The Last Kiss Goodbye: A Charlotte Stone Novel

by Karen Robards

  “It’s okay. I think they’re kind of cute,” Charlie replied.

  Tony grinned. “For God’s sake, don’t let Kaminsky hear you say that. I really will have to fire her.”

  Charlie laughed. “Don’t worry, I won’t.”

  “Do you mind if we take your car?” Tony asked. “I’d like to leave the rental for Kaminsky and Crane.”

  “That’s fine.” She was fishing in her purse for her keys as they approached the front door. Tony reached around her to open it for her.

  “You planning to drive?” Michael inquired as she produced them. “’Cause I can tell you right now that Dudley’d like to have the keys, but I’m betting he’s going to be too politically correct to ask.”

  Charlie’s fingers clenched around her keychain. Whether she’d been about to hand them over or not she had no idea, but now that he’d put the issue of gender equality into play she definitely would not. Lips compressing, she stepped out into the hot, brilliant sunlight, squinted a little, shaded her eyes with her hand, and shot Michael a blistering look as he appeared beside her.

  “You’d want to drive, too, you—you man,” she mouthed, piling a fair degree of venom on that last word. With Tony so close behind them, her voice wasn’t even as loud as a whisper. But when Michael grinned, she was perfectly sure that he had understood.

  “You’re right, but the difference is that I’m not worried about being politically correct,” he answered. “I’d just tell you to hand the keys over.”

  Unable to reply because Tony, clearly assuming that she had stopped to wait for him, was sliding a proprietary hand around her arm now as he joined her, Charlie gave Michael a fulminating look. It was wasted. He wasn’t looking at her—or Tony. He was looking toward the street.

  “Damn,” he said in a totally different tone, and then as Charlie followed his gaze she found herself staring in horror at the tide of reporters rushing at them.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Ken Ewell and Howie Martin, another deputy sheriff whom Charlie knew vaguely, had been parked in their marked cruiser outside of her house since shortly after dawn. They were ordered there by Sheriff Peel when media types had first started arriving in town. (That would be shortly before dawn.) Their mission was to keep the press on the public streets and off private property (such as Charlie’s yard and the yards of her neighbors), and to keep one of Big Stone Gap’s residents (that would be Charlie) from being harassed as the eyes of the nation that had been following on TV the effort to find Jenna McDaniels now turned to where and how she had been found. Although for the last hour there had been satellite trucks and carloads of reporters parked out in front of Charlie’s house, everything had been completely under control until Charlie herself stepped through her own front door.

  Then all hell broke loose.

  This Ken explained to Charlie in a breathless rush as he and his partner tried and failed to keep the press from completely surrounding her and Tony as they fought their way toward her garage, a detached, shedlike structure at the top of her driveway. By the time they reached it, Tony had his arm wrapped tight around Charlie’s waist and she had her head bent against his shoulder to avoid the intrusive cameras.

  “Dr. Stone, is it true that you rescued Jenna McDaniels?”

  “What can you tell us about her ordeal, Dr. Stone?”

  “Hey, Charlie, look this way!”

  “Wait, aren’t you the FBI agent who worked with Dr. Stone on the Boardwalk Killer Case?”

  “Yeah, you’re right, it’s Special Agent Anthony Bartoli! Is this another serial killer case, Agent Bartoli?”

  The press yelled those and what felt like a hundred other questions at them until Charlie and Tony (and Michael) reached the relative safety of the garage. With Ken and Howie trying to clear reporters from in front of the garage door—she and Tony entered through the people-sized one on the side of the small building—Charlie forgot about asserting her equality and being politically correct and whose car it was anyway and all other possibly pertinent issues except expediency, and handed Tony the keys to her blue Camry.

  Bottom line was, he had more practice driving through a horde of reporters than she did. Besides, she understood herself well enough to know that if somebody jumped in front of her bumper, she would hit the brakes. And she’d seen Tony drive a sufficient amount to further know that he would not; she liked to think it was because he trusted whoever it was would get out of his way.

  “That was a cluster fuck,” Michael muttered as the Camry made it out of the garage, around the dark blue Lincoln Tony had rented that was clogging up her driveway, and into the street, where it sped away from the media, all of whom had rushed to return to their vehicles to give chase. Ken and Howie had successfully blocked the pursuit by turning their car sideways in the street, but that wouldn’t hold the reporters back long, Charlie knew. Still, it might give them enough time to get to the hospital unimpeded. “Good call letting Dudley drive, by the way.”

  The car was small, with lingering traces of new car smell (she’d bought it right before she had moved to Big Stone Gap, so it was only a few months old). It was as stiflingly hot as a blast furnace as the air-conditioning struggled to make a dent in the heat. Michael was in the backseat. Unwilling to do more than cast a quick glance around at him under the pretext of looking out the back window for chasing reporters, Charlie flipped down the passenger-side visor, which came equipped with a small mirror. Of course, she couldn’t see him in it: she had forgotten. But it didn’t matter: the image she’d gotten in that one glance was engraved indelibly on her mind. He was way too big for the cramped space. His legs were folded up in a way that would’ve been uncomfortable if he were alive, and his forearms rested on his knees. The disgusted expression on his face would have made her want to smile if she hadn’t been battling off shivery little flutters of déjà vu. This degree of media interest was actually not as bad as the frenzy that had engulfed her when she had been the teenage survivor of the murder of Holly and her family. It was not as bad as what she had been through in the aftermath of the Boardwalk Killer’s resurgence. But the memories it evoked—the terror, the helplessness, the sense of being both trapped and at bay made her wonder, suddenly, if maybe Michael wasn’t right. Maybe she should simply walk away from her work at Wallen’s Ridge, abandon her research, forget about her determination to find out the building blocks of a serial killer and how such monsters could be identified and stopped, and make a whole new life for herself in which serial killers were part of her past, not her present, and not her future.

  The thought that it might be possible for her to do that briefly dazzled her.

  But then she thought, No. If I do that, if I walk away, all those horrible things that happened will have been for nothing. The deaths of Holly and her family, of the other victims, will be just that many more senseless killings. If what I am doing can save even one more life, then that’s what I have to do.

  “You okay, babe?” Michael seemed to be able to read her thoughts with uncanny accuracy. She wasn’t sure she liked that. No, she was sure: she didn’t like it. Then she realized that, while she couldn’t see him through the mirror, he could see her. He was reading her face, not her mind.

  Frowning, she gave a barely there nod by way of a reply. And snapped the visor back up against the ceiling so that he could no longer see her eyes.

  Hah!

  “If you can give me directions, I won’t have to stop and fiddle with the GPS,” Tony told her, and, glad of the distraction, Charlie did. Past the church where Michael was buried—as far as she could tell, Michael didn’t even give it a glance—and the Farmer’s Market and Miner’s Park, through the small downtown with its antique-style street lamps on every corner and Little Stone Mountain rising like a hulking, blue-gray sentinel above it, left at Traffic Light five (the lights were numbered one through eight) and finally into the hospital parking lot.

  Unlike the town itself, which was light on traffic on Saturday mornings,
the parking lot was crowded with vehicles. The hospital was a long, low structure of brick and white stucco with only sixty beds. There were at least that many cars in the parking lot. Charlie’s eyes widened as she saw the crowd of reporters gathered in front of the entrance. Satellite trucks from stations as diverse as their local WAPK to CNN had set up shop on the sweltering blacktop.

  “Oh, boy,” Tony said, glancing at her. “I’m afraid there’s nothing for it but to brave the gauntlet.”

  “Sneaking in the back isn’t going to work, either: looks like they got the place surrounded,” Michael added. Charlie could feel his eyes on her. “Look, you know you don’t have to do this. Dudley and the gang have been catching serial killers just fine without you. You can hole up in a hotel or something until this is over. If you want to help them, you can do it over the phone.”

  She was tempted, of course she was, but only for a second. She gave a quick, negative shake of her head, and Michael said, “Fuck.”

  By the time they reached Jenna’s room, Charlie was seriously wishing that there were another choice she could have made. Even after they fought their way through the reporters—the hospital’s security guards had been supplemented by deputies and local cops to keep the media out of the building—there was still the hospital itself to deal with. The area around the emergency room in particular was thick with the phantoms of the recently, violently departed. Even with Michael playing bodyguard, two of them rushed her the moment they realized she could see them. She never did find out what they wanted, because Michael scared them off before they reached her, and with Tony at her side she had to continue on. To make things worse, she found that she was the object of a great deal of unwanted attention from the living, too. At first she couldn’t understand all the sideways glances and nudges and not-quite-discreet-enough pointing fingers. Even though it seemed like almost everyone in the hospital recognized her and was interested enough in her to watch her for as long as she was in sight, that was, surely, only her own paranoia at work.

  Or so she told herself.

  But then, as she passed a half-filled waiting room and caught a glimpse of her own face on TV, she understood. It was starting up all over again. Just as Michael had said, she was the girl who had lived: a never-ending story, apparently, especially considering what she had grown up to become.

  The knowledge made her feel cold all over.

  Detective Sager was standing outside the door to Jenna’s room, along with a second man—who Charlie assumed was another detective—and two uniformed cops.

  “Since that initial interview last night, she’s clammed up. We’ve been ordered to keep a guard on the door, but not to enter the room or let anyone else in—unless authorized by the parents. But only a few minutes ago we got a call telling us that you were on the way up and we should let you through,” Sager informed Tony with barely concealed ire. “So I guess that makes you and Dr. Stone here special.” His eyes slid over Charlie, and not in a friendly way.

  Seeming to take no offense, Tony frowned at him. “Family has some clout, I take it?”

  Sager grimaced. “Her father’s a federal judge. He’s in there now, along with her mother and somebody I think is the family lawyer. What I want to know is, why don’t they want her to talk to us?”

  Charlie was pretty confident she knew the answer.

  “Teen Queen’s feeling guilty,” Michael said, echoing her own thoughts. Charlie knew he was remembering Raylene Witt’s accusation just as she was. If Jenna had killed Raylene, and possibly Laura, too, she very well might not want anyone to know. Telling Jenna up front that having his victims kill one another was part of the Gingerbread Man’s MO might or might not make her feel better about what she had done, but it would also taint any account that she gave of what had happened. When it came time for trial, defense lawyers would have a field day painting investigators as having led the witness. Tony had explained this on the way over, and Charlie knew it was true. She only hoped that Jenna knew what had happened was in no way her fault.

  Tony shrugged. “Couldn’t say.” Then, with a nod at Sager and a brief knock, he opened the door for Charlie and followed her—and Michael—into the room.

  It was a typical hospital room, small, cool from the air-conditioning, bright from the overhead light, and smelling of antiseptic.

  “Special Agent Bartoli?” A tall, silver-haired man in a dark suit was the first to react to their presence. He stood on the opposite side of the hospital bed alongside another man, who was shorter, stockier, with thinning gray hair, in another dark suit. A well-dressed woman of around fifty was seated on the near side of the bed. She had short, expensively styled red hair, and as she looked sharply around at the new arrivals Charlie saw that her features were remarkably similar to Jenna’s: delicate, pretty, upscale. Jenna herself was in the bed, in a semi-sitting position which allowed her to see and be seen without obstruction. She was still pale, but aside from that and the bandage on her forehead there were no outward marks of her ordeal that Charlie could see. Her long, inky black hair hung in a single thick braid over one shoulder, and she wore a satiny pink bed jacket on top of her hospital gown. A blue hospital blanket covered her from the waist down. An IV was in her left arm, and her expression as she looked at the newcomers was both nervous and wary.

  “Hello, Jenna,” Charlie said softly as Tony and the silver-haired man, who introduced himself as Jenna’s father, Judge Alton McDaniels, shook hands. For a moment Jenna’s eyes locked with hers, and Charlie could see the horror lurking in that golden brown gaze. Jenna was going to see a lot of people who would talk to her about putting what had happened behind her, about moving on, about forgetting. Charlie knew the girl never would.

  Jenna simply looked at her without replying.

  “Who are you?” Jenna’s mother asked sharply.

  “I’m Dr. Stone. We talked on the phone last night, remember? Your daughter ran to my house for help.” The woman’s face wasn’t exactly hostile, but it wasn’t encouraging, either. However, it was Jenna Charlie was interested in, Jenna she hoped to help. “I’m a psychiatrist. I’m working with Agent Bartoli”—she nodded at Tony, who was talking to Jenna’s father and the other man—“and his team to help catch the man who did this.”

  “Why did the freak send me down to your house?” There was an edge of suspicion in Jenna’s voice. The freak, Charlie knew, was Jenna’s way of referring to the Gingerbread Man.

  “Did he specifically send you down to my house?” Even as Charlie asked the question, she knew the answer: of course he had. “How did he do that?”

  “He said that the only place in the world where he wouldn’t kill me was the big white house at the bottom of the path. He said if I could make it there before he caught me, he’d let me live.” The rising emotion in Jenna’s voice caught the men’s attention.

  “He wanted to get me involved,” Charlie told her, at the same time as Jenna’s father said, “Jenna, are you all right?”

  As Jenna nodded, the man looked at Charlie with narrowed eyes.

  “And you are?”

  His wife told him. Charlie allowed herself to be distracted by introductions, shaking hands with Judge McDaniels; his wife, Jill; and Clark Andrews, their family attorney, in turn.

  “Thank you for letting us talk to Jenna,” Tony said when the last of the introductions was finished.

  “Only as long as she doesn’t get upset.” Jill McDaniels was holding her daughter’s hand. Beneath the strain on her face she, too, looked wary, and Charlie wondered exactly what Jenna had told her.

  “We’re going to do everything in our power to catch the person who did this,” Tony promised them all. He looked at Jenna, and his voice gentled. “It would help us a lot if you could answer a few questions. We’ll stop whenever you want.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, Jenna nodded.

  Tony asked, “Do you mind if I record this? So I don’t have to try to remember everything.” Jenna looked at her father. Both par
ents looked at the lawyer. He nodded.

  “As long as you’re prepared to turn it off if I tell you to,” Clark Andrews said.

  Tony said, “Absolutely.” Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a small tape recorder and set it on the bed table alongside the glass of water and other miscellaneous objects that were already there. Pressing a button, he turned the machine on, and looked at Jenna again.

  “Okay, here we go.” Tony smiled at Jenna. Charlie found herself impressed by the air of calm reassurance he projected. “Can you tell me where you were and what you were doing when you were abducted?” Charlie knew that he wanted to get some concrete information under their belts as quickly as possible, in case the session had to be stopped.

  Jenna took a breath. “In Hampton. On Pembroke Avenue, near the intersection with Mallory Street. We—my sorority—were having our run. You know, the No Excuse for Child Abuse 5k. I was handing out water at the three mile mark. I gave out all my water, and everybody had passed, and then one of the golf carts came by and gave Skyler—the girl I was with, she was feeling sick—a ride to the finish line. They were going to come back for me, but it was getting dark, so I started walking on in by myself. There were other people from the race heading in, too, and I was kind of following them, so it didn’t feel like I was really alone or anything. I remember the strap on my sandal came unfastened, and I sat down on a curb to fasten it, and everybody else was still walking and talking on up ahead. Then … I don’t know, I … blacked out.” Her mouth started to shake. “When I woke up I was in this—cage.”

  Tony asked: “While you were walking, did you see anyone suspicious? Anyone you now think could have been the man who grabbed you?”

  Jenna shook her head. “No. Nobody unusual, nobody who stood out that I can remember. I only just—I heard a voice, okay? Then later, when …” Clamping her lips together, she swallowed.

  “One of the doctors who examined her last night said that there are marks on her that are consistent with the use of a stun gun,” Judge McDaniels told Tony. His face was rigid, and his eyes were alive with anger at what had been done to his daughter.