What was Cilia doing here?
“What the hell is going on at the house?” I asked Sampson again. I was starting to get a little concerned.
“Invite me in for a cold beer,” he said as he pulled the key from the ignition. “Least you can do.”
Sampson was already up and out of the car. He moves like a slick winter wind when he wants to.
“Let's go inside, Alex.” I had the car door open, but I was still sitting inside. "I live here.
I'll go in when I feel like it." I didn't feel like it suddenly. A sheen of cold sweat was on the back of my neck. Detective paranoia?
Maybe, maybe not.
“Don't be difficult,” Sampson called back over his shoulder, “for once in your life.” A long icy shiver ran through my body. I took a deep breath. The thought of the human monster I had recently helped put away still gave me nightmares. I deeply feared he would escape one day. The mass killer and kidnapper had already been to Fifth Street once.
What in hell was going on inside my house?
Sampson didn't knock on the front door, or ring the bell, which dangled on red-and-blue wires.
He just waltzed inside as if he lived there.
Same as it's always been. Mi casa es su casa. I followed him into my own house.
My boy, Damon, streaked into Sampson's outstretched arms, and John scooped up my son as if he were made of air. Jannie came skating toward me, calling me “Big Daddy” as she ran. She was already in her slipper-sock pajamas, smelling of fresh talcum after her bath. My little lady.
Something was wrong in her big brown eyes. The look on her face froze me.
"What is it, my honey bunch I asked as I nuzzled against Jannie's smooth, warm cheek. The two of us nuzzle a lot. “What's wrong? Tell your Daddy all your troubles and woes.” In the living room I could see three of my aunts, my two sisters-in-law, my one living brother, Charles. My aunts had been crying; their faces were all puffy and red. So had my sister-in-law Cilia, and she isn't one to get weepy without a good reason.
The room had the unnatural, claustrophobic look of a wake. Somebody has died, I thought.
Somebody we all love has died. But everybody I love seemed to be there, present and accounted for.
Nana Mama, my grandmother, was serving coffee, iced tea, and also cold chicken pieces, which no one seemed to be eating. Nana lives on Fifth Street with me and the kids. In her own mind, she's raising the three of us.
Nana had shrunk to around five feet by her eightieth year. She is still the most impressive person I know in our nation's capital, and I know most of them the Reagans, the Bush people, and now the Clintons.
My grandmother was dry-eyed as she did her serving. I have rarely seen her cry, though she is a tremendously warm and caring person. She just doesn't cry anymore. She says she doesn't have that much of life left, and she won't waste it on tears.
I finally walked into the living room and asked the question that was beating against the inside of my head. “It's nice to see everyone Charles, Cilia, Aunt Tia but would someone please tell me what's going on here?”
They all stared at me.
I still had Jannie cradled in my arms. Sampson had Damon tucked like a hairy football under his massive right arm.
Nana spoke for the assembled group. Her almost inaudible words sent the sharpest pain right through me.
“It's Naomi,” she said quietly. “Scootchie is missing, Alex.” Then Nana Mama started to weep for the first time in years.
Alex Cross 2 - Kiss the Girls
CHAPTER 6.
CASANOVA screamed, and the loud sound coming from deep inside his throat turned into a raspy howl.
He was crashing through the deep woods, thinking about the girl he had abandoned back there.
The horror of what he had done. Again.
Part of him wanted to go back for the girl save her an act of mercy.
He was experiencing spasms of guilt now, and he began to run faster and faster. His thick neck and chest were covered with perspiration. He felt weak, and his legs were rubbery and undependable.
He was fully conscious of what he had done. He just couldn't stop himself.
Anyway, it was better this way. She had seen his face. It was stupid of him to think she would ever be able to understand him. He had seen the fear and loathing in her eyes.
If only she'd listened when he'd tried to talk to her. After all, he was different from other mass killers he could feel everything he did.
He could feel love ... and suffer loss ... and ... He angrily swept away the death mask. It was all her fault. He would have to change personas now. He needed to stop being Casanova.
He needed to be himself. His pitiful other self.
Alex Cross 2 - Kiss the Girls
CHAPTER 7.
IT'S NAOMI. Scootchie is missing, Alex.
We held the most intense Cross family emergency conference in our kitchen, where they've always been held. Nana made more coffee, and also herbal tea for herself. I put the kids to bed first. Then I cracked opened a bottle of Black Jack and poured stiff drinks of whiskey all around.
I learned that my twenty-two-year-old niece had been missing in North Carolina for four days.
The police down there had waited that long to contact our family in Washington. As a policeman, I found that hard to understand. Two days was pretty standard in missing-person cases. Four days made no sense.
Naomi Cross was a law student at Duke University. She'd made Law Review and was near the top of her class. She was the pride of everyone in our family, including myself. We had a nickname for her that went back to when she was three or four years old. Scootchie. She always used to “scootch” up close to everybody when she was little. She loved to “scootch,” and hug, and be hugged. After my brother Aaron died, I helped Cilia to raise her. It wasn't hard she was always sweet and funny, cooperative, and so very smart.
Scootchie was missing. In North Carolina. Four days now.
“I talked to a detective named Ruskin,” Sampson told the group in the kitchen. He was trying not to act like a street cop, but he couldn't help it. He was on the case now. Flat-faced and serious. The Sampson stare.
"Detective Ruskin sounded knowledgeable about Naomi's disappearance.
Seemed like a straight-ahead cop on the phone. Something strange, though. Told me that a law- school friend of Naomi's reported her missing. Her name's Mary Ellen Klouk."
I had met Naomi's friend. She was a future lawyer, from Garden City, Long Island. Naomi had brought Mary Ellen home to Washington a couple of times. We'd gone to hear Handel's Messiah together one Christmas at the Kennedy Center.
Sampson took off his dark glasses, and kept them off, which is rare for him. Naomi was his favorite, and he was as shook up as the rest of us.
She called Sampson “His Grimness,” and “Darth One,” and he loved it when she teased him.
“Why didn't this Detective Ruskin call us before now? Why didn't those university people call me?” my sister-in-law asked. Cilia is forty-one. She has allowed herself to grow to ample proportions. I doubted that she was five feet four, but she had to be close to two hundred pounds. She'd told me that she didn't want to be attractive to men anymore.
“Don't know the answer to that yet,” Sampson told Cilia and the rest of us. “They told Mary Ellen Klouk not to call us.”
“What exactly did Detective Ruskin have to say about the delay?” I asked Sampson.
“Detective said there were extenuating circumstances. He wouldn't elaborate for me, persuasive as I can be.”
“You tell him we could have the conversation in person?” Sampson nodded slowly. "Uh-huh. He said the result would be the same.