Kiss the Girls Page 0,17

her hair had come undone and rested on her shoulder. She was no longer beautiful. What was left of her was bloated and suffused. The odor of decomposition was pungent even out in the open air.

The empty sockets seemed to be staring up into a crescent-shaped opening at the tops of the pine trees, and I wondered what her eyes had looked at last.

I tried to imagine “Casanova” cavorting around in these deep dark woods before we had arrived. I took a guess that he was in his twenties or thirties, and physically strong. I was afraid for Scootchie, much more than I had been, in fact.

Casanova. The world’s greatest lover… God save us.

Chapter 15

IT WAS well past ten o’clock, and we were still at the grisly, highly disturbing murder scene. The dazzling amber headlights of official cars and emergency vehicles were used to illuminate a footworn path into the shadowy woods. It was getting colder outside. The chill night wind was a gritty slap in the face.

The corpse still hadn’t been moved.

I watched the Bureau’s technicians dutifully strip search the woods, collecting forensic clues and taking measurements. The immediate area had been cordoned off, but I made a sketch in the dim light, and took my own preliminary notes. I was trying to remember what I could about the original Casanova. Eighteenth-century adventurer, writer, libertine. I had read parts of his memoirs somewhere along the line.

Beyond the obvious, why had the killer chosen the name? Did he believe that he truly loved women? Was this his way of showing it?

We could hear a bird somewhere let out an unearthly scream, and also the sounds of small animals all around us. Nobody thought of Bambi in these woods. Not under the circumstances of the gruesome murder.

Between ten-thirty and eleven, we heard a loud roar like thunder in the eerie woods. Nervous eyes looked up into the blue-black sky.

“There’s a familiar old tune,” Sampson said as he saw the fluttering lights of an incoming helicopter approaching from the northeast.

“Probably mediflight finally coming for the body,” I said.

A dark blue helicopter with gold stripes finally swirled down onto the blacktop highway. Whoever was piloting the copter in was a real pro.

“Not mediflight,” Sampson said; “more likely be Mick Jagger. Big stars travel in copters like that one.”

Joyce Kinney and the regional Bureau director were already headed back to the highway. Sampson and I followed along like uninvited pests.

We received another rude shock right away. Both of us recognized the tall, balding, distinguished-looking man who stepped from the helicopter.

“Now what the hell is he doing down here?” Sampson said. I had the same question, the same uneasy reaction. It was the deputy director of the FBI. The number two man, Ronald Burns. Burns was a real hummer inside the Bureau, a bigtime cage rattler.

We both knew Burns from our last “multijurisdictional” case. He was supposed to be political, a bad guy inside the Bureau, but he had never been that way with me. After he had looked at the body, he asked to speak to me. It was getting stranger and stranger down in Carolina.

Burns wanted to hold our little talk away from the big ears and small minds of his own people.

“Alex, I’m real sorry to hear your niece might have been kidnapped. I hope that isn’t the case,” he said. “Since you’re down here, maybe you can help us out.”

“Can I ask why you’re down here?” I said to Burns. Might as well skip right to the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.

Burns smiled, showing off his capped, very white front teeth. “I do wish you had accepted our offer of that VICAP position.”

I had been offered a job as a liaison between the Bureau and the D.C. police after the Soneji kidnapping case. Burns was one of the men who interviewed me.

“I like directness more than anything in a senior officer,” Burns continued.

I was still waiting for an answer to my direct question.

“I can’t tell you as much as you’d like to hear,” Burns finally said. “I will tell you that we don’t know if your niece was taken by this sick Johnny. He leaves very little physical evidence, Alex. He’s careful and he’s good at what he does.”

“So I’ve heard. Leads us into some obvious areas for suspects. Policemen, army vets, amateurs who study the police. That could be misdirection on his part, though. Maybe he wants us to think that way.”

Burns nodded. “I’m here because this has become a high-priority mess. It’s