The Last Kiss Goodbye: A Charlotte Stone Novel

by Karen Robards

  As he watched her face his eyes darkened. Then his head bent, and she felt a shivery little thrill of anticipation when she realized that he was going to kiss her.

  Despite all the reasons why she shouldn’t, she closed her eyes and tilted her lips up to meet his. Meanwhile, her heart pounded and her pulse raced and her stomach fluttered like a thousand butterflies were taking wing in it.

  Then her lips got hit with the slightest of electric tingles and he said “Fuck” and her eyes flew open.

  To find his gorgeous blue eyes mere inches away, blazing down into hers.

  In a flash she realized what had happened: for a moment there, they had both forgotten that he was nothing more than a spirit with no physical substance whatsoever. He’d bent his head to kiss her like he’d thought he actually could, and she’d lifted her mouth to his like it was really going to happen.

  “Yeah,” he said in grim acknowledgment of reality, and got off the bed. He was already on the move when he told her over his shoulder, “I’m going for a walk.”

  “You can’t,” she began in instant warning, meaning to remind him that they were tethered.

  “I won’t forget that I’m on a fifty-foot leash. If nothing else, I’ll probably pace back and forth in front of your door. You should go to sleep.” His eyes slid over her, and then a quick, wry smile touched his mouth.”You look sexy as hell in that pretty nightgown, by the way. Not being able to do a thing about it is driving me out of my mind.”

  That was when she realized that ever since she’d clicked on the bedside lamp he’d gotten an up-close and personal view of her slinky little gown with its loose, cleavage baring neckline that gave the impression of being barely held up by satiny spaghetti straps. A quick glance down at herself confirmed it: the shimmery peach slip clung to her full breasts and lay whisper close to her narrow waist and flat stomach, leaving little to the imagination before, lower down, her laptop obstructed his view of her slender legs. Her nipples stood up in taut supplication beneath the thin silk. He had to know, as she did, that they were like that because of him.

  “I want you like hell,” he said, his tone making it almost a throwaway line.

  Then he strode on out of view.

  Charlie just sat there looking after him. Her lips still tingled in anticipation of that thwarted kiss. Her heart still pounded. Her pulse still raced. Deep inside, her body pulsed and burned. But even though she was now almost entirely convinced of his innocence, the hard truth was that the potent attraction that sizzled between them was still as impossible as it ever had been. If he was innocent—and she realized that on some deep, cellular level she had felt he was almost since he had died—that was terrifying in a whole new way. Because it meant there was now nothing to stop her from falling absolutely head over heels in love with him. Except for the fact that the only way falling in love with Michael could end was in her own heartbreak.

  Because he was still dead, and there was still no future in it.

  It took Charlie a long time to fall asleep.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The next few days were grueling. Michael seemed preoccupied, and Charlie was glad that he didn’t have a whole lot to say. Tony was sweet to her, but there was no time even to work in a run and they were rarely alone. The pace of the investigation was such that they were simply too busy to pursue a personal relationship further at that point, for which she was both glad and sorry. Glad because Michael—get real, her feelings for Michael—presented a definite obstacle, although she told herself fiercely that she was a fool to let that happen. Sorry since she really did want to pursue a personal relationship with Tony, because he was exactly the kind of guy she could see herself having a long-standing, mutually loving and supportive relationship with. Kaminsky and Buzz were their usual bickering selves, but nobody had time for much conversation that wasn’t directly related to the case. As the hours flew by without anything turning up in the way of solid leads, frustration threatened to set in. All of them were too aware of the ticking clock. Like the others, Charlie couldn’t rid herself of the tension-producing certainty that if they didn’t succeed in discovering the identity of the Gingerbread Man soon, more innocent victims were going to die. That was enough to keep her pushing doggedly ahead.

  Eric Riva was the first known recipient of the Gingerbread Man’s You can’t catch me letter. When they stopped by to interview him at his office at the Charlotte Observer he was glad to walk them through the circumstances surrounding the creation of the series of articles he had written on the Group Three (crossbow) murders two years previously. They had been published before he was contacted by the Gingerbread Man (which had happened in conjunction with the Group fFour—propeller—murders) and before anyone had even realized that the killings were the work of a serial killer. Riva’s focus in the articles had been on the three victims, and included detailed accounts of each of their lives before the crime, and, in the aftermath, the effect the crime had had on the murdered boys’ families, as well as the survivor and his family. The articles, which Charlie and the others had read before meeting with Riva, packed a real emotional punch. Riva agreed with them that the articles were probably what had prompted the Gingerbread Man to send him the letter in the first place. Riva’d had unusual access to inside information on the victims because one of them, fourteen-year-old Brad Carson, had been the son of a former girlfriend. The articles detailed the murders, in which three boys had been forced to vote on which of them would be the first one to die, in terrifying detail. The boy chosen had been killed by an arrow shot from a crossbow from outside the enclosure in which they had been imprisoned, presumably by the Gingerbread Man himself. After that, the two remaining boys had been given the choice of firing crossbows at each other until one of them was dead, or of both being killed. There had been a survivor in that group—sixteen-year-old Matt Hayes—but he no longer lived in the area. Immediately after the killings, he had been charged with the murders of the two other boys, because at the time the authorities hadn’t believed his story of a white-masked, grinning sadist who had forced him to kill. It had taken almost a year, and the commission of the Group Four murders along with the Gingerbread Man’s taunting letter to Riva, for authorities to believe that Matt had been telling the truth about what had happened, and to come to the conclusion that he should not, after all, be held responsible for the deaths of the other two boys. When Matt finally had been exonerated, his parents took him and his three siblings and moved out of state. For which Charlie didn’t blame them a bit.

  When the team reached Matt on the phone, he declined to talk to them. His mother told Tony, who had placed the call, that he had worked hard to put the horror behind him, and to please not contact them again.

  Charlie didn’t blame them for that, either.

  “Kelly—Brad’s mother—was totally devastated by the murder of her son. She gave me access to everything she knew about the case. Plus I did a lot of research,” Riva told them. Thirty-nine years old, of average height, with the kind of overmuscled build that told Charlie he spent a great deal of time lifting weights, he perched on a corner of the table in the newspaper’s glass-walled conference room. His brown hair was thinning and worn overlong to compensate, his khakis were rumpled, and the knot on his tie hung a couple of inches below the unbuttoned collar of his shirt, making him, in Charlie’s view, look like the quintessential reporter. “It was bad enough when she thought he had been killed by another teenage boy, but it was absolutely terrible for her to realize that he had been the victim of a serial killer. What made it worse was when she found out the same killer had struck in similar fashion at least twice before, and no one had known anything about it. She felt that if there had been any publicity about the previous killings, she would have kept Brad closer to home and he wouldn’t have been taken and subsequently killed.”

  “Did Kelly Carson approach you about writing the articles?” Tony asked. Unlike the rest of them, who sat around the table, he stood in front of the lo
ng windows that provided a panoramic view of Charlotte’s downtown. Tall and clean-shaven, he looked every inch the FBI agent in his dark suit and tie. The sun pouring through the window made his black hair gleam. Michael stood close by, a shoulder propping one of the struts between the windows, arms crossed over his chest, looking big and tough and gorgeous, a tawny-maned Sun God. Charlie couldn’t help the thought that popped into her head as she looked at the pair of them: handsome and handsomer.

  Then she determinedly refocused on the case.

  “Kelly DeMaris,” Riva corrected. “Brad’s father died, and she remarried. She turned to me as a friend when Brad was killed. It was my idea to write the articles, so people would know that a monster was at large in our community.”

  “How and when did Brad’s father die?” Kaminsky’s eyes had sharpened with interest. Like Tony, she and Buzz were in their FBI suits, but Kaminsky’s hair was still faintly damp from her shower and was slicked back from her face and tucked behind her ears. She’d slept through her alarm, she told the three of them with a glower when she joined them in the hall at the appointed time, and hadn’t had time to blow-dry her hair. Since then, she’d been snappish, and Charlie, and the others, too, had done their best not to provoke her.

  “He was killed in a small plane crash when Brad was nine,” Riva said. “Brad and Kelly were with him and were injured, but they recovered.”

  “Where did the crash happen?” Kaminsky asked with an uptick of excitement as she typed something into her laptop, no doubt noting one more victim who had witnessed the violent death of someone close. The list was far from complete, but it was shaping up to be one of the best—or at least most tantalizing—leads they had.

  Riva frowned. “In Indiana somewhere, I think. Why?”

  Kaminsky made a face. “No reason.”

  See, that was the problem with this particular lead: it encompassed too much. The number of first responders, emergency room personnel, doctors, nurses, chaplains, etc., involved was just too large, and the geographic areas of the deaths were too diverse. In trying to track down exactly who had been present at each of these possibly case-related death scenes, they had found it was almost impossible to be as precise as they needed to be to draw any meaningful conclusions. The medical personnel could be identified with a fair degree of accuracy from the patient charts, but it was much harder to pin support staff to the same time and place as a particular patient. Plus they felt there was a very good chance that a number of unaccounted for people were in and about the accident sites, emergency rooms, and other venues where these patients had been cared for. And if compiling a list for each individual site was difficult, cross-referencing with other sites, which they needed to do to find any individual who might have been present at multiple deaths, was so inaccurate as to be practically worthless.

  In other words, the lead was promising, but as far as useful results were concerned, they had zilch.

  “Did the boys know one another prior to the murders?” Charlie asked. There had to be a common denominator: she was certain of it. They just hadn’t found it yet.

  “They weren’t close friends, but they were acquainted,” Riva replied. “They were all from Mooresville—it’s a pretty small town—and they had all played in the same baseball league.”

  Charlie could see Kaminsky typing something into her computer, and guessed she was reminding herself to look into the other victims’ sport team affiliations. After all, Jenna had been participating in a run when the Gingerbread Man had grabbed her. Perhaps they could turn up a similar link with the others. Because there had to be something.

  “We have them, thanks,” Tony replied to Riva’s offer to get them copies of the articles under discussion. “What we’d like are copies of the notes you used in writing the articles, if you’d let us have them.”

  Riva agreed readily, but when Charlie saw the hundreds of pages of his photocopied notes, some of them of handwritten originals, that a staffer handed over a short time later, she felt her expectations plummet. Going through so much material as thoroughly as it needed to be gone through would clearly take a lot of time, and time was in increasingly short supply. What it came down to now was a matter of prioritizing what was most likely to yield results.

  “When Kelly came to me, after Brad’s death, I started trying to help her find out who did this,” Riva said. “Then, when that next batch of kids was killed, when I got that letter from the bastard who did it, I did everything I could to track him down. I’m still working on it. I’ve consulted with the local cops and the FBI agents who were working this case before you guys were brought in. I’ve run down a thousand possible leads, and explored so many theories that I can’t even remember most of them. And I don’t think I’ve come anywhere near identifying him. I hope you have better luck.”

  “We will,” Tony promised grimly. Charlie felt heartened by his confidence.

  After that, they met with the local police and FBI agents, toured the Group four (propeller) kill site, then drove to Winston-Salem and the Wake Forest campus. Charlie had long been familiar with the work of Dr. Jeffrey Underwood, who had a made a career out of studying the genetic makeup of violent killers and, most recently, serial killers. They met him at the medical school, where he was a distinguished professor.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Dr. Stone. I’m a big fan of your work,” was how Dr. Underwood greeted them when they joined him in his lab, where half a dozen graduate students labored diligently over implements ranging from microscopes to computers. Smiling at him, flattered at his words, Charlie returned the compliment. After shaking hands with her, and making a few remarks on her latest research paper, which had been published two months previously in The American Journal of Psychiatry, he turned his attention to Tony, Buzz, and Kaminsky.

  “I have no idea who could be behind these atrocities,” he said in response to Tony’s question. Balding and bespectacled, distinguished in his white lab coat, he looked older than his forty years. He was a tall, thin man with a restless air who stood shifting from foot to foot, watching his assistants with eagle eyes even as he answered questions, and rapping out the occasional instruction or rebuke to his underlings as he felt the need.

  “How was the letter from the Gingerbread Man delivered to you?” Tony asked.

  “It was slipped under the door to my office,” Dr. Underwood said. “I came in one morning, and there it was. Needless to say, I immediately contacted the police.”

  Tony looked at Kaminsky.

  “We already have a copy of it,” she answered, correctly interpreting his unspoken question. “Like the others, it was written by one of the victims, Liza Gill, under what we are sure was some sort of coercion. That was the group killed in the trash compacter, if you remember.”

  “Are there security cameras in the building?” Buzz didn’t look particularly hopeful. Because even if there were, by this time the footage would have been about a year old, which meant that unless it had been deliberately preserved, it almost certainly no longer existed.

  “There are,” Dr. Underwood replied, “but I understand that nothing usable was found. By the time police thought to check, the images had been taped over. I think the cameras are set to do that every seventy-two hours.”

  That came as a slight disappointment, but no surprise. As they went through their litany of questions, Dr. Underwood answered readily, but he had very little new to tell them.

  Still, Charlie found much of what he had to say fascinating, but that was because he kept getting away from Tony’s questions to explain to her where he was going with his research.

  “Right now we’re doing DNA tests on a number of samples of genetic material to see if the CHRNA7 gene, which is often missing in schizophrenics, is also missing in serial killers,” he told Charlie. “I’m hoping to get funding to do a large scale study on the subject, which includes mass killers as well, such as the Colorado movie theater shooter.”

  “Do you feel that mass murderers and
serial killers will be found to have the same mutation?” Charlie asked, immediately interested. It wasn’t often she had the opportunity to talk shop with someone whose area of expertise so closely paralleled her own.

  Dr. Underwood nodded. “I think so.”

  “I’m not convinced that we’ll ever find one single component that creates a serial killer,” Charlie said, totally drawn into the discussion. “It may be that a number of factors have to be present. Genetics may certainly play a role, but I am leaning toward the theory that environmental factors may be as important.”

  “Perhaps we could collaborate on a paper at some point,” Dr. Underwood suggested. “I’d be very interested in incorporating the work you’re doing into my research.”

  “I’m open to that,” Charlie agreed. A stray glance that happened to encompass the faces of Tony, Buzz, and Kaminsky reminded her that, involving though the discussion was, it wasn’t their reason for visiting Dr. Underwood. Michael was smiling faintly as he watched her. As she met his eyes she thought that what she saw might be pride in them … for her. Silly as it undoubtedly was to let the thought that he was proud of her affect her, she felt the beginnings of a tiny little glow. It occurred to her that having someone show pride in her was a rare thing in her life: she didn’t come from that kind of background. Funny (sad?) that it took her impossible bête noir to open her eyes to the fact that she had wanted that.

  “I only have one more question for you, Dr. Underwood,” Tony said. “We know that the Gingerbread Man is going to strike again, and soon. Do you have any suggestions as to which experts working in fields similar to yours and Dr. Stone’s he might be planning to send his next letter to? Whoever it is will be within the three-state area of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia.”