Alex Cross - 02 - Kiss the Girls by James Patterson

Alex Cross - 02 - Kiss the Girls by James Patterson

Author:James Patterson
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9780316072977
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2009-09-30T07:00:00+00:00


Chapter 64

SMALL 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.



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