The Last Kiss Goodbye: A Charlotte Stone Novel

by Karen Robards

  She might not have had it, but she knew what it was. At the erotic images that flooded her mind in the wake of his words, her knees went weak.

  “Not happening, Casper.”

  She climbed into bed, and pulled the covers up to her chin, and turned off the light.

  His voice came out of the dark. “Sleeping in your robe tonight?”

  Damn it, she’d forgotten to take it off. There was just enough light filtering in around the edges of the curtains to allow her to see the big, dark shape of him. Which meant that he could probably see her, too. Which meant that she was going to be taking her robe off under the covers, and dropping it discreetly off the far side of the bed.

  Which she did.

  “Dudley doesn’t turn you on.”

  Punching a pillow into submission, she turned onto her side with her back to him and laid her head on it. “How would you know?”

  “I know what you look like when you’re turned on. And you don’t look like that when you’re kissing him.”

  “I’m not having this conversation with you. In fact, I’m not having any conversation with you. I’m going to sleep.”

  “If he doesn’t turn you on when you’re kissing him, he’s not going to turn you on in bed.”

  She rolled so that she was facing him. “Damn it, Michael—”

  “You don’t want to have a relationship with a guy who doesn’t get you hot.”

  “Are you giving me relationship advice?”

  “If that’s what you want to call it. Bottom line is, you deserve a guy who gets you hot, babe.”

  “I’m not talking to you anymore. Good night.” She closed her eyes.

  “You like sex, Charlie. You know you do. You don’t want to shortchange yourself in that department.”

  Actually, most of the sex she’d had could be classified as lukewarm rather than hot. If she had to come up with an adjective to describe it, it would be fine. The sex was fine would cover almost every relationship she’d ever had.

  It didn’t cover sex with Michael, though. In fact, it was about the last description she would use to cover sex with him.

  Sex with Michael was not fine. It was—oh, no, she wasn’t going there. Not even in her thoughts.

  But her body went there anyway. She could feel its hungry tightening, feel her blood starting to steam.

  “There’s more to a relationship than sex,” she growled.

  He laughed. “You keep telling yourself that, babe.”

  Her eyes popped open of their own accord.

  “Mutual interests. Mutual respect. Common goals. A shared life plan.” She enumerated the building blocks of a good adult relationship.

  “If I could come over there and put my mouth on your breast and my hand between your legs, I guarantee you wouldn’t give a damn about any of that.”

  As her breath caught and her pulse rate surged and her bones liquefied, she sat straight up in bed and glared at him through the darkness. “Stop. I mean it.”

  “What? We’re having a discussion. You know, you make your point, I make mine.”

  “I don’t want to talk to you.”

  “I can think of lots of things I’d rather be doing to you, too—like, oh, I don’t know, getting you naked and pushing up inside you and making you come for me.”

  Caught by surprise by an undulating wave of desire that was hot enough to make her press her thighs together and squirm a little, Charlie fought to keep her breathing under control so her tormentor wouldn’t have a clue.

  “Listen, you jackass, if you don’t shut up I’ll—” Since she couldn’t think of anything that he might reasonably believe she would do to threaten him with, she broke off until something occurred to her . “Go knock on Kaminsky’s door and tell her the air-conditioning’s not working in my room and ask to sleep in her spare bed.”

  She could sense rather than see his smile. “And there you go: you just proved my point. You’re not threatening to run to Dudley, because you’re half afraid I’ll do something that’ll make you have to follow through, and you won’t do it. And you won’t do it because you don’t want to make him think you want to sleep with him, because you don’t, and that would be because he doesn’t turn you on all that much. If he did, you’d already be over there in bed with him.”

  “That is a total crock.”

  “Anyway, even if you did run to Sugar Buns for protection, I’d come with you. Remember that short leash you’ve got me on? The only difference would be that with Sugar Buns there you wouldn’t be able to answer back when I said dirty things to you.”

  “You know what? I don’t have to listen to this. I’m going to sleep.” She flopped back down and turned her back to him again.

  “You wearing any panties under that nightgown?”

  Charlie practically ground her teeth, but she didn’t reply.

  “Nah, I already know you’re not. Tell the truth, babe: did you bend over that bed on purpose, to drive me crazy with a glimpse of your sweet—”

  “Enough!” Charlie catapulted into a sitting position again and practically shot napalm at him with her eyes. “You want to talk? Is that it? Fine, I’m in. Why don’t you tell me about”—it took her a second, but then she had a topic that she felt was pretty much a sure bet to redirect his thoughts—“your watch?”

  There was a moment’s silence. “What about it?”

  Hah. She had him. She could hear the difference in his tone. “Where’d you get it? Was it a gift? What’s with the engraving on the back? That kind of thing.” She said it very much in the spirit of taking the battle to the enemy.

  He rolled over onto his back. She could see his hard profile, see the firm musculature of his chest and the flat plane of his abdomen and the bulge in his jeans and the powerful length of his legs, all in outline against the curtains. God, I want him. The thought came out of nowhere, and she was helpless against it. If he’d been alive, if he’d been a man instead of a ghost, she knew as well as she knew anything that she wouldn’t have been able to stop herself from crawling into bed with him and wrapping herself around him and letting him do anything he wanted to her while she sated herself with that hard body. But since he was a ghost, since doing what she was dying to do wasn’t possible (which was, she told herself, a good thing), she firmly ignored the hot, insistent throbbing deep inside her body and the too rapid beating of her heart and every other physical manifestation of her inner-slut-where-he-was-concerned. Instead, she was going to take advantage of this opportunity to try to get some answers from him. Even if she still wasn’t a hundred percent sure whether she could believe what he told her or not.

  “Some buddies gave it to me,” he said.

  “What kind of buddies?”

  “Marine buddies. Look, I don’t feel like talking about my watch right now. What the hell difference does it make at this point anyway?”

  “Oh, so we can talk about what you want but not about what I want? Is that it?” Crawling to the end of her bed, Charlie retrieved her laptop from its compartment in the top of her suitcase and clambered back up to the head of her bed with it. “So how about we don’t talk at all, then?”

  “What are you doing?” he asked as she pulled pillows into position, propped herself up against them, opened her laptop case, and turned her computer on. The soft glow of the screen allowed her to see that he was giving her a narrow-eyed look.

  “I was sleepy, but now I’m not. So I’m checking something out.” She clicked through to the file she was interested in.

  “What?”

  “None of your business.” It was Michael’s file, the digitalized combination of the boxes of papers and the Internet records and the medical and psychological assessments and everything else with his name on it that had been sent to Wallen’s Ridge when he had been acquired by her as a research subject. She’d had everything scanned and uploaded and cataloged into a master file which was kept on her office computer, and which had also been downloaded to her laptop for convenience,
just as she had done with the files of all of her research subjects. Everything that was officially known about each of their lives, and their crimes, was in there somewhere.

  Charlie located the section she was interested in, and started scrolling through the images.

  “That’s my damned file.” Michael had rolled to his feet and was now looming over her as he frowned down at the screen.

  “You’re right, it is.”

  As the page she sought came up Charlie sucked in her breath: three photographs recording a silver man’s watch, its wristband twisted and broken, the glass covering its face shattered, with a terrifying brown staining that she knew was dried blood darkening the cracks and crevices. Taken from different angles against a white ground, the photographs were labeled State’s Exhibit 27A.

  Reaching out, Charlie turned on the bedside lamp and picked up from the nightstand the man’s watch she had worn all day. Then she held it up beside the screen, comparing the object to the images. As far as she could tell, the two watches were identical.

  The pictures on the screen did not show the back of the face of the broken watch, where the words Semper Fi had been engraved on the watch in her hand.

  “Checking out my story?” There was an element of careful control to Michael’s voice. She glanced up at him, too engrossed in what she was doing to register the look in his eyes.

  “The watches appear to be identical.” Her tone made it a concession. She once again mentally checked off every similarity she could find: brand, features, size. “Of course, any engraving on the back of the face on this watch”—She tapped the screen—“is concealed by the angle of the pictures.”

  “There’s no engraving on the back of that watch. I got a real good look at it at my trial. Like I told the stupid motherfuckers then, and like I’m telling you now, it ain’t mine.”

  “Citizen men’s 860 stainless steel watch, found beside the body of victim number seven, Candace Hartnell,” Charlie read aloud. She had shifted into researcher mode. Her earlier tiredness—and arousal—was forgotten as she concentrated on the file. At the bottom of the page was a blue, underlined cross-reference number.

  As she clicked on it, Michael settled himself beside her on the bed.

  A moment later a video file labeled State’s Exhibit 27B came up on the screen. She clicked on the play arrow. For a second the screen went black.

  Then Charlie found herself looking at a grainy picture of Michael smiling a slow and seductive smile at a pretty dark-haired woman in a bar.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  It could have been any bar: dark gleaming wood, a long mirror fronted by a jumble of bottles and glasses, a heavyset bartender filling a mug with beer from a tap. Busy, with every bar stool occupied and more patrons crowding up to the counter. Dimly lit. Blue-collar and rowdy.

  Charlie found herself absolutely mesmerized by what she was watching. There was no sound, only poor-quality footage taken from a security camera above the bar. Other patrons were visible, but Charlie had no interest in them. Her attention was all on the extraordinarily handsome blond guy as he laughed and chatted and bought drinks for pretty, twenty-five-year-old Candace Hartnell, whom Charlie recognized from the photos in Michael’s file. She was obviously in the process of being swept off her feet. He was knocking back drinks himself at a rate that told her he was feeling no pain, and chasing the booze with an occasional handful of peanuts scooped up from the dish on the crowded counter. Watching the way Candace looked at him, the way she smiled, the way she first laid her hand over his and then playfully trailed her fingers down his muscular arm, Charlie saw with no surprise that the interest was at least as high on her part as it was on his. Finally, when he put his hand somewhere out of range of the camera that Charlie thought from the angle of both their bodies must be her thigh, and in response she leaned toward him to whisper in his ear, Charlie could tell she was ready to leave with him whenever he wanted. The footage practically crackled with heat, but it was Michael who captured her attention. This younger, happier, deliberately charming version of him made her breath catch and her heart ache a little.

  At least, until she recollected that the young woman he was using his devastating good looks to seduce so successfully would be dead before morning, her nude body found horribly slashed and mutilated in the tangled sheets of her own blood-soaked bed.

  Once she remembered that, it was almost like watching a python toy with a mouse. Gritting her teeth, Charlie pushed emotion as far away as she could, and set herself to looking for details: Michael was dressed exactly as he was right now, white tee and jeans, and—she was willing to bet, although she couldn’t see his feet—boots. The same outfit he was presently wearing, she was almost sure. On his wrist, plain to see and absolutely unmistakable in the context of what she now knew, was his watch. She looked at it closely. It appeared identical to both the intact one she was holding, and the broken one in the photos.

  As she watched, video Michael rolled to his feet, snagging Candace with an arm around her waist and pulling her up with him. Laughing, she leaned into him while he nuzzled her neck. Then, close as a stamp to an envelope, she walked out of the frame with him. He seemed slightly unsteady on his feet. She was clingy and had both arms around his waist.

  Candace Hartnell was slashed to death later that night. Early the following morning, Michael Garland was arrested and subsequently charged with the crime. Shortly thereafter he was linked with six previous knife murders of young women. The night she was watching had been the last night of freedom in his life: the five subsequent years had been spent in an assortment of jails and prisons. Charlie knew all that, knew, too, the overwhelming nature of the evidence pointing to his guilt that had been presented at his trial. The video she’d just watched, for example, was damning. It even showed him wearing the watch that had been found tangled in the covers with Candace Hartnell’s dead body: State Exhibit 27A.

  Only Charlie was holding an identical watch in her hand. One, moreover, that had been identified as belonging to Michael by the Mariposa Police Department, which had arrested him hours after Candace Hartnell’s murder and had presumably taken it from him then as intake material. Michael had correctly described the engraving on the back to her before he’d ever gotten a look at it. It was sized to fit his larger than average wrist, and he insisted that it, and not the one in the pictures, was his.

  That, to Charlie, raised at least a flicker of reasonable doubt as to his guilt.

  Clicking off the video, she glanced his way. He was lying on his back beside her now, his head on a pillow, his hands laced behind his head. Instead of watching the video, he’d been staring up at the ceiling. As if he felt her eyes on him, he looked at her.

  “After that, I took her back to her house and went psycho on her. Raped her. Cut her to ribbons with my handy-dandy hunting knife that I subsequently got rid of where no one could find it. Only I was too damned dumb not to get myself arrested, so I got nailed for her murder and six other murders besides. Does that answer the question you’re getting ready to ask me?” His tone was almost casual. His eyes were savage.

  Charlie sighed. She’d read those details in his file when he’d first become a subject of her study and, up until less than a week ago, had seen no reason to question them. Now she discovered that she was ready to consider other possibilities.

  “You want to tell me what really happened?”

  “What, you don’t believe I went psycho and killed that girl? That’s the conclusion a jury of my peers reached. They were so damned sure of it I got sentenced to death.”

  Tired of holding his watch, she slid it onto her arm. His eyes tracked the gesture, narrowed.

  “I want to hear the truth, whatever it is,” she said.

  His lips compressed. “Does it matter? At this point, what the hell does it change? Unless you’ve got some cure for dead I don’t know about.”

  “Michael. Please. Tell me what happened.”

  The look he gave her glittered wi
th anger and frustration and a whole host of other emotions Charlie didn’t even try to analyze.

  “You want the truth? Here it is: I had a few drinks, I picked up a girl in a bar, I went home with her, we got it on. No rape involved. Hell, I never raped a woman in my life. When I woke up, it was about four in the morning. She was asleep—not dead, no blood, not a hair on her head harmed; in fact, last time she had anything to say she gave me to understand that she was feeling pretty good. I wasn’t in any mood for the whole morning after thing so I put my clothes on and left. No, I didn’t wake her up to say goodbye. Hell, at that point I couldn’t even remember her name. But she was alive. So I’m driving home, and I guess I was speeding or something because I got pulled over by this damned little pissant of a cop. He arrested me on suspicion of drunk driving—no breathalyzer or anything, but he said I flunked his damned field sobriety test, which I didn’t. I guess he could smell the booze on me. So he takes me in and they lock me up, and while I’m asleep in their damned cell somebody comes across Candace—I found out her name pretty quick—sliced to pieces in her bed.” He grimaced. “After that, things went downhill on a greased slide.”

  Charlie was remembering the evidence. “They found your DNA all over her, and her DNA all over you, which I guess makes sense if you’d just slept with her. There were dozens of eyewitnesses to you leaving the bar with her, as well as that video footage. Your watch—a watch that appeared identical to yours—was found in bed with her dead body, looking like it was ripped off your arm and broken as she fought for her life. According to all the evidence, you were the last person to see her alive. Plus, if I recall, she had your skin under her fingernails and you had scratches on your body.”

  “The scratches were on my back! She was wild as hell, and when we were having sex, she scratched my damned back! That’s the kind of thing the prosecutors did: they twisted everything to make it sound like I was guilty. But I didn’t kill her. Why the hell would I kill her?” At something he must have seen in Charlie’s face, his brows snapped together. “Oh, that’s right: I’m a murderous psychopath. Who needs a reason?”