The Last Kiss Goodbye: A Charlotte Stone Novel

by Karen Robards

  “Serial killers are compelled to kill,” Charlie explained with automatic precision. “The compulsion is their reason.”

  The look he gave her was grim. “Like I said, she was alive when I left her.”

  Charlie clicked back through the file for the information she wanted. “Her body was found at eight a.m. by her sister. Time of death was estimated at three to four hours previous to that.” She frowned. “That means she was killed between four and five a.m.”

  “Like I said, I woke up around four and left her house—with her alive in it—as soon as I got my clothes on. Probably around 4:10.”

  She was scrolling through his file. “You were logged in to the jail at 5:30 a.m.”

  He made an impatient sound. “That dick of a cop kept me on the side of the road for a good hour.”

  “If you left Candace Hartnell alive at 4:10, that means somebody else had to have entered her house and killed her within the next fifty minutes.” It might be unlikely, but it wasn’t impossible, Charlie decided.

  “Yeah, I worked that out.” His voice was dry.

  Having run through the pages of photos of the evidence and not found what she sought, Charlie frowned. “What about the clothes you were wearing? I don’t see them here, but they should have been introduced as evidence. The crime scene was apparently extremely bloody. You should have been covered in blood.”

  “You’d think, wouldn’t you?” he said with disgust. “These are the clothes I was wearing—at least, the ghost version. Last civilian clothes I ever wore, except for a suit the lawyers scared up for my trial. They weren’t any more covered with blood when I got arrested than they are right now. The prosecution claimed it was because I killed her while nude, then showered, then dressed.”

  Charlie considered: if there was no blood on his clothes, then the prosecution’s theory was the only one that fit. “You were convicted of killing six other women over the two and a half years previous to Candace Hartnell’s murder. How many of them did you sleep with?”

  He snorted derisively. “None. Not one. Never even laid eyes on any of them. I swear to God. Yeah, I know they said my DNA was all over them and all that shit, but that’s not possible. Either one of those testing labs fucked up big-time, or somebody framed me. Why? How the hell do I know? Maybe some asshole cop or FBI agent wanted to clear up some old cases and I was the best option they had for sticking ’em on somebody. Or maybe somebody didn’t like me. Like I said, I don’t know.”

  Charlie watched him carefully. “Every single murder was within a four hour drive of where you lived.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “The murders started right after you got out of the Marine Corps, and continued over the entire period between then and your arrest. And you didn’t have an alibi for any of the nights those women were killed.”

  He sighed. “I did have an alibi for some of them. I was living with a girlfriend for something like the last six months before Candace Hartnell was killed. We broke up the day before I hit that bar and the shit hit the fan. On the nights of two of the other murders I know for sure I was asleep in bed with Jasmine. Hell, I’d just opened my garage and I was trying to get that business going. I was working maybe eighty hours a week and I was tired—too tired to run around slicing up women in the middle of the night. Only the damned cops messed with Jasmine until they got her to agree it was possible that I snuck out of bed while she was asleep, killed those women, then got back into bed before she woke up in the morning. Which was total shit. But she was pissed at me anyway because of the breakup, and then they scared her to death of me. They kept telling her, ‘You’ve been sleeping with a serial killer. Do you know how lucky you are to be alive?’ That kind of crap.”

  Charlie glanced back at the file. “So why’d you and Jasmine break up?”

  “Not because she was afraid of me. Nothing like that. She wanted to get married, and I didn’t. Hell, I didn’t even mean to start living with her. She just sort of moved herself in.”

  Charlie looked at him again. And only realized as she did so that she had been deliberately not looking at him as he talked about his girlfriend. She hated to admit it even to herself, but ever since she and he had started getting, uh, better acquainted, she’d been mentally poking around the fact that he’d had a girlfriend at the time of his arrest. The question that had burned unacknowledged in the back of her mind was, had he loved her?

  From the tone of what he’d said, the answer was no, he hadn’t.

  Not that it makes any difference, Charlie told herself hurriedly.

  “You got no call to be jealous of Jasmine, babe.”

  His words were so on the money that they almost made Charlie jump.

  “What?” Her eyes flared at him indignantly. “I am not jealous of your girlfriend. You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  The hardness that had been hovering around his eyes and mouth relaxed as he gave her a slow, teasing grin.

  “Ex-girlfriend. And I told you I could read your face like a neon sign.”

  “You are the most conceited—” She broke off, flustered, hoping he couldn’t tell. The more she protested, the more convinced he would be that he was right, she knew. So she shot him a withering glance, and went for the best distraction she could think of: the DVD that the Mariposa PD had sent along with the (his?) watch. She had transferred it from her purse to her laptop case when she’d been packing for this trip, and now, with Michael beside her so that she could gauge his reaction to whatever was on there, was the moment to watch it. Whether or not Michael was a serial killer was something she needed to have settled in her own mind before this … this connection that seemed to be growing between them went any further. Most of the time, whether he was being charming or annoying or overprotective or sexy as hell, she didn’t think about what he had done, and that, she decided, was due to the sheer force of his personality. But when she did, when she actually allowed herself to remember the seven women he had been convicted of slaughtering, the chill of fear and revulsion that went through her was enough to stop her in her tracks, enough to make her think she needed to get out of the way and let divine justice take its course where he was concerned.

  “What’s that?” he asked as she inserted the DVD into her laptop.

  She told him. Neither one of them said anything as the screen sprang to life. The first shot was an identifying one: date and time, which placed the footage as running from 9:31 to 9:35 a.m. on the morning after Michael had left the bar with Candace Hartnell.

  Then the camera was focused on Michael—the same younger, video Michael from the bar security tape. He was now seated in a small, gray, police interrogation room, dressed exactly as he had been the previous night, exactly as he was right at that moment on the bed beside her, as a matter of fact. Only the smiling seducer of the footage from the bar was replaced by a still to-die-for hot, but now obviously angry, man with bloodshot eyes and a night’s worth of stubble. Each wrist was cuffed to an arm of the straight-backed metal chair on one side of a small metal table, and almost the first thing Charlie noticed was that the watch he’d been wearing the night before was missing.

  Which didn’t mean anything, she reminded herself as her pulse quickened a little in response. Whether the watch had been taken from him at the jail or whether he had left it behind at the crime scene, by this time it would have been missing in either case.

  “So what did Candace do to piss you off?” The blue-uniformed cop on the opposite side of the table was leaning forward in his chair, his forearms resting on the smooth metal surface as he stared at Michael. The angle of the camera, which was positioned to capture the person being interrogated, recorded the cop’s beefy back, and the left side of a florid face beneath a close-cropped cap of reddish hair.

  “What? Who the hell is Candace?” Glaring, Michael rattled his cuffs against the metal arm rails. “Look, I got things to do. How about you tell me how much the fine is and let me pay it and I’ll be on my way.�
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  “The lady you were with last night.” Ignoring the last part of Michael’s speech, the cop looked at him intently. “We both know what women can be like. She must have pissed you off pretty good. What’d she do?”

  Michael’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, come on, now, Mr. Garland. We both know you do. Why don’t you just tell me what happened? Whatever the reason was, if you tell me about it now, I guarantee things’ll go a lot easier for you.”

  A commotion in the hall caused both men to glance in the direction of the open door. A split second later, a woman burst through it, crying, “Michael! Oh, my God, Michael, what did you do?”

  The woman was in maybe her mid-twenties, with a pretty, sulky-looking face enhanced by lots of mascara and bold scarlet lips, a riot of long black hair, and a va-va-voom figure in tiny shorts and a low-cut tank top.

  “Jasmine!” Michael sat straight up as she flew toward him, her high-heeled sandals clattering on the industrial gray floor. Before she could reach him, the cop behind the table leaped to his feet and interposed himself between her and Michael, and another cop barreled through the door to catch her by the arm.

  “Sorry about that! She got away from me—” the second cop said to the first as, drowning out the rest of what he had to say, Jasmine screamed at Michael, “You fucked another woman? We’re broken up one day and already you’re out fucking another woman? You …” The string of expletives she let loose with made the florid-faced cop whose chest she had run into, and who was at that moment backing her toward the door while the other cop pulled her in that direction with a hand on her arm and another on her waist, wince.

  Charlie couldn’t see Michael—the cops and the woman blocked the camera’s view of him—but in the background she could hear him growl, “Jesus H. Christ, what the hell did you bring her here for?”

  “Miss Lipsitz! You can’t talk to him!” said the cop, urgently pulling Jasmine out the door.

  Jasmine strained to get away. Every bit of her focus was on Michael. “You fucked her and then you killed her! That’s what they’re saying! Some bitch you picked up in a bar! Is it true?”

  Although the camera’s view of him was still blocked by the beefy cop who was shoving Jasmine out the door, Michael could be heard saying, “What the hell?”

  Jasmine was once again screaming expletives as she was forced into the hallway and the door was shut on her.

  The camera had an unimpeded view of Michael then. He was staring at the beefy cop, who’d turned back to look at him.

  “That girl I was with last night … she’s dead?” Michael asked slowly.

  The cop didn’t say anything. But even Charlie, watching grainy footage on a laptop, could read the answer in his body language: yes.

  “I want a lawyer,” Michael said. And that was it. The footage ended, and the screen went blank.

  “Like I said, after that it went downhill fast,” real, live (well, dead) Michael said. Charlie looked at him without really seeing him: she was too preoccupied with analyzing what she had just viewed. The news that Candace Hartnell was dead had definitely seemed to come as a surprise to him. Could he have been acting? Her best judgment said no, but she realized that she couldn’t be sure. The psychology of serial killers was complex enough to preclude her being able to count on the veracity of his reaction, and her connection to him was too personal to allow her to count on her own reading of it.

  “So that was Jasmine,” she mused, and only realized that she’d said it aloud when Michael grinned at her. Immediately she wanted to bite her tongue.

  “She was cute,” he said. “And even fun for a while. Not the brightest, but then, I didn’t keep her around to perform brain surgery on me.”

  “I bet.” Charlie couldn’t help it. That bit of sarcasm simply came out.

  His grin widened. “Like I said, you got no reason to be jealous of Jasmine, babe.”

  Charlie gave him a look, decided she wasn’t going there, and concentrated again on the evidence: the watch was the key.

  She said as much, then added, “If that watch they found at the crime scene wasn’t yours, and if that could be proved because it didn’t have the engraving on the back that yours did, wasn’t there anybody who could testify that it wasn’t your watch because your watch had Semper Fi on the back of it?”

  His eyes returned to the ceiling. “Everybody who could testify to that is dead.”

  “Everybody?”

  “Yup.”

  Clearly, Charlie saw, she was touching on what was, for him, a sensitive area. Or else he was smart enough—and he was smart enough—to know that he could get around her by pretending it was a sensitive area. That she was so softhearted she wouldn’t probe further if she thought the questions she was asking caused him pain.

  Yeah, to hell with that.

  “You want to elucidate on that a little?” she asked.

  He smiled faintly as his gaze slanted her way. “You trying to confuse me with that big word?”

  That didn’t fly, either. “Michael.”

  The smile vanished. “The watch was given to me by members of my unit, who were killed in Afghanistan, all right? They’re the only ones who knew what was engraved on it.”

  From the sudden tension in his jaw, she could tell he didn’t want to talk about it. And, damn it, she discovered that she was too softhearted to push him to go to a place that was obviously (unless he was very, very good at faking it, which was possible) hurtful to him.

  Kicking herself for her own lack of toughness, she moved on to something else that had occurred to her. But now that it had, it loomed large as a mountain right smack in the middle of the winding road she was traveling on the way to maybe actually believing him.

  Her eyes skewered him. Her tone sharpened until it teetered on the edge of being accusing. “So tell me this: if you didn’t kill those women, then how did you wind up in Spookville when you died?”

  His expression turned grim. “Babe, I never said I didn’t deserve to be where I was. What I said was, I didn’t kill those women.”

  Charlie frowned at him. “So what in the world did you do to deserve Spookville?”

  He shook his head at her. “I’m done talking about what I did or didn’t do. The only reason I even told you any of this is because it pisses me off when every now and then you start looking at me like you think I’m Jack the Ripper. What it comes down to at this point is, either you believe me or you don’t. Your call.”

  He sat up, and she was surprised at how physically close that brought him. As big as he was, he took up way more than his fair share of space on the bed, and her field of vision was suddenly full of his broad shoulders and wide chest. Their arms almost brushed, and she could see the muscles flexing in his, and in his torso beneath his shirt. They were both sitting on top of the covers, but she had her legs tucked beneath her and her laptop in her lap while his long legs in their jeans and boots stretched out almost to the end of the bed. He looked as solid and alive as it was possible for a man to look. Charlie was conscious of her idiot heart speeding up again just from his proximity.

  “So?” he said, and she knew what he was asking.

  She had to look up to meet his eyes. As she did, they darkened, and his mouth firmed. Searching his hard, handsome face, she realized that she had to consider the possibility that her original diagnosis of him might have been influenced by the fact that she had known he was a convicted serial killer. If she turned the thing on its head, if at the time of diagnosis she had been introduced to him as a normal, law-abiding citizen, would she have concluded that he was a charismatic psychopath capable of the ultimate in horrific violence?

  Or would she simply have seen a gorgeous guy with a charming smile?

  At this point, it was impossible to know.

  “Okay, I believe you,” she told him.

  His eyes slid over her face. One side of his mouth quirked up in a wry half-smile. “With r
eservations, huh?”

  He’d said he could read her face like a neon sign: here was more proof of it. She was still mentally sorting through the factors for and against his version of what had happened with Candace Hartnell.

  “I haven’t seen any overwhelming evidence that you’re innocent,” she told him honestly. “On the other hand, I’ve seen enough to make me think you could be.”

  “Your faith in me is staggering, babe.” The dryness in his voice made her smile a little.

  “What we need to do is find somebody who is willing to testify that this watch”—her voice was brisk with determination as she touched the watch on her arm—“is yours. Somebody who knows about the engraving on the back.”

  He smiled at her, a slow and ultimately dazzling smile that made her breath catch and her toes curl. Nobody, but nobody, looked like Michael when he smiled like that.

  “There goes that savior complex of yours kicking into gear again,” he said. “We don’t need to do shit. There’s no point in it. I’m dead, remember? Whether I’m innocent or not doesn’t matter a damn anymore to anybody but you.”

  “But …” Knowing that he was right defeated her.

  “You got to go with your gut here, babe. What’s it gonna be?”

  Looking into those sky blue eyes, Charlie silently acknowledged that for quite some time she had been having trouble picturing him as a merciless slaughterer of young women. It just didn’t fit with the man she was getting to know, she felt, pretty well.

  But there was no way to be sure. All she could do was go with—not so much her gut, she realized, as her heart.

  Her stupid, soft, and way-too-vulnerable heart.

  “I thought so,” he said with satisfaction, and she knew he had once again successfully read on her face what she was thinking.

  “Fine,” she told him. “I believe you.”

  “You could sound happier about it.”

  “I probably could.” If her response was tart, it was because she was disgusted with herself for being such a sucker where he was concerned. No good could come of it. She knew that, and was a sucker for him anyway.