The Last Time I Saw Her

by Karen Robards

  She frowned at him. “You’re not funny. This isn’t funny.”

  “It’s kind of funny. Come on, babe, an evil twin?”

  “Does he look just like you?” she countered, then added, “Well, his eyes are a different color, but besides that.”

  “What color are his eyes?”

  “Hazel. Yours are blue.”

  “I know what color my eyes are.”

  “Identical twins can have different-colored eyes. I researched it. Other than that, you look exactly the same. You saw it for yourself on the bus. I know you did, because I saw your face when you spotted him.”

  “Charlie—”

  “Would you just listen?” As concisely as she could, Charlie told Michael everything she knew about Rick Hughes, starting with the moment she’d first seen him at the grave and including the background information Tony had given her. She’d just gotten to the part where she was going to have the identical-twin thing officially confirmed via the DNA from Hughes’s coffee cup when Michael stopped her.

  “Wait. You think this guy slaughtered all those women and your reaction is to invite him up to your office to have coffee?”

  Charlie instantly knew where he was going with that. “I did not invite him up to my office to have coffee. He had a court order allowing him access to your files, which were in my office. I allowed him to come up to get the files, and in the process gave him coffee.”

  “So you could get his DNA.”

  “Seemed like the easiest way to do it to me.”

  “And that doesn’t strike you as being a little self-destructive?”

  “Would you stop with that already? Your trying to play armchair psychiatrist is getting old.”

  “Babe, if it walks like it needs a shrink and talks like it needs a shrink, then, take it from me, it needs a shrink.”

  Exasperated, she asked, “Don’t you want to know who really committed the murders that sent you to death row?”

  “You know what? At this point, I don’t give a shit. I’m dead now, remember? Whether the courts change their minds about if I did it or not doesn’t change a thing for me.” A smile just curved his mouth. “Wait a minute. Is this you finally saying you believe I’m innocent?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, what do you know. Glory be, it’s a miracle. The beautiful but slightly pigheaded Dr. Stone admits she got something wrong.”

  He called me beautiful. How stupid was it that the compliment made her feel warm all over? And pigheaded. Well, that didn’t make her feel warm.

  “You shouldn’t have messed with my inkblots,” she retorted. “If you hadn’t made up all those bloodcurdling descriptions of what you saw in them, and screwed around on all the other tests that were administered to you, too, I would have known right away that your psychological profile almost certainly precluded you from being a serial killer.”

  “Covering your ass, Doc?”

  She lifted her chin at him. “Altering my professional opinion on the basis of new information.”

  “Ah.”

  He was still smiling that slight smile at her, and he looked so dear, so familiar, so damned aggravating, but still so much her person, that one person who mattered for her, her friend and family and lover all rolled into one, that her heart turned over. It didn’t matter that he was gorgeous, although he was. It didn’t matter that he was sexy, although he was that, too. It didn’t even matter that he was dead, a spirit at that moment residing in a stolen human body. What mattered was that he was Michael.

  She said, “You know, it would have helped if every time you came near me you’d been a little less insolent. And a little less aggressive and threatening.”

  “I never threatened you. And, anyway, where would the fun have been in that?”

  With only limited use of his hands because of the cuffs, he caught the front of her shirt and tugged her closer, then kissed her so hotly that she could practically feel flames licking at her skin. Her hand slid around to the back of his head, and she kissed him back and burned for him.

  When he lifted his head her eyes opened. Heart thudding, she blinked at him, momentarily punchy. Unfair how easy it was for him to turn her on. From his expression, she got the feeling that she might be looking a little bit dazzled.

  She knew she felt dazzled.

  “You sure you don’t want to change your mind and just go ahead and fuck me now?” There was a wickedness to the slight smile he gave her that did unbelievable things to her body. “You know it’s going to happen, and this way we could get it over with. I mean, since we’re stuck here and—”

  “No,” Charlie said firmly, picturing herself beating off lust with a stick, and straightened away from him.

  He continued to smile at her. Wickedly.

  “Forget it,” she said. “Not happening. No way, José.”

  He still said nothing, just sat there, looking at her with that maddening smile. Any reaction—a frown, further protestations—would simply add to his enjoyment. Charlie mentally gritted her teeth, girded her loins, and cast her mind back to the conversation they’d been having. Before he’d managed to make her forget everything except him.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you about being innocent sooner,” she said after a moment, and was proud of how normal her voice sounded.

  “That’s okay. I kinda got that you were getting a thrill from thinking you were fucking a serial killer.”

  Charlie’s eyes flew to his face. She practically choked with indignation. “I was not getting a thrill from—” Seeing his sudden grin, she broke off and punched his arm. “You suck,” she said. “Just so you know.”

  He laughed. It was the first normal laugh she’d heard out of him since he’d returned, and it turned her heart inside out.

  Then he said, “I appreciate the fact that you’ve finally seen the light, but I want you to leave this Southern Slasher thing alone.”

  His tone left her in no doubt that he meant what he said.

  She said, “What? There’s no way I’m going to leave it alone. Aside from the fact that you deserve to have your name cleared, Rick Hughes is a murderer. Besides the women that got blamed on you, I’m certain that there are more victims. Serial killers don’t stop. The case he’s supposedly working on? If that murder is identical to the Southern Slasher murders, then he must have done it, too. And there will be others, I guarantee you.”

  It made her feel a little better to see that Michael was at least starting to look thoughtful.

  He said, “For the sake of argument, let’s say this guy is my identical twin. He looks like me, I was adopted, it’s not completely outside the realm of possibility. But why’d he come to you? If he’s the real Southern Slasher, and the Southern Slasher murders he committed were blamed on me, and I was dead, what was his purpose in coming to you and stirring the whole damned thing up again?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I haven’t figured that part out yet.”

  “Okay. Let that go for the moment. So here’s something else: If he killed Candace Hartnell in the fifty-minute window between the time I left her and the time she was found dead, he had to have known of my existence even though I didn’t know anything about him, and he had to have been stalking me, right, and waiting for his opportunity to kill a girl I’d just left my DNA all over so the blame for all seven murders would fall on me?”

  “Y-yes, I guess,” Charlie said. “That seems logical, although I haven’t had time to work out the whole process he went through yet. I will, though, believe me.”

  “One more thing: Where’d he get the watch?” He shot a meaningful look at the heavy silver watch that right at that moment was pushed halfway up Charlie’s forearm. “You know, the one that was left with the Hartnell chick’s body that was identical to my watch that you’re wearing now. Where’d he get it?”

  “Where’d you get it?” she asked.

  For a moment she thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then he said, “Afghanistan. When I first
got there, I was part of a force that was sent out to rescue some warlord from insurgents. We had to synchronize the rescue perfectly, so the CO handed out identical watches. Twenty-four of us went out, four of us came back. That was me, Sean, Hoop, and Cap. After that was when we got them engraved.”

  Michael wasn’t much on talking about his past, as she knew from experience. For him to tell her that was a measure of how far their relationship had come. She wanted to pat his arm, rub his leg, something, in sympathetic acknowledgment, but she was afraid that if she made too big a deal of his revelations he would immediately clam up. So instead she tucked the information away and said matter-of-factly, “So there were twenty watches given out at the same time as yours that weren’t engraved. I take it Hughes wasn’t one of the guys who got one?”

  “I think somebody would have noticed if I’d had a double over there. Hell, I probably would have noticed myself.” His tone was dry.

  “So no,” Charlie said, adding, “It’s possible that the same watch was available for purchase by anyone,” and she made a mental note to check, and also to try to ascertain the whereabouts of the other, not engraved watches that had been issued that day.

  “Maybe,” he said. “But you realize that having that damned watch turn up at the crime scene makes it almost certain that I was deliberately framed for those murders instead of blamed by mistake. If I’m following you, you think that this Hughes guy got hold of a watch like mine to frame me—but he wouldn’t have known to have it engraved—and then followed me around, waited for his chance, and killed a woman I’d been with. Why?”

  “To deflect suspicion from himself,” Charlie answered. That she’d already thought through. “He must have known about you and realized that you were the perfect fall guy for the murders he had already committed.”

  “Then why did he come to you and drag the whole thing up again?”

  Okay, they’d just come full circle. Charlie frowned at him. “I don’t know.”

  “Me neither,” Michael said. “And what’s more, I don’t care. What I do care about is that you’re going to get yourself killed if you don’t find a new gig that doesn’t have anything to do with serial killers.”

  She made a face at him. “Can anybody say ‘broken record’?”

  “Can anybody say ‘death wish’?”

  “Would you stop with the—” Charlie began indignantly, but he cut her off with a kiss. His brief but thorough invasion of her mouth had her gripping his shoulders hard and kissing him back with helpless abandon. It made her shiver. It made her heart pound. It made her yearn for more. With every kiss, he was weakening her defenses, making her burn hotter, upping the chances that she would do something like climb onto his lap and get the deed done already. What’s more, he knew it.

  Get thee behind me, Satan.

  When he straightened away from her, he said, “Babe, I think you’re suffering survivor’s guilt from your friend being killed all those years ago and you not being able to help her. If you don’t recognize what you’re doing and stop, you’re going to keep pushing until you wind up like her. Dead.”

  That his voice was all sexy and husky in the aftermath of their kiss did not make what he’d said any less annoying.

  “Oh, my God,” Charlie exclaimed, recovering from the tingly melties left behind by their kiss and glaring at him. “That’s it. That’s enough. One more amateur diagnosis out of you and I’ll…I’ll…” She couldn’t think of anything bad enough to threaten him with.

  He knew it, too. “You’ll what?”

  “I’ll start laying a few diagnoses on you.”

  “You’ve been doing your shrink thing with me since we met.” His mouth quirked at her. “Just so you know, most of the time it gets me hot. Turns out chicks with through-the-roof IQs and my-way-or-the-highway attitudes really do it for me. Who knew?”

  Charlie narrowed her eyes at him. “You are so full of—”

  “What, you don’t think I spent a lot of time when I was locked in my cell fantasizing about Dr. Ballbreaker with the sexy bod and the big blue eyes? ’Cause I did. Just like probably ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the men who come in contact with you in that damned prison do.”

  “I can’t help what—”

  He interrupted ruthlessly. “The thing is, I wouldn’t hurt you. Those bastards in that bus? They’d love hurting you. They’d have fun doing it. You got kidnapped right out of your workplace by a bunch of psychos who were absolutely going to rape and torture and kill you. If I hadn’t been there, they’d be doing it right now. Is that a normal thing that might happen to anybody in the course of their workday? No, it’s fucking not. The point I’m making is, you can’t count on me always being around to save your ass. I’m asking you, please: find a new line of work.”

  His tone and expression were both so completely serious that Charlie was surprised into paying attention. She frowned. This was a rehash of the argument they kept having over and over, but to have Michael looking at her this way, asking her this way, was new. It was enough to make her stop and think, at least.

  “Is there a reason you’re so stuck on this right now?” she asked, frowning at him. He glanced away: he was doing the twisty thing with the handcuffs again, and he looked down at them. She could read absolutely nothing in his face. But there was something—something…

  He said, “You ever think maybe I want to keep you alive?”

  “Michael. Talk to me.”

  He looked at her again then. “What we’ve got here—you and me, this thing that’s going on with us—is temporary. We both know that. One of these days I’m going to disappear from your life for good. Nothing either of us can do to change it. I’d like to see you safe before it happens.”

  The thought of him disappearing forever was like a shard of fear stabbing into her heart. She didn’t think she could live through a repeat of the last seventeen days, much less a lifetime of it. As she stared at him, she felt herself going cold all over.

  “What is up with you?” she demanded. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

  “I’m just facing facts,” he replied, and made a sudden savage movement with his wrists. A metallic snapping sound followed.

  Charlie’s eyes widened.

  “You broke the handcuffs,” she said on a note of mild disbelief as he stretched his arms wide. The bracelets still adorned both wrists, but the chain dangled from his left. “I didn’t think people could do that.”

  “Like riding a bike.”

  “I’m officially impressed.”

  “I’d rather you be officially unemployed.”

  “Michael—”

  She broke off as what sounded like running footsteps and violently rustling foliage from somewhere above was punctuated by a short, shrill, abruptly terminated scream.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Charlie and Michael looked up at the same time, their reaction automatic. There was nothing to see except a craggy, near perpendicular mountainside, a shadowy fringe of trees swaying along the edge of the cliff above them, and a flotilla of nearly black clouds blowing across a higher ceiling of ink black sky. Except for the low moan of the wind and the usual night sounds, there was also now nothing to hear. But the scream—Charlie hadn’t been mistaken about the scream. She thought it had come from the road, or rather the wooded verge beside the road, some hundred and twenty feet above their heads. She was about to glance at Michael when a handful of pebbles and dirt rained down on them.

  Instantly, she looked up again. Her pulse quickened.

  “Could be anything,” Michael said in response to her wordless clutching of his arm. “An animal up there hunting. Another damned ghost reenactment. Anything.”

  “It sounded like a woman screamed. A girl.” Charlie’s mouth was dry. “You know it did.”

  “Could be anything,” Michael repeated. Taking off his jacket, he draped it around her shoulders. “Here. Your teeth are starting to chatter.”

  The jacket was still warm
from his body, and she accepted it gratefully, sliding her arms into the sleeves, hugging it close.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  It was far too large, big enough to fit maybe three of her in it, the arms dangling past the tips of her fingers. She got busy rolling up the sleeves, launching straight back into the conversation they’d been having. “You have to go check it out. You said you could climb up. And now you don’t even have to worry about the handcuffs.”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean ‘no’? What if it’s Paris? Or Bree? Or…or…”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “We’ve been over this.”

  “You are not coldhearted and callous enough to just ignore that scream we heard.”

  “Want to bet?”

  “You jumped out of the bus after me.”

  “Like I think I may have told you before, you’re mine, Doc. I protect what’s mine.”

  That was equal parts infuriating and heartstopping, so chauvinistic on the one hand, so backhandedly romantic on the other, that for a moment Charlie was at a loss for a reply.

  Another truncated cry and a shower of debris made them both glance up again.

  “You know that’s not an animal.” Charlie was so agitated she stood up, wrapped her arms around herself, and started to pace back and forth.

  Michael looked up at her. “I do not know that’s not an animal. Anyway, I’m here to save your damned life, not go running around this whole damned mountain on some probably fruitless bleeding-heart search-and-rescue mission.”

  “You wouldn’t be running around the whole damned mountain. You’d be climbing right up there.”

  “Leaving you alone on this damned ledge.”

  “What on earth do you think is going to happen to me on this ledge? Nothing can get to me here. You have to—”

  “Help!” The cry was thin and faint and terrified. It was also clearly human, and almost certainly female.