The Last Time I Saw Her

by Karen Robards

  At the time, her thoughts on her reaction to him could have been summed up like this: Girlfriend, you are one sick chick.

  “You performed the tests in person?” Hughes persisted.

  Charlie nodded again, then said, “Yes.” Continuing to nod because she was finding it too difficult to talk was just weak of her. At some point, she knew, the pain of Michael’s loss would lessen, because even the worst heartbreak got better with time. Until then, she’d already determined her best course of action: Fake it until you make it. In other words, carry on as normally as possible until the raw wound that was her heart found a way to heal.

  It would. She had to believe it would.

  Hughes said, “Then when I tell you I’m here because I saw Michael Garland’s mug shots and got curious, you’ll understand what I’m talking about.”

  He watched her, clearly trying to gauge her reaction.

  Charlie’s throat felt tight as she asked, “You’ve—never met him? Never seen him in person?”

  Hughes shook his head. “No. The mug shots were enough.”

  She knew what he meant. The fact that this man was physically identical to Michael in all but the tiniest of details was impossible to miss. The resemblance was still knocking her sideways, messing with her emotions, blocking her thought processes. What it meant she had no clue yet, but if he was telling the truth, if he was who and what he said he was with no kind of chicanery involved, once he’d seen Michael’s picture there was no way he could have missed how much they looked alike. No one could.

  If he hadn’t been aware of Michael’s existence until that point, the resemblance might well have been enough to bring him here. She knew that if she came across someone who looked exactly like her, she’d follow up.

  “You look like him,” she said. It was the understatement of the year and she was proud of how steady her voice was and how coolly objective she sounded. But as she spoke her eyes moved over his face almost compulsively, and it was all she could do not to reach up and lay her hand against the smooth-shaven plane of his way-too-familiar-looking cheek.

  This is not Michael.

  The refrain shivered through her body with every heartbeat even as she yearned to believe that maybe, just maybe, she was wrong. But she was getting no sense of familiarity, no feeling of connection, and the awfulness of looking at the outer shell of Michael without it being him was beyond upsetting.

  “From what I could see, exactly like him,” he said, still watching her. “Unless it was a trick of the lighting or camera angles or something when they took the mug shots.”

  Folding her arms over her chest to try to maintain her calm, Charlie shook her head. “No. It wasn’t anything like that. It’s a—very strong resemblance. Except for your eyes. Your eyes are the wrong color. His are—were—blue.” She looked away from him with an effort, only to have her gaze fall fully on Michael’s grave. There were a few weeds growing in tufts that were taller than the sparse grass covering it—and it looked barren. And lonely. A hard knot formed in her chest, and for a moment the pain was indescribable. She jerked her eyes back to Hughes. “Other than that, you could be twins.”

  It was only then, as she said it, that the possibility shot like a missile out of the chaos churning in her brain. She didn’t know why it hadn’t hit her sooner: it should have first thing, as soon as she’d looked at him, as soon as she’d decided that he wasn’t Michael.

  If he wasn’t Michael, and he was alive and human, he almost had to be Michael’s relative. His brother. Maybe even his twin. Maybe even his identical twin.

  Her eyes widened at the thought.

  Could identical twins have different-colored eyes? She wasn’t certain, but until she could research it she wasn’t ruling it out.

  Michael had been adopted at a young age. Michael wouldn’t necessarily have known he had a sibling, even if that sibling was an identical twin. In fact, he certainly hadn’t known it, or the fact would have surfaced during his trial.

  For all intents and purposes, identical twins had identical DNA.

  The DNA evidence left at the crime scenes had been the strongest evidence tying Michael to the murders.

  Michael had always claimed that he was innocent. Of course, guilty men had been proclaiming their innocence from the world’s beginning, but by the time he’d disappeared she’d pretty much come to believe him. The man—ghost, whatever—she had come to know would never have brutally raped and killed seven women. It just wasn’t in him.

  So maybe here was the answer. Maybe this man who looked exactly like Michael was Michael’s identical twin who shared his DNA and who was the real serial killer.

  On that horrific thought, her eyes locked with his, and at what she saw in their wrong-color depths, Charlie suddenly felt cold all over.

  Michael had always told her that her face was way too easy to read.

  Moving closer, Hughes reached out to take hold of her upper arm. She was wearing a long-sleeved white shirt, thin and silky, with black pants. She could feel the strength of his fingers through it.

  Like Michael, he was a big guy. Big enough to seem menacing even if all he did was stand there gripping her arm. Big enough that she might have some trouble getting away from him if he didn’t want to let her go.

  “Something wrong, Dr. Stone?” he asked.

  CHAPTER TWO

  He was close enough that he loomed over her.

  Looking up into that hauntingly familiar face, Charlie felt a flash of disorientation. She wanted to throw herself into his arms and pull sharply away from him at the same time. A tide of longing cut by a quick infusion of fear. It was uncanny and even kind of horrible to look up into the face of someone she knew so well—and know that it wasn’t him she was seeing at all. Being afraid of Michael—that seemed impossible now, given everything that had passed between them. Only—was she? But of course if she was afraid, it wasn’t of Michael: it was of this guy.

  She had a sickening moment in which she found herself remembering how easily and quickly Michael had been able to kill when it suited him to do so.

  A strong man could break a neck in a matter of seconds, she’d discovered.

  Impossible to know whether or not Rick Hughes possessed similar skills. Stupid to assume he did not.

  This is not Michael. She had to mentally formulate the words again to counteract what her eyes were telling her.

  She’d come face-to-face with so much danger lately that having her heart start to pound and her pulse start to race and her breathing start to quicken felt almost normal.

  Didn’t mean she had to like it. But whether she liked it or not, that’s what was happening to her now. She was afraid—of this man who wasn’t Michael.

  To hell with this.

  She’d spent enough time being afraid to last a millennium. She was done with being afraid.

  It was daytime. Late afternoon in a public cemetery. They were in Big Stone Gap, the kind of Mayberry-esque small town where if she screamed every neighbor within earshot would come running, and given all the houses lining the street and the occasional car driving past and the leaf blower and the sounds of hammering and sawing she could hear from the not-so-distant town square, where booths were being assembled for the fall festival scheduled for that weekend, someone was bound to be within earshot. Her taxi with the driver in it was still waiting at the curb, for God’s sake.

  Real serial killer or not, Hughes was not going to murder her where she stood.

  “No, of course there’s nothing wrong.” She pulled free of his grip. He didn’t try to stop her. Tearing her eyes away from his face was harder, but she did it, and glanced toward the taxi idling at the curb. The driver, a stranger who’d come with the cab she’d hailed at the airport, had his head resting against the seat back and appeared to be napping. He’d rolled the windows down, presumably to catch the woodsmoke-scented breeze.

  He would definitely hear her if she screamed.

  “I have to go,” she said. Whether
she was right or wrong in what she’d been thinking, she could no longer stand being so close to Michael’s grave, or to this physical replica of him.

  “Hold on a minute,” he said, but she shook her head and turned away, heading for the taxi. Under the circumstances, keeping her spine straight and her gait steady required concentration, so she concentrated. She did not look back at Michael’s grave.

  Hughes fell into step beside her. She didn’t look at him, either.

  “I’d like to go over some things with you,” he said. Thank God his voice didn’t sound a thing like Michael’s honeyed drawl. She could listen to him and not get dizzy. “Do you have some time tonight? Could I maybe take you to dinner?”

  When pigs fly. Her intestines twisted at the idea of sitting across a table from him. For all kinds of reasons.

  “No.” Her reply was too fast and abrupt to be polite. She couldn’t help it. She felt like her heart was being carved up with a butter knife. She had to get away from him, had to have a chance to clear her head.

  “O-kay.” There was a note in his voice that made her think that he wasn’t used to having women turn him down. No surprise, with such a great-looking guy. She could feel his gaze on her face as he persisted. “What about tomorrow? I can come to your office.”

  She’d reached the taxi and he opened the door for her before she could grasp the handle herself. His hand was long-fingered and square-palmed and overtly masculine—and looked exactly like Michael’s.

  Oh, God, this was the worst pain she had suffered since the night Michael had disappeared.

  “I’m not going in to work tomorrow.” Sliding into the backseat, she gripped the window frame and pulled the door shut with Hughes’s hand still on the handle.

  He leaned down to look through the window at her. “You really can’t spare an hour or so to meet with me? That means I’ll have to hang around here until Monday. I do have a court order granting me access to those files, so if you’re going back to work then, you’re not going to be able to put me off any longer than that.”

  “I’m not trying to put you off,” she said. The thought of having him hanging around Big Stone Gap all weekend made her shudder inwardly. His resemblance to Michael was killing her and the best explanation she could come up with for it made her skin crawl. On the other hand, if he was the killer whose crimes Michael had been convicted of, what would his purpose be in coming here? Anyway, if he was the real serial killer, the Southern Slasher’s MO was to pick up hot young women in bars, not to take out unsuspecting psychiatrists in graveyards.

  Although not every serial killer stayed true to his MO.

  The thought brought a chill of warning with it.

  “Oh? You’re not?” Hughes asked dryly. She glanced at him, an automatic, unthinking response to being addressed, and felt her heart shred. He was studying her face. She liked to think that it was unreadable, but that probably wasn’t the case. Michael, at least, had been able to read her expressions easily.

  “No,” she said.

  “So set a time and place. I’ll be there.”

  His presence in town would hang over her head like the Sword of Damocles. The way he looked was killing her. Everything else—who he was, why he was there—she could sort out later. Her first priority had to be getting him gone so she could think and breathe—and function—again.

  “I can meet with you in my office tomorrow. At three,” she conceded abruptly. That would give her the rest of the night and the morning to calm down. It would also give her time to get a quick background check run on Rick Hughes, attorney.

  Luckily, she had friends in FBI places.

  “I’ll be there,” he said at the same time as she tapped the back of the seat in front of her.

  “Let’s go,” she said. The sleepy driver yawned in acknowledgment and nodded. A moment later the taxi was pulling away down the street. Charlie found herself leaning forward, watching through the side-view mirror as Michael—No, not Michael!—stood there in the churchyard with his arms folded over his chest, frowning after her.

  She could not tear her eyes away.

  It was only after the cab turned left at the intersection and she lost sight of him that it occurred to her that she’d never before seen Michael’s reflection in a mirror, because ghosts—which was what he had been for the majority of their acquaintance—have no substance to reflect.

  Which, by reminding her once again that the man in the churchyard was not Michael, caused a fresh wave of heartbreak to slam into her like a tidal wave.

  By the time she let herself into her two-story white clapboard house, she had a lump in her throat from choking back tears she refused to shed.

  Once the door closed behind her she could feel Michael’s absence. A thousand images of him—walking through the front hall, stretched out on the couch watching TV, growling warnings into her ear as he followed her up the stairs—threatened to overwhelm her.

  Her hands were shaking, she noticed. Taking calming breaths, she turned on the downstairs lights and the TV to combat the shadowy silence before doing what she always did as soon as she arrived home from a trip, which was lug her suitcase upstairs so that she could unpack. As a general rule, her hands never shook: since she had dealt with so much that was traumatic and horrible and terrifying over the years, keeping outwardly calm under any and all circumstances had become second nature to her. But this—this was different. This was shattering. Michael’s loss was killing her, and encountering Rick Hughes in the cemetery on top of it was the psychic equivalent of ripping open stitches that barely had been holding together a near-mortal wound.

  Walking inside her bedroom, she flipped on the light to brighten things up in there and then stopped dead as more memories hit her: the last time she’d been in this room, Michael had been with her, giving her crap as usual. One glance at her big brass bed with its immaculate white spread made her knees go weak.

  I can’t deal with this right now, she thought. Abandoning her suitcase just over the threshold, she fled back downstairs. The first time she’d had sex with Michael, it had happened in that bed; she’d slept many other nights in it with him beside her without having sex, because as an incorporeal being (i.e., a ghost) he was as insubstantial as air and ninety-nine percent of the time they couldn’t physically touch. The other one percent of the time—when something like strong emotion allowed him to briefly manifest in solid form, or when she somehow managed to pull off an astral projection that landed her on his side of the life/death divide—they wound up in each other’s arms as unerringly as metal flying toward a magnet. The sex was phenomenal. The friendship that had grown between them was, she was discovering now that he was no longer around, even more important to her.

  She missed him so much that it was an actual ache inside her.

  Without Michael, her house felt empty. It no longer felt like home.

  One step at a time. That’s how you’re going to get through this. Focus on the here and now, on doing what comes next.

  Which would be: Check out the creepy man in the graveyard.

  Right.

  Squaring her shoulders, she headed for the kitchen, fishing her phone out of her purse as she went. The number she punched into it was Tony’s. Tony as in FBI Special Agent Anthony Bartoli, head of the ViCAP serial killer unit that she’d just returned from working with. Tony was tall, dark, and handsome. He was smart and capable and gainfully employed. He was also single and had a thing for her.

  And she liked him, she really did. If it hadn’t been for her damned (literally) ghost, they probably would have been hot and heavy by now.

  As it was, she’d had to tell the closest candidate for Mr. Right that she had come across in years that she couldn’t get involved in a relationship with him right now because she’d been in love with someone she’d lost (that would be Michael, although she hadn’t gone into specifics about that) and she still hadn’t gotten over it. To which Tony, great guy that he was, had replied he was willing to wait. />
  The trouble was, he might be waiting forever, she thought, as Tony answered the phone with a casual “Hey there” that told her he knew who was calling.

  She was starting to be afraid that she was never going to get over Michael.

  People did recover from broken hearts, right?

  “Hi,” she responded. She was still jittery with nerves from her encounter with Hughes, and on top of that she was getting a headache. She’d been experiencing them on a regular basis since Michael had disappeared. Setting her purse down on the counter, she dug out the bottle of Advil she had started keeping with her constantly and popped the lid off. “How are you?” she asked.

  Tony had been shot and severely wounded moments before she’d received her far less serious wound, both at the hands of the serial killer they’d been trying to unmask. He was off work and staying at his parents’ vacation house as he recovered. He was able to walk and take care of himself, but he was still weak and had yet to regain full use of his left arm. When he’d left the hospital he’d asked her to come with him, but she’d turned him down.

  Because of Michael.

  “Recovering,” Tony replied as she swallowed two tablets and chased them with some water from the sink. “Today I managed to lift my arm over my head.”

  She smiled at the humor in his voice as she walked around the breakfast bar to the kitchen table, which was piled high with mail, courtesy of the neighbor who’d watched her house while she was gone. Through the back window she spotted Pumpkin, said neighbor’s big orange tabby, stalking through the tall sunflowers that, despite being a little ratty this late in the season, still bloomed by her back fence. A short distance beyond the fence, Little Stone Mountain rose in all its fall foliage–covered glory. Once upon a time, she had run daily on the trail that wound up the mountain; she hadn’t done that, or run at all, for a while.