The Last Kiss Goodbye: A Charlotte Stone Novel Read online

  “Yeah. The whole thing, plus close-ups of everything on it.”

  “The knife and envelope?”

  “Oh, yeah. At least a dozen.”

  “Okay.” Sager looked at Charlie. She was close enough to the table now that she could see the wet splotch the knife had left on the envelope. She could see something else, too, that made her eyes widen. Her name was written on the envelope: Dr. Charlotte Stone. In what looked like black sharpie, unsmudged despite the damp spot in the middle of it. The writing was large enough so that her name was easily readable. The script itself was delicate, flowing.

  A shiver slid over her skin as she looked at it.

  “Envelope’s addressed to you. Would you mind opening it?” As Charlie nodded assent Sager added, “I’ll need you to put on some gloves first.”

  Michael was frowning at the table. He cast a sharp look at Charlie. “You get that your name on that envelope means the sick bastard thinks he’s got some kind of connection going on with you.”

  Charlie got it, all right. Her pulse picked up the pace as, briefly, , she held Michael’s gaze. Once again she was burningly conscious of the open curtains. The sudden sense of vulnerability she felt at the thought that whoever had left that envelope on the table might be watching through the window was only slightly mitigated by reminding herself that her house was full of cops.

  “Dr. Stone.” A cop handed Charlie a pair of latex gloves. As she pulled them on, another similarly gloved cop picked up the knife and dropped it in a plastic bag.

  “Tag that for the FBI,” Sager told him, then added to Charlie, “Be real careful with that, please. I’ll get my butt handed to me if there’s damage to the evidence.”

  Charlie nodded, and picked up the envelope. It wasn’t sealed, she saw as she turned it over. Of course, whoever had left it had wanted her to open it.

  Taking a deep breath, conscious of the weight of many eyes on her, she lifted the flap and pulled out the single sheet of paper that was inside.

  On plain white typing paper, in black sharpie, in the same flowing script that was on the envelope, were written the words:

  You can’t catch me.

  Looking at them, Charlie felt her heart start to slam in her chest. Her breath caught. She looked up quickly, her eyes going instinctively to Michael, who like Sager was watching her with frowning attention.

  “I know who did this.” There was a sudden tightness in her chest. Then, remembering that to Sager and anyone else who was watching it would look like she was directing her words to thin air, she transferred her gaze from Michael to Sager.

  “I know who did this,” she repeated urgently.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Who?” Michael and Sager demanded almost in unison, as every eye in the kitchen that hadn’t already been watching her turned her way.

  Charlie took a deep, steadying breath as all the pieces suddenly started fitting together in her mind. The truth was terrifying: this was a case she had recently consulted on and she recognized the killer’s signature MO right off the bat. She felt her blood drain toward her toes as she faced it. “I’m almost positive that we’re dealing with a serial killer. He’s known as the Gingerbread Man.”

  “You know what, you need to rethink this whole serial killer gig you got going on,” Michael said. “And I’m being completely serious here.”

  “The Gingerbread Man?” Sager frowned doubtfully at her.

  “He’s been operating up and down the East Coast for at least the last two years.” Talking around the sudden tightness in her throat, Charlie directed her remarks to Sager and ignored the grim stare Michael was giving her. She took one last look at the piece of paper—the words You can’t catch me leaped out at her like the taunt they were meant to be—then carefully refolded it, slid it back inside the envelope, and started to put the envelope on the table.

  It took every bit of self-control she had to keep her hands steady.

  “You can get another job,” Michael told her. “Most shrinks write prescriptions for kids with ADHD. They talk fat cats off the ledge when the economy tanks. They listen to middle-aged women cry about their empty nests. They don’t put their lives at risk every single day. That’s crazy.”

  “Uh, would you mind dropping that in here?” The same cop who had bagged the knife held open another plastic bag to receive the letter. Doing her best to keep a clear head, Charlie obediently dropped it in. The idea that yet another serial killer had her in his sights was stirring up nightmare memories that she’d thought – hoped – prayed - she’d put to rest.

  “Well, now, I never heard of anyone called that,” Sager said. “A serial killer, you say. Here in town?”

  “Yes. At least, tonight he was.” Serial killers had always existed. They always would. That she had become enmeshed in their darkness was her bad luck. As she accepted the harsh truth of that, Charlie forgot all about her wobbly legs, the lingering remnants of nausea, the exhaustion that had been creeping over her, her very mixed emotions about what she had done with Michael. What she had been hoping to return to—her peaceful existence, her safe little house, the distance she had carefully crafted between herself and the serial killers she analyzed in hopes of learning what made them tick so that others of their ilk could be identified and stopped before they hurt anyone else—had just been blasted to hell. Once again, she was being plunged into the horror she had spent most of her life trying to avoid.

  The Gingerbread Man had been in her house less than an hour before. What she wanted to do—turn back the clock, erase the last hour, go on like Jenna McDaniels had never come banging on her door—was impossible. That being the case, she had no choice but to deal. And dealing meant taking up the Gingerbread Man’s challenge, doing her best to make sure that he got caught. If she did not succeed, he would kill again, and soon. Even if she turned her back on the challenge, left the investigation up to Sager and the FBI agents who were supposedly on the way, she still would not be able to simply go on with her life. A vicious, conscienceless serial killer had entered her house and left her a message. He knew who she was, where she lived, and what she did. He was interested in her. What were the chances that he would just forget all about her, go away and leave her alone if she refused to play? None. Zero. Zip.

  She had always been good at grasping the reality of a situation, and as she recognized the reality of that she pushed the fear and dread that were her first reactions aside. They would do her no good at all. For whatever reason, this was the hand she had been dealt.

  If she had no choice but to play, then she was damned well going to play to win.

  You have to outthink him, she told herself, and squared her shoulders in preparation.

  Okay. He had to have left trace evidence behind. For one thing, it was raining: there should be footprints in the muddy yard. Jenna had run to her house from somewhere presumably nearby. If investigators were very, very lucky, it would be the crime scene, where two bodies could possibly still be found. A fresh, intact crime scene.

  Plus, in Jenna, they had a living witness. A living witness with the crime still vivid in her mind.

  Maybe, this time, this particular monster had cut it too close. Maybe this was the mistake that would cause him to be caught. Maybe she could help put one more dangerous predator away where he could never hurt anyone again.

  The thought strengthened her. It cleared her head, fired her determination.

  I can do this.

  The local PD and sheriff’s department were great. She was sure the FBI agents who were coming, the ones who had been spearheading the search for Jenna, were competent. But they didn’t have the expertise or experience necessary to even begin to handle a monster like this one.

  Fortunately, she knew people who did. In fact, earlier that very night she had regretfully kissed one goodbye. If she was lucky, he might still be within reach.

  “Head’s up, folks. We’re going to be turning out the lights for a minute to see if our spray illuminates any fo
otprints on the floor,” a technician called.

  So apparently the chemical they’d been using wasn’t Luminol, after all.

  As the lights went out, as darkness descended, Charlie felt a shiver run down her spine. Ignoring it, resolutely ignoring it, she pulled her phone out of her pocket, called up her contact list, and hit the number she was looking for.

  “You phoning somebody?” Having moved closer to her in the darkness, Sager eyed her glowing cell phone askance. Unable to help herself—being too close to a stranger in the darkness didn’t feel comfortable now—Charlie took a step away from him even as she replied.

  “This is something that local law enforcement, no matter how good they are, isn’t equipped for,” Charlie told him as the phone rang in her ear. “If you’ve got men outside searching for evidence or for those other two girls or the crime scene or whatever, they need to stop where they are. I—”

  “Charlie?” The warmly masculine voice answering the phone was music to her ears. “What’s up?”

  “Tony,” she greeted him with relief, then felt even more relief as the lights came back on.

  “Fuck,” Michael said. “That guy?”

  “Dr. Stone, I don’t think—” Sager sounded unhappy.

  “Stop everything,” Charlie interrupted Sager, pinning him with what she hoped was a commanding look. “Stop. Now.”

  “I would.” On the other end of the phone, Tony was sounding amused. “But I’m really not doing much. Napping in a chair. Looks like I’m going to be spending the next few hours right here in Lonesome Pine Airport. Plane can’t take off because of the storm.”

  “With all due respect, Dr. Stone,” Sager said, “we have an investigation to conduct. Stopping it isn’t an option.”

  “When’s the last time your department handled any kind of murder investigation at all? How many years ago? This is a serial killer. The case needs to be overseen by experts in catching them,” Charlie answered Sager fiercely, while at the same time, except for shooting him a dirty look, doing her best to ignore Michael, who had just finished telling her, “You know you’ve got a major screw loose, right?” To Tony, whom she considered the only one really worth talking to at the moment, Charlie responded, “Thank God for the storm. Have you ever heard of the Gingerbread Man?”

  “Yeah, sure. He’s on the Active List”—meaning the FBI’s list of serial killers who were known to be active in the country at any given time—“but—”

  “He’s here.” Simply saying it made her palms go damp. “He’s been in my house. Tonight.”

  “What?” From the sound of his voice, Tony had sat bolt upright in his chair. He responded to a sudden burst of chatter on his end of the call with an impatient, “Quiet, you two. I need to hear this.”

  As he was obviously not talking to her, Charlie had to ask. “Who’s there with you?”

  “Kaminsky and Crane. Their plane didn’t get out of here, either.” In the background Charlie could hear the other members of the team—FBI Special Agents Lena Kaminsky and Buzz Crane—demanding to know what was up. They were quickly silenced, and Charlie imagined Tony, who was their boss, gesturing at them to be quiet.

  Charlie gave Tony a quick, condensed version of events, finishing with “The trail’s still fresh. We’ve got a real chance to catch this guy if you can get here fast. We—”

  “We?” Michael erupted. He was giving her the kind of hard, intimidating, you will bend to my will look that she hoped she had just turned on Sager. Once upon a time, coming from the big, scary convict in the orange jumpsuit who she was pretty sure had lied to her about her inkblots, she might actually have found that look alarming. Now, though, she found herself battling the impulse to stick her tongue out at him. “If you mean you and him, there is no we in this, buttercup. Your boyfriend there’s a federal agent who gets paid to lay his life on the line. You’re a shrink. You get paid to listen to people talk. Damn it, Charlie, I’m going to say this one more time: messing with serial killers is stupid. It’s fucking dangerous. Didn’t anybody ever teach you that if you poke a sleeping bear enough times sooner or later it’s going to wake up and eat you?”

  Charlie shot Michael a narrow-eyed mind your own business look. Replying to him was, of course, out of the question.

  So she continued talking to Tony instead.

  “—have a survivor, we have an envelope with handwriting on it as well as other possible trace evidence, we have a knife that may or may not be a murder weapon, we have—”

  “We’re out the door,” Tony interrupted her to say. “Thirty minutes, max.”

  That was exactly the response Charlie had hoped for. Tony and his team were as invested in the apprehension of serial killers as she was in the studying of them. She knew how good they were at their jobs because she had watched them work: on the very day that Michael had been killed, Tony and his team had come to her and asked for her help in finding the Boardwalk Killer, the serial killer who had murdered her best friend, Holly, and Holly’s family when she and Holly were only seventeen. Charlie had been staying the night with Holly at the time, and had hidden from the killer and survived. When the Boardwalk Killer had resurfaced after fifteen years, she had been reluctant (okay, afraid) to get involved—but she had done it anyway. As a result, the Boardwalk Killer had been captured, and, not incidentally, Charlie had been freed of the secret terror she had lived with ever since she’d survived the attacker who had killed Holly: that the Boardwalk Killer would, sooner or later, come back and kill her, too. And in the process, she had been enormously impressed with Tony and his team.

  Now there was another madman, more victims, fresh horror. Another serial killer who had turned his eyes toward her. Simply thinking about it made Charlie imagine that she could feel the darkness closing in. Her darkness, her own private one, the one that came from looking evil in the face and barely surviving. The darkness of her own mortal fear.

  She could feel a tightening in her chest.

  I don’t know if I can go through this again.

  Tony was saying, “Did you say the local police are there now? Could you let me speak to whoever’s in charge?”

  Stay in the moment. “That would be Detective Todd Sager.”

  Passing her phone to Sager, Charlie told him, “This is FBI Special Agent Tony Bartoli, from the Special Circumstances Division out of Quantico. They’re an elite team whose sole purpose is to track and catch serial killers. They’re on their way here right now.”

  “Well, hell, there goes the neighborhood,” Michael said with disgust, leaning back against the breakfast bar and folding his arms over his chest. Charlie shot him an angry look. Serial killers were evil by definition, and no matter how much he proclaimed his innocence, Michael was a convicted serial killer. She ought to hate him. She ought to fear him. She definitely ought to have let him go to his just reward when she’d had the chance. He was one of them.

  You know I’m innocent. Oh, God, she didn’t. The sad truth almost certainly was, he had said the words she needed to hear, and she just wanted to believe.

  “Oh, so now you’re mad at me?” Michael said. “Nice.”

  “I don’t think—” were the first words Sager said into the phone. Then he was silent, listening, finally nodding. “I’ll pass the word.” He looked at Charlie. “Special Agent Bartoli wants to speak to you,” he said, and handed the phone back to her.

  “Sit tight. We’ll be with you shortly,” Tony told her, while Sager barked at the other cops in the room, “Everybody, change of plan. We’re going to wait until Special Agent Bartoli’s team gets here to go forward.” He pointed to two cops near the back door. “Get out there and tell those guys outside to hold up. If we’ve got a crime scene, the last thing we want to do is contaminate it.”

  “You want I should finish up with the door?” The technician who was dusting for fingerprints asked. Kneeling on the floor below him, another cop was measuring the distance from the edge of the door to an area of damage in the door’s low
er third that hadn’t been there previously and that Charlie assumed was the result of something like a hard kick. Looking at it and realizing how ridiculously easy it had been for a killer to gain access to her house made her skin crawl. What had she been thinking, to imagine that she could live in a world where there was no need to keep a gun for protection, or to have a burglar alarm or something more than an ordinary, run-of-the mill lock on her doors? When had wishful thinking become her modus operandi? “In this rain, I wouldn’t want to wait.”

  Sager hesitated. Then he nodded. “Go ahead.”

  When this guy’s caught, I’ll be safe again. And there will be one less monster in the world.

  That was the thought that steadied Charlie’s nerves, calmed her down, helped her pull herself together. Mentally, she took a deep breath and stood tall.

  I’m not a scared teenager anymore. I’m an expert on serial killers. So this time the Gingerbread Man has messed with the wrong expert.

  “Did Jenna tell you where she had come from?” Charlie asked Sager as, Tony having disconnected, she slid her phone into her pocket again. If she didn’t have her emotions totally under control yet, well, she was working on it. Under the circumstances, there was no shame in taking a few moments to adjust.

  Sager shook his head. “No. At least, she wasn’t real specific. She was crying too hard to get anything of much value out of her, but she did say she ran down the mountain. Since she wound up at your back door, I figure she must have come down Big Rock Trail. Muddy as it’s bound to be, she must have left some tracks. I figure we can follow them back.”

  Charlie nodded. Big Rock Trail was the dirt path that she favored for her almost daily runs. Starting only a few yards beyond her back fence, it wound up through the thick piney woods of Smoke Mountain all the way to the top of the ridge. She would have worried about the downpour washing away any tracks Jenna might have left, except for the fact that at this time of year the canopy was so dense she couldn’t imagine much rainfall got through. Sager was apparently aware of that, too.