“You are?” Kate gave me a look. “Well, you never told me that.”
“Kate, believe it or not, is not self-centered enough,” I told Sampson. “Rare, rare disease in our quarter-century. It’s because she doesn’t watch much TV. She reads too many books instead.”
“It’s not polite to analyze your friends in front of your other friends,” Kate said to me with a little slap on the arm.
We talked about the case some more. About Dr. Wick Sachs and his head-games. About harems. The masks. The “disappearing” house. My newest theory involving Dr. Louis Freed.
“I was doing some light reading before you got here,” Kate told us. “An essay on the male sexual urge, the natural beauty and power of it. It’s about modern men trying to distance themselves from their mothers, from the smothering cosmological mom. It proposes that many men want the freedom to assert their masculine identities, but contemporary society continually frustrates that. Comments, gentlemen?”
“Men will be men.” Sampson showed his big white teeth. “Good case in point. We’re still lions and tigers at heart. Never met a cosmological mom, so I won’t comment on that part of your essay.”
“What do you think, Alex?” Kate asked me. “Are you a lion or a tiger?”
“I’ve never liked certain things about most men,” I said. “We are incredibly repressed. Monochromatic because of it. Insecure, defensive. Rudolph and Sachs are asserting their masculinity to the extreme. They refuse to be repressed by society’s mores or laws.”
“Ba dum bun.” Sampson did a talk-show drumbeat for me.
“They think they’re smarter than everyone else,” Kate said. “At least Casanova does. He laughs at all of us. He’s a nasty son of a bitch.”
“And that’s why I’m here,” Sampson told her, “to catch him, and put him in a cage, and lock the cage on a far mountaintop. And by the way, he’d be stone dead in the cage, anyway.”
The time passed like that, flashed by real quickly. Finally, it was getting late and we had to leave. I tried to talk Kate into staying at a hotel for the night. We had been over this subject repeatedly, and her answer was always the same.
“Thanks for the concern, but no thanks,” she said as she brought us out onto the porch. “I can’t let him chase me out of my own house. That will not happen. He comes back, we tangle.”
“Alex is right about the hotel,” Sampson said to her in the gentle voice he reserves for friends. There it was—a double recommendation from two of the sharpest cops around.
Kate shook her head, and I knew there was no sense in arguing with her anymore. “Absolutely not. I’ll be just fine, I promise,” she said.
I didn’t ask Kate if I could stay, but I wanted to. I didn’t know if Kate even wanted me to stay. It was a little complicated with Sampson there. I suppose I could have given him my car to drive back, but it was already after two-thirty. We all needed to get some sleep, anyway. Sampson and I finally left.
“Very nice. Very interesting woman. Very smart. Not your type,” Sampson said as we pulled away from the house. From him, it was a rare, rave review. “My type,” he added.
When we reached the end of the block, I turned and looked back at the house. It was cooler now, in the low seventies, and Kate had already turned off the porch light and gone in. She was stubborn, but she was smart. It had gotten her through med school. It had gotten her past the deaths of people she loved. She would be okay; she always had been.
I called Kyle Craig when I got back to the hotel, though. “How’s our man Sachs?” I asked him.
“He’s just fine. He’s all tucked in for the night. Not to worry.”
CHAPTER 92
AFTER THE good ship Alex and Sampson left, Kate carefully checked and double-checked all the doors and windows to her apartment. They were securely locked. She had liked Sampson right away. He was huge and scary, nice and scary, sweet and scary. Alex had brought his closest friend to see her, and she liked that.
As she did her rounds, her safety check of home sweet home, she ruminated about a new life, far away from Chapel Hill, far away from everything terrifying and bad that had happened here. Hell, I’m living a Hitchcock movie, she thought, if Alfred Hitchcock had stayed alive long enough to see and react to the madness and horror of the 1990s.
Exhausted, she finally climbed into bed. Yuck. She felt stale bread or cake crumbs against her legs. She hadn’t made the bed that morning.
She wasn’t accomplishing much lately, and that made her angry, too. She’d been on a proper schedule to complete her intern year this spring. Now she didn’t know if she’d make it by the end of summer.
Kate pulled the covers up under her chin—in early June. She was getting soooo buggy. Her anxiety wasn’t going to stop while the monster Casanova was on the loose out there, she knew. She thought about killing him. Her first and only violent fantasy. She imagined going to Wick Sachs’s house. An eye for an eye. She remembered the appropriate passage from the Book of Exodus. Eidetic memory, right.
She really wished that Alex had stayed, but she didn’t want to embarrass him in front of Sampson. She wanted to talk to Alex the way they always did, and she wished he was with her now. She wanted to be in his arms tonight. Maybe more than just in Alex’s arms. Maybe she was ready for more. One night at a time.
She wasn’t sure what she believed anymore, or if she believed in anything at all. She was praying lately, so maybe she did believe. Rote prayers, but prayers all the same. Our Father who art… Hail Mary, full of… She wondered if a lot of people did the same thing. “I do love the idea of you, God,” she finally whispered. “Please love the idea of me back.”
She couldn’t stop obsessing about Casanova, about Dr. Wick Sachs, about the mysterious, disappearing house of horror, and the poor women still trapped there. But she was so used to the continuous, terrifying nightmares that she finally drifted off to sleep, anyway.
Kate never heard him come into the house.
CHAPTER 93
TICK-COCK. Tick-cock.
Tickory, dickory, cock.
Kate finally heard a noise. A floorboard creaked on the right side of the bedroom.
Tiny, tiny sound… but unmistakable.
That wasn’t her imagination, wasn’t a dream. She sensed that he was there in her bedroom again.
Let it be a crazy thought; let it be a scene in a nightmare; let this whole past month be a nightmare I’m having.
Oh Jesus, oh God, no! she thought.
He was in her room. He’d come back! This was so bad that she couldn’t make herself believe it was happening.
Kate held her breath until her chest ached and threatened to cave in. She never really believed he would come back.
Now she realized that was a terrible mistake. The worst of her life, but not the last one she was allowed, she hoped.
Who was this extraordinary madman? Did he hate her so much that he would risk everything? Or did he think he loved her so much, the sick, pathetic bastard?
She sat tensely on the edge of the bed and listened intently for another sound. She was ready to spring at him. There it was again… a tiny creak. It was coming from the right side of the room.
Finally, she could see the full, dark silhouette of his body. She gulped air greedily and almost gagged.
There he was, goddamn him to hell.
A powerful, hateful energy, like currents of electricity, surged between them. Their eyes finally met. Even in the darkness his eyes seemed to burn through her. She remembered his eyes so well.
Kate tried to roll away from him, from his first strike.
The blow came fast and hard. He hadn’t lost his quickness. Excruciating pain ripped through her shoulder and down her left side.
Karate training kept her moving somehow. Sheer stubbornness. A will to live that was becoming her trademark. She was off the bed. Up on her feet. Ready for him.
“Mistake,” she whispered. “Yours, this time.”
She saw the outline of a
body again. This time against the moonlight streaming in a bedroom window. Fear and loathing gripped Kate. Her heart felt as if it might stop, just pack it in on her.
She fired a powerful kick. Hit him hard in the face and heard the crunch of bone. It was horrifying yet wonderful to hear.
A high-pitched voice shrieked out in pain. She’d hurt him!
Now do it again, Kate. She bobbed, moved, kicked hard at the dark, shifting body, striking the stomach area. Again he grunted in pain.
“How do you like it?” Kate screamed at him. “How do you like it?”
She had him, and Kate vowed that she wasn’t going to lose this time. She was going to capture Casanova all by herself. He was ripe for the catching. First, she was going to hurt him, though.
She punched him again. Short, compact, lightning fast, and powerful. Satisfying beyond anything she could imagine. He was staggering, moaning out loud.
His head snapped back hard. His hair flew out. She wanted him down on the floor. Maybe unconscious. Then she would turn on a light. Then she just might kick him while he was down.
“That was a love tap,” she told him. “Just a start.”
She watched him stumble in front of her. He was going down.
Woof—something, someone, struck her square in the back. The blow knocked all the breath out of her.
She couldn’t believe she’d been blindsided. Pain rushed through her body as if she’d been shot.
Woof.
It happened again.
There were two of them in her bedroom.
CHAPTER 94
KATE WAS in shocking pain, but she stayed on her feet, and finally she saw the second man in her bedroom. He swung hard and struck her in the forehead. She heard a metallic ring, and felt herself falling, toppling. Felt herself vaporizing, actually. Then her body bounced off the wooden floorboards.
Two voices were floating above her. Two monsters inside her bedroom. Stereo nightmares.
“You shouldn’t be here.” She recognized Casanova’s voice. He was talking to the second intruder. The demon behind door number two. Dr. Will Rudolph?
“Yes, I’m the one who should be here. I’m not involved with this stupid bitch, am I? I couldn’t care less about her. Think it through. Be smart.”
“All right, all right, Will. What do you want to do with her?” Casanova spoke again. “This is your show. Isn’t that what you want?”
“Personally, I’d like to eat her, a nibble at a time,” said Dr. Will Rudolph. “Is that too extreme?”
They kept laughing like two buddies talking at a sports bar. Kate felt herself fading away from the scene. She was leaving. Where was she going?
Will Rudolph said that he bought her flowers. They both began to laugh at the joke. They were hunting together again. No one could stop them. Kate could smell their body odor, a strong male musk that seemed to combine into an overpowering presence.
She stayed conscious for a long time. She fought with all her strength. She was stubborn, willful, proud as hell. The light finally went out for her like a tube in an old-fashioned TV set. A blurry picture, then a small dot of light, then blackness. It was that simple, that prosaic.
They turned on the bedroom lights when they were finished, so that all of Kate McTiernan’s admirers could have a last good look at her.
Murdered beyond cold blood.
CHAPTER 95
MY ARMS and legs were shaking uncontrollably as I tried to drive the five miles or so from Durham to Chapel Hill. Even my teeth were chattering, hitting together hard.
I finally had to pull off Chapel Hill-Durham Boulevard, or I thought I would probably crash the car.
I sat slumped in the front seat with the car headlamps shining across dancing dust motes and light-crazed insects that hovered in the early-morning air.
I took deep breath after deep breath, trying to suck in some sanity. It was past five in the morning, and the birds were already singing away. I put my hands over my ears to shut out their songs. Sampson was still asleep back at the hotel. I’d forgotten that he was there.
Kate had never been afraid of Casanova. She trusted in her ability to take care of herself, even after her abduction.
I knew that it was irrational and crazy to blame myself, but I did. Somewhere, at some time during the past few years, I had stopped behaving like a professional police detective. There was some good in that, but, in a way, it was bad. There was too much pain on The Job, if you let yourself feel it. That was the surest, fastest way to burnout.
I eventually eased the car back onto the road. About fifteen minutes later, I was at the familiar clapboard house in Chapel Hill.
“Old Ladies Lane,” Kate had dubbed the street. I could see her face, her sweet, easy smile, her enthusiasm and conviction about things that mattered to her. I could still hear her voice.
Sampson and I had been at this house less than three hours ago. My eyes were tearing, my brain screaming. I was losing control.
I remembered one of the last things she’d said to me. I could hear Kate’s voice. “He comes back, we tangle.”
Black-and-white police cruisers, somber-looking EMS vans, and TV trucks were already parked everywhere on the narrow two-lane blacktop street. They were filling every available space. I was sick to death of the sight of crime scenes. It looked as if half the town of Chapel Hill was congregated outside Kate’s apartment.
In the early-morning light all the faces looked pale and grim. They were shocked and angry. This was supposed to be a gentle college town, liberal-thinking, a safe haven from the whirling chaos and madness of the rest of the world. That was why most people chose to live here, but it wasn’t like that anymore. Casanova had changed that forever.
I fumbled on a pair of dusty and stained sunglasses that had been sitting on the dash of the car for months. They were Sampson’s shades, originally. He’d given them to Damon, so he could look as tough as Sampson whenever I gave him any trouble. I needed to look tough right now.
CHAPTER 96
I BEGAN to walk toward Kate’s house on unsure, rubbery legs. Maybe I looked like the toughest motherfucker around, but my heart was heavy and incredibly fragile.
News photographers snapped my picture again and again. The camera flashes sounded like hollow, muffled gunshots. Reporters approached, but I waved them off.
“Keep back, man,” I finally warned a couple of them. Serious warning. “This is not the time. Not now!”
But I noticed that even the reporters and cameramen looked dazed and confused and shocked.
Both the FBI and the Chapel Hill PD were at the scene of the unspeakable, cowardly attack. I saw a lot of local policemen. Nick Ruskin and Davey Sikes had come down from Durham. Sikes gave me the evil eye—like what did I think I was doing here?
Kyle Craig was already at the scene. He had personally called me at the hotel to give me the terrible news.
Kyle came up to me and he put his arm around my shoulder, spoke to me in a low whisper. “She’s very bad, Alex, but she’s hanging in somehow. She must want to live very, very much. They should be bringing her out any minute now. Stay out here with me. Don’t go inside. Trust me on this, will you?”
I listened to Kyle’s words and I was afraid I was going to break down in front of all the cameras, all the strangers, and the few people I knew. My head, my heart—it was all whirling chaos. I finally went inside the house, and I looked at as much as I could bear.
He had come into her bedroom again… he had been right there.
Something was wrong, though… something didn’t track in straight lines for me. Something… what was wrong here?
The emergency team from Duke Medical Center put Kate on a stretcher, the kind used for broken backs and severe head injuries. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone carried so delicately, under any tragic circumstances. The doctors looked ashen as they began to carry her out of the house. The crowd became suddenly hushed when the EMS crew appeared outside.
“They’re br
inging her to the Duke Medical Center. You’ll get some arguments from the university people, but that’s the best facility in the state,” Kyle told me. He was trying to be reassuring in his soothing, mechanical-man way. Actually, he was surprisingly good at it.
Something was wrong… something was all out of kilter…. Think. Focus your thoughts somehow. This could be important… but I couldn’t think in straight lines. Not yet, I couldn’t.
“What about Wick Sachs?” I asked Kyle.
“He got home before ten o’clock. He’s there now…. We don’t know that he didn’t go out for sure, I suppose. He could have slipped out past us somehow. Maybe he has a way out of the house. I don’t think so, though.”
I moved away from Kyle Craig and went over to one of the white-coated Duke University doctors near the ambulance. Camera flashes were erupting everywhere around us. Hundreds of “memorable” pictures were being taken by the nightcrawlers at the crime scene.
“Can I ride with her?”
The EMS doctor very gently shook his head at me. “No, sir,” he said. He seemed to be talking in slow motion. “No, sir, only the family can ride in the ambulance. I’m sorry, Dr. Cross.”
“I’m her family tonight,” I said. I pushed past him and climbed into the rear of the ambulance. He didn’t try to stop me. He couldn’t have, anyway.
I felt numb all over. Kate lay amid the solemn monitoring and resuscitation equipment in the close quarters of the rescue ambulance. I was afraid that she had died as I was getting into the ambulance, or when they were carrying her outside.
I sat beside Kate and held just the tips of her fingers. “It’s Alex. I’m here for you,” I whispered to her. “Be strong right now. You’re so strong, anyway. Be strong now.”
The same doctor who had told me I couldn’t get into the ambulance came in and sat next to me. He felt obliged to tell me the rules, but he didn’t care to enforce them. His name tag said Dr. B. Stringer, Duke University EMS Team. I owed him a big favor.