“Somebody please help me!” she heard. The woman was screaming at the top of her voice. She was breaking the house rules.
“Somebody help! I’m being held captive in here. Somebody help… my name is Kate… Kate McTiernan. Somebody help!”
Naomi shut her eyes. This was so bad. The woman had to stop. But over and over again the calls for help were repeated. That meant Casanova wasn’t in the house. He must have gone out.
“Somebody please help me. My name is Kate McTiernan. I’m a doctor from the University of North Carolina hospital.” The screams continued… ten times, twenty times. Not in panic, Naomi began to realize. In rage!
He couldn’t be in the house. He wouldn’t let her go on this long. Naomi finally summoned up her courage and shouted as loud as she could. “Stop it! You must stop calling for help. He’ll kill you! Shut up! That’s all I’m going to say!”
There was silence… blessed silence, finally. Naomi thought she could hear the tension all around her. She certainly felt it.
Kate McTiernan didn’t stop for long. “What’s your name? How long have you been here? Please, talk to me… hey, I’m talking to you!” she shouted.
Naomi wouldn’t answer her. What was wrong with the woman? Had she lost it after the last beating?
Kate McTiernan called out again. “Listen, we can help each other. I’m sure we can. Do you know where you’re being kept?”
The woman was definitely brave… but she was being foolish, too. Her voice was strong, but it was beginning to sound hoarse. Kate.
“Please talk to me. He isn’t here now, or he would have come with his stun gun. You know I’m right! He won’t know if you talk to me. Please… I have to hear your voice again.”
“Please. For two minutes. That’s all. I promise you. Two minutes. Please. Just one minute.”
Naomi still refused to answer her. He could have come back by now. He might be in the house, listening to them. Even watching them through the walls.
Kate McTiernan was back on the air. “All right, thirty seconds. Then we’ll stop. Okay? I promise I’ll stop… otherwise, I’ll keep this up until he does come back….”
Oh, God, please, stop talking, a voice inside Naomi was screaming. Stop it, right now.
“He’ll kill me,” shouted Kate. “But he’s going to do that, anyway! I saw part of his face. Where are you from? How long have you been here?”
Naomi felt as if she were suffocating. She couldn’t breathe, but she stayed at the door and listened to every word the woman had to say. She wanted to talk to her so badly.
“He may have used a drug called Forane. Hospitals use it. He might be a doctor. Please. What do we have to fear—except torture and death?”
Naomi smiled. Kate McTiernan had guts, and also a sense of humor. Just hearing another voice was so unbelievably good.
The words tumbled out of Naomi’s mouth, almost against her will. “My name is Naomi Cross. I’ve been here for eight days, I think. He hides behind the walls. He watches all the time. I don’t think he ever sleeps. He raped me,” she said in a clear voice. It was the first time she had said the words out loud. He raped me.
Kate answered right back. “He raped me, too, Naomi. I know how you feel, terribly bad… dirty all over. It’s so good to hear your voice, Naomi. I don’t feel so alone anymore.”
“Me, too, Kate. Now please shut up.”
Downstairs in her room, Kate McTiernan felt so tired now. Tired, but hopeful. She was slumped against one of the walls when she heard the voices around her.
“Maria Jane Capaldi. I think I’ve been here about a month.”
“My name is Kristen Miles. Hello.”
“Melissa Stanfield. I’m a student nurse. I’ve been here nine weeks.”
“Christa Akers, North Carolina State. Two months in hell.”
There were at least six of them.
PART TWO
HIDE AND SEEK
CHAPTER 36
A TWENTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD Los Angeles Times reporter named Beth Lieberman stared at the tiny, blurred green letters on her computer terminal. She watched with tired eyes as one of the biggest stories at the Times in years continued to unfold. This was definitely the most important story of her career, but she almost didn’t care anymore.
“This is so crazy and sick… feet. Jesus Christ,” Beth Lieberman groaned softly under her breath. “Feet.”
The sixth “diary” installment sent to her by the Gentleman Caller had arrived at her West Los Angeles apartment early that morning. As had been the case with the previous diary entries, the killer supplied the precise location of a murdered woman’s body before starting into his obsessive, psychopathic message for her.
Beth Lieberman had immediately called the FBI from her home, and then she drove quickly to the offices of the Times on South Spring Street. By the time she arrived, the Federal Bureau had verified the latest murder.
The Gentleman had left his signature: fresh flowers.
The body of a fourteen-year-old Japanese girl had been found in Pasadena. As was the case with the five other women, Sunny Ozawa had disappeared without a trace two nights ago. It was as if she’d been sucked up into the damp, muggy smog.
To date, Sunny Ozawa was the Gentleman’s youngest reported victim. He’d arranged pink and white peonies on her lower torso. Flowers, of course, remind me of a woman’s labia, he’d written in one of the diary entries. The isomorphism is obvious, no?
At quarter to seven in the morning, the Times offices were deserted and eerie. Nobody should be up this early except headbangers who haven’t been to bed yet, Lieberman thought. The low hum from the central air conditioning, mingling with the faint roar of traffic outside, was annoying to her.
“Why feet?” the reporter muttered.
She sat before her computer, almost comatose, and wished she had never written an article about mail-order pornography in California. That was how the Gentleman claimed he had “discovered” her; how he had chosen her to be his “liaison with the other citizens of the City of Angels.” He proclaimed that they were on the same ”wavelength.”
Following endless administrative meetings at the highest levels, the Los Angeles Times had decided to publish the killer’s diary entries. There was no doubt that they had actually been written by the Gentleman Caller.
He knew where the murder victims’ bodies were before the police did. He also threatened “special bonus kills” if his diary wasn’t published for everyone in Los Angeles to read over breakfast. “I am the latest, and I’m by far the greatest,” the Gentleman had written in one diary entry. Who could argue with that? Beth wondered. Richard Ramirez? Caryl Chessman? Charles Manson?
Beth Lieberman’s job right now was to be his contact. She also got to make the first edit of the Gentleman’s words. There was no way the intense, graphic diary entries could run intact. They were filled with obscene pornography and the most brutally violent descriptions of the murders he had committed.
Lieberman could almost hear the madman’s voice as she typed the latest entry on her word processor. The Gentleman Caller was speaking to her again, or through her:
Let me tell you about Sunny, as much as I know about Sunny, anyway. Listen to me, dear reader. Be there with me. She had small, delicate, clever feet. That’s what I remember best; that’s what I will always remember about my beautiful Sunny night.
Beth Lieberman had to shut her eyes. She didn’t want to listen to this shit. One thing was certain: the Gentleman Caller had definitely given Beth Lieberman her first break at the Times. Her byline appeared on each of the widely read front-page features. The murderer had made her a star, too.
Listen to me. Be there with me.
Think about fetishism, and all its amazing possibilities to liberate the psyche. Don’t be a snob. Open up your mind. Open your mind right now! Fetishism holds a fascinating array of diverse pleasures that you may be missing out on.
Let us not become too sentimental about “young” Sunny. Su
nny Ozawa was into the games of the night. She told me that, in confidence of course. I had picked her up at the Monkey Bar. We’d gone to my place, my hideaway, where we began to experiment, to play the night away.
She asked me if I’d ever done it with a Japanese woman before. I told her that I hadn’t, but I’d always wanted to. Sunny told me that I was “quite the gentleman.” I was honored.
This night, it seemed to me that nothing was so libertine as to focus on a woman’s feet, to caress them as I made love to Sunny. I’m talking about sunbrowned feet covered in luxurious nylon and semipricey high-heeled pumps from Saks. I’m talking about clever little feet. Very sophisticated communicators.
Listen. To really appreciate the very erotic mime show of a beautiful woman’s feet, the woman should be on her back while the man stands. That’s how it was with Sunny and me earlier tonight.
I lifted up her slender legs and watched closely where they joined together in such a way that the vulva puckered from her buttocks. I kissed the top of her stockings repeatedly. I fixated on her well-formed ankle, the lovely lines leading to her shiny black pump.
I concentrated all my attention on that flirtatious pump as our fevered action set her foot into rapid motion. Her little feet were talking to me now. An absolutely manic excitement rose in my chest. It felt as if there were live birds tweeting and twittering in there.
Beth Lieberman stopped typing and closed her eyes again. Tight! She had to stop the images that were flashing out at her. He had murdered the young girl that he was talking about so blithely.
Soon the FBI and the Los Angeles police would come storming into the relatively sedate offices of the Times. They would ask the usual battery of questions. They had no answers yet themselves. No significant leads so far. They said that the Gentleman committed “perfect crimes.”
The FBI agents would want to talk for hours about the gruesome details of the murder scene. The feet! The Gentleman had cut off Sunny Ozawa’s feet with some kind of razor-sharp knife. Both her feet were missing from the crime scene in Pasadena.
Brutality was his trademark, but that was the only consistent pattern so far. He had mutilated genitalia in the past. He had sodomized one victim, then cauterized her. He had cut open a woman investment banker’s chest and removed her heart. Was he experimenting? He was no gentleman once he selected his victim. He was a Jekyll and Hyde in the 1990s.
Beth Lieberman finally opened her eyes and saw a tall, slender man standing very close to her in the newsroom. She sighed loudly and she held back a frown.
It was Kyle Craig, the special investigator from the FBI.
Kyle Craig knew something that she desperately needed to know, but he wouldn’t tell her squat. He knew why the deputy director of the FBI had flown to Los Angeles the previous week. He knew secrets that she needed to know.
“Hello, Ms. Lieberman. What do you have for me?” he asked.
CHAPTER 37
TICK-COCK, dickory dock.
This was the way he hunted for the women. This was how it really happened, time after time. There was never any danger for him personally. He fit in wherever he chose to hunt. He did his best to avoid any kind of complication or human error. He had a passion for orderliness and, most of all, perfection.
That afternoon, he waited patiently in a crowded arcade of a trendy shopping mall in Raleigh, North Carolina. He watched attractive women enter and leave the local Victoria’s Secret across a long marble transverse. Most of the women were well dressed. A copy of Time magazine and also USA Today were folded on the marble bench beside him. The newspaper headline read: Gentleman Calls for 6th Time in LA.
He was thinking to himself that the “Gentleman” was zooming out of control in southern California. He was taking gruesome souvenirs, doing two women a week sometimes, playing stupid mind games with the Los Angeles Times, the LAPD, and the FBI. He was going to get caught.
Casanova’s blue eyes moved back across the crowded shopping mall. He was a handsome man, as the original Casanova had been. Nature had equipped the eighteenth-century adventurer with beauty, sensuality, and great enthusiasm for women—and so it was with him as well.
Now where was the lovely Anna? She had slipped into Victoria’s Secret—to buy something campy for her boyfriend, no doubt. Anna Miller and Chris Chapin had been in law school together at North Carolina State. Now Chris was an associate in a law firm. They liked to dress in each other’s clothes. Cross-dress to get their kicks. He knew all about them.
He had watched Anna whenever he could for almost two weeks. She was a startling, dark-haired twenty-three-year-old beauty, maybe not another Dr. Kate McTiernan, but close enough.
He watched Anna finally leave Victoria’s Secret and walk almost directly toward him. The click of her high heels made her sound so wonderfully haughty. She knew she was an extraordinary young beauty. That was the very best thing about her. Her supreme confidence nearly matched his own.
She had such a nicely arrogant, long-legged stride. Perfect slender lines up and down her body. Legs wrapped in dark nylons; heels for her part-time job in Raleigh as a paralegal. Sculptured breasts that he wanted to caress. He could see the subtle lines of her underwear under a clinging tan skirt. Why was she so provocative? Because she could be.
She seemed intelligent, too. Promising, anyway. She had just missed Law Review. Anna was warm, sweet, nice to be around. A keeper. Her lover called her “Anna Banana.” He loved the sweet, stupid intimacy of the nickname.
All he had to do was take her. It was that easy.
Another very attractive woman suddenly broke into his field of vision. She smiled at him, and he smiled back. He stood up and stretched, then walked toward her. She had store packages and bags piled high in both arms.
“Hi there, beautiful,” he said when he got close. “Can I take some of those? Ease your heavy load, sweet darlin’?”
“You’re such a sweet, handsome thing yourself,” the woman said to him. “But then you always were. Always the romantic, too.”
Casanova kissed his wife on the cheek and helped her with the packages. She was an elegant-looking woman, self-possessed. She had on jeans, a loose-fitting workshirt, a brown, tweed jacket. She wore clothes well. She was effective in many ways. He had picked her with the greatest care.
As he took some bags, he held the nicest, warmest thought: They couldn’t catch me in a thousand years. They wouldn’t know where to start to look. They couldn’t possibly see past this wonderful, wonderful disguise, this mask of sanity. I am above suspicion.
“I saw you watching the young chippie. Nice legs,” his wife said with a knowing smile and a roll of her eyes. “Just as long as all you do is watch.”
“You caught me,” Casanova said to his wife. “But her legs aren’t as nice as yours.”
He smiled in his easy and charming way. Even as he did so, a name exploded inside his brain. Anna Miller. He had to have her.
CHAPTER 38
THIS WAS harder than hard.
I slapped on a happy, make-believe smile as I barged through my own front door back home in Washington. A day off from the chase was necessary. More important, I had promised the family a meeting, a report on Naomi’s situation. I was also missing my kids and Nana. I felt as if I were home on leave from a war.
The last thing I wanted Nana and the kids to know was how anxious I was about Scootchie.
“No luck yet,” I told Nana as I stooped and kissed her cheek. “We’re making a little progress, though.” I stepped away from her before she could cross-examine me.
Standing in the living room, I launched into my best working-father lounge act. I sang “Daddy’s Home, Daddy’s Home.” Not Shep and the Limelites’ version; my own original tune. I scooped up Jannie and Damon in my arms.
“Damon, you got bigger and stronger and you’re handsome as a prince of Morocco!” I told my son. “Jannie, you got bigger and stronger and beautiful as a princess!” I told my daughter.
“So did you, Dad
dy!” The kids squealed the same kind of sweet nonsense right back at me.
I threatened to scoop up my grandmother, too, but Nana Mama made a serious-looking cross with her fingers to ward me off. Our family sign. “You just stay away from me, Alex,” she said. She was smiling, and issuing a baleful stare. She can do that. “Decades of practice,” she likes to say. “Centuries,” I always come back at her.
I gave Nana another big kiss. Then I more or less “palmed” the kids. I held them out the way big men can hold basketballs as if they were nothing but an extension of their arms.
“Have you two been good little rapscallions?” I began my interrogation techniques with my very own repeat offenders. “Clean your rooms, do your chores, eat your brussels sprouts?”
“Yes, Daddy!” they shouted in unison. “We been good as gold,” Jannie added as convincing detail.
“You lyin’ to me? Brussels sprouts? Broccoli, too? You wouldn’t lie so brazenly to your daddy? I called home at ten-thirty the other night, both of you were still up. And you say to me that you’ve been good. Good as gold!”
“Nana let us watch pro hoops!” Damon howled with laughter and undisguised glee. That young con man can get away with anything, which worries me sometimes. He is a natural mimic, but also an ingenious creator of his own original material. At this point, his humor level is about that of the TV hit In Living Color.
I finally reached into my travel satchel for their cache of presents. “Well, in that case, I’ve brought y’all something from my trip down South. I say y’all now. I learned it in North Carolina.”
“Y’all,” Jannie said back at me. She giggled wildly and did an impromptu dance turn. She was like the cutest puppy kept in the house for an afternoon. Then you come home and she’s all over you like sticky flypaper. Just like Naomi was when she was a little girl.