Beyond the obvious, why had the killer chosen the name? Did he believe that he truly loved women? Was this his way of showing
it?
We could hear a bird somewhere let out an unearthly scream, and also the sounds of small animals all around us. Nobody thought
of Bambi in these woods. Not under the circumstances of the gruesome murder.
Between ten-thirty and eleven, we heard a loud roar like thunder in the eerie woods. Nervous eyes looked up into the blue-black
sky.
“There’s a familiar old tune,” Sampson said as he saw the fluttering lights of an incoming helicopter approaching from the
northeast.
“Probably mediflight finally coming for the body,” I said.
A dark blue helicopter with gold stripes finally swirled down onto the blacktop highway. Whoever was piloting the copter in
was a real pro.
“Not mediflight,” Sampson said; “more likely be Mick Jagger. Big stars travel in copters like that one.”
Joyce Kinney and the regional Bureau director were already headed back to the highway. Sampson and I followed along like uninvited
pests.
We received another rude shock right away. Both of us recognized the tall, balding, distinguished-looking man who stepped
from the helicopter.
“Now what the hell is
he
doing down here?” Sampson said. I had the same question, the same uneasy reaction. It was the deputy director of the FBI.
The number two man, Ronald Burns. Burns was a real hummer inside the Bureau, a bigtime cage rattler.
We both knew Burns from our last “multijurisdictional” case. He was supposed to be political, a bad guy inside the Bureau,
but he had never been that way with me. After he had looked at the body, he asked to speak to me. It was getting stranger
and stranger down in Carolina.
Burns wanted to hold our little talk away from the big ears and small minds of his own people.
“Alex, I’m real sorry to hear your niece might have been kidnapped. I hope that isn’t the case,” he said. “Since you’re down
here, maybe you can help us out.”
“Can I ask
why you’re
down here?” I said to Burns. Might as well skip right to the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.
Burns smiled, showing off his capped, very white front teeth. “I
do
wish you had accepted our offer of that VICAP position.”
I had been offered a job as a liaison between the Bureau and the D.C. police after the Soneji kidnapping case. Burns was one
of the men who interviewed me.
“I like directness more than anything in a senior officer,” Burns continued.
I was still waiting for an answer to my direct question.
“I can’t tell you as much as you’d like to hear,” Burns finally said. “I will tell you that we don’t know if your niece was
taken by this sick Johnny. He leaves very little physical evidence, Alex. He’s careful and he’s good at what he does.”
“So I’ve heard. Leads us into some obvious areas for suspects. Policemen, army vets, amateurs who study the police. That could
be misdirection on his part, though. Maybe he wants us to think that way.”
Burns nodded. “I’m here because this has become a high-priority mess. It’s large, Alex. I can’t tell you why at this time.
It’s
classified
large.” Spoken like a true FBI honcho. Mysteries wrapped in more mysteries.
Burns sighed. “I will tell you one thing. We believe that he might be a
collector.
We think he could be keeping a few of the young women nearby… a private harem maybe. His very own harem.”
It was a scary, startling idea. It also gave me hope that Naomi might still be alive.
“I want to be in on this,” I told Burns, holding eye contact with him. “Why don’t you tell me everything?” I gave him my terms.
“I need to see the whole picture before I start giving out any theories. Why does he reject some of the women? If that’s what
he’s doing.”
“Alex, I can’t tell you any more right now. I’m sorry.” Burns shook his head and closed his eyes for a second. I realized
that he was exhausted.
“But you wanted to see how I would react to your collector theory?”
“I did,” Burns admitted, and finally had to smile.
“A modern-day harem would be possible, I guess. It’s a common enough male fantasy,” I told him. “Strangely, it’s a prevalent
female fantasy, too. Don’t rule that out yet.”
Burns catalogued what I’d said and left it at that. He asked me to help again, but was unwilling to tell me everything he
knew. He finally walked back to be with his own people.
Sampson came up beside me. “What did His Rigidness have to say? What brings him to this unholy forest with us mere mortals?”
“He said something interesting. Said that Casanova might be a collector, maybe creating his own private harem somewhere near
here,” I told Sampson. “He said the case is
large.
His choice of words.”
“Large” meant it was a very bad case, probably worse than it already seemed. I wondered how that could be, and I almost didn’t
want to know the answer.
K
ATE MCTIERNAN was lost in an odd, but nicely illuminating, thought.
When the strike of a hawk breaks the body of its prey,
she considered,
it’s only because of timing.
That was the insight from her latest kata in black-belt class. Exquisite timing was everything in karate, and also in so many
other things. It also helped if you could bench-press almost two hundred pounds, which she could.
Kate dawdled along busy, funky, rambunctious Franklin Street in Chapel Hill. The street ran north and south, bordering the
picturesque campus of the University of North Carolina. She passed bookstores, pizza shops, Rollerblade rentals, Ben & Jerry’s
ice cream. The rock group White Zombie was blaring from the icecream store. Kate wasn’t a dawdler by nature, but the evening
was warm and pleasant, so she stopped to window-shop for a change.
The college-town crowd was familiar, friendly, and very comfortable. She loved her life here, first as a medical student and
now as an intern. She never wanted to leave Chapel Hill, never wanted to go back and be a doctor in West Virginia.
But she would go. It was her promise to her mother—just before Beadsie McTiernan died. Kate had given her word, and her word
was good. She was old-fashioned about things like that. A small-town mensch.
Kate’s hands were thrust into the deep pockets of a slightly wrinkled hospital medical jacket. She thought that her hands
were her bad feature. They were gnarled, and she had no fingernails to speak of. There were two reasons for that: her job
as slave labor at the cancer ward and her avocation as a second-degree black belt, a Nidan. It was the one tension releaser
she allowed herself; karate class was her R & R.
The name pin on the upper left pocket of her jacket said
K. McTiernan, M.D.
She liked the tiny irreverence of wearing that symbol of status and prestige with her baggy pants and the sneakers. She didn’t
want to seem like a rebel, and she really wasn’t, but she needed to keep some small individuality inside the large hospital
community.
Kate had just picked up a paperback copy of Cormac McCarthy’s
All the Pretty Horses
at the Intimate Book Shop. First-year interns weren’t supposed to have time to read novels, but she made time. At least she
promised to make time tonight.
The late April night was so fine, so perfect in every way, that Kate considered stopping off at Spanky’s on the corner of
Columbia and Franklin. She might sit at the bar and just read her book.
There was absolutely no way she would let herself meet somebody on a “school night” —which meant most nights for her. She
usually had Saturdays off, but by then she was too bushed to deal with pre- and post-mating rituals.
It had been that way ever since she and Peter McGrath had severed their on-again, off-again relationship. Peter was thirty-eight,
a doctor of history and close to brilliant. He was handsome as sin and way too self-absorbed for her taste. The breakup had
been messier than she had expected. They weren’t even friends now.
It had been four months without Peter now. Pun intended. Not good, but not in the top ten worst things she’d had to deal with.
And besides, she knew the breakup was really her fault and not Peter’s. Breaking up with lovers was a problem she had; it
was part of her secret past. Secret present? Secret future?
Kate McTiernan raised her wristwatch to her face. It was a funky Mickey Mouse model that her sister Carole Anne had given
her, and it was a swell little timekeeper. It was also a reminder to herself: Never get a big head because you’re a DOCTOR
now.
Damn!
Her farsightedness was getting worse—at
almost
thirty-one years old! She was an old lady. She’d been the grandam of the University of North Carolina Medical School. It
was already nine-thirty, past her bedtime.
Kate decided to pass on Spanky’s and head back to the hacienda. She’d heat up some fourth-degree chili, and maybe have hot
chocolate with about an inch topping of Marshmallow Fluff. Curling up in bed with some junk food, Cormac McCarthy, and maybe
R.E.M. didn’t sound half bad, actually.
Like many of the students at Chapel Hill—as opposed to the wealthier crowd up Tobacco Road at “Dook” —Kate had a major cash-flow
problem. She lived in a three-room apartment that was the top floor of a frame house, a North Carolina “country” house. All
the paint was peeling, and the house looked as if it were molting. It was at the ass-end of Pittsboro Street in Chapel Hill.
She had gotten a good deal on the rent.
The first thing she had noticed about the neighborhood were the exquisite trees. They were old and stately hardwoods, not
pines. Their long branches reminded her of the arms and fingers of wizened old women. She called her street “Old Ladies Lane.”
Where else would the old lady of the medical school live?
Kate arrived home at about a quarter to ten. Nobody was living downstairs in the house that she rented from a widowed lady
who lived in Durham.
“I’m home. It’s me, Kate,” she called to the family of mice who lived somewhere behind the refrigerator. She couldn’t bring
herself to exterminate them. “Did you miss me? You guys eat yet?”
She flipped on the overhead kitchen light and listened to the irritating electric buzz that she hated. Her eyes caught the
blowup of a quote from one of her med-school teachers: “Medical students have to practice humility.” Well she was definitely
practicing humility.
Inside her small bedroom, Kate pulled on a wrinkled black polo shirt that she never ever bothered to iron. Ironing clothes
was not a priority these days. It was one reason to have a man around, though—someone to clean, maintain, take out the trash,
cook, iron. She was fond of a particular old feminist line:
“A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.”
Kate yawned just thinking about the sixteen-hour day that would start for her at five the next morning. Dammit, she
loved
her life! Loved it!
She fell onto the creaking double bed that was covered with plain white sheets. The only flourish was a couple of colored
chiffon scarves which hung from the bedpost.
She canceled her order for chili and hot chocolate with Marsh-mallow Fluff, and she set
All the Pretty Horses
on top of unread copies of
Harper’s
and
The New Yorker.
Kate flipped off her lamp and was asleep in five seconds. End of wonderfully illuminating discussion with herself for the
night.
Kate McTiernan had no idea, no suspicion, that she was being watched, that she had been followed ever since she’d walked down
crowded, colorful Franklin Street, that she had been chosen.
Dr. Kate was next.
Tick-cock.
N
O! KATE thought.
This is my home.
She almost said it out loud, but she didn’t want to make a sound.
There was someone in her apartment!
She was still half asleep, but she was almost sure about the intruding noise that woke her up. Her pulse was already racing.
Her heart floated up into her throat.
Jesus God, no.
She stayed very still, huddled near the head of her bed. A few more nervous seconds passed slowly, like centuries. Not a move
from her. Not a breath. Bone-white slants of moonlight played across the windowpanes, creating eerie shadows in her bedroom.
She listened to the house, listened with total concentration to every creak and crack the old building made.
She didn’t hear anything unusual now. But she was sure she had. The recent murders and the news stories about the kidnappings
in the Research Triangle area made her fearful.
Don’t be gruesome,
she thought.
Don’t get melodramatic.
She sat up slowly in bed and listened. Maybe a window had blown open. She had better get out of bed and check the windows
and doors.
For the first time in four months, she actually missed Peter McGrath. Peter wouldn’t have helped, but she would have felt
safer. Even with dear old “Peter-out.”
Not that she was totally frightened or vulnerable; she could hold her own with most men. She could fight like hell. Peter
used to say that he “pitied” the man who messed with her, and he meant it. He had been a little physically afraid of her.
Well, prearranged fighting in karate dojos was one thing. This was the real thing.
Kate slipped silently out of bed.
Not a sound.
She felt the roughness and coolness of the floorboards under her bare feet. It sent a wake-up call to her brain, and she
moved into a fighting stance.
Whap!
A gloved hand came down
hard
over her mouth and nose, and she thought she heard cartilage crack in her nose.
Then a large and very strong male body tackled her. All of his weight was pressing her into the cool, hard floorboards, pinning
her down.
Athlete.
Her brain was computing every bit of information. She tried to stay clear and focused.