Alex Cross 02 - Kiss the Girls by James Patterson Page A

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 large, Alex. I can’t tell you why at this time.
     It’s
classified
large.” Spoken like a true FBI honcho. Mysteries wrapped in more mysteries.
    Burns sighed. “I will tell you one thing. We believe that he might be a
collector.
We think he could be keeping a few of the young women nearby… a private harem maybe. His very own harem.”
    It was a scary, startling idea. It also gave me hope that Naomi might still be alive.
    “I want to be in on this,” I told Burns, holding eye contact with him. “Why don’t you tell me everything?” I gave him my terms.
     “I need to see the whole picture before I start giving out any theories. Why does he reject some of the women? If that’s what
     he’s doing.”
    “Alex, I can’t tell you any more right now. I’m sorry.” Burns shook his head and closed his eyes for a second. I realized
     that he was exhausted.
    “But you wanted to see how I would react to your collector theory?”
    “I did,” Burns admitted, and finally had to smile.
    “A modern-day harem would be possible, I guess. It’s a common enough male fantasy,” I told him. “Strangely, it’s a prevalent
     female fantasy, too. Don’t rule that out yet.”
    Burns catalogued what I’d said and left it at that. He asked me to help again, but was unwilling to tell me everything he
     knew. He finally walked back to be with his own people.
    Sampson came up beside me. “What did His Rigidness have to say? What brings him to this unholy forest with us mere mortals?”
    “He said something interesting. Said that Casanova might be a collector, maybe creating his own private harem somewhere near
     here,” I told Sampson. “He said the case is
large.
His choice of words.”
    “Large” meant it was a very bad case, probably worse than it already seemed. I wondered how that could be, and I almost didn’t
     want to know the answer.

Chapter 16
    K ATE MCTIERNAN was lost in an odd, but nicely illuminating, thought.
When the strike of a hawk breaks the body of its prey,
she considered,
it’s only because of timing.
    That was the insight from her latest kata in black-belt class. Exquisite timing was everything in karate, and also in so many
     other things. It also helped if you could bench-press almost two hundred pounds, which she could.
    Kate dawdled along busy, funky, rambunctious Franklin Street in Chapel Hill. The street ran north and south, bordering the
     picturesque campus of the University of North Carolina. She passed bookstores, pizza shops, Rollerblade rentals, Ben & Jerry’s
     ice cream. The rock group White Zombie was blaring from the icecream store. Kate wasn’t a dawdler by