The Last Time I Saw Her

by Karen Robards

  He watched it happening around him, again and again and again, terrible, ruthless exterminations carried out with pitiless precision, the details imperfectly concealed by gloom. Sooner or later, it was going to happen to him.

  Sometimes he almost thought it would be a relief.

  Just get it over with. Boom. Done.

  But then he suspected that thoughts like those were part of the process of wearing him down. The monsters’ whispers lodging wormlike inside his consciousness.

  The searing pain that felt like it was devouring him from the inside out was excruciating. Indescribable. Never-ending. Worse than anything he had ever experienced in life, or afterward. It would have had him screaming for mercy to the heavens if he’d had a voice left with which to scream. But his outer voice was gone now, stripped away by overuse within either moments or centuries or eons (he could no longer accurately judge time) of his arrival in this place.

  We can end your torment. We can make the pain stop. Your suffering is needless.

  He heard the monsters talking in his head. They spoke to him constantly, in deceptively soft, gentle voices, coaxing him to give in to the inevitable, to let them wipe out his agony by ending his existence.

  When he’d been alive, he would have sworn that there was nothing left in heaven or hell that could scare him. But that was before he knew that there really was a heaven and a hell, and there were things betwixt and between that could make dying seem like a day at the beach.

  The thought of ceasing to exist—of having his consciousness obliterated—had disturbed him once upon a time. It still did on some level, but he rarely connected with that level of himself anymore. He recognized that the brutishness building up inside him was part of what was happening to him, was a function of this place. The knowledge didn’t make him feel any less savage. If anything, it made the savagery worse, because it fed his anger exponentially. It felt like the basest, most beastly and damnable part of himself was growing like a cancer, swallowing up the last shreds of his humanity, eating away at any small pockets of decency that remained to him.

  It had gradually dawned on him that the reason the monsters had not yet terminated him was because they couldn’t.

  The whisper that had followed him here was the constant to which he clung. It was his shield, his lifeline. The words—he had to force them into his consciousness now through the rising tide of ferocity that was slowly blocking them out—burned inside him, keeping the hellish cold from freezing him through. One day, he thought, he would no longer be able to remember the words, and that would be the day that it ended. That he ended.

  I love you.

  She’d said that to him. Charlie.

  Those words were what held him to an existence. She was what held him to an existence. He wasn’t ready to let go of them, of her, of what was between them.

  What he had done while he was alive might have damned him to hell for all eternity. He might even be carrying so much darkness inside him that he deserved to cease to exist. He wouldn’t argue with that. But he wasn’t ready to go.

  He couldn’t leave her. He didn’t want to leave her.

  Not yet. Somewhere along the way, he’d lost the ability to pray, but that was the plea that beat fiercely inside him. I need a little more time.

  Part of the torture he suffered was that he could feel her pain.

  She cried out to him, and he knew it, and each time she called his name was like a whip lashing his soul. She ached because he was gone, and a thousand billy clubs beating him unmercifully couldn’t have injured him more.

  He’d never meant to hurt her.

  She’d said, I love you.

  The words were killing him and saving him at the same time. When he was snatched away, her whisper had flown after him into the dark. It had wrapped itself around what passed for his heart, and it held him fast now, like a string anchoring a kite to earth. Sometimes his consciousness flashed along the path of the string and he could see things. Not her—but things she could see.

  Lightning glimpses of a hospital room, the interior of an airplane, her house.

  So tantalizingly brief. So meaningless and yet—

  Each one sharper than a thousand knives.

  He had little doubt that he was deliberately being shown her life in snapshots as it was happening, as she continued on without him. The glimpses were a means of softening him up.

  One day he wouldn’t be able to take the pain.

  Holding on to her hurts.

  His life had never been about love. He’d never really believed in it. He’d had bedmates, buddies, fellow Marines who for a time had become the closest thing he’d had to family. The men in his small unit—he’d cared about them. Band of brothers and all that.

  But love was something deeper, something more profound. Other men seemed to experience it, but not him. He supposed it sprang from an openness and vulnerability that he didn’t possess. At its core his heart had remained a cold and distant place that allowed no one in.

  He could have gone his whole life like that. But then he’d gone and died.

  She’s better off without you. Let her go.

  More insidious voices in his head, more attempts by the monsters to fuck with him. If he did what they wanted him to, if he closed his mind to her, if he let the words she’d sent winging after him into the dark fade from his consciousness, there would be nothing left to hold the monsters off.

  The thing about it was, though, he was starting to feel like the voices might be right.

  She was better off without him.

  He wanted her to be happy.

  Alive, he thought he could make her happy, but that airship had gone the way of the Hindenburg.

  Dead, he got in the way of her living her life. He was always going to get in the way of her living her life.

  She was grieving for him. He could feel it. Her grief was torture to him.

  But people got over grief. She would get over him.

  Maybe they’d both be better off if he just gave up and let go.

  Took what was coming to him.

  Let the darkness win.

  We can take away your pain. You can set her free.

  For her sake even more than his own, he was tempted.

  But then he thought, No: I’ll never stop fighting. They’ll have to destroy me to win.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  By the time Rick Hughes appeared in the doorway of Charlie’s office at a few minutes after three p.m. the following day, nobody could have told that she had spent much of the previous night in a shivering huddle on her kitchen floor. Nobody would have guessed that she had phoned Tam, told her about what she’d seen, and begged her friend to send her psychic feelers out into the universe in search of Michael one more time, only to have Tam report back that she could find no trace of him anywhere. Nobody would have known that Charlie had managed no more than a couple of hours of sleep, only to give up and get up as soon as dawn was streaking the sky and cut a big armful of sunflowers from those that remained in her backyard. Then, when she’d taken them to the cemetery, a light rain had started to fall as she’d piled them on Michael’s grave.

  Can anybody say, tears from heaven?

  Call her stupid: she knew that nothing of him that mattered was in that grave. But she’d covered his grave with sunflowers from her garden anyway, because she wanted him to have something from home.

  The background check Tony had run on Rick Hughes confirmed that he was indeed a lawyer with the firm Hughes, Taybridge Associates in Baltimore. The Hughes in the firm’s name was his father, Richard Graham Hughes Sr., who went by Graham and who at age seventy-three was still alive and practicing criminal law. Rick Hughes had had a privileged upbringing, attending private schools and a private college and the University of Maryland law school, directly after which he’d gone to work for his father. His mother, Ann Cramer Hughes, had died ten years ago, still married to Graham. Rick had no arrest record and a clean disciplinary record at the schools
he had attended. No history of violence. No history of anything that wasn’t squeaky clean. The picture Tony had e-mailed along with the report had, indeed, been the Rick Hughes who’d been standing in the cemetery.

  In other words, he was Michael’s double. And apparently he was the All-American boy who’d grown up into Mr. Upstanding Citizen as well.

  There was no indication that he’d been adopted: his birth certificate listed Richard and Ann Hughes as his parents.

  His birth date was given as December 4.

  Michael’s was November 16 of the same year.

  A little more than two weeks’ difference.

  The elemental markers associated with serial killers appeared to be absent in Hughes’s case. Macdonald’s triad, first presented as a paper after a landmark psychological study, posited that the most violent offenders tended to share three common childhood traits: obsession with fire-starting, animal cruelty, and persistent bed-wetting past the age of five. If Hughes had exhibited any of the three, there was no record of it. There was also nothing in the record about abuse or neglect suffered in childhood. No record of youthful delinquency or crimes. Not even an excessive number of speeding tickets, which also tended to be a marker for an antisocial personality. Nothing in anything she’d seen so far on Rick Hughes would have raised the smallest red flag if she’d come across it under any other circumstances.

  Except that he looked exactly like Michael.

  It was too big a coincidence. Hughes’s appearance, the close proximity of his birth date to Michael’s, the fact that he had shown up in Big Stone Gap looking for information. How could all of that not have meaning?

  Her own research, conducted on a quick and superficial level that morning, had confirmed that it was possible for identical twins to have different-colored eyes.

  It had also turned up at least eighty sets of identical twins in Virginia’s criminal databases alone. Once an identical twin was identified, it made criminal prosecution of an individual almost impossible. Eyewitness testimony, DNA evidence, etc., became useless.

  Could she prove that Hughes was Michael’s identical twin?

  At her request, Tony was having his people dig deeper into Hughes’s background.

  She was going to dig deeper.

  She owed it to Michael to find the truth. He’d said a number of times that since he was dead his guilt or innocence no longer mattered, but if she could clear his name she would. If there was nothing else left she could do for him, she could at least do that.

  There was something more at issue, too: if Michael was innocent, then it meant that the man who had slaughtered the seven women Michael had been convicted of killing was still at large. If she knew anything about serial killers, and that was one thing she actually knew quite a lot about, he was also still killing. Whether or not this new murder proved to be the work of the Southern Slasher, he was out there somewhere. He wouldn’t have stopped. They never stopped until they were stopped.

  At this point, Hughes was her hands-down favorite candidate to be the real Southern Slasher. Which meant that he was a vicious killer who so far had gotten away scot-free.

  But speculation was just that. Without proof, there was nothing anyone could do.

  If there was proof, she meant to find it.

  As well as an answer to the question that was really starting to bother her: Why is he here?

  —

  When Hughes gave a courtesy knock on her open door and she looked up at him from where she was seated behind her desk, Charlie was as coolly composed as if her meltdown of the previous night had never happened, and she didn’t suspect the man standing in her doorway of a number of heinous murders. Her hair was twisted into the no-nonsense updo she preferred for working in the prison’s all-male environment, her makeup was minimal but effective in covering up any last vestiges of sleeplessness, and her only jewelry was Michael’s watch and a pair of small silver hoop earrings. The long-sleeved gray silk blouse and black pants she wore under her lab coat were completely businesslike, as were her sensible shoes.

  Professional to the core, that was her.

  “Dr. Stone,” Hughes greeted her. Sporting a briefcase, a clean-shaven face, and carefully groomed hair, he was the picture of workday elegance in a well-cut charcoal suit with a white shirt and a pale blue tie. Her lips tightened at the sight of him—the thought that he had killed at least eight women, gotten Michael imprisoned and killed, and was still walking around free as a bird gave Charlie the momentary urge to kill him herself—but she felt her expression changing and managed to control it in time, she hoped, even as she gestured at him to enter. Then as he walked toward her Charlie found herself unexpectedly blindsided by the sight of Michael all brushed and polished and in a suit. She’d never seen Michael in a suit, or with a good haircut, and the whole GQ aura he gave off was dazzling. Lips parting, she blinked at him. Finally she got it together—Not Michael!—stood up, and moved out from behind the desk.

  “Mr. Hughes,” she said, without offering to shake hands. Her aversion to him in that moment was just too strong. Their eyes met: once again, she picked up no evil vibes. But she’d figured out sometime back that picking up evil vibes wasn’t exactly her strong suit, so that didn’t tell her a thing. “I can give you precisely one hour.”

  She couldn’t help it. Her voice was clipped and cold.

  “I’ll take what I can get. And please, call me Rick.” He smiled at her. She suspected he’d killed a lot of ladies—and how was that for sick humor?—with the aid of that smile, which was wasted on her. She did not smile back. She did not invite him to call her Charlie. Instead, she grabbed her self-control with both metaphorical hands; said, “Have a seat”; and then gave herself a minute to regroup by looking beyond him at a pack of what seemed to be scruffy civilian teenagers moving past her office. Clearly they were the source of the chatter she’d been listening to since she’d opened her door to wait for Hughes to arrive.

  As Hughes headed toward the chair she had indicated, Johnson, the burly guard who was assigned to this area and who, having brought Hughes to her office, now hovered just outside the door, gestured urgently to her.

  Frowning, she stepped into the hallway.

  “That guy—he looks just like that bastard Garland,” Johnson whispered, shooting an uneasy look past her at Hughes. “Pardon my French, Dr. Stone, but you know who I’m talking about? That research subject of yours who got shanked in the hall a couple months back? I’m not crazy, right? You see it, too?”

  “I did notice a resemblance,” Charlie admitted, keeping her voice low.

  “Is he supposed to look like that?”

  Charlie had no idea what to make of that question, so she simply raised her eyebrows at him.

  Johnson wet his lips and glanced toward Hughes again. “Uh, look, uh, some of the inmates, uh, said they saw Garland. Uh, his ghost, after he was dead, I mean. Standing in front of one of the cells.” Charlie remembered Michael telling her that he’d paid a visit to the prison after he’d died. Specifically, to an inmate named Nash, who’d killed him. Apparently he’d made quite an impression. Johnson continued, “You don’t think that could be possible, do you?”

  “It seems unlikely,” Charlie said.

  His next words came out in a rush. “You don’t think we could have something like a High Plains Drifter situation going on here with this guy, do you?”

  Charlie thought she saw a flash of real fear in Johnson’s eyes. It took her a second to place the reference, then from the dregs of her memory she pulled up the vague memory of a Clint Eastwood movie about a cowboy ghost. Later, when she got the chance, she would check the movie out to be sure.

  “Mr. Hughes is definitely not a ghost,” she replied.

  “Yeah.” Johnson still didn’t look happy, but Charlie wasn’t in the mood to talk ghosts with him any longer, especially when the ghost in question was Michael.

  Instead she nodded at the teens. There were eight of them, including two girls. One gi
rl wore a miniskirt, the rest of the kids wore jeans, and there were tattoos and piercings on both sexes. A few of them, in too-cool-for-school mode, were joking and laughing loudly. The rest, except for one pale-faced boy who was clearly frightened by his surroundings, looked sullen. Aged fifteen to seventeen was Charlie’s guess. They had a civilian woman escort, plus two of the guards, and from their direction she assumed their destination was the prison library, which was farther along the hall.

  She asked, “What are they doing here?”

  Casting the group a disparaging look, Johnson said, “They’re juvies. The court sent ’em over. You know, as part of one of those Scared Straight things.”

  Charlie knew what he meant: Scared Straight and its imitators were programs designed to acquaint juvenile offenders with the grim realities of adult prisons. The purpose was to scare them away from a life of crime for fear of the consequences if they continued on their ruinous path. Numerous studies had shown that such programs didn’t work, and that, indeed, they had the opposite effect: a far higher percentage of offending youths who participated in them ended up in adult prisons than did offending youths who did not.

  But the powers that be were not convinced, and the programs continued to run.

  “We’ll be bringing some Level Fours up to talk to them,” Johnson told her. Level Four was prison jargon for the most violent offenders. “Another one of your guys is on the list: Gary Fleenor.”

  Gary Fleenor, known to the world as the Beer Can Killer because his trademark was drinking a number of Keystone Lights after committing a murder and then leaving the empty cans of the cheap beer beside the victim (which had proved to be a real boon to prosecutors when he was finally caught), had killed twenty-six women. A cold, calculating sexual sadist who was completely without remorse, he exhibited every marker of a typical serial killer. He was completely textbook. He was also one of six serial killers currently being housed at Wallens Ridge, and was part of Charlie’s current study.

  Charlie frowned. “Is that a good idea?”

  “Not my call,” Johnson replied. “Anyway, the program’s called Scared Straight, and Fleenor’s one scary dude.”