The Last Kiss Goodbye: A Charlotte Stone Novel Page 11

  “Being dead doesn’t have a whole lot of good points, but one of them is not having to worry about mosquitoes,” Michael said. “Just so you know, there’s one on your arm. I’d smack it for you, but that ain’t happening.”

  Charlie had already slapped at a good half a dozen. After a hasty glance down, she slapped again.

  “Damned mosquitoes,” Sheriff Peel said. “Perfect breeding conditions for them, though. All this standing water, and then it’s been hot as Hades.”

  The rain should have cooled things off. It hadn’t. The day—typical for late August—had been baking hot, and even in these, the small hours of the morning, the humidity made the air feel almost too thick to breathe. There were two water-filled pits on the site, although as far as anyone could tell only one held bodies. Steam rose up from the surface of the water in both pits, from the piled shale and mossy rocks around the edge of the clearing, from the thick mulch beneath the huge pines and oaks and beeches, from the flat grassy area where Charlie (and Michael) stood with Sheriff Peel and Ken, who were at the bottom of the law enforcement food chain on this investigation and thus had nothing to do at this point, and Jerry Ferrell and his dogs, whose part was played out. The dogs, big, loose-limbed, floppy-eared bloodhounds, lay panting on the ground at Ferrell’s feet. They cast occasional suspicious looks at Michael, whom Charlie was almost certain they could see, but having been ordered by their handler to lie down and be quiet that’s what they did.

  “You don’t think I ought to be getting on home to Debbie and the kids, do you?” Ken asked the sheriff uneasily as he, too, slapped at a mosquito. “Half the time, she doesn’t even lock the doors.”

  “I were you, I’d wait for the rest of us,” Sheriff Peel said. “No telling if the guy who did this is still on the mountain. And starting tomorrow, you make sure Debbie locks them doors.”

  “If you’ve finished with your pictures, I’d like to start getting the bodies out of the water now,” Frank Cramer, the medical examiner, called to the police photographers. He was an older, bald guy to whom Charlie had been introduced shortly after he’d arrived on the scene.

  Tony and Crane were once again back within the glare of the klieg lights, Charlie saw. Tony was standing next to the ME looking down into the pit with the bodies, while Crane was now videotaping everything, with the purpose, Charlie knew, of allowing the team to play the footage over and over again in an exhaustive search for clues. Even as she looked at him, Crane panned the camera over her and the men she was standing with, then moved on to the cops and firefighters and coroner’s assistants and the rest of what seemed like a cast of thousands currently milling around on the sidelines. Charlie knew what he was doing: watch the watchers was one of Tony’s maxims. Sometimes it yielded surprisingly fruitful results.

  Because a lot of times a killer would show up at a crime scene to drink in the efforts of law enforcement to find him. This killer in particular was likely to still be somewhere in the vicinity, Charlie knew. He would take pleasure in observing everything that went on in the aftermath of what he had done.

  It was part of the power trip he was on.

  One of the hounds—Mabel, Charlie thought her name was; the other one was Max—picked up her head and stared intently at the far side of the pit. Charlie followed her gaze curiously. What she saw when she did had her drawing in a sharp breath.

  “You okay?” Ken asked.

  “Damned mosquitoes,” Charlie echoed Sheriff Peel, and gave her arm another slap.

  But mosquitoes weren’t what had caused her reaction. On the other side of the pit, just beyond the bright circle cast by the klieg lights, a girl sat with her knees drawn up to her chin, her arms wrapped around her legs, and her head bent and resting on her knees. A girl with long, curly dark hair that spilled around her body to almost brush the flat shelf of rock she was sitting on. A girl with bare feet, and bare legs beneath mid-thigh-length shorts and slender bare arms emerging from a sleeveless dark-colored top. A girl who looked to be soaking wet, with water streaming from her body.

  A girl who hadn’t been there the last time Charlie had glanced that way.

  A dead girl. The spirit of one of the two girls whose bodies were still floating in the pit.

  Charlie felt her heartbeat speed up.

  She looked fixedly at the girl, saw her shoulders heave, and guessed that the spirit was crying.

  Every muscle in Charlie’s body tensed.

  I hate this.

  But finding out what she could from the newly deceased victims was the primary reason she had come. If she had only wanted to look over the crime scene, she could have waited until daylight. Or she could have looked at pictures. There had been no guarantee that the remaining girl’s spirit would be here, of course, but if she was still anywhere on earth at all, the place where she had been killed was the most likely for her to be found.

  And here she was.

  For a moment there, the small victory almost made Charlie feel good. Then the tragedy of what she was seeing reasserted itself, and her throat tightened.

  All I can do for her is help find who did this.

  “Excuse me, I’m going to go have a word with Agent Kaminsky.” Charlie chose that excuse because Kaminsky, heels and skirt suit ditched in favor of an FBI windbreaker along with black pants and sneakers that she had retrieved from her luggage when she’d changed at Charlie’s house before tackling the mountain, had just walked briskly past. Small as Kaminsky was in flat shoes, she still looked formidable with a shovel in her hands and not so much as a sideways glance to spare for anyone. Speculating on what Kaminsky might be going to do with that shovel was a waste of effort, so Charlie gave up on it almost at once. Instead she followed in Kaminsky’s wake without the least intention of catching up, skirting the dogs, dodging the fluid clusters of law enforcement types who were presumably engaged in one evidence-gathering activity or another, keeping to the shadowy edges of the clearing as she headed toward the crying girl.

  “You see her, too, huh?” Michael was right behind her. His voice had a resigned quality to it. “I figured.”

  Where they were, the darkness was obscuring enough that a quick nod in reply wasn’t going to work. Cops, deputies, FBI agents, rescue workers, coroner’s assistants, technicians—the clearing was swarming with official types. A steady stream of foot traffic moved continuously around the periphery as people went where they needed to go while trying to follow Tony’s directive to stay out of the crime scene as much as possible. But most of them were busy, doing their jobs, bustling from place to place. As far as she could tell, no one was paying any particular attention to her.

  So she took a chance.

  “I see her,” Charlie admitted, keeping her voice low. “I’m going to try to talk to her.”

  “You know, I kind of guessed that when you started heading this way. Got your barf bag with you?”

  That bit of sarcasm earned him a glower. “Shut up, okay? I’m talking to her, and that’s the end of the discussion.”

  “Go for it. Knock yourself out.”

  “Stay out of it,” Charlie warned, his blunt treatment of the other girl’s spirit still fresh in her mind. Then she had a corollary thought: “Unless I need you.”

  “Try not to need me. Weeping women ain’t exactly my thing.”

  “So get over it already. Weren’t you the one who just said life’s a bitch?”

  “Then I guess it’s a good thing I don’t have to worry about it anymore, right?”

  At that, Charlie made an exasperated sound under her breath and abandoned the conversation. Cool and heavy, his too-big watch had slid down her arm to lodge against her hand, and with exasperation she shoved it back up almost to her elbow, reflecting that of course any possession of his would be as annoying as he was. Then it hit her: Maybe he really isn’t a serial killer. Maybe he actually is innocent, and this watch is proof. Before she could even start to get all excited about that, a cool sprinkle of water distracted her as she passed to
o close beneath an overhanging evergreen branch and dislodged a shower of droplets that ran down her neck, making her flinch. In front of her, the long shadows cast by the trees seemed to twist in upon themselves like crooked, arthritic fingers. The smell of the woods—pine and moss and wet earth—was strong enough to supplant what was now the background note of the swampy scent of the water in the pit. Snatches of conversation rose and fell around her, their individual threads more discernible than before. The steady hum of the generator, the clank of metal on rock as a boat hook attached to a chain was readied for the removal of the bodies, the rustle of bright blue body bags being laid out by the side of the pit, filled her ears. The dead girl now looked almost more vivid than the living people on the scene. Charlie’s senses had heightened. It sometimes happened when she was in the close vicinity of the newly dead. She cast a quick, consuming look all around to try to make certain she wasn’t being observed. As far as she could tell, no one was paying the least attention to her. Still, the sensation she had of being watched could have come from anywhere, or nowhere, like her imagination. It could be the Gingerbread Man, who might be somewhere keeping an eye on the kill site. But she saw no one looking in her direction, and at the moment that’s all she had to go by. Concentrating on the spirit, who was only a few yards away now, Charlie did her best to block everything else out.

  As she approached she could hear the girl crying. The sound tore at Charlie’s heart.

  “I’m here to help you,” Charlie told her, positioning herself so that her back was turned to most of the people in the clearing as she stopped a few steps from the edge of the rock shelf the girl was sitting on. She ignored the sudden queasiness that attacked her stomach like clockwork. She had no intention of letting anyone—read Michael—know about it unless and until it got to the point where she couldn’t hide it anymore. Until then, she would power through and hope for the best. Thanks to the klieg lights, it wasn’t entirely dark where she stood, but the tangled shadows were thick enough to obscure a lot of detail. Another uneasy glance around found tiny pairs of glowing orbs shining among the trees: animal eyes, Charlie identified them even as she shivered. At least they accounted for the eerie feeling she had that she was being intently watched. Without looking up, the girl continued to sob pitifully. The sound made Charlie feel sick at heart. “Are you Laura? Or Raylene?”

  The girl cried on as if she hadn’t heard.

  Michael made a rough sound under his breath. He was no longer behind Charlie. Instead, he had moved to her left and slightly in front of her, not blocking her view of the girl but clearly positioning himself to step in between them if the need should arise. Noticing that with impatience, Charlie made a mental note to give him, the first chance she got, a quick overview of the rules covering ghosts on the ground.

  “Hell, somebody’s beat her to death,” Michael said. His face had tightened. His position allowed him to view the girl from a different angle, and it was apparent that what he was seeing was bad. Even as Charlie instinctively craned her neck to look, Michael shook his head at her. “You don’t want to see this.”

  Charlie shot him a look. This whole Protective-R-Us thing he had going on was actually kind of cute, but it was also annoying and, given who and what he was, ridiculous.

  “Believe me, I’ve seen worse.” Her response was tart. Charlie then got an eyeful of what he was trying to keep her from seeing and immediately wished she hadn’t.

  The back of the girl’s head was bashed in. Crushed like an egg. Dark clots of blood matted her hair to the wound. More blood made the strands around the wound clump together. Shattered remnants of her skull were embedded in gelatinous brain matter. Part of the brain itself hung out of the hole, looking like a slimy lump of congealed oatmeal, dripping blood mixed with a milky liquid Charlie could only surmise was brain fluid.

  It was, in a word, gruesome.

  Charlie’s stomach, which had been fighting the good fight against nausea so that she had been registering only mild gastric distress, started to churn.

  “Told you not to look,” Michael said, and Charlie guessed that she must have blanched.

  “Hello?” The girl looked up suddenly, hopefully, her eyes going straight to Michael. Blinking, she peered at him as if trying to get him into focus. The light hit the tears rolling down her face so that they made glistening tracks along her cheeks. She was a pretty girl, twenty-ish, small and slender, with big dark eyes currently welling with tears and delicate features framed by masses of wet black curls. As she blinked at Michael, her breath caught on a shuddering sob. From her expression it was clear that, if she hadn’t been able to see him before, she could see him now. Her voice took on an urgent note. “Who are you? Do you know what’s happened?”

  She scrambled to her feet as she spoke: she was maybe five-foot-two. More tears spilled from her eyes. Taking first one and then another hesitant step toward Michael, as if she wasn’t quite sure she was actually seeing him, she then whispered, “Oh, thank goodness!” and broke into a run. An instant later she threw herself against him, wrapping her arms around his waist as she started to cry again in earnest. Michael looked down at her with as much alarm as if he had just been grabbed by a ghost—and he wasn’t one himself.

  Well, the ins and outs of finding himself among the dead were new to him. He was still adjusting.

  “Yo,” he said, his eyes sliding Charlie’s way. Sobbing loudly, the girl buried her face in the front of his white T-shirt and clung. His hard, handsome face turned grim as he looked down at her shattered head. Seeing how small the girl looked in comparison to him—the top of her head didn’t even begin to reach his broad shoulders, and a whole lot of wide chest was visible on either side of her—Charlie registered again in passing how tall and muscular he truly was. Add his surfer God good looks to the mix and, in life, he must have had women hanging off him like Christmas tree ornaments. Except as part of appraising his qualities as a predator, it wasn’t something she’d really thought about before, but … now she did. She also registered something else: a tiny niggle of—what? Awareness, that was it. Seeing Michael with a woman was new, and what she was feeling was simply herself becoming aware of the newness of it.

  It was different, that was all. And that’s why she was feeling the niggle.

  “So do something already,” he said, glancing at Charlie again.

  “Don’t talk to me. She doesn’t know I’m here,” Charlie instructed. “I want you to talk to her. Tell her you’re here to help.”

  Lips tightening, he transferred his attention back to the weeping girl and gave her a couple of clumsy-looking pats on the back.

  “Don’t worry, I’m here to help,” he said.

  “Good job,” Charlie encouraged him, and in return received a look that she roughly interpreted as meaning something on the order of eat dirt. The niggle that was her awareness of him with a woman in his arms subsided—he couldn’t have looked more uncomfortable if a python were twining itself around him—and Charlie was glad to dismiss it as the nothing it had been. She would have found his obvious unease with his situation almost amusing if the girl’s distress hadn’t been so heartrending. “You’re doing great.”

  “Please.” The girl’s voice trembled as she looked up at him. “I don’t know where I am. I—I think I’m lost. Can you help me?”

  It was obvious to Charlie that, as was the case with many new spirits, she had no idea she was dead. She also was no longer able to experience the world of the living. The girl could only see Michael. The people around her—Charlie, law enforcement, rescue workers, everyone on the scene—were invisible to her, as were the details of her surroundings. Why? Because she was dead and they were not: each existed in a different plane. Here in this moment, in this place, for this dead girl, only Michael existed.

  “Don’t come right out and tell her she’s dead,” Charlie said quickly to Michael as he looked like he was getting ready to do just that. She had a lively fear that he was about to be as forthright
with this girl as he had been with the one in her house. “Ask her her name.”

  Michael sent Charlie another of those narrow-eyed this sucks flickers before looking down at the girl again.

  “Everything’s okay,” he told her, rather gingerly putting an arm around her shoulders as, with both arms still wrapped around his waist, she looked beseechingly up into his face. Charlie had to admit that she was impressed by how reassuring he was actually being. “My name’s Michael. What’s your name?”

  “L-Laura. Laura Peters.” The girl looked wildly all around. “Where are we? What’s happened?”

  “Ask her what she remembers,” Charlie instructed, and Michael did.

  “Oh. Oh, oh.” Laura’s expression changed dramatically. Pushing away from him, looking all around, she suddenly started gasping. “I’m drowning. The water—the water’s pouring in. I can’t—they said kick your feet, and move your arms like this.” She mimed trying to breaststroke. “They’re trying to help me. But I’m sinking—” She started to cough violently. “I can’t swim! I can’t swim!”

  “You don’t have to be afraid. You’re safe now,” Michael told her. Shaking her head, Laura looked up at him with blind terror, then sank down on her haunches and covered her face with her hands as she burst into tears again. With a glinting look at Charlie, Michael crouched beside her.

  “Ask her who tried to help her swim,” Charlie directed.

  “Laura. Can you tell me who tried to help you swim?” In contrast to his face, which could have been carved from stone, Michael’s voice was soft and steady.

  Her hands dropped away from her face. Her expression was agitated as she looked at him. “The other girls. They can swim. They tried to help me, but I can’t. I can’t swim! My head keeps going under and—” She broke off, gasping and gagging as if she were choking. “There’s a man. I’m afraid of him. He’s drowning us. He wants us to—he wants us to— The water’s pouring in. Oh, no! Oh! Oh!”