The Last Kiss Goodbye: A Charlotte Stone Novel

by Karen Robards

  “Sounds like you got it,” Tony said, nodding at Kaminsky to resume the call. “No way can that be a coincidence.”

  Kaminsky hit a button, said, “Sorry to put you on hold, Dr. Pelletier. Here’s our team leader, Special Agent Anthony Bartoli.”

  “Dr. Pelletier.” Tony slid into the seat beside Kaminsky. “I’m sure Special Agent Kaminsky has filled you in on what’s going on.”

  Pelletier nodded. Charlie had never met him, but she was familiar with his work. In his late thirties, with a round, jovial face and short, reddish hair, he looked like anything but the distinguished researcher he was.

  “Everything’s been fine,” Pelletier said in reply to Tony’s question about whether he’d noticed anything out of the ordinary over the last few days.

  Tony nodded. “We’re going to be putting surveillance on you. I’ll have people in place within the hour. Around your home, office, you personally. They’ll stay out of sight, but they’ll be there.”

  Pelletier looked a little startled. “You really think a serial killer’s going to be contacting me?”

  “Yes,” Tony said uncompromisingly. “And right now you’re our best hope of catching this guy, so we’d appreciate your cooperation.”

  “Sure,” Pelletier agreed, and they ended the conversation with him looking alarmed but game. No sooner had he hung up than Jenna called Charlie back: she hadn’t attended the Grief Connection counseling session the morning of the run, she said, which caused Charlie momentary consternation. Then Jenna added that she had stopped by the session briefly to drop off flyers about the run, and had stopped to talk to a couple of people near the door about the tragedy in her own life. It was possible that she could have been overheard, she said, although she didn’t remember anyone who seemed particularly interested in her. She also didn’t remember seeing Laura, or Raylene, although they could have been there. She hadn’t been paying much attention, and she hadn’t stayed long.

  “That’s got to be it,” Charlie said as she recounted the conversation to the others, who agreed.

  “All we can do is look at any security video we can find from the surrounding streets that morning,” Tony said. As it had already been collected and was in the process of being reviewed, that base was pretty well covered.

  “Look who all I’ve talked to this morning,” Kaminsky said as Tony, after refusing Kaminsky’s offer to contact the deputy director of the Bureau on Skype, went out to make the call to set up the arrangements for what needed to happen with Pelletier.

  Kaminsky punched a button, and immediately faces appeared on all of the screens.

  Charlie recognized four of them at a glance. The other two she had no clue about.

  “I left messages for Dr. Underwood and Dr. Myers yesterday”—Kaminsky pointed to two of the screens—“and both called back this morning to confirm that at a young age they were present at the violent death of someone close. Dr. Underwood had a friend hit in the chest with a ball at a baseball game—I know, bizarre—and Dr. Myers’ cousin was accidentally shot and killed when they were together.” She looked around at Charlie and Buzz. “Which means all four of our experts share that common experience. Include Dr. Pelletier—although he is not technically one of our experts yet—and we’ve got a clean sweep. Plus, I’ve talked to Ariane Spencer”—she pointed to the pretty blond teen on the third screen—“who was, if you recall, the surviving victim from Group two … (that was the snakes)—” Kaminsky broke off to shudder. “—and Andrew Russell, the Group five … trash compactor, remember? … survivor”—she pointed to the fourth screen—“and Saul Tunney, the Group six … grain silo … survivor”—his was another of the faces Charlie recognized—“and they all confirm that they were present at the violent death of someone close, previous to what happened to them with the Gingerbread Man.”

  “What about grief counseling?” Buzz asked. “Did they get any?”

  “I don’t know.” Kaminsky sounded faintly aggrieved. “When I was talking to them, grief counseling wasn’t part of the picture.” She made a face. “Well, I guess I get to call them all back.”

  “You called Ken Ewell?” Charlie was frowning at one of the faces on the screens. The deputy sheriff from Big Stone Gap seemed like an unlikely contact for Kaminsky to need to make.

  “He called me,” Kaminsky corrected. “Apparently they have a surveillance video of what looks like a gray van on the road leading into Big Stone Gap on the night of the murders. He’s e-mailing it to me.”

  “Maybe we can get a license plate,” Buzz said hopefully.

  “Like our luck is ever that good,” Kaminsky replied. Then she pointed to the last screen. “This is a parent of—”

  She broke off as Tony came back into the room. An envelope was in his hand, and the expression on his face as he looked at Charlie—directly at her, instead of at the three of them in general—was concerned.

  “This came for you,” Tony said as he handed the envelope to her. “It was delivered this morning. The clerk at the front desk thought it might be urgent, so he gave it to me to give to you.”

  Charlie accepted the envelope. It was one of the cardboard, black and gold, overnight delivery envelopes from FedEx. The name on the return label was unknown to her, she saw as she ripped it open.

  Inside was another envelope, a white business-sized one. On it, in spidery black handwriting, was nothing more than her name: Dr. Charlotte Stone.

  The flap was unsealed. Inside that was a single sheet of paper. Even before Charlie unfolded it, her heart started to slam in her chest.

  She knew, knew, in every cell of her body, who it was from.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  YOU DIDN’T CATCH ME was what the message said.

  “The Gingerbread Man,” Kaminsky breathed, as Michael, who had been looking over Charlie’s shoulder, said, “Fuck,” and Charlie looked down with growing horror at the small, stiff square of paper that had been tucked inside the folded sheet.

  It was a Polaroid photograph of three young girls lying, apparently unconscious, in a wire cage.

  “Oh, my God.” Charlie dropped the picture like it stung her fingers. The images of the girls—they looked to be young teens—burned itself into her brain. Someone—Buzz—took the letter from her, while Tony picked up the photo, holding it very carefully by the corner with a tissue he’d acquired from somewhere, and positioned it so they all could see.

  “He’s escalating again,” Charlie said. For the first couple of seconds she’d looked at it, she’d thought—hoped—that what she was seeing was one of the groups of victims he had attacked in the past. But she didn’t think so. In fact, she was as sure as it was possible to be that this was a new group of victims.

  “Find out who those girls are,” Tony ordered, and Kaminsky nodded.

  “Since we know Dr. Pelletier is the expert the Gingerbread Man’s most likely to contact, we can catch him,” Buzz said. “Pelletier’s at the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine, right? Isn’t that in Roanoke? We can be there in a couple of hours, catch the SOB when he drops off the letter.”

  “Unless he’s smart, and mails it, like he just did to you,” Michael said dryly to Charlie.

  Charlie repeated that, minus the snark.

  Frowning, Tony was looking down at the photograph he still held in his hand. “Even if he drops it off in person, by the time he does, at least two of these girls are going to be dead. And we may be totally wrong about the identity of the expert. Or he may not even contact an expert this time. As the change in timing proves, he’s flexible enough to make adjustments to his game plan.”

  “I think our best bet is to try to identify him, and the place we need to look is where the first Gingerbread Man murders occurred.” Charlie was thinking it through as she spoke. “He’ll have some kind of roots there. Probably a connection to one of the first group of victims.”

  “We don’t have time to dig into all that.” Kaminsky’s voice was tight as she looked up from the lapt
op, where she had been frantically working. “He’s already got those girls. That means we have—at most—two more days. Or we might not even have that. He’s already changed the timing on us.”

  “You got anything on the identities?” Tony asked Kaminsky while he passed the photo to Buzz, then said to him, “We need to get that, and the letter, to the lab.”

  “I’ll see to it,” Buzz said, while Kaminsky answered, “Nothing yet. I’m checking all the databases, but nothing’s instantaneous, you know.”

  “I have a psychic friend whom I know to be very accurate,” Charlie said. With lives at stake, and possessing information she felt might be important, concealing her chats with Tam no longer mattered. “She called a couple of days ago to warn me that I’m in danger near dark water. It seems to me that if I’m in danger near dark water, then near dark water, or any water that can turn dark—like Buggs Island Lake, for example—is where the danger has to be. It’s possible she’s gloamed on to a different danger, but I don’t think so. I think the danger I’m in comes from the Gingerbread Man, and the Gingerbread Man will be found near water that is or can be dark.”

  For a moment everyone else in the room stared at her silently.

  Then Kaminsky said, “Well, that sure clinches it for me.”

  Michael gave a snort of amusement. Charlie shot Kaminsky an unappreciative look. Tony said, “I’m not willing to discount any psychic help we can get.” He looked at Charlie. “You got the grief counseling connection pretty much out of nowhere. How strongly do you feel about tracking the unsub down through the Buggs Island Lake connection?”

  Charlie hesitated.

  “I’ve got a hit on the girls.” The tension in Kaminsky’s voice was palpable as she looked up from her laptop. “Diane Townsend, Kim Oates, and Natalie Garza. All fourteen, all reported missing this morning from Twinbrook, a girls’ camp in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, that specializes in—get this—grief counseling. Apparently this week’s program caters to survivors of school shootings.”

  “Looks like our guy was in a hurry,” Michael said. “Instead of cherry-picking ’em, this time he went straight for the all-you-can-eat buffet.”

  “Notify the agents down there that we may have a lead on the girls,” Tony told Buzz, who nodded, then asked, “Should I tell them we’re on our way?”

  Tony grimaced. “As I see it, we’ve got three ways we can go here. We can head for Roanoke and sit on Pelletier. We can head down to Rocky Mount and join the search there. Or we can take a quick trip to Buggs Island Lake and see what we can dig up.”

  Buzz said, “Dr. Pelletier’s covered. If the unsub shows up there, we’ll have him.”

  “Too late for the girls, though,” Kaminsky put in.

  Buzz continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “I’m guessing that they’ve got half the Bureau, plus the state police and all available local law enforcement, on the scene in Rocky Mount.”

  “We’d be the only ones looking at Buggs Island Lake,” Tony said.

  Kaminsky looked up from her computer. “A friend of a girl who went missing at Buggs Island Lake five years ago reported that in the days leading up to her disappearance a man had been following them. She told police she could describe him, although if she ever did, it didn’t make it into this file. The witness still lives in the same house, near the lake.”

  “We could go interview her, get a description, check out any local police records,” Buzz said. “If it doesn’t look like anything will pan out down there, we could move on.”

  Tony made up his mind. “Sounds like a plan. Get packed. I want to be in the air in under an hour.”

  Buggs Island Lake (as they call it in Virginia), which is also known as Kerr Reservoir (to the folks in the Carolinas), was a fifty-thousand acre swimmers, boaters, and fishermen’s paradise. Long and narrow, it ran along the Virginia/North Carolina border and was one of the most popular summer resort areas in both states. Erin Hill, the friend of the disappeared girl, who lived in the little lakeside community of Clarksville, was indeed able to give them a description: a dark-haired man, maybe in his early thirties, who had followed them around in a gray van. The part about the gray van hadn’t made it into the police report, and it sent a shaft of excitement through the team. The lead was promising enough that they turned Erin over to a local police sketch artist.

  While they waited for the results, in an empty office off the small squad room, Kaminsky was busy checking out a map of the lake area that hung on the wall. Charlie, who like the others was acutely aware of the swift passage of time, was starting to realize that she hadn’t gotten as much rest the previous night as she had supposed. She was sitting in one of the hard metal chairs and chugging stale police coffee as she went over the missing persons reports that Kaminsky had thought might be relevant to the case, which the agent had e-mailed to her. Buzz was combing through the police files on the four supposedly-accidental-but-deemed-by-Kaminsky-to-be-suspicious deaths that she had identified in the area during the time period in question. Having stepped outside because the reception was better, Tony was on the phone, talking to agents at the scene of the kidnappings in Rocky Mount, and then to those assigned to conduct surveillance on Dr. Pelletier. Michael was on his feet staring out the window at the beautiful blue water of the lake. It was early evening by this time, but the sunlight was still strong enough to make the surface sparkle. Charlie could read in Michael’s body language his longing to be out there as part of the living world again, but he was still palpably angry at her and for the most part wasn’t talking. Under the circumstances, she wasn’t, either. What could she say? There was nothing in what she had told him that she would take back. And she badly needed to put him in his proper place in her life, which should probably be, as he had sneeringly described it, the ghost whisperer’s apprentice and nothing more. But the sad truth was, just letting her eyes run over him evoked feelings in her that were disturbingly sexual. One look at his broad shoulders and muscular back, at his tight butt and long powerful legs, and she was back in last night’s darkened hotel room with him again.

  He makes me hotter than any man I’ve ever known.

  That was the thought that was floating through her mind when Kaminsky glanced around at her and asked, “What did that psychic friend of yours tell you, exactly?” Charlie was caught off guard enough so that she had to think for a moment.

  “She said I was in danger near dark water.” Which—Charlie had noted, to her relief—, Buggs Island Lake was not. At least at that moment, its waters were the approximate shade of Michael’s eyes.”She said the danger came from a gray house in the dark water. I’m wondering if maybe we’ll find our unsub on a houseboat.”

  “You know I’m fluent in a number of languages, right?” Kaminsky said. “One of them is Algonquin. About fifteen miles from here on this side of the lake is Pocomoke Village. In Pocomoke Village is Pocomoke Street.” Buzz was looking at Kaminsky, too, at this point.”In Algonquin, pocomoke means dark water.”

  At that, Michael also swung around to stare at Kaminsky.

  “Oh, my God,” Charlie said. At the same time Buzz said, “Wow,” and Michael said, “Shit.”

  “It’s probably a coincidence.” Kaminsky turned away from the map to head for her laptop, which rested on the desk. “But there it is.”

  “There’s no such thing as coincidence,” Michael said, and narrowed his eyes at Charlie. “You don’t go anywhere near that place.”

  As Kaminsky plopped herself behind the desk and Buzz rose to look over her shoulder while she called something up on her laptop, Charlie gave Michael a hard look that could be roughly translated as, You’re not the boss of me.

  He folded his arms over his chest. “Babe, here’s a tip: don’t mess with me right now. I ain’t real happy with you.”

  Bite me, was what she silently replied.

  “I’ve got it here on Google Earth. Pocomoke Street is dotted with what looks like little fishing cottages. They’re far apart, and the area seems
really rural,” Kaminsky drew her attention by saying.

  “Laura said the van smelled like fish,” Charlie said before she thought.

  “Who?” Kaminsky frowned at her, while Michael, with a taunting smile, said, “Oops.”

  “Somebody. It doesn’t matter.” Charlie covered her misstep hastily, and covered herself even further by refusing to look at Michael again. “The point is, someone said the van used in the kidnappings smelled like fish.”

  “I think I heard that,” Buzz said.

  “One of the cottages is painted dark gray.” Kaminsky got to the point. “What we have here, then, is a gray house on the equivalent of Dark Water Street.”

  “There are a lot of gray houses on a lot of streets with Indian names,” Tony cautioned when he stepped back into the office after finishing his phone calls and Kaminsky’s discovery was explained to him. “Who owns it?”

  Kaminsky tapped a few keys on her laptop. “Benjamin Motta.” Her tone was portentous.

  I can’t talk right now, Ben.

  That’s what Laura said she’d overheard the Gingerbread Man saying to someone on the phone.

  “Let’s go check it out,” Tony said.

  “Oh, no,” Michael said, pointing a finger at Charlie. “Not you.”

  But she was already on her way out the door with the rest of them.

  “Can you say ‘death wish,’ Doc?” Michael growled as they all piled into the car, a rental that had been waiting for them at the airport.

  Charlie’s mouth tightened. She hated to admit it, but he had a point.

  “What about Ms. Hill, boss?” Buzz asked from the backseat, where he and Kaminsky now sat as a matter of course. Ms. Hill was the witness who was at that moment working with the sketch artist.

  “One of the locals can give her a ride home if we’re not back by the time she’s finished. We’ll pick up the sketch later.” From the little side street they’d been on, Tony pulled onto the main drag that ran along the lakefront even as he glanced at Kaminsky in the mirror and added, “Kaminsky.”