The Last Kiss Goodbye: A Charlotte Stone Novel Read online

  “The screamer said Teen Queen killed her,” said Michael. “You say the killer is somebody called the Gingerbread Man. Want to explain to me what’s up with that?”

  Charlie caught herself just as she was about to answer, and almost had to bite her tongue to hold the words back. The glare she gave him this time was downright threatening. Fortunately Sager was talking to the fingerprint technician who apparently—from the fact that he was closing the back door—had finished, as had the cop who had been measuring the damage on the door and was now on his feet writing something on a clipboard. Point was, Sager wasn’t watching her; otherwise, no telling what he would have made of her fierce scowl at nothing.

  “Ooo,” Michael said. “There’s that you’re really pissing me off now look of yours. You were always giving me that one back at the Ridge. Turned me on then. Turns me on now.”

  Bite me, her eyes said, but having a one-sided argument, she was discovering, only actually worked for the side who could talk. She might be seething inside, but Charlie was proud of her own self-control: she fell back on the one weapon she had that she knew from experience actually kind of bugged him, and ignored him. Pointedly.

  “So what can you tell me about this Gingerbread Man?” Sager asked her as two of the cops he’d been talking to headed across the kitchen for the hall, signaling to a couple of others who fell in behind them. In response to her look questioning this mini-exodus, Sager said, “They’re going to be putting together some equipment so we can head up the mountain.” He added hastily, in response to what she could only assume was a change in her facial expression:”We won’t actually go until Special Agent Bartoli’s team gets here.”

  “Did I hear you say there’s a serial killer in town?” Freed from the cop who’d been questioning him, Ken came over to join Sager. Both of them looked at Charlie expectantly. At the breakfast bar, Michael lifted his eyebrows at her. The silent message she took from that was: So, see, I’m not talking. You want me to keep it up, you talk.

  “Fine. Um, yes.” After that first snapped-out slip of the tongue, she was careful to moderate her tone and direct her reply to Ken and Sager rather than Michael: “The Gingerbread Man is fairly unique in the annals of serial killers in that he doesn’t actually kill the majority of his victims himself. What he has done historically is kidnap three people at a time and force them to kill one another. He appears to try to match them in terms of gender, with a lesser correlation in age and body size although there seems to be a degree of correlation with those factors, too. Sometimes the victims know one another, sometimes they don’t. In both of the last two years, he has kidnapped three disparate groups of three people within a period of about a month. Then he goes dormant for another year. As far as I know, the group in which Jenna McDaniels was a part is the first group for this, the third year. There have been five survivors if you include Jenna McDaniels tonight, which I do, and much of what we know we’ve learned from them. The survivors consistently tell us that they were put into some kind of confined area together, given weapons, and told they would all be killed unless they started killing one another. They were promised that the last one standing would be released alive provided that whoever survived had participated in the killing of at least one of the other victims. The Gingerbread Man appears to keep his promise, although it’s difficult to tell because only two of the survivors have admitted to investigators that they actually killed anyone. But they were released by the Gingerbread Man, which indicates that they fulfilled the conditions he set for them.”

  “So if Teen Queen was let go because she was the winner in a cage fight to the death, why was she screaming her head off about a man with a gun who was chasing her?” Michael asked.

  So much for him not talking. Well, she hadn’t expected it to last. Charlie looked at him, put her nose in the air, and deliberately transferred her attention to Sager, who said slowly, as if her words were just starting to compute for him: “Are you saying that Jenna McDaniels herself might have killed those other two girls she was telling us about?”

  Bingo, Charlie thought, but that was one more answer she couldn’t give.

  “If she did, it was because she had no choice,” she ended up saying. Revealing what she knew through the phantom girl wasn’t possible, so she couldn’t definitively say yes. “In the environment in which the victims find themselves, it’s strictly kill or be killed.”

  “Come on, Charlie, talk to me,” Michael said impatiently. “You really think you’re going to be able to treat me like a potted plant?”

  Since she caught herself shooting him a dirty look in response, the inescapable answer was, obviously not. She gave up: because he’d asked a legitimate question as opposed to simply being annoying, she would try to answer. To all appearances, she hoped, she was simply providing additional information to Sager and Ken.

  “The first two survivors were simply let go. The last two, not counting Jenna, were apparently chased by the Gingerbread Man after he released them. All three, and I’m including Jenna in this, reported that he was armed with a gun. All three reported that when he let them go, he told them to run, then came after them. They were sure he was going to kill them, too.”

  Ken said, “Since there are eyewitnesses, I’m assuming law enforcement has a description of—what did you call him, the Gingerbread Man?—on file somewhere?”

  “He wears a mask,” Charlie answered. “We have eyewitness descriptions of that.”

  Michael said, “Don’t serial killers usually have butch names like the Boardwalk Killer and the Bind, Torture, Kill Killer? I mean, when I was on trial the news channels were calling me the Southern Slasher, for cripe’s sake. What is this guy, the sissy serial killer? Where’d anybody come up with a name like the Gingerbread Man?”

  “It’s from the nursery rhyme,” Charlie answered, and immediately gave herself a mental smack—she would save the glare at Michael for a time when it wouldn’t simply serve to underline the fact that as far as anyone watching was concerned she was conversing with thin air—and transferred her gaze to Sager and Ken. “The reason he’s called the Gingerbread Man is from the nursery rhyme. You know, ‘Run! Run! As fast as you can! You can’t catch me, I’m the Gingerbread Man!’ Because he told several of his surviving victims to run, and because four times that I am aware of he has sent or left a letter addressed to someone in authority or an expert he wants to match wits with, saying ‘You can’t catch me.’” She finished a little lamely, “I just thought you’d want to know.”

  “Debbie reads that nursery rhyme to the kids.” Ken sounded appalled.

  Michael said, “So what you’re telling me is that now the sick bastard wants to match wits with you?”

  Charlie gave a truncated nod. The icy little prickle that snaked down her spine as she acknowledged the truth of that was something she couldn’t do anything about.

  Soldier through the fear. She had done it before. She could do it now. No, she would do it now.

  Sager was saying, “Yeah, go ahead, I guarantee you we’ll be doing the grunt work anyway” in a low voice to the fingerprint technician, who apparently wanted next to begin work on the table and chairs. While the technician nodded and turned away to start scooping up the foam peanuts, which he dropped into a plastic Ziploc bag, Charlie said, “It’s like a game to him. A challenge. As soon as I saw the words you can’t catch me, I knew who it was.”

  “This guy knows who you are, too.” Michael’s voice was flat. “And that ain’t good.”

  A commotion from the front hall distracted all of them. Hoping it was Tony and crew, Charlie started forward, only to fall back with disappointment when three strangers walked into her kitchen. The tall, burly, gray-haired man in uniform she had seen before: Wise County Sheriff Hyram Peel. The two men in dark suits were, of course, FBI, although not the agents she was anxiously awaiting. Introducing themselves as Agents Greg Flynn and Dean Burger, they were part of the team that had been involved in what apparently had been a massive
search for Jenna McDaniels. While other agents had gone to the hospital to secure her, they said, they had been detailed to talk to Charlie.

  She was just beginning to tell them her part of what had happened when Michael exclaimed, “Damn, that’s my watch.”

  Distracted from her recital of events, Charlie quit talking to frown at him. He had been leaning against the breakfast counter looking grim. Now he was standing upright, staring at the table like there was something on it that was getting ready to leap at him. Automatically she followed his gaze to find that, now that the technician had finished scooping up the last of the foam peanuts—he was shaking them in a plastic bag with fingerprint powder—it was possible to see a man’s matte silver watch still resting inside the overturned package she had received.

  “I told those damned clowns that it wasn’t my watch they found next to that dead woman.” Michael’s charged gaze shifted to Charlie. “Did they believe me? Hell, no. But look at that: there it is. That’s my watch.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “Pick it up. Look at it.” Because Michael was talking to her, because of the intensity of his tone, because of the emotion she could feel rolling off him, Charlie completely forgot about Agents Flynn and Burger. “It’s got Semper Fi engraved on the back of the case. Go ahead, check it out. It’s my damned watch.”

  Semper fi, Charlie recalled, was the Marine Corps motto. She was familiar enough with his file to know that Michael had spent eight years as a marine.

  “Uh, Dr. Stone, you were saying?” Flynn prompted.

  Realizing that she had broken off in mid-sentence, Charlie dragged her eyes away from Michael and sought desperately to recall where she had stopped. Flynn was frowning at her. He was a stocky, muscular man of about forty, with short brown hair and average looks. There was impatience in his narrowed brown eyes.

  “Jenna was obviously traumatized,” Charlie picked up the thread, and with that launched back into her story.

  Even with Flynn and Burger both looking at her, even as she talked, it was impossible for Charlie not to watch, out of the corner of her eye, as Michael moved over to the table. His big hands wrapping around a chair back, his powerful shoulders bunching so that the muscles strained against his shirt, he stared down at the watch. Of course, it was impossible for him to touch it, much less pick it up. His hands would pass right through.

  “How in hell is that thing turning up now?” Michael looked, and sounded, angry, and more as if he was talking to himself than her. “All this fucking time, and it turns up now?”

  “Thank you,” Flynn said, and Charlie realized that she had stopped talking again. Fortunately it was in a place where Flynn could conclude that she had finished with what she had to say. He nodded toward the galley part of the kitchen, where Ken and Sheriff Peel were quietly conversing. Charlie noted in passing that the kitchen faucet was no longer running: someone had obviously turned it off. She was only glad that Michael no longer seemed to need whatever strengthening effect it had on him. “Is that Deputy Ewell? Didn’t you say that he was the first person on the scene here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Excuse us. We have a few questions for him.” With a nod at her, Flynn and Burger headed toward Ken.

  A quick glance around told Charlie that everybody was now busy doing something else. She moved over to the table and frowned at Michael questioningly.

  “Look at it.” He nodded at the watch. “Tell me if it doesn’t say Semper Fi on the back of the case.”

  Although as far as she could tell none of the other roughly half-dozen people in the room were paying the least bit of attention to her, Charlie knew that all it would take would be for her to start talking aloud, supposedly to herself, for that to instantly change.

  Picking up the watch—it was cool and heavy, with all kinds of fancy little dials on the face and an expandable wristband—she turned it so she could see the back of the watch face. Engraved on the smooth metal surface was the Marine Corps motto.

  “Semper Fi?” There was tension in Michael’s face.

  Charlie nodded. His gaze returned to the watch.

  “Goddamn it. Of course the thing would show up now, when it’s too fucking late.” He sounded almost savage.

  Charlie picked up the box the watch had arrived in. Fortunately, cutting through the layers of tape that had been wrapped around it had left the return address intact. It read Mariposa Police Department.

  Her fingers tightened on the box.

  I wrote to them. Of course.

  Tiny Mariposa, North Carolina, was where Michael first had been arrested, for the last of the seven murders with which he had subsequently been charged. As part of her research into the backgrounds of the men she was studying, Charlie had sent the department an official request for access to any materials/information/files they still had concerning him.

  This was their reply. In addition to the watch, at the bottom of the box was a DVD, and tucked to the side was a tri-folded sheet of letter-sized paper.

  Charlie pulled it out.

  “What the hell is this?” Michael growled as she unfolded the single, typewritten sheet. The letter was brief and she read it quickly. “Some kind of cosmic joke?”

  “Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you not to touch anything on the table until I’m done here.” This interruption by the fingerprint technician, who had been standing a little distance away while his gloved hands busily rifled through the now powder-coated foam peanuts, almost made Charlie jump. “Could you put that back, please?”

  “I’m sorry.” She managed a smile for him. Then, with Michael in mind, she added, “Um, I just got this material from the Mariposa Police Department and I needed to look at it. I wrote to them, you know, about a month ago, concerning a research subject I was studying.” She put the letter down on the table, open and positioned for Michael to read. He flicked her a glance.

  “Don’t let go of that damned watch.”

  She barely managed not to nod. Mouth tight, he leaned forward to read the letter.

  The technician said in an apologetic tone, “That box was out on the table, wasn’t it? It’s possible that the perp touched it. I need to test it for fingerprints.”

  “I understand.”

  Charlie set the box back down on the table. The watch she slipped onto her own wrist. She was fine-boned, with long, slender limbs, and the watch, sized for a big man’s solid forearm, was way too large for her. The expandable metal band was not adjustable, so there was nothing to do but wear it as it was. As it slid up her arm, as she felt the weight of it and the glide of the cool metal against her skin, a prickle rippled along her nerve endings. It felt weird to have something real and solid that belonged to Michael touching her.

  It was almost like having him touch her himself.

  “Sorry,” she told the technician again. He nodded. It was clear that he was waiting for her to step away from the table, but she wasn’t ready to do that until she saw Michael’s reaction to what he was reading.

  Having read it herself, she already knew what the letter said:

  Dear Dr. Stone,

  In response to your inquiry about County Inmate #876091, Michael Alan Garland, I am sending you a copy of what we have retained in our files. In addition, I am enclosing our department’s video records concerning him, as well as a man’s wristwatch that was tagged with his name and was found during the course of our recent move. As far as I can tell, this is the only personal effect of his still in our custody. Because of misfiling by a clerical worker, it was inadvertently left out of the bag containing his personal effects that was passed on to the FBI some years ago. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused, and hope that you will now pass it on to whoever should have possession of it.

  Thank you.

  If you have any additional questions, please feel free to contact me.

  Sincerely,

  Betty Culver

  Executive Assistant to the Chief

  Mariposa County Poli
ce Department

  “Son of a bitch,” Michael said. Charlie didn’t say anything, but he must have felt the weight of her eyes on him, or else she must have made some small sound. Because his head came up, and he looked at her then, his eyes blazing.

  “They found a damned watch exactly like this next to the body of the last chick I’m supposed to have sliced to ribbons. It was broken, had her blood on it. They said it was mine, ripped from my wrist in the struggle. I told the stupid bastards it wasn’t.”

  Charlie’s heart lurched. What he was telling her was that this watch was evidence of his innocence. Weighed against all the evidence of his guilt, it was a small thing, but still—it was something tangible.

  If he was telling the truth. If he wasn’t somehow playing her.

  Charismatic psychopaths had a genius for playing people, she knew. They were so good at it that it wasn’t even embarrassing to the people who studied them when they, too, fell victim to their lies.

  The Mariposa Police Department had identified the watch as belonging to Michael right there in the letter. Plus, he’d known that Semper Fi was engraved on its back.

  How could he have manipulated something like that?

  She didn’t think he could have. She didn’t see how it was possible.

  How important a part a watch like the one she was wearing had played in his case was something she would have to check into.

  For now—it wasn’t nearly enough to persuade her.

  Sway her a little, maybe, but not persuade her.

  Still, it was something.

  “Fuck.” The blaze in Michael’s eyes had hardened and cooled. “What the hell difference does it make now, right? It’s done.”

  Shaken by the glimpse she had just gotten into what lay beneath the tough guy exterior, Charlie felt as if the earth were shifting beneath her feet, as if she were no longer standing on solid ground. Before she could formulate a response, the sound of new arrivals, coupled a moment later with a familiar voice behind her, distracted her, causing her to glance around.