam nekkid, which was forbidden by my father. Anything my father strictly forbade, we tried
to do.”

“All that swimming experience came in handy,” I said. “Maybe it helped get you safely down the Wykagil.”

Kate shook her head. “No, that was just pure stubborness. I
vowed
I wasn’t going to die that day. Couldn’t give him the satisfaction.”

I was keeping my own discomfort about being in the woods to myself. Some of my uneasiness had to do with the unfortunate history
of these woods and the surrounding farmlands. Tobacco farms had been spotted all through here once upon a time. Slave farms.
The blood and bones of my ancestors.
The extraordinary kidnapping and subjugation of more than four million Africans who were originally brought to America. They
had been
abducted.
Against their will.

“I don’t remember any of this terrain, Alex,” Kate said. I had strapped on a shoulder holster before we left the car. Kate
winced and shook her head at the sight of the gun. But she didn’t protest beyond the baleful look. She sensed that I was the
dragonslayer. She knew there was a real dragon out here. She’d met him.

“I remember I ran away, escaped into woods just like these. Tall Carolina pines. Not much light getting through, eerie as
a bat cave. I remember clearly when the house disappeared on me. I can’t remember too much else. I’m blocking it. I don’t
even know how I got into the river.”

We were about two miles from where we’d left the car. Now we hiked north, staying close to the river Kate had floated down
on her miraculous, “stubborn” escape. Every tree and bush reached out relentlessly toward the diminishing sunlight.

“This reminds me of the Bacchae,” Kate said. Her upper lip curled in an ironic smile. “The triumph of dark, chaotic barbarism
over civilized human reason.” It felt as if we were moving against a high, relentless tide of vegetation.

I knew she was trying to talk about Casanova and the terrifying house where he kept the other women. She was trying to understand
him better. We both were.

“He’s refusing to be civilized, or repressed,” I said. “He does whatever he wants. He’s the ultimate pleasure seeker, I suppose.
A hedonist for the times.”

“I wish you could hear him talk. He’s very bright, Alex.”

“So are we,” I reminded her. “He’ll make a mistake, I promise.”

I was getting to know Kate very well by now. She was getting to know me. We had talked about my wife, Maria, who was killed
in a senseless drive-by shooting in Washington, D.C. I told her about my kids, Jannie and Damon. She was a good listener;
she had excellent bedside-manner potential. Dr. Kate was going to be a special kind of doctor.

By three that afternoon, we must have walked four or five miles. I felt grungy and a little achy. Kate didn’t complain, but
she must have been hurting. Thank God the karate kept her in great shape. We hadn’t found any sign of where she had run during
her escape. None of the landmarks we passed looked familiar to her. There was no disappearing house. No Casanova. No outstanding
clues in the deep, dark woods. Nothing to go on.

“How the hell did he get so good at this?” I muttered as we tramped back to the car.

“Practice,” Kate said with a grimace. “Practice, practice, practice.”

T
HE TWO of us stopped to eat at Spanky’s on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill. We were bushed, famished, and most of all thirsty.
Everybody knew Kate at the popular bar and restaurant, and they made a nice fuss over her when we walked in. A muscular, blond-haired
bartender named Hack started a big round of applause.

A waitress and friend of Kate’s gave us a table of honor at a front window on Franklin Street. The woman was a doctoral candidate
in philosophy, Kate told me. Verda, the waitress-philosopher of Chapel Hill.