The Beast was up bright and early. He was tall and professorial-looking, with sandy blond hair brushed straight back and horn-rimmed glasses. He appeared to have a very good build.
He had ventured out to the porch at around seven to pick up the Durham paper. The headline read: Casanova Watch Continues. The local newspaper editors could have had no idea, no clue, how accurate those words were.
Sachs glanced at the front page, then casually folded it under his arm. Nothing of interest for him today. Another ho-hum day at the serial-killer office.
At a little before eight, he came out with his children in tow. He had a big toothy smile turned on for the kids. The good father was taking them to school.
His little boy and girl were outfitted as if they belonged in the front window of Gap For Kids or Esprit. They looked like adorable little dolls. The FBI would follow Sachs and the children to the school.
“Isn’t this a little unusual, Alex? Two surveillance jobs in a row like this?” Kate asked me. She was analytical and her mind never stopped working all the angles. She was as obsessive about the case as I was. That morning she was dressed down as usual. Tatty jeans, a navy blue T-shirt, sneakers. Her beauty shone through, anyway. She couldn’t hide it.
“Investigations of repeat killers are almost always unusual. This one is stranger than most,” I admitted. I talked about the twinning angle again. Two badly twisted men with no one to talk to, to share with. No one to understand, until they met each other. Then a powerful connection between the two killers. Kate was a twin, but she’d experienced a benign form of twinning. With Casanova and the Gentleman, it was something else.
Wick Sachs came right back from the drop-off at school. We could hear him whistling cheerfully as he strolled to his perfect house. Kate and I had talked about the fact that he was a doctor after all, though a doctor of philosophy.
Nothing much happened for the next few hours. There was no sign of Sachs, or his wife, the lovely Mrs. Casanova.
Wick Sachs left the house on the hill again at eleven. He was blowing off his teaching classes today. He had already missed his ten o’clock tutorial, according to the schedule I had from Dean Lowell. Why was that? What slick game was he playing now?
There were two cars in the circular driveway. He chose the burgundy one, a Jaguar XJS convertible with a tan top, twelve-cylinder engine. The other car was a black Mercedes sedan. Not too shabby on a professor’s salary.
He was heading out now, hitting the road. Was he going to visit his girls?
CHAPTER 82
WE FOLLOWED Wick Sachs’s sporty Jaguar onto Old Chapel Hill Road. We eased through Hope Valley, passing very substantial houses that had been built in the twenties and thirties. Sachs didn’t seem to be in a hurry.
So far, this was his game. We didn’t know the rules, or even what game he was playing.
Casanova.
The Beast of the Southeast.
Kyle Craig was still working on a financial investigation of Sachs with Internal Revenue. Kyle also had half-a-dozen agents filling in all the dots that might connect Sachs and Will Rudolph in the past. The two had definitely been classmates at Duke. High honor students. Phi Beta Kappa. They had known each other but weren’t close friends in school, at least they didn’t seem to have been. Actually, Kyle had been at Duke then, too, in the Law School. Phi Beta himself.
When had the actual twinning taken place? How had the strong, freakish bond occurred? Something wasn’t making sense to me about Rudolph and Sachs yet.
“What if he lets that XJS out?” Kate said as we discreetly followed the monster to what we hoped was his lair in the woods, his harem, his “disappearing house.” We were tailing Sachs in my old Porsche.
“I doubt he wants to draw a lot of attention to himself,” I told her. Although the XJS and the Mercedes kind of worked against that theory. “Besides, a Jaguar isn’t much of a test for a Porsche.”
“Even a Porsche from another century?” Kate asked.
“Ho,” I answered her, “ho.”
Sachs drove down Interstate 85, then turned onto 40. He got off at the exit for Chapel Hill. We followed him for another two miles through town. He finally stopped and parked near the University of North Carolina campus on Franklin Street.
“All of this is making me feel so weird, Alex. A professor at Duke University. A wife and two beautiful children,” Kate said. “The night he grabbed me, he probably followed me off the campus. He watched me. I think he chose me right here.”
I glanced over at Kate. “You okay?” I asked her. “Tell me if you’re not up to this.”
Kate looked at me. Her eyes were intense, troubled. “Let’s get this the hell over with. Let’s get him today. Deal?”
“Deal,” I agreed.
“We’ve got you, Butt-head,” Kate muttered into the car windshield.
The quaint and pretty Chapel Hill street was already busy at quarter to twelve. College kids and profs were sliding in and out of the Carolina Coffee Shop, Peppers Pizza, the newly rebuilt Intimate Bookstore. All the favorite Franklin Street haunts were doing a pretty good business. The college-town atmosphere was appealing; it took me back to my days at Johns Hopkins. Cresmont Avenue in Baltimore.
Kate and I were able to follow Wick Sachs from about a block and a half away. It would be easy for him to lose us now, I knew. Would he run to the house in the woods? Would he go to see his girls? Was Naomi still there?
He could easily duck into the Record Bar, or into Spanky’s restaurant on the corner. Come out a side door and disappear. A game of cat and mouse had begun. His game; his rules. Always his rules, so far.
“He seems too smug, too self-satisfied,” I said as we tailed along at a reasonable distance. He hadn’t even turned to see if he was being followed. He looked like a tweedy, jaunty prof on a lunchtime errand. Maybe that was all this was.
“You still okay?” I checked on Kate again.
She was watching Sachs like a scrapyard dog with a grudge to settle. I remembered that she took karate lessons somewhere near here in Chapel Hill. “Mmm, hmm. Lot of bad memories stirred up, though. Scene of the crime and all that,” Kate muttered.
Wick Sachs finally stopped in front of the nicely retro Varsity Theatre in downtown Chapel Hill. He stood next to a community billboard covered with all sorts of handwritten notices and posters, mostly aimed at university students and faculty members.
“Why would that scum be going to a movie?” Kate whispered, sounding more incensed than ever.
“Maybe because he likes to escape, as in sublimate. This is the secret life of Wick Sachs. We’re watching it.”
“I’d kind of like to go after him right now. Rumble,” Kate said.
“Yeah, me too. Me too, Kate.”
I had noticed the cluttered community billboard on one of my walks here before. There were several notices about missing persons in the Chapel Hill area. Missing students. All of them were women. It struck me that this was a cruel plague that had come to the community, and no one had been able to do anything to stop it. No one had the cure.
Wick Sachs seemed to be waiting for something or somebody. “Who the hell is he going to meet here in Chapel Hill?” I muttered.
“Will Rudolph,” Kate said without missing a beat. “His old school chum. His best friend.”
I’d thought about Rudolph coming back to North Carolina, actually. Twinning could be an almost physical addiction. In its negative form, it was based on codependency or enabling behavior. The two of them abducted beautiful women, and then tortured or killed them. Was that their shared secret? Or was there even more to it than that?
“He looks like Casanova would look without the mask,” Kate said. We had slipped inside a small cutesie-pie shop called School Kids. “He has the same color hair. But why wouldn’t he disguise his hair?” she muttered. “Why only a mask?”
“Maybe the mask isn’t a disguise at all? It might mean something different in his private fantasy world,” I suggested. “It?
??s possible that Casanova is his real persona. The mask, the whole human-sacrifice aura, the symbolism—all of that would be very important for him.”
Sachs was still waiting in front of the community billboard. Waiting for what? I had a gut feeling that something wasn’t right with this picture. I sneaked a peek at him through the binoculars.
His face was unconcerned, almost serene. A day in the park for the vampire Lestat. I wondered if he might be high on some kind of drug. He certainly knew about sophisticated tranquilizers.
Behind him on the community board were all sorts of messages. I could read them with the binoculars.
Missing—Carolyn Eileen Devito
Missing—Robin Schwarz
Missing—Susan Pyle
Women for Jim Hunt for Governor
Women for Lt. Governor Laurie Garnier
The Mind Sirens at the Cave
All of a sudden, I had a possible answer. Messages!
Casanova was sending out a cruel message for us—for anyone who was watching him, anyone who dared to follow him.
I slammed my hand down hard against the dusty windowsill inside the small store.
“The son of a bitch is playing mind games!” I nearly shouted in the crowded shop where we were watching Wick Sachs. The elderly shopkeeper eyed me as if I were dangerous. I was dangerous.
“What’s wrong?” Kate was suddenly peering over my shoulder, leaning her body against me, trying to see whatever it was that I saw up the street.
“It’s the poster behind him. He’s been standing under it for the past ten minutes. That’s his message, Kate, to whoever’s following him. That bright orange-and-yellow poster says it all.”
I handed her the binoculars. One poster on the bulletin board was larger and more prominent than the others. Kate read it out loud.
“Women and children are starving… as you walk by with loose change in your pocket. Please change your behavior now! You can actually save lives.”
CHAPTER 83
0H, JESUS, Alex.” Kate spoke in a tense whisper. “If he can’t go out to the house, they’ll starve, and if he’s followed he won’t go out to the house. That’s what he’s telling us! Women are starving… change your behavior now.”
I wanted to take out Wick Sachs right there. I knew there was nothing we could do to him. Nothing legal, anyway. Nothing sane.
“Alex, look.” Kate sounded an alarm. She handed me the glasses.
A woman had come up to Sachs. I squinted through the binoculars. The noonday sun was bright off shiny glass-and-metal surfaces up and down Franklin Street.
The woman was slender and attractive, but she was older than the women who had been abducted. She had on a black silky blouse, tight black leather slacks, black shoes. She was carrying a briefcase loaded with books and papers.
“She doesn’t seem to fit his mold, his pattern,” I said to Kate. “She looks in her late thirties.”
“I know her. I know who she is, Alex,” Kate whispered.
I looked at her. “Who, for God’s sake, Kate?”
“She’s a professor in the English Department. Her name is Suzanne Wellsley. Some of the students call her ‘Runaround Sue.’ There’s a joke about Suzanne Wellsley throwing her underwear against the wall, and it sticks.”
“They could tell the same joke about Dr. Sachs,” I said. He had a nasty reputation as a rake on campus. He’d had the bad rep for years, but no disciplinary action was ever taken. More perfect crimes?
He and Ms. Suzanne Wellsley kissed in front of the “hunger” billboard. A tongue kiss, I could see as I watched through the binoculars. A very hot embrace, too, with no apparent concern about the public venue.
I had second thoughts about the “message.” Maybe it was just a coincidence, only I didn’t believe in coincidences anymore. Maybe Suzanne Wellsley was involved with the “house” that Sachs kept. There could be others, too. Maybe this whole thing involved some kind of adult sex cult. I knew they existed; even in our nation’s capital they existed and flourished.
The two of them walked casually a short way down crowded Franklin Street. In no apparent hurry. They were headed in our direction. Then they stopped at the Varsity Theatre ticket booth. They were holding hands. Cute as could be.
“Damn him. He knows he’s being watched,” I said. “What is his game?”
“She’s looking this way. Maybe she knows, too. Hello, Suzanne. What the hell are you up to, dragon lady?”
They bought movie tickets, like any normal couple, and went inside. The theatre marquee advertised “Roberto Benigni is Johnny Stecchino—riotous comedy.” I wondered how Sachs could be in the mood for an Italian comedy. Was Casanova that cool? Yes, he probably was. Especially if this was all part of some plan of his.
“Is the movie marquee a message, too? What is he telling us, Alex?”
“That this is all a ‘riotous comedy’ for him? It just might be,” I said.
“He does have a sense of humor, Alex. I can vouch for that. He was capable of laughing at his own bad jokes.”
I called Kyle Craig from a pay phone in a nearby Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. I told him about the woman and children are starving poster. He allowed that it could be a message for us. Anything was possible with Casanova.
When I came out of the store, Sachs and Suzanne Wellsley were still inside the Varsity Theatre, presumably laughing riotously at the Italian actor Roberto Benigni. Or perhaps Sachs was laughing at us? Women and children are starving.
Just past two-thirty, Sachs and Dr. Wellsley came out of the Varsity Theatre. They strolled back to the corner of Franklin and Columbus. The half-block walk seemed to take ten minutes. They ducked inside the ever-popular Spanky’s, where they had a late lunch.
“Isn’t this sweet. Young love,” Kate said with a hiss in her voice. “Damn him. And damn her, too. Damn Spanky’s for giving them food and grog.”
They sat near the front window inside the restaurant. On purpose? They held hands at their table and kissed a few times. Casanova the Lover? A lunchtime tryst with another professor? None of it made any sense yet.
At three-thirty they left Spanky’s restaurant and walked the half-block back to the message board. They kissed again, but this time with more restraint, and finally parted. Sachs drove back to his house in Hope Valley. Wick Sachs was definitely playing with us. His own game, for his own private pleasure.
Rat and cat.
CHAPTER 84
KATE AND I decided to have a late supper at a place called Frog and the Redneck in downtown Durham. She said we had to have a couple of hours’ break from the action. I knew she was right.
Kate wanted to go home first, and asked me to call for her in a couple of hours. I wasn’t prepared for the Kate who opened the door of her apartment. It wasn’t Kate’s usual bas couture look. She had on a beige linen sheath with a flowered blouse worn as a jacket. Her long brown hair was tied back with a bright yellow scarf.
“My Sunday-go-to-eatin’ clothes,” Kate said with a conspiratorial wink. “Except I can never afford to go out to eat on my post-med-school budget. Occasionally KFC or Arby’s.”
“You have a hot date tonight?” I asked her in my usual kidding tone. I wondered who was kidding whom, though.
She casually took my arm in the crook of hers. “As a matter of fact, maybe I do. You look nice tonight. Very dashing, very cool.”
I had abandoned my usual bas couture look, too. I’d decided on dashing and cool instead.
I don’t remember much about the car ride to the Durham restaurant, except that we talked all the way. We never had any trouble talking. I don’t exactly remember the meal, except that it was very good regional/continental grub. I have the recollection of Muscovy duck, of blueberries and plums in whipped cream.
What I remember most clearly is Kate sitting with one arm propped on the table, her face resting easily on the back of her hand. A very nice picture-portrait. I remember Kate taking off the yellow scarf at one point during dinner. “T
oo much,” she said and grinned.
“I have a new pet theory, theory du jour, about the two of us. I think it’s right. Do you want to hear it?” she asked me. She was in a good mood, in spite of the harrowing and frustrating investigation. We both were.
“Nah,” said the wiseguy in me, the part afraid of too much in the way of emotions. Lately, anyway.
Kate wisely ignored me and went on with her theory. “I’ll start… Alex, we’re both really, really afraid of attachments right now in our lives. That’s obvious. We’re both too afraid, I think.” She was carefully leading the way. She sensed this was difficult territory for me, and she was right.
I sighed. I didn’t know if I wanted to get into any of this right now, but I plunged ahead. “Kate, I haven’t told you much about Maria…. We were very much in love when she died. It was like that between us for six years. This isn’t selective memory on my part. I used to tell myself, ‘God I’m unbelievably lucky I found this person.’ Maria felt the same way.” I smiled. “Or so she told me. So yes, I am afraid of attachments. Mostly I’m afraid of losing someone I love that much again.”
“I’m afraid of losing someone else, too, Alex,” Kate said in a soft voice. I could barely hear her words. Sometimes she seemed shy, and it was touching. “There’s a magical line in The Pawnbroker, magical to me, anyway. ‘Everything I loved was taken away from me, and I did not die.’ ”
I took her hand and kissed it lightly. I felt an overwhelming tenderness toward Kate at that moment. “I know the line,” I said.
I could see anxiety in her dark brown eyes. Maybe we both needed to take this thing forward, whatever was beginning to happen between us, whatever the risk might be.
“Can I tell you something else? One more true confession that doesn’t come easily? This is a bad one,” she said.
“I want to hear it. Of course I do. Anything you want to tell me.”
“I’m afraid I’m going to die just like my sisters, that I’ll get cancer, too. At my age, I’m a medical time bomb. Oh, Alex, I’m afraid to get close to someone, and then get sick on them.” Kate let out a long, deep breath. It was obviously a hard thing for her to say.