Kiss the Girls

CHAPTER 23.

I WAS a street detective again.

I spent most of Monday morning interviewing people who knew Kate Mctiernan. Casanova's latest victim was a first-year intern who'd been abducted from her apartment on the outskirts of Chapel Hill.

I was attempting to put together a psych profile of Casanova, but there wasn't enough information. Period. The FBI wasn't helping. Nick Ruskin still hadn't returned my phone calls.

A professor at North Carolina med school told me that Kate Mctiernan was one of the most conscientious students she'd taught in twenty years. Another professor at the school said that her commitment and intelligence were indeed high, but “her temperament is the truly extraordinary thing about Kate.” It was unanimous in that regard. Even competing interns at the hospital agreed that Kate Mctiernan was something else. “She's the least narcissistic woman I've ever met,” one of the woman interns told me. “Kate's totally driven, but she knows it and she can laugh at herself,” said another. “She's a really cool person. This is such a sad, numbing thing for everyone at the hospital.” “She's a brain, who happens to be built like a brick shithouse.” 1 called Peter Mcgrath, a history professor, and he reluctantly agreed to see me. Kate Mctiernan had dated him for almost four months, but their relationship had ended abruptly. Professor Mcgrath was tall, athletic-looking, a bit imperious.

“I could say that I fucked up royally by losing her,” Mcgrath admitted to me. "And I did. But I couldn't have held on to the Katester. She's probably the strongest-willed person, man or woman, that I've ever met.

God, I can't believe this has happened to Kate."

His face was pale, and he was obviously shaken up by her disappearance.

At least he appeared to be.

I ended up eating by myself in a noisy bar in the college town of Chapel Hill. There were hordes of university students, and a busy pool table, but I sat alone with my beers, a greasy, rubbery cheeseburger, and my early thoughts on Casanova.

The long day had drained me. I missed Sampson, my kids, my home in D.C. A comfortable world without any monsters. Scootchie was still missing, though. So were several other young women in the Southeast.

My thoughts kept drifting back to Kate Mctiernan, and what I'd heard about her today.

This is the way cases got solved at least it was the way I had always solved them. Data got collected. Data ran loose in the brain.

Eventually, connections were made.

Casanova doesn't just take physically beautiful women, I suddenly realized in the bar. He takes the most extraordinary women he can find. He's taking only the heartbreakers ... the women that everybody wants but nobody ever seems to get.

He's collecting them somewhere out there.

Why extraordinary women? I wondered.

There was one possible answer. Because he believes he's extraordinary, too.