Kiss the Girls (Alex Cross)

I was on the sun porch of our house on Fifth Street when it all began. The blues was having its sneaky-sad way with me on the piano, but my kids, Damon and Jannie, were whistling along beside me, trying to cheer me up. I loved these times more than all the rest of my life put together. Then came the insistent pounding on the back door, and a voice shouting my name. A young woman from the projects stood there in the teeming rain, her coat smeared with blood. A little boy, Marcus Daniels, had been stabbed. He had asked for me. I ran with him in my arms to St. Anthony's, but it was too late. I held his lifeless hand and remembered our talks, the sadness in his eyes. When I finally returned home, the house was full of family, their faces puffy from crying. My grandmother, Nana Mama, gave me the news that sent the sharpest pain right through me. “It's Naomi,” she said quietly. “Scootchie is missing, Alex.”

My niece, Naomi, a brilliant law student at Duke University, had been missing for four days. The police in North Carolina had waited that long to contact us. My partner, John Sampson, and I drove south into a multijurisdictional nightmare. A serial killer was at work in the idyllic college towns of the Research Triangle. He called himself Casanova, and he was collecting the most beautiful, extraordinary young women he could find. The FBI was involved, but they were secretive, hinting at a case that was far larger than it appeared. We were taken to a crime scene deep in the woods, the body of a young mother tied to a tree, savaged by animals. It wasn't Naomi, but the horror of it settled deep in my bones. The FBI's deputy director, Ronald Burns, appeared out of the night in a helicopter, telling me something startling: Casanova might be keeping the women alive in a private harem.

The investigation was a tangled mess of jurisdictional squabbles and withheld information. Then came the first real break. Dr. Kate McTiernan, a first-year intern, was abducted from her apartment in Chapel Hill. He came for her in the night, a powerful, intelligent predator who knew her name, her habits, even her black belt in karate. But Kate was a fighter. She was taken to a hidden, windowless room - a prison cell decorated to mimic her own apartment, filled with clothes just like hers. He left her a note, signed *Casanova*, laying out the rules of his house. The most important one: “You must never try to escape - or you will be executed.” But Kate wasn't like the others. She fought him, saw a sliver of his face behind his mask, and in a desperate, drug-fueled haze, she found a way out.

Kate's escape was a miracle. She stumbled through dense woods, chased by the monster, until she reached the edge of a steep canyon. With nowhere left to run, she leaped into the Wykagil River far below. She was found barely alive, suffering from post-traumatic shock, unable to speak. When she finally could, her story was fragmented and terrifying. She confirmed there were other women in a hidden house, including one named Naomi. But her most baffling memory was of the prison itself. After she fled, she looked back, and the house had simply disappeared. Her mind was a fog of trauma and the powerful drugs Casanova had used, but she became my partner, a fierce and brilliant ally in the hunt for the man who had stolen her life.

The case exploded, twisting into something no one could have imagined. Out in Los Angeles, another killer, the “Gentleman Caller,” was terrorizing the city, sending his diaries to a reporter at the *Los Angeles Times*. In one of the unedited entries, there was a chilling mention of Casanova - and of a law student named Naomi C. The monsters were communicating. They were friends, perhaps even competitors in a gruesome, coast-to-coast game. Kate and I flew to L.A. to hunt the Gentleman Caller, a handsome and arrogant plastic surgeon named Dr. Will Rudolph. We tracked him to a cabin in Big Sur, a second house of horrors. The FBI moved in, but Rudolph escaped after a wild chase that ended in a fiery crash on the Pacific Coast Highway.

The hunt led back to North Carolina. We followed Will Rudolph to Chapel Hill, where he met Casanova in broad daylight on a busy street. I cornered Rudolph, and in the ensuing shootout, I shot him. As he lay dying in my arms, his face stripped of its mask, he whispered a final taunt: “You'll never find him. He's the best ever.” But he had given me a clue, a link back to an old, unsolved campus murder. The two monsters had met at Duke University years ago, bonding over their shared sickness. Their secret was a phenomenon known as twinning - a codependent urge between two lonely, broken souls who, together, became a single, perfect predator.

With Rudolph gone, Casanova grew bolder and more enraged. He murdered one of the captives, Anna Miller, hanging her body in the common room as a warning. But the women, led by Naomi and a brave girl named Kristen, were plotting their own escape. Sampson and I, guided by an old map of the Underground Railroad, searched the woods for abandoned farm cellars. We found the “disappearing house” - an elaborate underground structure built on the site of an old tobacco farm, completely hidden from view. Inside, the scene was horrific. We found the women, and I was finally reunited with Naomi. But Casanova and Rudolph had been waiting for us. They ambushed us in the dark, stabbing Sampson before vanishing into the labyrinthine corridors.

The chase was on. I pursued them through the woods, back to the streets of Chapel Hill where it all began. The final confrontation was a chaotic gun battle in the middle of Franklin Street. I shot Rudolph, but Casanova escaped. The local police, desperate for a resolution, arrested a Duke professor, Dr. Wick Sachs, a known collector of erotica whom the killers had framed perfectly. I knew they had the wrong man. Casanova had been there all along, hiding in plain sight, watching every move we made. He was the one who always knew our next step because he was one of us.

Kate and I went to the Outer Banks, setting a trap. We knew he would come for us, for revenge and to reclaim what he saw as his. He came on a moonlit night, disabling the FBI agents protecting us. He cornered me in the beach house, hitting me with a stun gun. He wore no mask this time. I finally saw the face of Casanova. It was Detective Nick Ruskin, the local star on the case. But before he could finish me, Kate attacked. She fought him with a fury born of pure hatred, a whirlwind of karate strikes that brought the monster to his knees. As he reached for a hidden gun, I put a full clip into him. He fell, and the reign of the Beast of the Southeast was finally over.

I returned home to my children, to the familiar comfort of Nana Mama's kitchen and the blues on my piano. The women were safe, Sampson was recovering, and Naomi was home. Kate went back to West Virginia to fulfill a promise to her mother, to become a doctor in the small town where she grew up. We had found something rare and precious together in the middle of all that darkness, a friendship born of shared trauma and trust. But even with Casanova gone, the world doesn't stop being what it is. One night, the phone rang. It was Kyle Craig from the FBI. He had news, the kind that makes the hair on your neck stand up. A monster from my past, Gary Soneji, had escaped from prison. He'd left a note. It said he would be stopping by to see me sometime soon.