“I’m Special Agent Tony Bartoli. This is Special Agent Lena Kaminsky. Special Agent Buzz Crane.”
Bringing a whiff of fresh air with him into a room that was now overwarm and smelled faintly metallic, from either the aerosol spray or the fingerprint powder, Tony was there, in her kitchen, at last. Thank God. Raindrops gleaming on his hair and the shoulders of his jacket, he was shaking hands, first with Sager and then with Sheriff Peel, Ken, and Agents Flynn and Burger, as he introduced himself, Kaminsky, and Crane. As apparently all of the law enforcement types in the house converged on the newcomers, the room felt suddenly small and crowded. Relief welling up inside her, Charlie cast one more worried glance at Michael. Still tense with anger and whatever other clearly negative emotions he was experiencing, he looked at the new arrivals, too, with a less than welcoming expression. But at least the raw pain she thought she had glimpsed at the backs of his eyes was gone, and he seemed more or less his usual badass self. In any case, there was nothing she could do for him at the moment, Charlie concluded. That being the case, her focus had to be on what was most important: catching a serial killer.
With that firmly fixed in the forefront of her mind, she hurried toward Tony, Kaminsky, and Crane.
“Hey,” Tony said when he saw her, taking the hand she held out for him to shake—anything more intimate, like, say, a quick hug or a kiss on the cheek, would be unprofessional, and anyway she wasn’t a huggie/kissie kind of person—and giving her a slow smile in which the memory of the very sexy good-night kiss they had so recently shared lingered. His coffee brown eyes crinkled around the edges when he smiled, she noted in passing, and his long mouth stretched and quirked up at the corners to reveal even white teeth. He had black hair, cut short and brushed back, and a lean, mobile face that, while not as flat-out gorgeous as Michael’s, was nonetheless handsome enough to merit a second look. At the moment he was faintly red-eyed, with more than a hint of five o’clock shadow darkening his jaw, which wasn’t surprising considering that it was now well after one in the morning and he had been going since seven a.m. She knew that for sure because seven a.m. (yesterday now) was when the four of them had risen to meet for breakfast before going over some files for what she had thought would be the last time; later, they’d driven to the airport to catch the private plane that had brought her back to Big Stone Gap.
Tony was six-one, about a hundred eighty pounds, lean compared to Michael’s ripped body but still nicely muscled. Anyway, all that leanness looked particularly good in the well-tailored dark suits that were the Bureau’s de facto uniform. He was still wearing the one he’d taken her to dinner in, as a matter of fact. His white shirt still looked fresh. His red tie was snugly in place.
Michael was right, Charlie decided as she smiled back at Tony: she did have a serious screw loose. This was the guy who should be making her heart go pitter-pat. This was the guy whose arms she should be wanting to walk into, whose mouth she should be wanting to kiss, who she should be wanting to fall into bed with. This guy liked her, more than liked her, wanted to sleep with her, wanted to have a relationship. This decent, gainfully employed, law-abiding, honorable, kind, very handsome, and alive man had happily ever after written all over him.
He had been clasping her hand just a couple of beats too long. Still smiling at him, she gently disengaged.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she said, and his smile widened.
Charlie was suddenly burningly conscious of the weight of Michael’s gaze.
Sliding a sideways glance his way, she encountered blue eyes gone stony gray, a hard mouth, a granite jawline. His expression—no, his whole body—radiated frustrated, barely controlled tension. He made her think of a wild animal, a big one, a predator, that had suddenly been made aware of its situation, aware that it was trapped hopelessly and forever in an impossible-to-escape cage.
Charlie’s heart unexpectedly stuttered. Her mouth went dry. She felt like she was falling, the sensation as unmistakable as if she’d stepped into an elevator and dead-dropped three floors. The feeling wasn’t good, and it certainly wasn’t welcome, but there it was.
How Michael felt mattered to her.
As epiphanies went, that one kind of blew.
Talk about smart women, foolish choices, she thought, mentally aiming a swift kick at her own posterior. Lately she was practically its poster child.
“Long time no see, Dr. Stone,” Kaminsky greeted her. Twenty-nine-year-old Kaminsky was small and curvy, with shiny, chin-length black hair that turned under on the ends and an olive complexion. Pretty in an exotic kind of way, she favored snug, above-the-knee skirt suits like the pale gray one she was currently wearing and, because she was only five-two and sensitive about it, sky high stilettos. Since Charlie had last seen Kaminsky only a few hours before, when their plane had touched down at the Lonesome Pine Airport to drop Charlie off in Big Stone Gap, and Kaminsky and Crane had been left behind to take a commercial flight on to their home base of Quantico while Tony had gone with Charlie to take her to what he had described to them as a “thank you” dinner, Kaminsky’s sarcasm was not really a surprise. “Bartoli says you’ve managed to attract another serial killer. How is that even possible?”
“The Gingerbread Man, no less,” Crane added on a note of what almost sounded like glee. In the classic combination known to any woman who frequented bars or other places where men tended to hang out, he was, at thirty-two, the geek to Tony’s hottie. Five-ten and slightly built, with black-framed glasses dominating a thin, sharp-featured face topped by a halo of short brown curls, he was more clumsy-puppy-cute than handsome. His bright blue eyes were alive with interest as he looked at Charlie. “He’s somebody we sure would like to catch. In a little more than two years he’s taken out fourteen people.”
“I think that as of tonight the number is probably sixteen,” Charlie said. “Jenna McDaniels said there were two other girls with her and they are dead. She told me their names were Raylene—” She stopped, frowned. “Oh, God, I’m drawing a blank here. I can’t remember that girl’s last name.”
“Raylene Witt and Laura Peters,” Agent Flynn finished for her. “I just got a call from our agents at the hospital who’ve been talking to Ms. McDaniels. She gave us the names. That’s who we’re looking for now.”
“Is Jenna’s mother with her yet?” Whatever Jenna had or had not done, Charlie hated to think of her being alone. She knew what the girl was going through: the sense of being caught up in a nightmare, the ever-present fear, the grief. She knew, because she had lived it herself. “Do you know?”
“I don’t.” Flynn shook his head. “Next time I talk to our guys I’ll check.”
Charlie nodded thanks.
“The McDaniels girl has been all over the news the last couple days, but I haven’t seen anything about the other two,” Sager said. “I didn’t even realize there were two more young women gone missing.”
“I’m not sure the other two have even been reported,” Flynn said. “We haven’t found anything on them. At this point, we’re not even one hundred percent certain that they exist, to tell you the truth, or if they do that they’re victims. They may be Ms. McDaniels’ hallucinations, for example. Or her lies. I don’t necessarily think that’s the case, but I’ve learned to keep an open mind.”
“So has Ms. McDaniels given a statement?” Tony asked, and Flynn shook his head.
“We’ve got guys at the hospital waiting to take it as soon as she’s up to talking to them. As of right now, though, it hasn’t happened.”
“Kaminsky, when there’s a statement from Ms. McDaniels, I want you to get on it. Flynn, if you’d make sure Kaminsky gets a copy as soon as it’s available I’d appreciate it. Anything that can help us locate those two girls, we need to know as soon as possible. The rest can wait for tomorrow.” Tony looked at the assembled group. “Right now, our top priority has to be to find those other girls. Until we have proof that they’re dead or don’t exist, we can’t just assume it. For all we kno
w, one or both of them could still be at this guy’s mercy, or lying out in the rain somewhere dying.”
There were nods of agreement all around. Charlie didn’t mention that she already had been furnished with proof positive that at least one of the girls was real, but also dead. From the background check he had done on her when he had first wanted her to come work with his team in their race to find the Boardwalk Killer, Tony knew that she had what he called “some psychic ability.” She had even admitted to him that sometimes she saw the spirits of the dead, and he had used information that she had gleaned from her ghostly encounters to help solve the previous case.
Not that he knew anything like the full extent of what she routinely experienced. And he certainly didn’t know a thing about Michael. No one did, and however the whole mess worked out, no one was ever going to.
She had her career to think about. Her personal life, too.
No real worries there, though: even if she flat-out told everyone she met about Michael, about the things she saw, nobody was going to believe her. Oh, they might pretend to, they might even kinda, sorta, halfway buy into it like Tony sometimes seemed to, but in the end they couldn’t know, not for certain, and what they would carry away with them when they thought about her was something on the order of “headcase.” That she knew from painful experience.
“Even if they’re up the mountain, finding them in the dark and rain isn’t going to be easy. That trail back there has dozens of branches, and the girls might not even be on any kind of trail.” Sager looked at Sheriff Peel. “You get ahold of Jerry Ferrell?”
“I did,” Sheriff Peel said. “He’s on the way, him and the dogs.”
“If they’re up there, Jerry and his dogs’ll find them.” Sager addressed that remark to Tony. “Ferrell has the best damned tracking dogs in the state. We’ve got equipment coming to help us recover any bodies we might find, too.”
“Let’s hope we don’t need it, but it’s best to be prepared in case we do.” Tony looked at Charlie. “So while we wait, why don’t you tell us what happened, from the beginning?”
Charlie once again recounted the whole story (judiciously edited to leave out the phantom girl and, of course, Michael) from the time Jenna had banged on her kitchen door. Tony and the other newcomers examined the dent in the back door, as well as the knife and the You can’t catch me message the Gingerbread Man had left, and Tony had Crane make arrangements to have the latter two sent on to the FBI lab for analysis on an expedited basis. After that, everybody in the room talked logistics as they discussed (argued about) the best way to mount a search and rescue or retrieval operation up a muddy, treacherous mountainside in the middle of the night in the pouring rain.
Leaving them to it, Charlie ran upstairs to change into a tee, jeans, and sneakers for the trek up the mountain. That’s where she was when the dogs came. Although their arrival was almost certainly announced by some other method downstairs, Charlie was clued in by the sudden onset of a dolorous howling right outside her house.
“Your boyfriend had a lick of sense, he wouldn’t let you go with them,” Michael said sourly. Since she had forbidden him to enter the bathroom, where she was changing, his voice came to her through the closed bathroom door.
“I have to go with them.” Charlie discovered that she almost welcomed the heretofore annoying boyfriend reference because it meant that Michael was starting to get back to normal. The silent and brooding presence who had followed her upstairs had been slightly unnerving. She was still pulling her hair back into a low ponytail as she emerged from the bathroom to find him stretched full length on her bed. His head was planted on one of her lace-trimmed pillows, his arms were folded behind it, and his booted feet were crossed at the ankle and resting on her snowy white coverlet.
Ghost boots, Charlie reminded herself, and limited her response to a disapproving glance along the length of his powerful body. The thing was, she had decorated her house to suit the needs of a single, childless woman whose workaday life was generally spent within the dull gray walls of a prison. It was light, airy, and, yes, feminine, with delicate, expensive fabrics and lots of pale colors and white.
He was entirely too masculine for it.
His eyes followed her as she walked across the bedroom, toward the door. “That’s just plain stupid. You know that? You’re not a cop. You’re not a tracker. You’re not part of a search and rescue team. It’s pitch black out there and it’s raining and muddy and it’s a damned mountain and there’s a psycho killer on the loose who’s made himself your new pen pal. What part of that makes it smart for you to go with them?”
“If you say something about me having a death wish again I’ll murder you.” She said it lightly, deliberately, hoping to provoke a smile in return. He hadn’t smiled, not once, since setting eyes on the watch.
He still didn’t smile, exactly, but the quick upward quirk of one side of his lips was a start. “Too late.”
Finishing with her ponytail, Charlie paused at the foot of the bed to look at him. It was a queen-sized bed, and she had always thought that it was huge. Now, with his big body taking up one whole side, it looked surprisingly small. Her hands curled around the cool smooth brass of the footboard as she tried to make him understand. “The one thing I can bring to this investigation that nobody else can is that I can sometimes see the dead. If the second girl is dead, and her spirit is still hanging around up there somewhere, I might be able to talk to her. And she might be able to tell me something we can’t get any other way. Something that will help us catch this monster.”
“Catching this monster isn’t your job.”
“I have to help if I can.”
“No, you don’t. Not if helping puts you at risk. And it does.”
So much for trying to get Michael to see things from her point of view. Although why she cared if he did she didn’t know. He was the intrusion into her life. Intrusions did not get to call the shots. They didn’t even get a vote.
Enough already.
“I’m going. End of discussion.” She headed for the door.
“You think I don’t know that?” There was disgust in his voice as he swung his feet to the floor, stood up, and came after her. She had opened the door and was stepping out into the hall when he added, “Nice ass in those jeans, by the way.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Thanks to Jerry Ferrell’s hounds, it took the search party not quite an hour to locate the bodies. There were two of them, floating in a water-filled, abandoned mine shaft some three quarters of the way up the mountain, about a mile and a half off the path where Charlie ran every day. Fortunately, by the time they got there the rain had slowed to little more than intermittent sprinkles. But the cloud cover remained, obscuring the moon, making the night almost as black when they stepped out into the open area around the mine shaft as it had been under the thick canopy of trees. So black that, without flashlights, they wouldn’t have been able to see the ground beneath their feet.
“That’s something you hate to see,” Sheriff Peel said as half a dozen klieg lights that had been hooked to a generator powered on at once, illuminating the site so that there was no longer any hope of a mistake. The pale objects that could be glimpsed just beneath the shining black surface of the water were not the white bellies of dead fish, or quartz-laced rocks, or any of the dozens of other faintly luminescent things that they could have been. They were the bare and swollen arms and legs of the corpses that drifted facedown in a lazy rotation of death.
The dead bodies of two girls in shorts and T-shirts, with long dark hair floating around them, looking like grotesque lily pads in some horrible inky pond.
The sight of the bodies made Charlie feel sick at heart. It made her want to weep.
Poor girls, went the refrain that kept running through her mind. She wondered if, when the sun had risen that morning, they had guessed this would be their last day alive.
“Life’s a bitch,” Michael said from behind her. “No point in getting
all teary-eyed about it.”
A little annoyed because she was absolutely sure that she was not getting (outwardly anyway) all teary-eyed about it, she was startled by his apparent ability to read her mind. Charlie shot him a killing glare.
A corner of his mouth quirked up in response. Having apparently recovered from his earlier bout of the dismals—at least, if he was still upset, she couldn’t tell—he was standing right beside her, his big body protectively close. Although nothing short of torture would have gotten her to admit it, Charlie was glad he was there. The hiss of the wind moving through the towering trees that crowded close around the clearing, the ageless quality of the absolute darkness beyond the reach of the klieg lights, the swampy scent of the place, which she had smelled before on Jenna, were combining to slightly creep her out.
Given what he was, Michael was an unlikely antidote for a developing case of the heebie-jeebies, but for her he was.
“Everybody keep to the edge of the clearing. Nontechnical personnel, stay out of the way. Let’s try to preserve this crime scene as much as possible so we can get a good look at it when the sun comes up.” Tony called instructions from the side of the pit. Like the rest of the agents, he had traded his sport coat for an FBI windbreaker, and the big white letters made him easier to keep track of in the confusion than he otherwise would have been. Charlie watched as he turned to speak to a body retrieval crew in blue jumpsuits who were standing by, presumably until the photographers were finished taking pictures. Off to one side, a police department sketch artist was looking at the pit as she drew. Charlie assumed she was making a rough drawing of the bodies and their position in the crime scene. Two cops were setting tall tent stakes and stringing yellow crime scene tape from them around the edge of the clearing, leaving only a narrow pathway between it and the trees.
“Boss, I think I’ve found our point of egress,” Crane yelled, and Tony turned away from the pit to head toward him. Crane was on an upward slope at the right side of the clearing; since he was beyond the reach of the klieg lights Charlie could only locate him by his voice and the round glow of his flashlight. A moment later all she could see of Tony, too, was his flashlight. Several other flashlights converged on the spot, but it was too dark for Charlie to identify any of the people holding them.
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