Tick-cock.
Tick-cock! Tick-cock! A beautiful honey-blond coed sat cross legged on the grass intersecting his path. She was reading a paperback, Karl Jaspers Philosophy of Existence. The rock group Smashing Pumpkins was contributing mantra like riffs from a portable CD player. Casanova smiled to himself.
Tick-cock! The hunt was relentless for him. He was Priapus for the nineties. The difference between him and so many gutless modern men was that he acted on his natural impulses.
He relentlessly searched out a great beauty and then he took her! What an outrageously simple idea. What a compellingly modern horror story.
He watched two petite Japanese coeds chowing down on greasy North Carolina barbecue from the new Crooks Corner II restaurant in Durham.
They looked so delicious eating their dinner, wolfing their barbecue like small animals. North Carolina BBQ consisted of pork cooked over a fire, seasoned with a vinegar-laced sauce, then finely chopped. You couldn't eat BBQ without slaw and hush puppies.
He smiled at the unlikely scene. Yum.
Still, he moved on. Sights and scenes caught his eye.
Pierced eyebrows. Tattooed ankles. Lalapalooza T-shirts. Lovely flowing breasts, legs, thighs everywhere he looked.
He finally came to a small Gothic-style building near the Duke University Hospital, North Division. This was a special annex where terminally ill cancer patients from all over the South were cared for during their final days. His heart began to pound, and a series of small tremors shook his body.
There she was!
Alex Cross 2 - Kiss the Girls
CHAPTER 10.
THERE WAS the most beautiful woman in the South! Beautiful in all ways. Not only was she physically desirable she was extremely smart.
She might be able to understand him. Maybe she was as special as he was.
He almost said the words out loud, and believed them to be absolutely true. He had done a great deal of homework on his next victim. Blood began to pump and rush into his forehead. He could feel a throbbing all through his body.
Her name was Kate Mctiernan. Katelya Margaret Mctierman, to be as precise as he liked to be.
She was just walking out of the terminal cancer wing, where she had worked to help pay her way through medical school. She was all by her lonesome, as usual. Her last boyfriend had warned her that she was going to “end up a beautiful old maid.” Fat chance of that. Obviously, it was Kate Mctiernan's decision to be alone as much as she was. She could have been with nearly anyone she chose. She was stunningly beautiful, highly intelligent, and compassionate, from what he could tell so far. Kate was a grind, though. She was incredibly dedicated to her medical studies and hospital duties.
Nothing was overdone about her, and he appreciated that. Her long, curly brown hair framed her narrow face nicely. Her eyes were dark blue, and sparkled when she smiled. Her laugh was catchy, irresistible. She had an all-American look, but not banal. She was a hard body but she appeared so soft and feminine.
He'd watched other men hit on her studly students and even the occasional jaunty and ridiculous professor. She didn't hold it against them, and he saw how she deflected them, usually with some kindness, some small generosity.
But there was always that devilish, heartbreaking smile of hers. I'm not available, it said.
You can never have me. Please, don't even think about it. It's not that I'm too good for you, I'm just ... different.
Kate the Dependable, Kate the Nice Person, was right on time tonight.
She always left the cancer annex between a quarter to eight and eight.
She had her routines just as he did.
She was a first-year intern at North Carolina University Hospital in Chapel Hill, but she'd been working in a co-op program at Duke since January. The experimental cancer ward. He knew all about Katelya Mctiernan.
She was going to be thirty-one in a few weeks. She'd had to work three years to pay for her college and medical-school expenses. She had also spent two years with a sick mother in Buck, West Virginia.
She walked at a determined pace along Flowers Drive, toward the multilevel Medical Center parking garage. He had to move quickly to keep up with her, all the while watching her long shapely legs, which were a little too pale for his liking. No time for the sun, Kate?
Afraid of a little melanoma?
She carried thick medical volumes against one hip. Looks and brains.
She planned to practice back in West Virginia, where she was born. Didn't seem to care about making a lot of money.
What for? So she could own ten pairs of black high-topped sneakers?
Kate Mctiernan was wearing her usual university garb: a crisp white med-school jacket, khaki shirt, weathered tan trousers, her faithful black sneakers. It worked for her. Kate the Character. Slightly off-center. Unexpected. Strangely, powerfully alluring.
On Kate Mctiernan, almost anything would have worked, even the most homespun interpretation of cheap chic. He particularly loved Kate Mctiernan's irreverence toward university and hospital life, and especially the holier-than-thou medical school. It showed in the way she dressed; the casual way she carried herself now; everything about her lifestyle. She seldom wore makeup. She seemed very natural, and there was nothing phony or stuck-up about her that he'd noticed yet.
There was even a little of the unexpected klutz in her. Earlier in the week, he had seen her flush the deepest red after she tripped on a guardrail outside Perkins Library and crashed into a bench with her hip. That warmed him tremendously. He could be touched, could feel human warmth. He wanted Kate to love him ... He wanted to love her back.
That was why he was so special, so different. It was what separated him from all the other one-dimensional killers and butchers he had ever heard or read about, and he had read everything on the subject. He could feel everything. He could love. He knew that.
Kate said something amusing to a fortyish-looking professor as she walked past him. Casanova couldn't hear it from where he was watching.
Kate turned for some quick repartee, but kept on walking, leaving the professor with her luminous smile to think about.
He saw a little jiggle action as Kate whirled around after her brief interchange with the prof. Her breasts weren't too large or too small.
Her long brown hair was thick and wavy, shiny in the early evening light, revealing just a touch of red. Perfect in every detail.
He had been watching her for more than four weeks, and he knew she was the one. He could love Dr. Kate Mctiernan more than all the others.
He believed it for a moment. He ached to believe it. He said her name softly Kate ... Dr.
Kate.
Tick-cock.
Alex Cross 2 - Kiss the Girls
CHAPTER 11.
SAMPSON AND I took shifts at the wheel on the four-hour haul from Washington, down into North Carolina. While I drove, the Man Mountain slept. He wore a black T-shirt that bluntly said SECURITY. Economy of words.
When Sampson was at the controls of my ancient Porsche, I put on a set of old Koss headphones.
I listened to Big Joe Williams, thought about Scootchie, continued to feel hollowed-out.
I couldn't sleep, hadn't slept more than an hour the night before. I felt like a grief- stricken father whose only daughter was missing.
Something seemed wrong about this case.
We entered the South at noon. I had been born around a hundred miles away, in Winston-Salem. I hadn't been back there since I was ten years old, the year my mother died, and my brothers and I were moved to Washington.
I'd been to Durham before, for Naomi's graduation. She had finished Duke undergraduate summa cum laude, and she received one of the loudest, cheeriest ovations in the history of the ceremony. The Cross family had been there in full force. It was one of the happiest, proudest days for all of us.