Alex Cross 02 - Kiss the Girls (22 page)

I finally left the stakeout at around eleven o’clock. Rudolph had been inside for more than four hours. A loud, unidentifiable
buzzing noise in my head wouldn’t go away. I was still moving on Eastern time. It was 2:00 A.M. for me, and I needed to get
some sleep soon.

The FBI agents promised to call right away if anything broke, or if Dr. Rudolph went out hunting again that night. It had
to have been a bad scene for him on Melrose, and I thought that he might go after someone else soon.

If
he was actually the Gentleman Caller.

I was driven to the Holiday Inn at Sunset and Sepulveda. Kate McTiernan was staying there, too. The FBI had flown her to California
because Kate knew more about Casanova than anyone they had assigned to the case. She had been kidnapped by the creep and had
lived to tell about it. Kate might be able to identify the killer if he and Casanova were the same person. She had spent most
of the day being interviewed at the FBI offices in downtown Los Angeles.

Her room was several doors down from mine at the hotel. I only had to knock once before she opened a white door with a black
26 on the knocker.

“I couldn’t sleep. I was up waiting,” she said. “What happened? Tell me everything.”

I guess I wasn’t in a great mood after the failed bust. “Unfortunately, nothing happened.” I told her the bottom line.

Kate nodded, waiting for more. She had on a light blue tank top, khaki shorts, and yellow flip-flops. She was wide awake and
revved up. I was glad to see her, even at half-past two on a shitty morning.

I finally came in and we talked about the FBI stakeout on Melrose Avenue. I told Kate how close we might have come to getting
Dr. Will Rudolph. I remembered everything he’d said, every gesture. “He sounded like a gentleman. He acted like a gentleman,
too… right up until the blond woman made him angry.”

“What does he look like?” Kate asked. She was eager to help. I couldn’t blame her. The FBI had flown her to Los Angeles, then
stuck her in a hotel room for most of the day and night.

“I know how you feel, Kate. I’ve talked to the FBI, and you’re going to ride with me tomorrow. You’re going to see him, probably
in the morning. I don’t want to set up any bias in your mind. Is that okay?”

Kate nodded, but I could tell her feelings were hurt. She definitely wasn’t happy about her level of involvement so far.

“I’m sorry. I don’t want to act like a tough detective, a controlling bastard,” I finally said. “Let’s not fight about it.”

“Well, you were distant. Anyway, you’re forgiven. I guess we better get some sleep. Tomorrow’s another day. Big day maybe?”

“Yeah, tomorrow could be a big day. I really am sorry, Kate.”

“I know you are.” She finally smiled. “You really are forgiven. Sweet dreams. Tomorrow we nail Beavis. Then we get Butt-Head.”

I finally went off to my room. I hit the bed and thought about Kyle Craig for a while. He’d been able to sell my unorthodox
style to his confrères for one reason: it had worked before. I already had one monster’s scalp on my belt. I hadn’t played
according to the rules to get it. Kyle understood and respected results. In general, so did the Bureau. They were certainly
playing according to their own rules here in Los Angeles.

My last semiconscious thought was of Kate in those khaki shorts. Take your breath away. I had a passing thought that she might
come down the hall and
knock, knock, knock
on my door. We were in Hollywood, after all. Wasn’t that the way it happened in the movies?

But Kate didn’t come knocking on my hotel door. So much for Clint Eastwood and Rene Russo fantasies.

T
HIS WAS going to be a big day in Tinseltown. The manhunt of manhunts was playing in Beverly Hills. Just like the day they
finally caught the killer-strangler Richard Ramirez out here.

Today we get Beavis.

It was a few minutes past eight in the morning. Kate and I were sitting in an arctic-blue Taurus parked half a block from
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. There was an electrical sound in the air, as if the city were being run on a single,
huge generator. A play on an old line ran through my head:
Hell is a city much like Los Angeles.

I was nervous and tense; my body felt numb, and my stomach was queasy. The burnout factor. Not enough sleep. Too much stress
for too long a stretch. Chasing monsters from sea to shining sea.

“That’s Dr. Will Rudolph climbing out of the BMW,” I said to Kate. I was so wound up, I felt as if strong hands were squeezing
me.

“Good-looking,” Kate muttered. “Real sure of himself, too. The way he moves.
Doctor
Rudolph.”

Kate didn’t say another word as she intently watched Rudolph. Was he the Gentleman Caller? Was he also Casanova? Or were we
being set up for some sick, psychopathic reason that I did’t understand yet?

The morning’s temperature hovered in the low sixties. The air had a crisp snap, like fall in the Northeast. Kate had on an
old college sweatsuit, high-topped running shoes, dimestore sunglasses. Her long brown hair was bunched back in a ponytail.
Sensible stakeout attire and grooming.

“Alex, the FBI’s all around him now?” she asked me without looking away from the binoculars. “They’re here right now? That
scum can’t possibly get away?”

I nodded. “If he does anything,
anything
that shows us he’s the Gentleman, they’ll grab him. They want this arrest for themselves.”

But the FBI was also giving me whatever rope I needed. Kyle Craig had kept his promise. So far, anyway.

Kate and I watched as Dr. Will Rudolph slid out of the BMW coupe, which he’d just parked in a private lot on the west side
of the hospital. He wore a European-style charcoal-gray suit. It was cut well and looked expensive. It probably cost as much
as my house in D.C. His brown hair was held back in a fashionable ponytail. He had on dark glasses with round tortoiseshell
frames.

A doctor in an exclusive Beverly Hills hospital. Smug as hell.
The goddamn Gentleman Caller who was setting this city on fire?

I ached to run across the parking lot and hit him, take him down right now. I ground my teeth until my jaw was stiff. Kate
wouldn’t take her eyes away from Dr. Will Rudolph. Was he Casanova, too? Were they one and the same monster? Was that it?

We both watched Rudolph as he crossed the hospital lot. His stride was long and quick and buoyant. Nothing bothering him today.
Finally, he disappeared inside a gray metal side door of the hospital.

“A
doctor,
” Kate said and shook her head back and forth. “This is so weird, Alex. I’m shaking on the
inside.
”

The static on the car radio startled us, but we could hear agent John Asaro’s deep, raspy voice.

“Alex, did you guys see him? Get a good look? What does Ms. McTiernan think? What’s the verdict on our Dr. Squirrel?”

I looked across the front seat at Kate. She looked all of her thirty-one years right now. Not quite so confident and assured,
a little gray around the gills. The prime witness. She understood the deadly seriousness of the moment perfectly.

“I don’t think he’s Casanova,” Kate finally said. She shook her head. “He’s not the same physical type. He’s thinner…
carries
himself differently. I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I don’t think it’s him, goddammit.” She sounded a little disappointed.

Kate continued to shake her head. “I’m almost sure he isn’t Casanova, Alex. There must be two of them. Two Mr. Squirrels.”
Her brown eyes were intense, as she looked at me.

So there
were
two of them. Were they competing? What the hell was their coast-to-coast game all about?

S
MALL TALK, surveillance talk; it was familiar territory for me. Sampson and I had a saying about surveillance back in D.C.:
They
do the crime;
we
do the time.

“How much could he make with a successful Beverly Hills medical practice? Ballpark number, Kate,” I asked my partner. We were
still watching the doctors’ private parking lot of Cedars-Sinai. There was nothing to do but eyeball Rudolph’s spiffy new
BMW and wait, and talk like old friends on a front stoop in D.C.

“He probably charges about a hundred and fifty to two a visit. He could gross five or six hundred thousand a year. Then there
are surgery fees, Alex. That’s if he has a conscience about the prices he charges, and we
know
he doesn’t have a conscience.”

I shook my head in disbelief as I rubbed my palm over my chin. “I have to get back into private practice. Baby needs new shoes.”

Kate smiled. “You miss them, don’t you, Alex? You talk about your kids a lot. Damon and Jannie. Poolball-head and Velcro.”

I smiled back. Kate knew my nicknames for the kids by now. “Yeah, I do. They’re my babies, my little pals.”

Kate laughed some more. I liked to make her laugh. I thought of the bittersweet stories she’d told me about her sisters, especially
her twin, Kristin. Laughter is good medicine.

The black BMW coupe just sat there, shining brightly and expensively in the California sunlight.
Surveillance sucks,
I thought,
no matter where you have to do it. Even in sunny L.A.

Kyle Craig had gotten me a lot of rope here in Los Angeles. Certainly much more than I’d had in the South. He’d gotten rope
for Kate, too. There was something in it for him, though. The old quid pro quo. Kyle wanted me to interview the Gentleman
Caller once he was caught, and he expected me to report everything to him. I suspected that Kyle himself hoped to bag Casanova.

“Do you really think the two of them are competing?” Kate asked me after a while.

“It makes psychological sense out of some things for me,” I told her. “They might feel a need to ‘one up’ each other. The
Gentleman’s diaries could be his way of saying: See, I’m better than you. I’m more famous. Anyway, I haven’t decided yet.
Sharing their exploits is probably more for thrill purposes than intimacy, though. They
both
like to get turned on.”

Kate stared into my eyes. “Alex, doesn’t it make you feel creepy as hell trying to figure this out?”

I smiled. “That’s why I want to catch Butt-Head and Beavis. So the creepiness will finally stop.”

Kate and I waited at the hospital until Rudolph finally reappeared. It was nearly two in the afternoon. He drove straight
to his office on North Bedford, west of Rodeo Drive. Rudolph saw patients there. Mostly women patients. Dr. Rudolph was a
plastic surgeon. As such, he could
create
and
sculpt.
Women
depended
on him. And… his patients all
chose
him.

We followed Rudolph home at around seven. Five or six hundred thousand a year, I was thinking. It was more than I could make
in a decade. Was it the money he needed to be the Gentleman Caller? Was Casanova wealthy, too? Was he a doctor also? Was that
how they committed their perfect crimes?

These questions were rolling around in my head.

I fingered an index card in my trouser pocket. I had begun to keep a “shortlist” on both Casanova and the Gentleman. I would
add or subtract what I considered key attributes to the profile. I carried the card with me at all times.

CASANOVA

Collector

harem

artist, organized

different masks… to

represent moods or personas? doctor?

claims to “love” victims

gaining a taste for violence

knows about me

competing with Gary Soneji?

competing with the L.A. Gentleman?

GENTLEMAN

gives out flowers—sexual?

extremely violent and dangerous

takes beautiful young women of all types

extremely organized

not artistic in terms of his killing

doctor

cold and impersonal as a killer… a butcher

craves recognition and fame—

possibly wealthy—penthouse apartment

graduated Duke Medical School, 1986

raised in North Carolina

I thought some more about the connection between Rudolph and Casanova as Kate and I twiddled our thumbs outside the apartment.
A relevant psychological condition had occurred to me. It was called twinning, and it could be a key. Twinning just might
explain the bizarre relationship between the monsters. Twinning was caused by an urge to bond, usually between two lonely
people. Once they “twin,” the two become a “whole”; they become dependent on each other, often obsessively so. Sometimes the
“twins” become highly competitive.

Twinning was like an addiction to
couple.
To belong to a
secret club.
Just two people and no passwords. In its negative form, it was the fusing of two people for their own individual needs, which
weren’t mutually healthy.

I ran it by Kate. She was a twin, too.

“Quite often, there’s a dominant figure in a twinning relationship,” I said. “Was that true of you and your sister?”

“I probably was with Kristin,” Kate said. “I got the good grades in school. I was a little pushy sometimes. She even called
me ‘Push’ in high school. Worse names than that, too.”

“The dominant twin can act in a male role-model behavior structure,” I said to Kate. The two of us were talking doctor to
doctor. “The dominant figure might
not
be the more skillful at manipulation, though.”

“As you could imagine, I’ve read a little about the phenomenon,” Kate said and smiled. “Twinning creates a uniquely powerful
structure within which the bonded pair can operate in complex ways. Something like that?”

“That’s correct, Dr. McTiernan. In the case of Casanova and the Gentleman, each would have his own bodyguard-cum-supportive
person. That could be why they
achieve
so well. Perfect crimes. They each have a built-in, and very effective, emotional support system.”

The question ringing loudly in my mind was—
how had they originally met?
Was it at Duke? Had Casanova been a student there, too? It made some sense. It also reminded me of the Leopold-Loeb case
in Chicago.
Two very smart boys, special boys, committing forbidden acts together. Sharing evil thoughts and dirty secrets because they
were lonely and had no one else to talk to… twinning at its most destructive.