The Last Kiss Goodbye: A Charlotte Stone Novel

by Karen Robards

  Suddenly conscious of the humidity wrapping around her like a blanket, sure she was already rosy with the heat, Charlie turned toward the house, to discover Michael standing not ten feet away.

  His eyes twinkled at her. “Anybody ever tell you you look cute chasing chickens?”

  Her eyes swept him. “It’s nice to see you with all your clothes on.”

  He grinned. “The shirt dried. That silky nightgown you were wearing last night? Real pretty.”

  She was not about to ask How do you know? But her face must have said it for her, because after a single comprehensive look at it his grin widened and he continued, “You kicked all the covers off. About the same time you started letting out panicky little cries like something was after you.”

  Remembering how comforting she had found his presence in the middle of the night, she scowled at him. “What did you do, spend the entire night hovering over me?”

  “Nah, I spent most of it in Sugar Buns’ bedroom. I just checked on you occasionally.”

  Now, that would have been infuriating if she had believed it. The thing was, she didn’t. He might (or might not) be a charismatic psychopath/serial killer, but she’d already figured out that he wasn’t a creep. Flicking him a look that said Aren’t you funny, she walked on past him through the door into the blessedly cool air-conditioning. She was impatiently waiting on Michael to follow her so that she could close the door on the heat that billowed in behind her—she hadn’t yet quite totally internalized the fact that he could walk right through a closed door anytime he wanted to—when Kaminsky, half turning on the bar stool to look at her, said, “So what did your gossipy neighbor have to say?”

  “She wanted to know what had happened,” Charlie replied, closing the door after Michael did, indeed, walk through it—and while she was still holding it open, too. “She’d heard things, and she wanted to check.”

  “We need to canvas the neighbors, see if they saw or heard anything,” Tony said.

  Skirting the table, Charlie headed for the breakfast bar. “I already asked Melissa. She said the entire family went to bed at eleven and they didn’t know a thing about it until this morning, when a friend called and told her.”

  “I bet the whole town’s running scared,” Crane said. He looked at Charlie. “You want a cup of coffee?”

  “Thanks.” Charlie slid up onto the bar stool beside Tony, who smiled at her. “The horrible thing about it is, this wouldn’t have happened here if I didn’t live here.”

  “Tell me you’re not gonna start feeling guilty about it.” Michael leaned against the bar on her other side. Having his big body close enough to where she could have shifted an inch or so sideways and brushed him with her arm if she’d wanted to was vaguely unsettling. The thing was, every single bit of him from the faintest suggestion of stubble on his square jaw to the rock-hard abs inches from her elbow looked as real and solid as Tony did on her other side. It was difficult to keep her eyes off him, difficult to keep from letting his nearness kick her pulse rate up a notch. “The whole world ain’t your problem, babe.”

  “It would have happened somewhere,” Tony told her. “This guy’s a killer, and whether you’re involved or he’s pulling in some other expert he feels like challenging, he’ll kill until we catch him. Simple as that.”

  “The locals shouldn’t be in danger anyway. I’ve plotted out the location of the kill zones, which in this case are always the same as the disposal zones, and he never goes back to the same place,” Kaminsky said. “Right now, as far as this unsub is concerned, this town is probably the safest place on the planet.”

  “Oh, yay, I’ll tell my neighbors.” Charlie’s response was wry. “I’m sure that’ll make up for everything.”

  Tony’s eyes touched hers, dropped.

  “Just so you know, from where I’m standing, right above that first button you’ve got done up on your blouse, I can see this really mouthwatering little bit of cleavage. What do you want to bet Dudley can see it, too?” Michael drawled.

  Charlie couldn’t help it. Even as she shot him a fierce Stop talking to me look, she laid a protective hand across the bottom of the vee formed by the open collar of her blouse. It was all she could do to keep from doing up another button, simply to make sure that there was no cleavage to be seen. But that, she knew, would provide Michael with way too much entertainment. And would be a dead giveaway to how easily he could get under her skin, too.

  “After we go over some things, I’d like you to come with me to the hospital to talk to Jenna McDaniels,” Tony said to Charlie, who (a little jerkily) nodded agreement. Very subtly (she hoped) she adjusted her position so that she was sitting straight enough that presumably neither of the men on either side of her could see down her shirt. Not that she had any evidence except Michael’s suggestion that Tony had been looking. “Crane, when we’re through here you and Kaminsky can get busy talking to the neighbors. Plus, we need to pull all the surveillance video from every ATM, every convenience store, every traffic cam in the area. If the police cruisers have video, pull that, too. Everything. We know this guy was here in town yesterday and last night. It’s possible that he, or his vehicle, were caught on tape.”

  “Sure thing, boss,” Crane said as he handed Charlie a cup of coffee. Charlie dosed it liberally with Sweet’N Low from the sugar bowl on the counter, pointed Crane to a cabinet when he bemoaned the lack of real sugar, declined a doughnut (despite Michael telling her, “Take it. You need to eat.”), discreetly did up another blouse button when she judged that everyone (read Michael) was looking elsewhere, and allowed her attention to be directed to the laptop screen as Tony gestured at it and said, “Kaminsky, bring us up to speed, would you please?”

  Kaminsky put down her coffee cup.

  “First, there are seven separate groups of three victims each, for twenty-one known total victims of the Gingerbread Man.” Kaminsky tapped the screen, which displayed what looked like a bulletin board with small photos grouped together by threes. “Of that number, there have been sixteen fatalities. Five survived the attacks, including Jenna McDaniels.” She pointed to a line-up of five photos at the far side of the screen: the top one was of Jenna. “Three attacks occurred in each of the last two years and one attack—that would be Jenna McDaniels’ group—has occurred so far this year. The time frame for all of them is August/September. If the Gingerbread Man stays true to pattern, the attack on the McDaniels’ group is the only the first this year. We can expect three more victims to be kidnapped approximately ten to fourteen days from now. The next kill date should be two weekends away, on either Friday or Saturday. That’s the pattern.”

  “So we’ve got about ten days to find this guy before he starts up again,” Crane said, and Kaminsky nodded. “Always supposing he stays true to the pattern.”

  “Any idea how he chooses his victims?” Tony took a bite of a doughnut. From the corner of her eye, Charlie saw that Michael was watching Tony almost broodingly, and frowned. Surely he wasn’t looking like that because he thought the other man had been ogling her cleavage. After all, he had been doing the same thing. Then she had another thought: she was thinking of her pesky ghost strictly as Michael now. Calling him “Garland” no longer entered her head. And what that said about the changing state of their relationship she didn’t even want to contemplate.

  Kaminsky shook her head. “I’ve listed the victims’ names, ages, genders, races, marital status, occupations, and hometowns, and any other known identifying characteristics. I can’t find a pattern in the criteria he uses to select them—yet.”

  Charlie said, “If I’m remembering correctly”—she scanned the identifying information for each group to confirm it—“each group is roughly similar in composition. For example, the first group was made up of boys aged twelve, thirteen, and fourteen.”

  Kaminsky nodded. “That’s right. Group Two was three fifteen-year-old girls. Group Three was teenage boys again—two fourteen-year-olds and a sixteen-year-old. Group Four was
a departure in that two of the victims were adults and one was markedly dissimilar from the other two—two women in their forties and a fifteen-year-old boy. Group Five was a sixteen-year-old girl, a seventeen-year-old girl, and seventeen-year-old boy. Group Six was a fourteen-year-old boy, a fifteen-year-old boy, and an eighteen-year-old girl. Group Seven—well, that was the group last night. Raylene Witt and Laura Peters were both twenty-one. Jenna McDaniels is twenty.”

  “Who are the survivors?” Tony asked, polishing off his doughnut with a last, super-sized bite then wiping his fingers on a napkin. Michael was still watching him as he chewed and swallowed, Charlie saw. But when she took another sip of coffee, Michael’s eyes, glinting with some emotion she still couldn’t quite pinpoint, flickered to the cup she had just set down, where they lingered. It took a second, but then Charlie had an epiphany: she realized that Michael wasn’t ticked off at Tony at all. He was envying them their breakfast.

  Of course, he missed eating.

  She hated the idea of that.

  Michael must have felt her gaze on him, because he looked up then, saw her expression, and frowned at her.

  “So what’s up with the big sad eyes you’re giving me?” he demanded suspiciously.

  Charlie altered her expression in a hurry. No idea what you’re talking about, was the first part of what she hoped her expression conveyed. The second, which she already knew he was about as likely to pay attention to as he was to suddenly sprout an angelic halo, was Hush. Then, as Kaminsky started talking, Charlie wrenched her gaze away.

  “Ariane Spencer, fifteen at the time, from Group Two.” Not quite touching the screen, Kaminsky pointed to what looked like a yearbook photo of a pretty blond teen. “Matthew Hayes, sixteen, from Group Three.” The kid was wiry, with spiky black hair and a small silver ring piercing a nostril. “Andrew Russell, seventeen, from Group Five.” This boy had very short brown hair and thick black glasses. “Saul Tunney, fifteen, from Group Six.” He had a round, earnest-looking face and blond waves. “And, last but not least, Jenna McDaniels from Group Seven.”

  “So what we’ve got are seventeen teenagers ranging in age from fourteen to eighteen and five adult women, if you count Jenna McDaniels at twenty as an adult,” Tony said.

  “Did any of the victims know one another?” Having polished off his meal, Crane had come around the breakfast bar so he could look at the computer screen, too. Leaning toward it, he started to rest a hand on the counter. It passed right through Michael, who grimaced. Snatching his hand back, Crane straightened with a sharp “Ah!” and started rubbing his fingers.

  “Counter shocked me,” he said defensively in response to the surprised looks he got from the others. “Damned static electricity.”

  “Boo,” Michael growled after him as Crane moved on down to stand on the other side of Kaminsky.

  Involuntarily, Charlie smiled.

  Michael was smiling, too, as he met her gaze. After a second his eyes darkened. Then they moved down to her lips.

  “When you smile like that, all I want to do is kiss you,” he told her. “Damned shame I can’t. But I’m working on it.”

  He was trying to get a reaction out of her, Charlie told herself. She knew he took a great deal of pleasure from teasing her, rattling her composure, provoking her, turning her on. The only defense she had against him was to not respond. So she didn’t. At least, not outwardly.

  But there wasn’t a thing in the world she could do about the instant mental image she had of his mouth covering hers. Just like there wasn’t a thing in the world she could do about the way her body suffused with heat.

  “I think some of them did know the others in their group.” Looking away from Michael, who, having clearly seen something that interested him in her face, was now watching her like a cat at a mouse hole, Charlie concentrated on Crane instead as she picked up the thread of the (important, real-world) conversation. “Which ones and what the relationships were exactly I don’t recall right off the top of my head.”

  “We need to find that out.” As Tony spoke he looked at Kaminsky, who nodded.

  “What strikes me is that all the males are kids. I’m betting that seventeen-year-old boy was undersized. This guy’s afraid to tangle with a grown man. Which makes me think he’s not a real big guy himself, and probably doesn’t have any military or police background. No combat training or anything like that,” Crane said.

  Tony made a face. “I don’t think we can rule out a military or police background on the basis of that. A grown man is harder for anyone to deal with than a woman or a child. And it may be that grown men aren’t this guy’s thing.”

  Crane shrugged. “Good point.”

  “Forget the damned victims. You’re the key,” Michael told Charlie. His face had hardened, and the look he gave her was suddenly grim. “You want to figure out who this guy is, figure out how he knows you.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Charlie cast a surprised look at Michael: she hadn’t expected him to have tuned out the conversation, exactly—knowing him, that would have been expecting too much—but she equally hadn’t realized that he had been following it to such an extent. Certainly she hadn’t expected him to make such an astute observation. As soon as the words came out of his mouth, she realized that he was right.

  “Faster this guy’s caught, faster I quit having to worry about you getting yourself killed. And the faster Dudley there goes back to where he came from,” Michael replied to the look she gave him.

  Remembering in the nick of time that she had an audience, Charlie didn’t respond to that by so much as the flicker of an eyelash. Instead, she looked at Tony as she repeated Michael’s suggestion aloud. Only she expanded it to include figuring out how the Gingerbread Man knew all the experts to whom he had sent his message.

  “That’s a really good idea. Four’s a much more manageable number to start an investigation with than twenty-one,” Tony said thoughtfully. “Who’re the experts?”

  “Dr. David Myers, who as I told you last night wrote the definitive text on criminal psychology. Dr. Jeffrey Underwood, research geneticist and professor at Wake Forest School of Medicine. And Eric Riva, a reporter who wrote a series of articles about the case for the Charlotte Observer. That would be the primary newspaper in Charlotte, North Carolina,” Charlie said.

  “And you,” Kaminsky added, giving Charlie an inscrutable look. “Dr. Charlotte Stone, certified forensic psychiatrist, one of the top serial killer experts in the country.”

  “Who needs to find a new specialty,” Michael said, while Charlie, ignoring him, said to Tony, “I think what we need to ask ourselves is how the Gingerbread Man came to know about each of the experts. For example, I don’t think anybody outside of academia or the forensic psychiatric community has ever heard of me. So that should narrow the list of possible suspects right there.”

  “Are you kidding? You’ve been all over TV,” Kaminsky shot Charlie an incredulous glance. “For a few days there, practically every news channel and talk show host in the country was covering the Boardwalk Killer case twenty-four seven. You included.”

  “The girl who lived,” Michael told her on a satiric note. “Think about it: as a theme, it’s classic.”

  Considering the source, this clear reference to Harry Potter came as a shock. Michael had told her before that there wasn’t much to do in prison besides read and work out, but at the time they’d been talking about Shakespeare. Charlie decided that her mind had just officially been blown by the eclecticism of his literary choices.

  “Prison library,” Michael explained, clearly able to correctly interpret the look on her face. “If they had it, I read it.”

  “You were all over TV,” Crane was saying to her when she forced her attention to return to the living. “Including CNN. Anybody in the whole world practically could know who you are and what you do.”

  Charlie hadn’t realized. Or, rather, she hadn’t let herself realize. Probably, she decided, because she hadn’t wante
d to know.

  “I forgot about that.” Okay, that sounded lame.

  “You’ve been busy,” Michael said excusingly.

  “So let’s consider the other three,” Tony said. “How could this guy know them?” He looked at Charlie. “How did you know who they were?”

  She said, “I knew their identities from looking over the case for Dr. Myers. I knew him, of course, and I had heard of Dr. Underwood, but I had never heard of Eric Riva before Dr. Myers sent me the case files.”

  “Eric Riva was the first person to receive the Gingerbread Man’s You can’t catch me message, right?” Tony asked. When Charlie nodded, he said, “Let’s start with him.” He looked at Kaminsky. “Find out how widely read those columns he wrote were. And how he came to write them in the first place.”

  Kaminsky nodded. “I’m on it.”

  “I would say the first group of victims is the most important, too,” Charlie said slowly. “Something caused the Gingerbread Man to start with that group. I would posit that either he knew one of the victims in some way, or that he saw himself in one of the victims. Something traumatic may have happened to him at that age.”

  “Check them out, too,” Tony directed, and Kaminsky nodded.

  Then, remembering Raylene Witt’s appearance in her front hall—to be there, the spirit almost had to have been attached to someone or something nearby—Charlie added, “One more thing. We know the Gingerbread Man chased Jenna down the mountain. He—or a confederate, although I am almost one hundred percent certain we’ll find he works alone—kicked open my back door and entered my kitchen to leave the note and the knife for me to find. He may very well have walked around to the front of the house after that, and may even have come inside with the rescuers. We should check for video or photos of the front of my house—maybe one of the neighbors whipped out his phone and took pictures of the ambulance crew, or of Jenna on the stretcher, for example. We should compare fingerprints from the front door and hall with fingerprints on the back door. Also, we should probably get as complete a list as we can of who was on the scene.”