“I know I helped find him, but Wick Sachs didn’t do it,” I told Hatfield straight to his face. “You’re arresting the wrong man. Let me tell you why. Give me ten minutes right now.”
He smiled at me, and it seemed like a goddamn condescending smile. It was almost as if he were stoned on the moment. Chief Hatfield pulled away from me and walked outside.
He walked out in front of the bright TV camera lights, playing his part beautifully. He was so taken with himself that he almost forgot about Sachs.
Whoever called about the women’s underwear is Casanova, I was thinking to myself. I was getting closer in my mind to who that might be. Casanova did this. Casanova is behind it, anyway.
Dr. Wick Sachs passed by me as they led him outside. He was dressed in a white cotton shirt and black trousers. All of his fine clothes were drenched through with his sweat. I imagined he was swimming in his shoes, too: gold-buckled black loafers. His hands were cuffed behind his back. All of his arrogance was long gone.
“I didn’t do anything,” he said to me in the softest, choking voice. His eyes were pleading. He couldn’t believe this, either. Then he said the most pathetic thing of all. “I don’t hurt women. I love them.”
I was struck with a mad, absolutely dizzying, thought on the Sachs porch. I felt as if I were in the middle of a somersault, and then I just stopped. Time stopped. This is Casanova! I suddenly understood.
Wick Sachs was the original model used for Casanova, anyway. That was the monsters’ plan from the start; they had a fall guy for their perfect murders and de Sade–like adventures.
Dr. Wick Sachs was actually Casanova, but he wasn’t one of the monsters. Casanova was a front, too. He knew nothing about the real “collector.” He was another victim.
CHAPTER 101
I’M THE Gentleman Caller,” Will Rudolph announced with a polite, theatrical bow. He was wearing a dinner jacket, black tie, dress shirt. His hair was tied in a tight ponytail. He’d bought white roses for the special occasion.
“And you know who I am, ladies. You all look so very lovely,” Casanova spoke at his side. He was a striking contrast to his partner. Tight black jeans. Black cowboy boots. No shirt. His stomach washboard-hard. He had on a black fright mask with thick, handpainted median-gray streaks.
The killers introduced themselves as the women filed into the living room at the hideaway. They lined up in front of a long table.
This was to be a special celebration, they had been informed earlier in the day. “The mad dog Casanova has finally been caught,” Casanova told them. “It’s all over the news. Turned out that he was some crazed college professor. Who can you trust these days?”
The women had been asked to wear serious party clothes, whatever they would choose for a special night out. Gowns with plunging necklines, high-heeled evening shoes with sheer stockings, and perhaps pearls or long earrings. No other jewelry. They were to look “elegant.”
“Only seven pretty ladies here now,” Rudolph noted as he and Casanova watched the women enter the living room and form a receiving line. “You’re too picky, you know. The original Casanova was a voracious lover who wasn’t choosy at all.”
“You have to admit that the seven are extraordinary,” Casanova said to his friend. “My collection is a masterpiece, the best in the world.”
“I quite agree with you,” said the Gentleman. “They look like paintings. Shall we begin?”
They had agreed to play an old favorite game. “Lucky seven.” At other times it had been “lucky four,” “lucky eleven,” “lucky two.” It was the Gentleman’s game, actually. This was his night. Perhaps the final night at the house for the two of them.
They calmly walked down the receiving line. They talked with Melissa Stanfield first. Melissa wore a red silk sheath. Her long blond hair was pinned back on one side. She reminded Casanova of a young Grace Kelly.
“Have you been saving yourself for me?” the Gentleman asked.
Melissa’s smile was demure. “I’ve been saving my heart for someone.”
Will Rudolph smiled at the clever answer. He ran the back of his hand across her cheek. He let his hand slowly track down her throat and over her firm breasts. She submitted without showing fear or revulsion. That was one of the rules when the games were played.
“You’re very, very good at our little game,” he said. “You’re a worthy player, Melissa.”
Naomi Cross was next in the line. She had on an ivory cocktail dress. Very chic. She would have been the belle at some Washington law firm’s ball. The scent of her perfume made Casanova feel a little giddy. He had been tempted to declare her off-limits to the Gentleman. He wasn’t fond of her uncle, Alex Cross, after all.
“We might come back to visit with Naomi,” the Gentleman said. He lightly kissed her hand. “Enchanté.”
Rudolph nodded, then stopped at the sixth woman in the receiving line. He turned his head and checked out the final girl, then his eyes returned to number six.
“You’re very special,” he spoke softly, almost shyly. “Extraordinary, actually.”
“This is Christa,” Casanova said with a knowing smile.
“Christa is my date for tonight,” the Gentleman exclaimed in an enthusiastic voice. He’d made his choice. Casanova had given him a present—to do with as he pleased.
Christa Akers tried to smile. That was the house rule. But she couldn’t. That was what the Gentleman especially liked about her: the delicious fear in her eyes.
He was ready to play kiss the girls.
One last time.
PART FIVE
KISS THE GIRLS
CHAPTER 102
THE MORNING after the arrest of Dr. Wick Sachs, Casanova strolled the corridors of the Duke Medical Center. He calmly turned into Kate McTiernan’s private room.
He could go anywhere now. He was free again.
“Hello, my darling. How goes the wars?” he whispered to Kate.
She was all by her lonesome, though there was still a Durham policeman stationed on the floor. Casanova sat on the straight-backed chair beside her bed. He looked at the sad physical wreck that had once been such an outstanding beauty.
He wasn’t even angry with Kate anymore. There wasn’t much to be angry with now, was there? The lights are still on, he thought as he stared into the vacant brown eyes, but there’s nobody home, is there, Katie?
He enjoyed being in her hospital room—it got his juices going, turned him on, moved his spirit toward great things. Actually, just sitting beside Kate McTiernan’s bed made him feel at peace.
That was important now. There were decisions to be made. How, exactly, to handle the situation with Dr. Wick Sachs? Did more tinder need to be thrown on that fire? Or would that be overkill, and therefore dangerous in itself?
Another tricky decision would have to be made soon. Did he and Rudolph still have to leave the Research Triangle area? He didn’t want to—this was home—but maybe it had to be. And how about Will Rudolph? He had clearly been emotionally disturbed in California. He had been taking Valium, Halcion, and Xanax—that Casanova knew of. Sooner or later he was going to blow it for both of them, wasn’t he? On the other hand, it had been so unbearably lonely when Rudolph was away. He’d felt cut in half.
Casanova heard a noise behind him at the hospital room door. He turned—and smiled at the man.
“I was just leaving, Alex,” he said, and got up from the chair. “No change here. What a damn shame.”
Alex Cross let Casanova slide by him and out the door.
He fit in anywhere, Casanova thought to himself as he walked away and down the hospital corridor. He was never going to be caught. He had the perfect mask.
CHAPTER 103
THERE WAS a fine old upright piano inside the barroom at the Washington Duke Inn. I was there playing Big Joe Turner and Blind Lemon Jefferson tunes between four and five one morning. I played the blues, the blahs, the doldrums, the grumps, the red ass. The hotel maintenance staff sure was impres
sed.
I was trying to put everything I knew together. I kept circling back to the same big three or four points, my pillars to build the investigation on.
Perfect crimes, both here and in California. The killers’ knowledge of crime scenes and police forensics.
Twinning between the monsters. Male bonding as it had never existed.
The disappearing house in the woods. A house had actually disappeared! How could that happen?
Casanova’s harem of special women—but even more than that, the “rejects.”
Dr. Wick Sachs was a college professor with questionable morals and actions. But was he a stone-cold murderer without a conscience? Was he the animal who had imprisoned a dozen or more young women somewhere near Durham and Chapel Hill? Was he a modern-day de Sade?
I didn’t think so. I believed, I was almost certain, that the Durham police had arrested the wrong man, and that the real Casanova was out there laughing at all of us. Maybe it was even worse than that. Maybe he was stalking another woman.
Later that morning, I made my usual visit to Kate at Duke Medical Center. She was still deep in a coma, still listed as grave. The Durham police no longer had an officer on guard outside her room.
I sat vigil beside her and tried not to think about the way she had been. I held her hand for an hour and quietly talked to her. Her hand was limp, almost lifeless. I missed Kate so much. She couldn’t respond, and that created a gaping, painful hole in my chest.
Finally, I had to leave. I needed to lose myself in my work.
From the hospital, Sampson and I drove to the home of Louis Freed in Chapel Hill. I had asked Dr. Freed to prepare a special map of the Wykagil River area for us.
The seventy-seven-year-old history professor had done his job well. I hoped the map might help Sampson and me find the “disappearing house.” The idea came to me after reading several newspaper accounts of the golden couple murder case. Over twelve years ago, Roe Tierney’s body had been found near “an abandoned farm where runaway slaves had once been hidden in large underground cellars. These cellars were like small houses under the earth, some with as many as a dozen rooms or compartments.”
Small houses under the earth?
The disappearing house?
There was a house out there somewhere. Houses didn’t disappear.
CHAPTER 104
SAMPSON AND I drove to Brigadoon, North Carolina. We planned to hike through the woods to where Kate had been found in the Wykagil River. Ray Bradbury had once written that “living at risk is jumping off a cliff, and building your wings on the way down.” Sampson and I were getting ready to jump.
As we trudged into the foreboding woods, the towering oaks and Carolina pines began to shut out all light. A chorus of cicadas was thick as molasses around us. The air wasn’t moving.
I could imagine, I could see, Kate running through these same dark green woods only a few weeks earlier, fighting for her life. I thought of her now, surviving on life-support systems. I could hear the machine’s whoosh-click, whoosh-click. Just the thought hurt my heart.
“I don’t like it in the deep dark woods,” Sampson confessed as we passed under a thick umbrella of twisted vines and tent-like treetops. He had on a Cypress Hill T-shirt, his Ray-Ban sunglasses, jeans, workboots. “Reminds me of Hansel and Gretel. Melodramatic bullshit, man. Hated that story when I was a little kid.”
“You were never a little kid,” I reminded him. “You were six foot when you were eleven, and you already had your cold stare down to a fine art.”
“Maybe so, but I hated those Grimm Brothers. Dark side of the German mind, turning out nasty fantasies to warp the minds of little German children. Must have worked, too.”
Sampson had me smiling again with his warped theories of our warped world. “You’re not afraid going through the D.C. projects at night, but a nice walk in these woods gets you? Nothing can hurt you here. Pine trees. Muscadine grapevines. Brier brambles. Looks sinister, maybe, but it’s harmless.”
“Looks sinister. Is sinister. That’s my motto.”
Sampson was struggling to get his statuesque body through closely bunched saplings and honeysuckle at the edge of the woods. The honeysuckle was actually like a mesh curtain in places. It seemed to grow tangled.
I wondered if Casanova might be watching us. I suspected that he was a very patient watcher. Both he and Will Rudolph were very clever, organized, and careful. They had been doing this for a lot of years and hadn’t been caught yet.
“How’s your history on the slaves in this area?” I asked Sampson as we walked. I wanted his mind off poisonous snakes and dangling snakelike vines. I needed him concentrating on the killer, or maybe the killers, who might be cohabitating these woods with us.
“I’ve dabbled with some E. D. Genovese, some Mohamed Auad,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he was serious. Sampson is well read for a man of action.
“The Underground Railroad was active in this area. Runaway slaves and whole families heading north were kept safe for days, even weeks, at some of the local farms. They were called stations,” I said. “That’s what Dr. Freed’s map shows. That’s what his book was written about.”
“I don’t see any farms, Dr. Livingstone. Just this muscadine grapevine shit,” Sampson complained and pushed away more branches with his long arms.
“The big tobacco farms used to be west of here. They’ve been deserted for almost sixty years. Remember I told you that a student from UNC was brutally raped and murdered back in nineteen eighty-one? Her decomposed body was found out here. I think Rudolph, and possibly Casanova, killed her. That’s around the time they first met.
“Dr. Freed’s map shows the locations of the old Underground Railroad, most of the farms in the area where runaway slaves were hidden. Some of the farms had expanded cellars, even underground living quarters. The farms themselves are gone now. There’s nothing to see from aerial surveillance. The honeysuckle and brambles have grown thick, too. The cellars are still here, though.”
“Hmmph. Your handy-dandy map tell us where all the old-time tobacco farms used to be?”
“Yup. Got a map. Got a compass. Got my Glock pistol, too,” I said and patted my holster.
“Most important,” Sampson said, “you got me.”
“That too. God save the miscreants from the two of us.”
Sampson and I walked a long, long way into the hot, damp, buggy afternoon. We managed to find three of the farm sites where tobacco leaf had once flourished; where terrified black men and women, sometimes whole families, had been taken in and hidden in old cellars, as they tried to escape to freedom in the North, to cities like Washington, D.C.
Two of the cellars were located exactly where Dr. Freed said they would be. Antique wood planks and twisted, rusted metal were the only signs left of the original farms. It was as if some angry god had come down and destroyed the scene of the old slave-owning ways.
Around four in the afternoon, Sampson and I arrived at the once-proud-and-successful farm of Jason Snyder and his family.
“How do you know we’re here?” Sampson looked around at the small, desolate, and deserted area where I had stopped walking.
“Says so on Dr. Louis Freed’s hand-drawn map. Same compass points. He’s a famous historian, so it must be true.”
Sampson was right, though. There was nothing to see. Jason Snyder’s farm had completely disappeared. Just as Kate had said it would.
CHAPTER 105
PLACE GIVES me the creeps,” Sampson said. “So-called tobacco farm.”
What was once the Snyder farm was particularly eerie and otherworldly, creepy as hell. There was almost no visible evidence that anyone human had ever lived here. Still, I could feel the blood and bones of the slaves as I stood before the disturbing ruins of the old tobacco farm.
Sassafras trees, arrowwood shrubs, honeysuckle, and poison ivy had grown up to the level of my chin. Red and white oaks, sycamores, and a few sweet gum trees stood tall and mature where a prosp
erous farm had once been. But the farm itself had disappeared.
I felt a cold spot at the center of my chest. Was this the bad place, then? Could we be near the house of horror that Kate had described?
We had worked our way north, and now east. We weren’t too far from the state highway, where I wished I had the car parked. According to my rough calculations, we couldn’t be more than two or three miles from the state road.
“Search parties for Casanova never came all the way back in here,” Sampson said as he prowled around. “Undergrowth’s real thick, real nasty. Not trampled down anywhere I can see.”
“Dr. Freed said he was probably the last person to come out and examine each of the old Underground Railroad sites. The woods were getting too thick and overgrown for casual visitors,” I said.
Blood and bones of my ancestors. That was a powerful, almost overwhelming, notion: to walk where slaves were once held captive for years.
No one ever came to rescue them. No one cared. No detectives back then went looking for human monsters who stole entire black families from their homes.
I used natural landmarks from the map to locate where the original Snyder cellar might have been. I was also trying to brace myself—in case we found something I didn’t want to find.
“We’re probably looking for a very old trapdoor,” I told Sampson. “There isn’t anything specific marked on Freed’s map. The cellar is supposed to be forty to fifty feet west of those sycamores. I think those are the right trees, and we should be right over the cellar now. But where the hell is the door?”
“Probably where nobody would walk on it by mistake,” Sampson figured. He was making a path into the thicker, wilder undergrowth.