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so delicious eating their dinner, wolfing their barbecue like small animals. North Carolina BBQ consisted of pork cooked over a fire, seasoned with a vinegar-laced sauce, then finely chopped. You
couldn’t
eat BBQ without slaw and hush puppies.
    He smiled at the unlikely scene.
Yum.
    Still, he moved on. Sights and scenes caught his eye. Pierced eyebrows. Tattooed ankles. Lalapalooza T-shirts. Lovely flowing breasts, legs, thighs everywhere he looked.
    He finally came to a small Gothic-style building near the Duke University Hospital, North Division. This was a special annex where terminally ill cancer patients from all over the South were cared for during their final days. His heart began to pound, and a series of small tremors shook his body.
    There she was!

Chapter 10

    T HERE WAS
the most beautiful woman in the South! Beautiful in all ways. Not only was she physically desirable—she was extremely smart. She might be able to understand him. Maybe she was as special as he was.
    He almost said the words out loud, and believed them to be absolutely true. He had done a great deal of homework on his next victim. Blood began to pump and rush into his forehead. He could feel a throbbing all through his body.
    Her name was Kate McTiernan. Katelya Margaret McTiernan, to be as precise as he liked to be.
    She was just walking out of the terminal cancer wing, where she had worked to help pay her way through medical school. She was all by her lonesome, as usual. Her last boyfriend had warned her that she was going to “end up a beautiful old maid.”
    Fat chance of that. Obviously, it was Kate McTiernan’s decision to be alone as much as she was. She could have been with nearly anyone she chose. She was stunningly beautiful, highly intelligent, and compassionate, from what he could tell so far. Kate
was a grind, though.
She was incredibly dedicated to her medical studies and hospital duties.
    Nothing was overdone about her, and he appreciated that. Her long, curly brown hair framed her narrow face nicely. Her eyes were dark brown, and sparkled when she smiled. Her laugh was catchy, irresistible. She had an all-American look, but not banal. She was a hardbody, but she appeared so soft and feminine.
    He’d watched other men hit on her—studly students and even the occasional jaunty and ridiculous professor. She didn’t hold it against them, and he saw how she deflected them, usually with some kindness, some small generosity.
    But there was always that devilish, heartbreaking smile of hers.
I’m not available,
it said.
You can never have me. Please, don’t even think about it. It’s not that I’m too good for you, I’m just… different.
    Kate the Dependable, Kate the Nice Person, was right on time tonight. She always left the cancer annex between a quarter to eight and eight. She had her routines just as he did.
    She was a first-year intern at North Carolina University Hospital in Chapel Hill, but she’d been working in a co-op program at Duke since January. The experimental cancer ward. He knew all about Katelya McTiernan.
    She was going to be thirty-one in a few weeks. She’d had to work three years to pay for her college and medical-school expenses. She had also spent two years with a sick mother in Buck, West Virginia.
    She walked at a determined pace along Flowers Drive, toward the multilevel Medical Center parking garage. He had to move quickly to keep up with her, all the while watching her long shapely legs, which were a little too pale for his liking.
No time for the sun, Kate? Afraid of a little melanoma?
    She carried thick medical volumes against one hip. Looks and brains. She planned to practice back in West Virginia, where she was born. Didn’t seem to care about making a lot of money. What for? So she could own
ten
pairs of black high-topped sneakers?
    Kate McTiernan was wearing her usual university garb: a crisp white med-school jacket, khaki shirt, weathered tan trousers, her faithful black sneakers. It