Sampson was located one floor above Kate. Man Mountain had already come out of surgery, and his condition was listed as good.
He was awake and alert when I came in to see him. “How’s Kate and the other women?” he asked me. “I’m about ready to leave this place myself.”
“Kate’s still in a coma. I just came from her room. Your condition is ‘good,’ if you’re interested.”
“You tell the doctors to upgrade me to ‘excellent.’ I hear Casanova got away.” He started to cough, and I could tell he was angry.
“Take it easy. We’ll get him.” I knew it was time for me to go.
“Don’t forget to bring me my shades,” he said as I left. “Too much light in this place. Feel like I’m in Kmart.”
At nine-thirty that night I was back in Scootchie’s hospital room. Seth Samuel was there. The two of them were impressive to watch together. They were strong, but they were also sweet. I began the happy task of getting to know Naomi-and-Seth.
“Auntie Scootch! Auntie Scootch!”
I heard a familiar voice behind me, and it was the best sound. Nana, Cilla, Damon, and Jannie all trooped into the room. They had flown in from Washington. Cilla broke down and cried as she saw her baby. I saw Nana Mama also wipe away a few tears. Then Cilla and Naomi were giving the word hug a new meaning.
My kids watched their Auntie Scootch lying in the scary hospital bed. I could see the fear and confusion shining in their little eyes, especially Damon’s, who tries to rise above all forms of uncertainty and terror in his life.
I went to my kids and scooped them up in my arms. I held them both as tightly as I could. “Hello, son, little cue ball in the side pocket! How’s my Jannie?” I asked. For me, there’s nothing like my family, nothing even close. I imagine that’s part of why I do what I do. I know it is. Doctor Detective Cross.
“You found Auntie Scootch,” Jannie whispered into my ear. She hugged me tightly with her strong little legs and arms. She was even more excited than I was.
CHAPTER 114
IT WASN’T over for me. The job was only half-done. Two days later, I trudged down a well-worn path through the woods separating Route 22 and the underground house. The local police officers I passed on the way were somber and quiet. They tramped out of the woods with their heads lowered, not talking with one another, their faces drained of color and affect.
They had met the human monsters on an intimate basis now. They had seen the intricate and ghastly handiwork of Dr. Will Rudolph and the other monster who called himself Casanova. Some of them had explored the house of horror.
Most of them knew me by now. I was a regular at the hellfires with them. Some nodded or waved hello. I waved back.
I was finally somewhat accepted in North Carolina. Twenty years ago that wouldn’t have been possible, not even under these extreme circumstances. I was beginning to like it in the South a little, more than I would have thought possible.
I had a new notion, a plausible theory, about Casanova. It had to do with something I’d noticed during the gun-battle scene in these woods and on the streets of Chapel Hill. You’ll never find him, I recalled Rudolph’s dying words. Never say never, Will.
Kyle Craig was at the house of horror that warm, hazy afternoon. So were about two hundred men and women from the Chapel Hill and Durham police forces, as well as soldiers from Fort Bragg, North Carolina. They were getting to know the human monsters up close and personal.
“Extraordinary time to be alive, to be a cop,” Kyle said to me. His humor got a shade darker every time I saw him. He worried me. Kyle was such a loner most of the time. Such a careeraholic. Apparently such a straight arrow. He had even looked that way in the Duke yearbook pictures I’d found of him.
“I feel sorry for these local people dragged out here for this,” I said to Kyle. My eyes passed slowly over the ghoulish crime scene. “They won’t be able to forget this until the day they die. They’ll dream of it for years.”
“How about you, Alex?” Kyle asked. His intense, grayish-blue eyes leveled mine. Sometimes, he almost seemed to care about me.
“Oh, I have so many nightmare images now, it’s hard to pick out just one favorite,” I confessed with a thin smile. “I’ll go home soon. I’ll make my kids sleep in with me for a while. They love to, anyway. They won’t understand the real reason why. I’ll be able to sleep okay with the kids there to protect me. They pound on my chest if I have a nightmare.”
Kyle finally smiled. “You’re an unusual man, Alex. You’re both incredibly open and secretive.”
“Getting more unusual every day,” I said to Kyle. “You come on a new monster one of these days, don’t bother to call. I’m monstered out.” I stared into his eyes, trying to make contact and not completely succeeding. Kyle was secretive too, not very open with anybody that I knew of.
“I’ll try not to call,” Kyle said. “You rest up, though. There’s a monster working in the city of Chicago right now. Another in Lincoln and Concord, Massachusetts. Someone very evil is taking children in Austin, Texas. Little babies, actually. Repeat killers in Orlando and Minneapolis.”
“We’ve still got work here,” I reminded Kyle.
“Do we?” he asked, his voice dripping with irony. “What work is that, Alex? You mean spadework?”
Kyle Craig and I watched the terrifying scene that was unfolding near the underground house. Seventy to eighty men were busy digging up the meadow west of the “disappearing” house. They were working with heavy pickaxes and shovels. Searching for bodies of murder victims. Spadework.
Since 1981, beautiful and intelligent women from all over the South had been abducted by the two monsters and murdered. It was a thirteen-year reign of horror. First, I fall in love with a woman. Then, I simply take her. Will Rudolph had written that in his diaries out in California. I wondered if the sentiment was his or his twin’s. I wondered how badly Casanova was missing his friend now. How he grieved. How he planned to cope with his loss. Did he already have a plan?
I believed that Casanova had met Rudolph sometime back around 1981. They had shared their forbidden secret: They liked to kidnap, to rape, and, sometimes to torture, women. Somehow, they came up with the idea of keeping a harem of very special women, women who were bright and fascinating enough to hold their interest. They never had anyone to share their secrets with before. Then suddenly they had each other. I tried to imagine never having anyone to confide in—never once in your life—and then finding someone to talk to when you are twenty-one or twenty-two years old.
The two of them had played their wicked games, gathered their harem of beauties in the Research Triangle area and throughout the Southeast. My theory on twinning had been close to the truth. They enjoyed kidnapping and holding beautiful women captive. They also competed. So much so, that Will Rudolph finally had to go off on his own for a while. To Los Angeles. He had become the Gentleman Caller out there. He’d tried to make it on his own. Casanova, the more territorial of the two, continued to work in the South, but they communicated. They shared stories. They needed to share. Sharing their exploits was part of the thrill for both of them. Rudolph eventually told stories to a reporter at the Los Angeles Times. He tasted fame and notoriety, and he liked it. Not so Casanova. He was much more of a loner. He was the genius; the creative one, I believed.
I thought I knew who he might be. I thought that I’d seen Casanova without his mask.
I kept drifting in and out of strange, private thoughts at the dizzying crime scene. I was burnt toast, but that didn’t matter anymore; it hadn’t mattered for a while.
Casanova, the territorial killer, I was thinking. He was probably still in the area around Durham and Chapel Hill. He had met Will Rudolph around the time of the golden couple murders. So far, he’d thought everything through with almost perfect clarity. He had finally made a mistake during the shootout two days before. A small mistake, but that was all it took sometimes… I thought I knew who Casanova might be. But I couldn’t share it wi
th the FBI. I was their “loose cannon,” right? The “outsider” on this case. So be it.
Kyle Craig and I watched the same distant spot in the high waving grass and honeysuckle, out where the digging was taking place. Mass graves, I thought as I watched the horrific scene. What a concept for the nineties.
A tall balding man stood up from his deep hole in the soft earth. He waved long arms high over his head, which was shiny with sweat. “Bob Shaw here!” He called out his name in a loud, clear voice.
The digger’s name was the verbal signal that another woman’s body had been found. An entire corps of North Carolina medical examiners was at the dreamlike, unbearably grisly scene. One of the MEs ran over to the digger in a strange, lopsided waddle that would have made Kyle and me laugh under different circumstances. He gave Shaw a hand out of the grave.
The TV cameras at the scene moved in on Shaw, who was U.S. Army from Fort Bragg. An attractive woman reporter nearby received a dab of makeup before she spoke into the lens of a camera.
“They’ve just found victim number twenty-three,” the reporter said with appropriate solemnity. “All the victims so far appear to have been young women. The grisly murders—”
I turned away from the TV coverage and I had to sigh out loud.
I thought of children like my own Damon and Jannie, watching this spectacle in their homes. This was a world they were inheriting. Human monsters roaming the earth, a majority of them in America and Europe. Why was that? Something in the water? In the high-fat fast food? On Saturday morning TV?
“Go the hell home, Alex,” Kyle said to me. “It’s over now. You won’t catch him, I promise you.”
CHAPTER 115
NEVER SAY never. That’s one of my few mottos as a cop. My body was bathed in a cold sweat. My pulse was jumpy and irregular. This was it, wasn’t it? I needed to believe that it was.
I waited in the hot, still darkness outside a small wood-shingled house in the Edgemont section of Durham. It was a typical middle-class Southern neighborhood. Nice middle-class houses, American and Japanese cars in about equal numbers, mower-striped lawns, familiar cooking smells. It was where Casanova had chosen to live for the past seven years.
I had spent the early part of that night at the offices of the Herald Sun. I had reread everything written in the newspaper about the unsolved murders of Roe Tierney and Tom Hutchinson. A name mentioned in the Herald Sun helped put it together for me, confirmed my suspicions and fears, anyway. Hundreds of hours of investigating. Reading and rereading Durham police briefs. Then, pay dirt on a single line of newsprint.
The name was in a story lost in the Durham newspaper’s middle pages. It appeared just once. I found it, anyway.
I had stared for a long time at the familiar name in the news article. I thought about something I’d noticed during the shoot-out in Chapel Hill. I thought about the whole subject of “perfect crimes.” It all fit together for me now. Game, match, set, bingo.
Casanova had blinked just once. I had seen it with my own eyes, though. The name in the news article was verification. It materially linked Will Rudolph and Casanova for the first time. It also explained to me how they had met, and why they had talked.
Casanova was sane and completely responsible for his actions. He had planned every step in cold blood. That was the most horrifying and unusual thing about the long trail of crimes. He knew what he was doing. He was a slime who had chosen to abduct beautiful young students in their prime. He’d chosen to rape and murder again and again. He was obsessed with perfect young women, with loving them as he called it.
I conducted an imaginary interview with Casanova as I waited outside his house in the car. I could see his face as clearly as the numbers on the dashboard.
You don’t feel anything one way or the other, do you?
Oh, I do. I feel elation. I feel the most tremendous high when I take another lady. I feel varying levels of excitement, anticipation, animal lust. I feel an incredible sense of freedom that most people will never feel.
But not guilt?
I could see him smirk as I sat in my car. I’d seen that smirk before, in fact. I knew who he was.
Nothing that would make me want to stop.
Was there any nurturing, any love given and received when you were a boy?
They tried. I wasn’t really a boy, though. I don’t remember acting or thinking like a boy.
I had begun to think like the monsters again. I was the dragonslayer. I hated the responsibility. I also hated the part of me that was becoming a monster. There was nothing I could do to stop it at this point.
I was outside Casanova’s house in Durham. Hammers of fear tapped lightly in my heart. I waited there for four nights.
No partner. No backup.
No problem whatsoever. I could be as patient as he was.
I was hunting now.
CHAPTER 116
I SUCKED in a harsh, deep breath and felt a little lightheaded. There he was!
Casanova was leaving the house. I watched his face, watched his body language. He was confident, very sure of himself.
Detective Davey Sikes sauntered out to his car at a little past eleven on the fourth night. He was a powerful, man, athletic. He wore jeans, a dark windbreaker, hightopped black sneakers. Sikes climbed into a ten- or twelve-year-old Toyota Cressida he kept in the garage.
The sedan had to be his cruising car; his troller; his anonymous pickup vehicle. “Perfect crimes.” Davey Sikes definitely had the know-how. He was a detective on the case, and had been for over a dozen years. He’d known the FBI would investigate every local policeman when they entered the case. He had been ready with his “perfect” alibis. Sikes had even altered the date of a kidnapping to “prove” he was out of town when it happened.
I wondered if Sikes would dare to go after another woman now. Had he been out carefully stalking and hunting already? What was he feeling now? What was he thinking right at this moment, I wondered, as I watched the dark Toyota back out of the driveway in suburban Durham. Was he missing Rudolph? Would he continue their game, or maybe stop now? Could he stop the game?
I wanted him so badly. Sampson had said at the beginning that this case was too personal for me. He was right on. No case had ever been more personal for me, not even close to this.
I tried to think the way he might. I tried to get into his rhythm. I suspected that he had already picked out a victim, even if he didn’t dare take her yet. Would she be another smart, beautiful college student? Maybe he would change his pattern now. I doubted it. He loved his life, his creation, too much.
I followed the human monster down dark, deserted streets in southwest Durham. Blood pumped loudly through my head. I couldn’t hear much of anything else. I drove with my headlights off for as long as Davey Sikes stayed on the side streets. Maybe he was just headed to the Circle K for cigarettes and beer.
I thought that I had finally figured out what had happened back in 1981, that I had probably solved the golden couple murder which had shocked the university community here and in Chapel Hill. Will Rudolph had planned and committed the violent sex murders while he was a student. He had “loved” Roe Tierney, but she was interested in football stars. Detective Davey Sikes had met and questioned Rudolph during the subsequent police investigation.
At some point, he had begun to share his own dark, forbidden secret with the brilliant medical student. They had known about each other. Felt it, sensed it. Both of them desperately wanted to share their secret need with someone. Suddenly, they had each other. Twinning.
Now I had killed his only friend. Did Davey Sikes want to kill me for that? Did he know I was coming for him? What was he thinking right at this moment? I didn’t just want to catch him, I needed to capture his thoughts.
Casanova turned onto Interstate 40 and headed south. He was traveling toward Garner and McCullers, according to bright white-on-green road signs. There was relatively heavy traffic on the interstate, and I was able to follow him in a safe clust
er with four or five other cars. So far, so good. Detective against detective.
He got off at Exit 35, which was boldly marked for McCullers. He’d gone a little over thirty miles. It was approaching eleven-thirty at night. The witching hour.
I was going to take him out tonight, no matter what. I had never done that before, not in all my time as a homicide detective in Washington.
This time it was personal.
CHAPTER 117
A MILE from the exit ramp off 41, a Ford pickup truck swerved out of a hidden driveway. It was unexpected, but good luck for me. The dull red truck fell in between Sikes and me, offering me some cover. Not much, but enough for a few more miles.
The Cressida finally pulled off the main road a couple of miles outside McCullers. Sikes parked in the crowded lot of a bar called the Sports Page Pub. One more car that wasn’t likely to be noticed.
That was what had begun to give him away. It was why even Kyle Craig had been on my list of suspects. Casanova seemed to have known every move the police would make before they made it. He had probably abducted some of the women by coming up to them as a police officer. Detective Davey Sikes! He had gone into a professional shooting crouch that afternoon on the street in Chapel Hill. I knew he was another cop.
When I searched through the newspaper articles on the golden couple murder, I had spotted his name. Sikes had been a young cop on the original investigation team. He had interviewed a student named Will Rudolph back then, but he never mentioned it to any of us, never let on that he had met Will Rudolph in 1981.
I passed by the Sports Page Pub, and pulled off the road as soon as I turned the next bend. I got out of the car and hurried back toward the bar. I was in time to see Davey Sikes cross the highway on foot.
Casanova walked along the side of an intersecting side road with his hands thrust into his trouser pockets. He looked as if he belonged in the small-town neighborhood. Stun gun in one of those deep pockets, sport? Feeling the familiar, burning itch now? The thrill is back?