The Last Kiss Goodbye: A Charlotte Stone Novel

by Karen Robards

  “Pouting?” The look he slanted down at her was sharp with disbelief. “I don’t pout.”

  “Oh, yeah? You could have fooled me.”

  Then Buzz pulled up in the rental car and any chance of further conversation, at least on her part, was gone.

  “Just so you know, babe, fooling you ain’t that hard,” Michael said by way of a parting shot. Surrounded by the living again, Charlie couldn’t do more than skewer him with a dirty look in reply.

  A little more than forty-five minutes later, with Tony at the wheel of their rented SUV, they were on the University of South Carolina’s campus driving down Sumter heading for their meeting with David Myers. Charlie cast a fond look at the Horseshoe, the quadrangle that was home to some of the campus’ most historic buildings, admiring the huge oaks with their festoons of gray Spanish moss and the lush lawn where a handful of students lounged in the shade. Then they rounded a corner, and a moment later they were pulling into the parking lot of the very modern building that housed David Myers’ office.

  “So, you went to college here, huh?” Michael asked as they walked through the suffocating heat of the parking lot into the welcome chill of the building. “What, was this guy your college sweetheart?”

  Glad as she was that he seemed to have gotten over being mad at her, Charlie didn’t care for the subject. Since it previously had been raised right after Michael had seen Laura go off with her two dead friends, and he hadn’t commented at the time, Charlie had been hoping he’d been too wrapped up in what he had just witnessed to pay attention when she’d been admitting to a relationship with David Myers. Obviously, no such luck.

  A firming of her lips was her only reply. Clearly he took that for the yes she really didn’t want to give him, because interest sparked in his eyes.

  When the door to David Myers’ office opened in response to Tony’s knock, Charlie thought she was prepared.

  She should have known that she wasn’t.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  For a moment, for the briefest sliver of time as she found herself looking at David, Charlie was twenty-one again and achingly vulnerable. She had an instant mental image of herself, slim in blue jeans with her waist-length hair pulled back from her face by a barrette so that the silky fall of it rippled down her back, as she had looked on the first day of spring semester of her senior year in college. That was when she’d come to work for Dr. David Myers as his research assistant. By the end of that semester she had absolutely hero-worshipped him.

  At least now she was mature enough to realize just how young and foolish she had been. But still, as she came face-to-face with David again, the memory was more embarrassing than she had expected it to be.

  “Charlie!” He greeted her with apparent delight, smiling broadly as his gaze swept her. “You look fantastic.”

  “Hello, David.” Burningly conscious that she was the object of the undivided attention of every other member of her group even if none of them (except Michael) was blatant enough to be openly watching her, she smiled her coolest, most professional smile and held out her hand. When he shook hands with no more than the appropriate degree of friendliness, she found herself devoutly glad that he seemed determined to keep things professional, too. “I’d like you to meet—”

  “Holy hell, he wasn’t a student when you were here anymore than I was,” Michael said in her ear as she, trying her best to tune her bête noire out, performed the introductions. “What, were you boinking your professor?”

  Actually, yes she had been. Her psychology professor, to be exact. Only a few times, toward the end of the semester. And the last time they had set eyes on each other, when he had broken off their budding relationship because he was getting married to the woman he’d been engaged to, unbeknownst to her, all along, and then going to England to accept a fellowship at Oxford, she had told him she loved him and begged him to stay.

  None of which she said out loud. That last part at least she never intended to share with anyone. Seen in the bright light of eleven years later, it was downright humiliating. Worse, it was stupid.

  It was also one more example of her unerring instinct for choosing the absolutely wrong man.

  His office was different than the one he’d had when she’d worked for him. Bigger. Not quite as messy. Of course, he was a full professor now, instead of a freshly minted, thirty-year-old Ph.D. in his first year as an assistant professor. Except for a well-trimmed mustache and goatee, he looked pretty much the same: a shade under six feet tall, with a slim build that showed no signs of softening around the edges and short coffee brown hair. A few gray hairs at his temples and some lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth that hadn’t been there before were the only real indications of the passage of time. Even the Gamecocks tie and blue dress shirt he wore tucked into blue jeans could have been the same.

  Charlie took comfort from the knowledge that she looked—and was—totally different from the academically accomplished but otherwise clueless girl that he had known.

  “The Columbia Police Department took the letter the day after I got it,” David answered Tony’s question, which referred to the whereabouts of the You can’t catch me message David had received. Tony sat in the chair across from David, who was ensconced behind his cluttered desk in what Charlie, in psychiatrist mode, recognized as his deliberate assumption of the power position. Charlie and Kaminsky sat on a tweedy love seat in front of the window. Buzz perched atop a small stool nearby. Michael leaned against the wall near Charlie. “I don’t know if they still have it, or if they passed it on to the FBI. At first the detectives here thought they were dealing with just a bizarre double homicide. It was a couple of weeks before the connection to the previous murders was made and the FBI was called in. I spent quite a bit of time working with the detectives and the FBI to try to identify the killer”—he glanced at Charlie with the faintest of smiles—“and I even tried to enlist the help of the illustrious Dr. Stone here, whose work with serial killers I have followed with interest and admiration, but the fact is we made no appreciable headway. Of course, now that your elite team of serial killer hunters is on the job, presumably we can hope for better luck.”

  “Do you have any idea why you were chosen to receive that letter?” Tony asked.

  David shook his head. “No, not really. I mean, I’m fairly certain it was because of my book. I’m the author of Criminal Psychology: Understanding the Deviant Mind, you know—it’s the textbook of choice in most criminal psychology courses, so there’s wide access to it.”

  “A fifteen-year-old boy survived the attack,” Charlie said. “Had you ever met him before?”

  “Saul Tunney.” David turned his attention to her, and Charlie recognized that particularly intent gaze as the one he got when something truly interested him. “A remarkable young man. No, I’d never met him before, but we stay in fairly regular contact now. He’s actually planning to matriculate here at USC when he graduates high school.” He made a face at her. “I had to do quite a bit of talking to get him into regular counseling, but I did it. I’ve been acting as kind of a mentor to him. As horrible as what happened was, it doesn’t seem to have done any permanent psychological damage to him.”

  “What about the two deceased victims?” Tony asked. “Had you ever met either of them?”

  “No.” David shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

  “Did you know Dr. Jeffrey Underwood or Eric Riva prior to receiving that letter?” Kaminsky asked.

  “I knew of Dr. Underwood, of course.” David glanced at Charlie. “I’ve been aware of his work for years, as I’m sure Charlie has. It’s really very impressive.” Charlie nodded in agreement. “I did not know him in any other capacity. And I had never heard of Eric Riva until I found out—weeks after I was dragged into the case—that he had been the first recipient of the killer’s taunt.”

  “Do you have any idea why the Gingerbread Man chose a Charlotte newspaper reporter to send that first letter to?” Tony asked. “It doesn�
�t seem to mesh with his selection of three widely heralded experts in the criminal psychology field as the recipients of the next three letters.”

  David’s expression brightened. “Now, that I can tell you. We—the previous investigators and I—believe it was because Mr. Riva had written several newspaper stories about the ordeal suffered by the three boys in an earlier attack. I posited that the killer had read those articles, which I felt meant that at that time he had to be living somewhere within the readership area of the Charlotte Observer. I still think that.”

  Tony nodded. Remembering the file David had sent her to look at when he had asked her to consult and that she had sent back when she’d declined, Charlie said, “Could we get a copy of the file you put together on the case, do you think? As well as anything else you have that you think might help us.”

  “Yes, of course,” David said. Then he smiled a little ruefully at Charlie. “Once the killer is caught, I’m hoping to turn my experiences with this into a book. So if you would treat everything in that file as confidential I would appreciate it.”

  “We will,” Charlie promised, and Tony nodded agreement.

  David summoned his newest research assistant—a pretty college senior who seemed just as eager to please David as Charlie, inwardly wincing, remembered she once had been—to make a copy of the file, and they all stood up to take their leave. David took advantage of the fact that the other three had moved ahead of them into the hall to pull Charlie aside and ask her quietly if she’d like to go out to dinner with him that night, “for old times’ sake.”

  When foolish little girls grow a brain, was what Charlie thought, in the spirit of when pigs fly. What she said, with scarcely any acidity at all, was, “Don’t you think your wife might object?”

  “I’m divorced. Three years ago.” He smiled at her. “That’s one of the reasons I reached out to you when I got pulled into these murders. I’ve never forgotten you, you know. In fact, I’ve followed your career with great interest. And pride, I might add. After all, you were once my star pupil. I was hoping we could get reacquainted.”

  “We’re leaving town tonight,” Charlie said. Then she added, very gently, “And David—even if we weren’t, I’m not interested.”

  She wouldn’t have been human if that softly spoken rejection hadn’t made her feel a little bit better. As far as her pride was concerned, it evened the scales some small degree. But the other truth was that she would have refused even if there hadn’t been a history between them that needed avenging. She no longer felt the slightest interest in him as a man: the girl who had thought that he was the greatest thing since sliced bread was long gone.

  “Guy’s a douche bag,” Michael said as they joined the others in the hall and observed the adoring smile the research assistant gave David as she handed him the file she had copied for him. “One of these days you’re going to have to tell me how you ended up hitting that.”

  The look Charlie shot him said Not in this life. And for the first time since lunch, he smiled.

  Saul Tunney was waiting for them in his mother’s home in Ballentine, a Columbia suburb. He was now sixteen, although he was still round-cheeked and faintly baby-faced, which Charlie thought he tried to counter by sporting a blond crew cut that looked almost defiantly masculine. At about five-eight and a hundred thirty pounds, his size wouldn’t have posed much of an obstacle to someone bent on kidnapping him, especially since, a year ago when the crime had occurred, he’d presumably been even smaller. Having apparently told his story dozens of times, he related it to them in a few terse sentences. He had been snatched off a Columbia street after a baseball game. He’d found himself in a cage, and, later, a grain elevator with two other kids: Isaac Stein, 14, and Sofia Barrett, 18. If they wanted to know what had happened in the grain elevator, they could read the police reports: he was done talking about it. What it came down to was, in the end, he had lived, the other two had died.

  No, he hadn’t known them previously. No, he couldn’t identify his attacker: he’d just caught a glimpse of the guy, who had worn black clothing and a white Halloween mask, with a Joker kind of grin. No, he had no idea why he had been targeted.

  He did have two things of interest to tell them: he thought the attacker had used some kind of voice synthesizer to disguise his voice; and, four years previously, Saul had been out hunting with his uncle and cousin when his uncle had accidentally shot his cousin dead.

  That last had been in response to Kaminsky’s question about any other violent deaths he had witnessed in his life.

  “I think that’s the answer, it really might be our common denominator,” Kaminsky said with barely suppressed excitement once the interview was over and they were on their way to meet with the local detectives and FBI agents who had worked the case, to see the Group Six kill site.

  “Now all we need to do is uncover a violent death in the pasts of seventeen other victims, tie them all together, and figure out what it all means, and we’ll have solved the case,” Buzz said dryly.

  “At least it’s a place to look,” Kaminski snapped.

  Their subsequent visit to the abandoned grain elevator that only Saul Tunney had escaped alive was, for Charlie at least, heartrending. At the time, the silo had been full of corn. Standing on the surface of the stored grain was much like standing on quicksand, one of the local agents who was walking them through what had happened explained. When none of the victims had done anything in response to his warning that he would kill them all unless they started killing one another, the Gingerbread Man had opened a floor hole, which was designed to speed the flow of grain from the silo to a loading chute. The girl, Sofia, had been swept away. Her body was found with grain clogging her throat, her nose, her eyes. It was, the detective said, a particularly hideous death. The boy, Isaac, had subsequently been killed by Saul Tunney. With a pickaxe, the kind that was sometimes used in grain elevators to break up hard clumps of grain. The silo had since been emptied of its contents, but traces of Isaac Stein’s blood still stained the walls.

  Looking at those rust-colored speckles, Charlie felt sick.

  It wasn’t until much later, when they were getting ready to land at the Charlotte airport, that Charlie finally realized what had been bothering her so much about this case. She’d been listening with only half an ear to the various discussions swirling around inside the plane while she mentally twisted the facts that they knew like the pieces of a puzzle in hopes of getting something to fit, when it clicked.

  “I think,” she said, looking at the others as if she was really seeing them for the first time in a while, “that he’s killed before. Before these group murders began, I mean. This whole thing is too elaborate. He has to have worked up to it. This is his escalation. We need to start looking at unsolved single murders.” She paused to let her thoughts settle. “We should probably begin in the same geographical area in which the first Gingerbread Man murders occurred. We should work backwards from the date of those murders. He will have an MO, although it will be different from what he’s doing now. There will be a pattern. There should be a series of single murders, because this—these death scenarios with multiple victims—represents a major escalation.”

  For a moment everyone simply looked at her.

  “Makes sense,” Michael said. He was lying on the couch again, and his eyes had been closed until he looked at her as he spoke. Charlie hadn’t even realized that he had been paying attention.

  “What kind of time frame are we talking about?” Tony asked.

  Charlie shook her head. “If he is at the upper age limit for serial killers—and with this severe an escalation I’m guessing that he is—we’re probably looking at the last twenty years.”

  Buzz whistled through his teeth. “What’s the geographical area?”

  Kaminsky consulted her laptop. “The first Gingerbread Man murders occurred right outside Clarksville, Virginia.”

  “Buggs Island Lake,” Charlie said suddenly. She looked at Michael, sta
rted to say, Remember, Laura said, swallowed that, and quickly switched her gaze to Tony. By leaving off the first three words, the rest of the sentence was perfectly acceptable. “The van Jenna McDaniels and the other girls were put into smelled like fish, remember? Buggs Island Lake is this huge fishing destination. And part of it is near Clarksville, Virginia. We should check it out.”

  “That’s in Mecklenburg County,” Kaminsky said. “And how do we know the van smelled like fish?”

  “We just do,” Charlie said impatiently.

  Kaminsky eyed her askance.

  “Okay, we look for unsolved murders with a single MO in the vicinity of Clarksville, Virginia, and this lake,” Tony summed up as the pilot announced they would be landing in Charlotte in five minutes. “Starting around the date of the Group One murders and going back twenty years.”

  “Got it,” Buzz said, and Kaminsky added, “Not that this is going to be hard or anything.”

  “Look at it this way.” Tony smiled tranquilly at the pair of them. “If it was easy, none of us would have a job.”

  It was full dark by the time they got to their hotel, which in late August meant that it was after ten p.m. Charlie was tired, wired, and a little on edge. They grabbed a quick dinner in the hotel restaurant—Charlie had salad and a bowl of soup—and then they went up to their rooms, which were in a block on the eleventh floor. They each had their own, with Tony on one side of Charlie and Kaminsky on the other. Crane’s room was next to Kaminsky’s. For security reasons (actually, Charlie knew it was for her security), Tony had requisitioned a local FBI agent to stand watch in the hallway all night.

  She appreciated it. Now that it was night again, Tam’s warning was crowding in on her. The thing was, she had never known Tam to be wrong.

  “I’ve stayed here before,” Tony said to Charlie as they walked along the hallway to their rooms. “They’ve got a great jogging track up on the roof. I’m going to go make use of it. Want to come?”