The Last Kiss Goodbye: A Charlotte Stone Novel

by Karen Robards

  “Yeah. No,” she said.

  “Your call. I’ll still be around when putting your clothes on in the bathroom gets old, though.”

  Probably true, but like lots of things concerning him she mentally filed it away under “Stuff to worry about later.” Clothes in hand, Charlie was heading back into the bathroom when she noticed the disgusted glance he cast at the remote, which lay on the console table beside the TV. Frowning, she paused to ask, “Is something wrong?”

  “I can’t work it. The remote.” Reaching for it, he demonstrated: his hand passed right through, no traction at all. “I’d gotten to where I could. Before last night. Now I can’t.”

  He looked so bothered by his failure that she would have said something comforting, like Hmm, if a knock hadn’t sounded on the door.

  “Charlie?” It was Tony’s voice. Michael immediately looked sour. “You up?”

  “Yes. I’ll be right there,” she called back, and rushed into the bathroom to dress. When she emerged, Michael was leaning against the wall beside the door, waiting for her. As he straightened, his eyes skimmed her. Her hair was twisted up in a loose knot, lots of tendrils which made it, she hoped, both cool and elegantly sexy, and she was wearing another purchase from the gift shop, a sleeveless, knee-length yellow linen shirtdress with a skinny self-belt around her waist, and last night’s kicky little sandals. She thought, with pardonable satisfaction, that she was looking pretty good. When his eyes rose to meet hers again, he smiled.

  That slow smile was enough to make Charlie’s heart skip a beat.

  Oh, boy.

  Well, she’d known she was in trouble.

  “You look good enough to eat,” he said. Then, right as a quick thank you smile was curving her lips, he added, “Just so we’re on the same page, you start making out with Dudley again and it’s going to royally piss me off.”

  Here it was. She’d known this was coming. It was tempting—oh, so tempting—to ignore it, to brush it off, to save this cold splash of reality to be dealt with at a later, more convenient time. But she felt she needed to make herself very clear, for her own sake as well as his.

  The scary thing was, she was dangerously close to losing her heart to him, and she wasn’t about to let that happen.

  Her life would be ruined forever.

  “You have no right to object to anything I choose to do,” she said evenly. “Last night was—only a night. We can’t be together; you know that. And I have to live my life. So if I want to make out with Tony—or anybody else, for that matter—that’s what I’m going to do.”

  Then, before he could erupt—and it was clear from his face that an eruption was imminent—she turned and walked out the door.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Michael’s furious growl sliced through the conversation as Charlie headed with Tony, Buzz, and Kaminsky for the elevators. “An hour ago I’m fucking you into next week, and now you’re throwing this shit at me?”

  Tony was laying out the game plan for the day, so Charlie’s reply to Michael was minimal: she narrowed her eyes at him. He stalked along beside her, looking all badass and mad, but she wasn’t about to back down. For her own self-preservation, she needed to draw a line in the sand with him while she still could.

  “I just heard back from Eric Riva. He was in an ATV wreck as a teenager that killed the friend he was riding with,” Kaminsky said excitedly. She was checking her e-mail as they stopped to wait for the elevator. Like Charlie, she was wearing one of her gift shop purchases: a short-sleeved orange blouse worn loose over a white tank and skirt. Charlie presumed the blouse hid Kaminsky’s gun.

  “You want to get it on with Dudley? Is that it?” Michael had planted himself directly in front of her. “What, did I give you a taste for hot sex last night and now that I can’t come through you think you’ll get him to pinch hit? Here’s a heads-up, babe: it don’t work like that.” His eyes blazed at her.

  Entirely unaware of Michael practically oozing menace over the pair of them, Tony, who was standing beside her, smiled at Charlie. “Did you have a good night?”

  “Yes,” she replied with an answering smile, while Michael snarled, “You want to see him turn tail and run, tell him how good your night really was.”

  They were in the elevator on the way down by that time, and Tony was close enough so that if she leaned slightly to her left their arms would brush. But she didn’t. Right at that moment she didn’t feel in the least little bit like doing anything to further her relationship with Tony. She had just wanted to make her position clear to Michael. To leave her options open, so that when the memory of last night’s lust-fest had faded enough, she could move ahead with her life. If not with Tony, then with someone else. Some living, breathing man.

  Michael said, “Let’s see, how many times did I make you come? Three? Four? Hell, I lost count long about the third time you sucked my—”

  “Did you find any more possible single murders around Buggs Island Lake?” Charlie asked Kaminsky before Michael could finish, in a deliberate effort to not hear that last word. Because the scorching memory it conjured up was, in the bright light of day, embarrassing. It also turned her on a little, but she wasn’t even going to let herself think about that.

  “Oh, so you think you can fucking ignore me now?” Michael growled, and slammed a hand down on the elevator alarm. But instead of going off, as it had last night, nothing happened: his hand passed right through it.

  Michael looked totally pissed. Charlie almost smiled.

  Kaminsky grimaced. “Right now, four of the accidental deaths could possibly be murders. But what’s really interesting is that ten kids between the ages of eleven and seventeen have gone missing from around that lake over the ten years before the Gingerbread Man killings started. That I’ve found so far. I mean, it’s a big area with a lot of people, and ten in ten years isn’t actually all that many, but—”

  “They’re important,” Charlie told her, her attention effectively refocused, at least temporarily.

  “What I thought was interesting is that Buggs Island Lake is no more than a four hour drive from any of the grab or kill sites,” Buzz said. “If the area we’re looking at was a wheel, the lake would be almost in the center of it.”

  “He started there,” Charlie said. “I’m almost sure of it.”

  “Keep looking into those deaths and disappearances around that lake,” Tony said to Kaminsky, who nodded. They reached the lobby, and Kaminsky sheared off toward the hotel conference room which she had set up as a kind of ad hoc War Room, with her computers in place. The rest of them headed for the waiting SUV. Tony and Buzz started comparing notes on which of the victims had confirmed having been exposed to a violent death at a young age, and Charlie tried to stay tuned in to what they were saying, but it was hard with Michael practically vibrating with anger beside her.

  “Fine, babe,” he said as they all stepped out into the wall of sweltering heat that was the day. “You want to give me the cold shoulder, you do that. For now. But I’m not going anywhere, and neither are you.”

  That sounded so much like a threat that Charlie flicked a look up at him. He was cold-eyed and hard-mouthed, his tall, powerfully built body sending out waves of aggression. If she’d met him as a stranger in a dark alley right now, she thought, she would have shrunk back into the shadows and tried to escape his notice. But he wasn’t a stranger, and she wasn’t afraid of him.

  What she was was teetering on the brink of falling hopelessly, madly in love with him, she realized with dismay. Last night she’d gotten a glimpse deep beneath the gorgeous golden surface, into what lurked in the furthest reaches of his soul. What she’d seen there had been dark and violent and dangerous. And the truth was, as far as the way she felt about him was concerned, it hadn’t changed a thing.

  And that, she thought, was the scariest thought of all.

  They grabbed coffee from a McDonald’s, parked the SUV, and started walking along Mallory Str
eet, which was on the route of Jenna’s 5K run. They went from store to store, interviewing the workers. The heat was oppressive even so early in the day, and a number of the stores weren’t yet open. Buzz was marking those down on a map so they could catch them on the way back up the street, and Tony was thanking a voluble restaurant owner for his cooperation, when Charlie noticed the spirit. It was a well-dressed but blood-drenched elderly man who was following an equally well-dressed (living, not blood-drenched) elderly woman along the sidewalk. Nothing special: she saw spirits like him all the time. At a guess, he’d died in some kind of accident, certainly within the last seven days. But a little farther down the block she saw the spirit of a teenage boy with the blue lips of someone who had died from a lack of oxygen following a middle-aged couple going in the same direction as the elderly pair. And behind him came the spirit of a little girl of maybe five, blond with a pink bow in her hair and not a mark on her that Charlie could see, following a woman of about thirty who had tears running down her face and looked so much like the little girl that Charlie assumed she had to be her mother.

  Three spirits of the newly, violently dead on the same block, heading in the same direction, was unusual enough to make Charlie frown.

  “So, you got a clue what this whole spook parade going on out here is about?” Michael asked in her ear. He hadn’t spoken a word to her since his “I’m not going anywhere” comment, and she knew he absolutely wasn’t over being mad at her. That meant that what he was seeing was extraordinary enough to compel him to mention it to her. She didn’t think the three spirits she could see would constitute a spook parade in his book, so after a glance to assure herself that Tony and Buzz were still preoccupied Charlie did a quick pivot so that she was facing Michael.

  “I see three spirits,” she told him, mindful of the other people on the crowded sidewalk. “What do you see?”

  The look he gave her bristled with barely contained hostility. But then he glanced around and came back to her with, “I count eleven of ’em. All walking down the street in the same direction, following somebody who’s alive.”

  Charlie frowned thoughtfully. Then, as she saw Tony finishing with the restaurateur and Buzz looking in her direction, she quickly said, “Could you ask one of them where they’re going?”

  He snorted. “You really think I’m going to keep doing your dirty work? News flash, babe: I ain’t the damned ghost whisperer’s apprentice.”

  “We’re trying to catch a guy who murdered a bunch of kids here,” she hissed.

  His lips compressed. But as Tony caught up with her and Buzz came trailing behind, Michael left her to apparently walk beside someone she couldn’t see.

  “You get anything?” Tony asked Buzz as he joined them. Buzz shook his head. Michael, meanwhile, appeared to be engaging in conversation with the unseen spirit.

  “Not a thing.” Buzz sounded discouraged. “If Jenna, Laura or Raylene went inside any of these places, nobody remembers seeing them. Maybe we’ll see something on the security camera footage from the ATM at the corner. What about you?”

  Tony shook his head. “Nothing. You check the security video from Omar’s?”

  One corner of Buzz’s mouth quirked up. “Yeah. Lena—uh, Kaminsky—and I looked at it last night. We got Laura Parker on it, all right. She’s competing in a wet T-shirt contest with about twenty other girls.” The quirk turned into a full-blown grin. “It was something to see.” At the look Tony gave him, Buzz added hastily, “Kaminsky did facial recognition on all the guys caught on tape watching, but there was nobody who jumped out.”

  Michael was back. The look he gave Charlie as her eyes turned on him questioningly was dark.

  “Damn it.” Tony glanced around at the surrounding buildings in frustration. “There’s got to be something here. I just don’t think he chose those three girls at random, and this is the only place that we know they intersect.”

  “They’re following their loved ones to a grief counseling group session,” Michael told Charlie, who sucked in a breath as the connection suddenly became crystal clear in her mind. “Apparently there’s a meeting on the second floor of that building on the corner.”

  He pointed, but he didn’t have to: Charlie watched the blood-drenched elderly man follow the elderly woman into the building, and grabbed the sleeve of Tony’s jacket.

  “It’s grief counseling.” Charlie could feel the excitement coursing through her veins. “That’s the connection. I’m sure of it. We’ll find that all the victims were with someone who suffered a violent death and then went to grief counseling.”

  “What?” Tony said as he and Buzz gave her identical surprised looks.

  “They’re getting ready to have a session right now on the second floor of that building on the corner.” Charlie tugged on Tony’s arm. “Come on.”

  “You’re welcome,” Michael said sourly, and Charlie forgot herself enough to give him a quick smile even as she was practically frog-marching Tony toward the building. Michael didn’t smile back. Watching her with Tony, his eyes had gone all flinty, and his mouth was grim.

  Tony frowned at her questioningly. “What made you think of grief counseling? And how do you know there’s a session getting ready to start in that building?”

  “I can’t wait to hear this.” Michael’s voice was dry. “Go on, buttercup, tell him how you know.”

  “The universe speaks to me, remember?” she said lightly, throwing Michael an eat dirt look. “Plus, somebody walking past was carrying a brochure.”

  “Yeah, I thought so,” Michael said.

  The look Tony gave her was searching. Of course, he knew she was, ahem, a little bit psychic, even if he didn’t know the half of it. One day, Charlie told herself, she might even sit him down and tell him the whole truth. Minus the part about Michael, of course.

  She was never going to be able to tell anybody about Michael.

  The Grief Connection was the group’s name. It was printed on a sign affixed to the open door of a room that was already filling up with people, dead and alive. Rows of molded plastic chairs, a speaker’s podium, a table with coffee and pastries, that was it. According to the social worker getting ready to lead that day’s session, open meetings were held every weekday from nine to ten a.m. It was run like an AA meeting. People came, shared the source of their grief, and found comfort. No, there were no records of who attended the meetings, and there were certainly no security cameras. But she was able to give them a list of the meeting leaders, and a number they could use to contact the parent organization for more information.

  “What are the chances that Jenna, Raylene, and Laura all ended up in one of these sessions together?” Buzz whispered as they stood at the back of the room watching the meeting get under way.

  “It’s the only thing that fits.” Tony’s gaze swung to Charlie. “You want to give Jenna a call when we get out of here and see if she can confirm being at one of these meetings the day she was kidnapped? I’d do it, but I think it’d be better coming from you. Crane, when we get back to the hotel, see if you can find out if any of the other victims went in for some kind of grief counseling.”

  Charlie nodded, and Crane said, “Will do, boss.”

  As they watched the elderly woman Charlie had observed on the street stand up and start to share her story of loss—her husband of fifty-two years (who she had no idea was right beside her) had been killed in a traffic accident the previous week—Charlie said thoughtfully, “The Gingerbread Man almost had to be at that same session. How else would he know that those girls had suffered that kind of loss?”

  “Maybe they have regulars, and one of them will remember a weird guy who stared at all the participants, trying to decide who he was going to kidnap and kill.” That was Michael, who was standing beside her looking both pissed off (that would be at her) and seriously formidable, which she assumed was his way of making sure that the spirits she couldn’t see steered clear.

  None of the participants in that morning’s
meeting looked like he could remotely fit the bill, Charlie determined with a glance.

  After the organized part of the meeting was concluded, when the participants were milling around the refreshments table, Tony asked the social worker about regulars. She pointed them out, and they went to talk to them. They got nothing.

  They were just leaving the meeting when Tony got a call from Kaminsky, who’d been kept abreast of the possible grief counseling connection via a text from Buzz. Charlie, who was in the act of phoning Jenna, knew instantly from Tony’s expression that something was up.

  “Kaminsky thinks she’s figured out the identity of the next expert the unsub’s going to contact,” Tony said as he disconnected. “We need to head back to the hotel.”

  Jenna wasn’t answering her phone. As they sped back to the hotel, Charlie left a message asking the girl to please return the call as soon as possible.

  The makeshift War Room was a small conference room down a short hall off the lobby. It was windowless, and Kaminsky had set it up with a system that had her facing a half-dozen laptops placed side by side on the long table that, along with the eight chairs around it, was the room’s only furniture.

  “It’s Dr. Anthony Pelletier,” Kaminsky burst out excitedly as the others walked into the room. She was seated in a padded leather chair, but stood up as they entered. On one of the laptop screens was the frozen face of the esteemed neuropathologist who had made a name for himself studying the effect of brain disease on criminal behavior. From the look of him on the screen, Kaminsky had hit pause in mid–phone call. “He’s the only one of the experts on the list you gave me who was involved in a violent death when he was young. His eighteen months older sister was killed in a house fire when he was seven. Apparently the two of them were found unconscious at the bottom of some stairs by firefighters. Dr. Pelletier was able to be revived; the sister was not.”