The Last Kiss Goodbye: A Charlotte Stone Novel

by Karen Robards

  It wasn’t so much what he had said, as how he had said it: there had been, she thought, genuine admiration in his tone. Approval and, yes, affection had been mixed in there somewhere, too.

  His opinion of her meant something to her. Actually, it meant a whole lot.

  The realization didn’t exactly make her happy. Bottom line, though, was that it was a new fact of her life with which she was just going to have to deal.

  She and Tony grabbed a quick lunch at the Mutual Drug Store and Cafeteria, which was so crowded with members of the Powell Valley High School football team who were having a meal after practice that they were able to eat undisturbed except for a few friendly waves. They talked shop throughout, although Tony did throw a couple of would-be-flirty comments her way. Given that Michael was lounging beside her listening to every word that was said, flirting with Tony was impossible, so she didn’t follow through and that part of the conversation went nowhere. Which didn’t exactly please her—a relationship with Tony was something that she really did want to explore—but under the circumstances what could she do? She did manage to consume her lunch without worrying too much about Michael, who was looking increasingly disgruntled as he listened to their conversation. But he did nothing more disruptive than make the odd annoying remark, which she, of course, ignored, and watch them eat.

  Tony was paying the bill—Bureau expense account, he teased—when Charlie’s cell phone buzzed. Having set her phone on vibrate, she’d been letting her calls go through to voice mail but this one, she saw, was from Tam.

  Tam was different. Tam was important. Tam’s call—and Charlie hated to think what that said about how her priorities were now ordered—might very well be about Michael. This call she needed to take.

  Excusing herself to Tony, she headed for the ladies’ room.

  “You can wait out here,” she told Michael at the door. A pair of elderly women walked out of the restroom at that moment. Michael glanced at them, then looked back at her.

  “You see me arguing?” He settled his broad shoulders against the wall beside the door.

  Charlie went inside and called Tam.

  “Oh, cherie, I am in such a state!” Tam exclaimed without preliminaries when they connected. “Where are you?”

  Charlie told her.

  “You’re safe? You’re not in any kind of danger?”

  Charlie looked around the small, blue-tiled restroom. The last stall was occupied by a woman and her little girl—Charlie knew, because she could hear them talking—but other than that she was alone.

  “No. I’m fine.”

  “Well, you listen up: there’s danger around you. Terrible danger. Ever since I talked to you, I’ve been getting visions of you being swallowed up in this giant gray cloud. It makes my blood run cold.”

  “What kind of danger?” Charlie tried not to let her voice change. She knew Tam: Tam was the real deal. If Tam said she was in danger, then Charlie was prepared to take her word for it.

  “I don’t know. It isn’t clear. I just know it’s close—closer than you think. For some reason you can’t see it. It’s like you’re blind to it, or the wool is being pulled over your eyes or something.” Tam’s voice had an urgent undertone. “I wish I could be more specific, but I can’t. Not yet anyway.”

  “Okay.” Charlie felt like a cold hand was gripping the back of her neck. She caught herself looking warily around the bathroom. It was no more than two sinks, three stalls. Wherever the danger to her lurked, she was pretty certain it wasn’t in there. “Thanks for warning me.”

  “I’m focusing on you real intensely. I’ll have a breakthrough soon.” Tam was breathing hard; Charlie could hear it through the phone. “You be careful, you hear?”

  The sound of the toilet flushing made Charlie jump. A moment later, the little girl and her mother emerged to head for the sink.

  “I’ll be careful.” Charlie instinctively made sure her back was to the wall as she watched the mother and daughter at the sink. The knowledge that Michael was right outside was comforting. If she yelled, he would hear.

  But then, given that he was as solid as mist, what good would that do?

  “I’ll call you, cherie, the moment I get more,” Tam promised, and, as Charlie said “Thanks,” she disconnected.

  Dropping her phone back in her purse, Charlie’s first instinct was to run as fast as she could to first Michael and then Tony and tell them what Tam had said.

  But as she considered it, the thought of telling Tony that her psychic friend had warned her she was in danger made her uncomfortable: how far on the nut-job side of the equation did she really want him to think she was? As for Michael, there was the solid-as-mist factor to consider. Plus he was already in overprotective mode, and did she truly want to risk having him start harping again on how she needed to find a new job?

  As the mother and daughter left, Charlie washed her hands, splashed a little cool water on her face, then took a moment to brush her hair and smooth on lip gloss. All the while she was thinking the matter through.

  She couldn’t tell Tony. But Michael?

  Charlie hadn’t made up her mind when she exited the bathroom to find Michael, as she had expected, still stationed outside the door. Straightening to his full height as she approached him, he swept her with a sardonic look. Then his eyes narrowed on her face.

  “So what’s with you?” he asked.

  Charlie’s lips pursed. She walked down the short corridor toward the main dining room, where she knew Tony would be waiting for her. Michael fell in beside her.

  “Something’s up,” he persisted. “In case you still don’t get it, your face is as easy to read as a neon sign. You can either go ahead and tell me what happened in there, or we can play twenty questions until I get an answer. Your choice.”

  Charlie flicked him a look. Could he really read her that easily? The answer was: apparently so. Then she sighed and gave up. The truth was, she almost certainly had been going to tell him anyway. She badly needed to tell somebody, and Michael was the only one around who would not only believe her, but, because he’d had firsthand experience with Tam’s gifts, appreciate the seriousness of the warning.

  “Tam called.” The corridor was deserted. Charlie stopped walking, turned to look at him.

  He stopped, too. His eyebrows went up. “The voodoo priestess?” Then he frowned at her, as if had occurred to him that he might have been the subject of the conversation. “What did she want?”

  Charlie hesitated. While she’d been tangentially absorbing how tall and powerfully built and absolutely staggeringly good-looking he was, a horrible little niggle of a suspicion inserted itself into her brain. Once it was there, there was nothing she could do about it. It squirmed around taking on a life of its own. “She called to warn me. She said I’m in danger.”

  His eyes narrowed. His jaw tightened.

  “What kind of danger?” he asked carefully.

  She shook her head. “Tam didn’t know. She simply said I should be careful. She said she saw me being swallowed up by a big gray cloud, and that that was bad.”

  Even as she said it, Charlie felt that creeping chill on the back of her neck again.

  Michael swore. Then he said, “You take her seriously?”

  Charlie nodded. “Yes. I do.”

  His face softened fractionally. “You don’t have to look so worried, buttercup. I got your back. And from here on out, I’m not letting you out of my sight.”

  “Yes, but what if you’re the danger Tam saw?” That was the niggling little thought that had been squirming around the edges of Charlie’s mind, and now she’d come out with it. After all, it wasn’t like there was anything physical he could do to her even if the wool had been totally pulled over her eyes and he really was the psycho killer she had first thought him. She didn’t think.

  “Me?” He first looked surprised, then disgusted. “As in, you think you’re in danger from me?”

  The look Charlie gave him brimmed with all
the latent mistrust she’d been arguing herself out of since he had died.

  As he met her gaze his eyes cooled. Then they hardened. Then he gave her the smallest of mocking smiles. “If that’s the case, then I guess I’d have to say that makes you shit out of luck.”

  Two more women appeared at the top of the corridor, clearly heading for the ladies’ room, and Charlie started walking again. Michael stalked—that was the only word for it—at her side, and a glance at his face told her that he was seriously angry.

  “You don’t scare me, Casper,” she hissed beneath the cover of a hand she lifted to ostensibly cover a yawn.

  “Watch it, Doc,” he said. “You’re pissing me off. Lucky for you I don’t have access to a ghost knife.”

  “That was out of line,” she flared at him as they proceeded into the dining room, completely aware that they were no longer alone but hoping that amid the football team’s rowdiness no one would notice her talking to empty space. “Tam said the wool was being pulled over my eyes. I’d be a fool not to be cautious.”

  “Oh, right, and that would be by me.” His eyes glinted at her. “But you’ve figured out that you don’t have to be afraid of me because I’m dead, right? It’d be different if I was still alive.”

  Before she could respond to that Tony, spotting her, called her name, and she had to look away from Michael to smile at him.

  Two hours later, she, Tony, Buzz, and Kaminsky (plus a still obviously ticked off Michael) were on board the team’s private plane on their way to Columbia, South Carolina, where David Myers lived. He had agreed to meet with them at four. After that, they would talk with local investigators, interview the surviving victim, who still lived in the area, and tour the kill site. Then they would fly on to Charlotte, North Carolina, where they would spend the night. In the morning they would interview Eric Riva, tour the Group Four kill site (there was no surviving victim in that group), then drive the 83 miles to Winston-Salem, where they would meet the final expert, Jeffrey Underwood, and visit the Group Five kill site. The Group Five survivor, then-seventeen-year-old Andrew Russell, had since moved to Seattle, Washington. It was agreed that the most time-efficient method of talking to him and other geographically distant survivors was via Skype.

  On the plane, they all got busy doing their respective jobs, and for a while, except for the hum of the engine, quiet reigned. Charlie compiled a list of possible experts whom she guessed the Gingerbread Man might target next. By limiting herself to the general geographic area that seemed to be the killer’s comfort zone, and doing her best to extrapolate what might draw the Gingerbread Man to a particular expert’s résumé, she came up with a list of ten possibilities. It wasn’t by any means comprehensive, as she told Tony when she presented it to him, nor did she have any idea if the Gingerbread Man would actually choose any one of the experts on the list. But as Tony said, it was a place to start, and he immediately alerted local FBI offices to keep a watch on the people she had named, and to start searching within a ten mile radius of their locations for possible future kill sites.

  There was no time to waste. None of them ever forgot for a minute that the clock was ticking. In approximately twelve more days, the Gingerbread Man would collect his newest victims, and the killing cycle would begin again.

  “He would’ve needed some kind of equipment—an industrial grade hose and pump, presumably—to siphon water from the secondary pit to the primary one,” Tony said. By that time, they were all seated together in the cushy leather seats surrounding the small oval pop-up conference table in the middle of the plane. Kaminsky had her laptop on. The rest of them relied on their own notes or devices—or memories—to keep up. The day was beautiful if hot, the flight was smooth, and outside the window at Charlie’s elbow the sky was endlessly blue above a layer of frothy white clouds.

  “The secondary pit was fed by an underground stream, so it was always full,” Kaminsky said. “Continual flooding was one of the reasons the site had been abandoned.”

  “Can we try to identify and trace the equipment?” Tony asked.

  “On it,” Buzz said, and pecked a note into his tablet. “It’s probably a rental. If it is, this’ll be a piece of cake.”

  “What we have here is a power seeker killer,” Charlie said thoughtfully. “There is no sexual component to the murders at all, and no gain motivation, either, as far as I can tell. But I think there is a purpose behind the killings other than the thrill he gets from acting as God to the victims. Of course, it might be something as simple as him getting a charge out of the challenge of coming up with and then acting out these death scenarios. Or it might be something else.”

  “The guy’s a sick fuck.” Michael was stretched out on the couch opposite the area where Charlie and the others were sitting. His blue eyes were impossible to read. His mouth had a hard look to it. “There you go, babe. End of story.”

  “We just got preliminary results back on the objects left in Dr. Stone’s kitchen.” Kaminsky was looking at her computer. “The knife was the weapon used to kill Raylene Witt. The only fingerprints on it belonged to Jenna McDaniels, which confirms her account of what happened. And the handwriting on the You can’t catch me letter is consistent with Laura Peters’. Her fingerprints were all over the paper and envelope. There was no one else’s.”

  “So the unsub made Laura Peters write the note,” Tony said. “He’s toying with us. He knew we’d be salivating at the idea that we had a sample of his handwriting. And I’m one hundred percent convinced that he left that knife because he wanted to make sure we knew that Jenna McDaniels killed Raylene Witt.”

  “Like I said, he’s a sick fuck,” Michael said. Charlie flicked him a glance—with one arm tucked behind his head he looked comfortable enough, although his broad shoulders were too wide for the narrow couch—then focused her attention on the others, who actually were trying to contribute something productive to the discussion.

  “Omar’s—the bar Laura Peters left right before she was abducted—is right around the corner from Pembroke Avenue, where Jenna McDaniels was picked up,” Kaminsky was still peering at her computer screen.

  “Which leaves us with the question: did he go there targeting them, or did he pick them at random?” Tony asked.

  “There has to be a common denominator among the victims.” Because she was basically thinking aloud, Charlie looked at Tony without really seeing him. “What makes him choose them? Laura Peters couldn’t swim, for instance, and he chose to subject that group to death by drowning. The question we need to ask is, did he know Laura Peters couldn’t swim? And if so, how did he know it? And what about the others? Did he choose the death scenarios he placed them in according to their fears? If so, how did he know his victims, and what they were afraid of?”

  “Raylene Witt was a manicurist at Hollywood Nails in Hampton. Maybe at some point she did the other girls’ nails,” Buzz offered.

  Tony looked at him.

  “I’ll check it out,” Buzz added hastily. Then he made a face. “She couldn’t have done them on the day they disappeared, though, which was the only time Jenna McDaniels was in Hampton. Raylene had called in sick on Wednesday, which is the day she disappeared, and wasn’t scheduled to work again until Saturday. Only, because she lived alone, no one knew she had disappeared.”

  “Maybe there’s a twenty-four-hour clinic or pharmacy or something over there near that bar where Laura got nabbed and the street where Teen Queen got picked up. Maybe the screamer was over there because she was sick. Because it makes sense that they were all taken from the same area.” Michael was frowning up at the ceiling rather than looking at Charlie. She knew that, she realized crossly, because she was looking at him. But his comments bore repeating, so she did.

  “I’ll check that out, too,” Buzz said.

  “You know what, I think I may have just found a common denominator for these last three victims.” There was barely suppressed excitement in Kaminsky’s voice. “They were all in terrible car accid
ents when they were young. Raylene Witt’s mother was killed when a drunk driver hit the family car. Raylene was six years old. Her injuries were minor. Laura Peters was in a car crash when she was twelve. A friend’s mother was driving a group of four girls to a birthday party. Kylie Waters and Sara Goldberg—who were both twelve, too—were killed.” (“There you go,” Michael said, his gaze shifting to Charlie. “Kylie and Sara.” Remembering the two little girls who had come for Laura, Charlie thought, Yes, that sounds right. Those little girls, who were presumably her close friends at the time they were killed, would have come to take Laura to the light. Presumably.) “Then there’s Jenna McDaniels. At the age of sixteen, she was on her way to a dance when there was a rollover accident. The boy driving, Tommy Stafford, who I’m presuming was her date, was killed.”

  “Could be coincidence,” Buzz cautioned.

  “Ain’t no such thing as coincidence,” Michael said. He was looking at the ceiling again.

  “All right, we want to check into first responders, hospital personnel, anybody who might have been on the scene of all three accidents,” Tony said. “If that’s a coincidence, it’s a pretty big one.”

  “I’ll get on it.” Kaminsky typed something into her laptop.

  The pilot’s voice came over the intercom, telling them to prepare for landing. They were on the ground not long afterward.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, are you still pouting?” Charlie hissed at Michael, taking advantage of a semi-private moment as Tony talked to the flight crew, Kaminsky placed a phone call, and Buzz went to fetch the rental car. Michael was standing grim-faced and silent on the tarmac beside her.