Alex Cross 2 - Kiss the Girls

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 impressed.

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 killer's 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.

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.