The Last Kiss Goodbye: A Charlotte Stone Novel

by Karen Robards

  It was such a stupid thing to say. Clearly, since he had locked her in a cage in the back of a van that smelled (she was a little relieved to realize she could still smell) of fish, with, according to Michael, the three kidnapped girls and Kaminsky unconscious beside her, the fact that David had punched her in the face was a small thing. But it felt like such a violation of the relationship they’d had that, yes, she was angry.

  “Don’t worry, babe. I’ll kill him for you later.” Michael’s tone was so even that for a moment she almost missed the deadly promise that ran beneath it. Glancing at him, registering his tall, powerful body, she knew he meant it, and knew, too, that he could break David in half with no trouble whatsoever. Then she remembered that he was dead, and there was, actually, nothing he could do, which he was apparently forgetting, too, and she felt cold sweat start to prickle to life around her hairline.

  “You saw me,” David said. “It was the only thing I could think of to do. I could see in your face that you knew. I stopped at the Inn to grab a quick dinner before I hit the road, and I went to the restroom, and when I came out there you were. If I’d had any idea you were around—but I didn’t. And then after I put you in the van, when I was going back for my briefcase, your cop friend saw me, too.”

  By cop friend, Charlie knew he was referring to Kaminsky.

  Charlie caught her breath, sucked in air.

  “You’re the Gingerbread Man.” Again, it was stupid. She even said it with a touch of incredulity, because, she supposed, she was still hoping that this was all some huge mistake, and he would deny it. But then reality set in, and she knew that however unthinkable, however terrible it seemed, it was true.

  As she faced the reality of that, her mouth went sour with fear.

  “Have bad taste in boyfriends much?” Michael asked grimly from the other side of the cage, which he was slowly circling like a predator trying to get in. Under other circumstances, the sight would have made her smile. She didn’t.

  In this case, it wasn’t that he couldn’t get in. It was that he couldn’t get any of them out.

  The knowledge was terrifying. It settled like a rock in her stomach. She was already battling back a creeping tide of panic. Tony and Buzz. The explosion. Oh, God, she remembered everything. Had they been hurt? Were they even alive? Please let them be okay. But she had to be careful: the last thing she wanted to do was let David think she and Kaminsky were now alone.

  “David, why?” she asked when he didn’t say anything. Talking felt funny, but it didn’t really hurt, and her nose had, thankfully, gone numb. What hurt was blinking, or trying to move her eyes.

  “Because I wanted to find out what makes people into killers,” David replied like it was the most natural thing in the world. Charlie saw that he was watching her through the rearview mirror, and goose bumps raced over her skin. What would it take to provoke him to kill? Because hard as it was to get her mind around it, that was clearly what he intended: to kill her. And Kaminsky, and the three girls as well.

  The certainty made her shiver. The question was, how much time did they have?

  I have to try to get out of here.

  She made an abortive movement to sit up, lifting her head, pushing down against the uneven metal floor beneath her with an elbow.

  Pain shafted through her head. It hurt too much. She stopped, sank back, rested her eyes.

  Michael’s voice was tight as he said, “Babe, you want to stay kind of still, and when Sugar Buns wakes up you want to tell her to stay still, too. He’s got the ability to incapacitate you, either with that stun gun of his or more of whatever he used to knock out these girls, and you don’t want to give him cause to do it.”

  Charlie felt her blood turn to ice at Michael’s words. She could tell from his tone that he was trying not to scare her, but that he was expecting something bad to go down soon. And if they were all incapacitated, none of them would stand a chance.

  She tried to think, tried to concentrate, tried to come up with a plan. But all she could focus on was the relentless pounding of her pulse in her ears.

  “There’s a reason people become killers,” David continued, and she opened her eyes and forced herself to pay attention. Maybe, if she listened, she could latch on to something that she’d be able to use to talk him out of killing them. He sounded perfectly normal, perfectly rational. Hearing the familiar voice under such circumstances was surreal. Charlie’s stomach turned inside out. Her mouth went dry. “There’s always a reason for everything. I wanted to find out what it is. It’s the same reason you do your research.”

  Pull yourself together. Use what you know.

  “Causative Factors: A Treatise on the Nature of Evil,” Charlie enunciated each word precisely. The title, she had discovered, was branded on her brain. Easing onto her back so that she could get a more complete view of her surroundings, feeling the wire grid beneath her digging into her shoulder blades and butt through the thin linen of her dress, she was able to see all three of the girls. They were right beside her, sprawled across one another as though they had been huddling together when they’d collapsed, limp as fresh corpses now, although Charlie could see—and hear—that they still breathed. Little girls, really, two with blond ponytails, one with long, loose dark hair. Shorts and tees and tennis shoes. Children. Innocents. What were their names? Oh, yes: Natalie and Diane and Kim. Beyond them, on the far side of the cage, lay Kaminsky. Her breathing had changed; she was moving a little.

  “I wish you could read it.” David sounded enthused suddenly, and proud as well. Charlie realized that in his mind he had been doing serious work. “My working theory is, there’s something inborn in some people that makes them more able to kill than others. I could never tell who in each group the killer was going to be, though.”

  Searching for some way to reach him, working hard to keep the fear that was making her feel all shaky inside at a manageable level, Charlie remembered the violent death they’d uncovered in his past. Could she use it to try to throw him off balance? The last thing she wanted him to do was get into his groove, his serial killer mode. They all had them: every serial killer she had studied had presented as perfectly normal until something triggered the monster within.

  “Did you kill your cousin on purpose, David?”

  She could see his eyes on her in the mirror.

  He said, “I was never sure. Tommy—that was his name—was my best friend as well as my cousin, you know. I stayed at his house near the lake here every summer when I was a kid, and we hung out together. One day when we were thirteen, we found his dad’s—my uncle’s—pistol in a drawer. We were looking at it, and I pointed it at him and pulled the trigger. It was loaded. It killed him. Everybody thought it was an accident, but to this day I’m not sure.” He paused. “All I know is I liked watching him die.”

  There was the serial killer talking. Charlie felt like an icy hand had just closed around her heart.

  “So you killed again.” It wasn’t a question: Charlie knew the answer too well from her own work. They were called serial killers for a reason: they killed serially. Insatiably, one victim after another, again and again and again.

  “I did, once I started coming back to the lake in the summers. For a number of years after Tommy’s death, though, I didn’t. My uncle and aunt sold the house Tommy died in, everything changed, and I didn’t really have the urge. But then, when I was in college, I got a summer job working for one of the marinas here. And it suddenly came back to me: Tommy’s death, and how it had felt to watch him die. I kind of considered myself like a shark: I’d had a taste of blood, and I needed more.”

  “Who did you kill next?” Charlie asked. As long as she didn’t move her head too quickly, she could do what she needed to do, she decided. The pain behind her eyes had subsided into no more than a dull throb. The middle of her face felt swollen, but the good news was it was also numb.

  Shifting positions a little, she was able to see Michael. He was on his feet, back bent to acco
mmodate his height to the van’s ceiling as he feverishly examined every inch of the cage’s door. From his strained expression the result wasn’t pleasing him.

  “A girl. A stranger. She was swimming. I drowned her. Everybody thought that was an accident, too. No one knew I was involved.” He drew in an audible breath. It was a sound of excitement, and she realized that he was taking pleasure in remembering. Her heart gave an odd little kick. Her life’s work was studying serial killers. She knew the signs: David was getting worked up for the kill. “After that, I just kept killing. One or two a year. If I couldn’t make it look like an accident, I’d hide the bodies. But as I got older, and began teaching, and doing research, and people started looking up to me, I realized I had a lot to lose, and I tried to stop. But I couldn’t. I simply had this compulsion to kill. I can’t give you a reason for it. Except—I like watching people die.”

  Charlie’s heart was pounding, as if her body had finally processed and recognized the extent of the danger she was in. Kaminsky stirred again, and her breathing was lighter and faster. Charlie hoped it wouldn’t be long before she regained consciousness: a highly trained FBI agent was a valuable ally. Was it possible that Kaminsky still had her gun? Charlie thought about what she knew of David, and answered herself: no, it was not.

  He was intelligent, methodical. A highly organized killer. He would never be that careless.

  Keep him talking. Keep him remembering who he’s talking to.

  “So you decided to conduct some experiments to learn why you felt the need to behave as you did,” Charlie said. She actually could understand that: she’d run experiments on subjects (serial killers) herself to understand why they behaved the way they did. Only her tools involved things like inkblots, not murder.

  The van jolted, and Charlie felt something jab hard into her left shoulder. She was, she saw as she cautiously shifted position again, lying on one of the bolts that fastened the cage to the floor. That was the least of her concerns: the quality of the ride had changed. It was now rough and bouncy, and Charlie could hear the rattle of gravel beneath the tires.

  “Hell, he’s turned off the road.” The savage note in Michael’s voice scared her to death. She knew he sounded like that because of her. Because he was afraid for her.

  “Yes, I did,” David responded, pleased that she understood. “My first theory was that it was purely genetic, so I took my nephew—he was the closest I could come to someone who shared my genes who was of an appropriate size and weight to work with easily—and two other boys, and locked them in an abandoned tractor-trailer with an abundance of weapons but without any water, and told them that if one of them killed the other two, I would let that one live. I was hoping that stress would cause my nephew’s relevant genes to surface. But it didn’t. They all just—died.” He sounded disgusted. “So then I started wondering if environmental factors played a role.”

  “You thought that killing your cousin might have been the trigger that caused you to kill others,” Charlie said.

  “That’s right.” His tone was that of a teacher pleased with the performance of a star pupil. Charlie remembered him sounding exactly the same when she’d been in his class. “So I started looking for subjects with a similar trigger. But it was difficult to find young, malleable people who had actually killed someone else, so I settled for suitable subjects who had firsthand exposure to sudden, violent death.”

  “You found them at grief counseling sessions.” It wasn’t a question. Charlie knew the answer. Beside her, one of the girls gave a sudden little gasp, and moved her arm.

  “Keep ’em quiet,” Michael warned, even as Charlie felt a rush of fear. If David thought he needed to, he would knock them all out again, she was sure. Her worst fear was that he had more of the oblivion producing gas, because if he used it to knock them all out it would be game over.

  David said, “My parents made me go to a lot of grief counseling sessions after Tommy died. People spill their guts at those things. All I had to do was go to one and sit and listen. Hearing what they had to say—they talked about nightmares they had, terrible experiences, everything—gave me some ideas for certain modes of death to threaten them with that played on their deepest fears. I hoped that might act as a trigger as well. I even followed the survivors of my experiments, like Saul Tunney, to see if the trauma of being forced to kill might turn them into killers afterward. It didn’t. Not one.” He shook his head. “That’s the fascinating thing. What I found is, you never can tell. Some people just have it in them to kill, and others don’t.”

  Kaminsky’s eyes were open now. Charlie watched them widen in sudden alarm as Kaminsky started to take in her surroundings. With a quick glance at the rearview mirror to make sure David wasn’t watching, Charlie waved a hand to get her attention. As Kaminsky looked her way, Charlie shook her head at her.

  “Stay down. Don’t move,” Charlie mouthed. Kaminsky blinked and frowned.

  Then she nodded.

  Thank God.

  “You kept records,” Charlie said to David, thinking of the manuscript. “You wrote it all down.”

  “It’s the greatest research project I’ve ever done,” David agreed happily. “I wanted to bring other researchers in on it, but it took me a long time to figure out how. Then I read the newspaper articles by that reporter—Eric Riva. I was impressed with some of his conclusions. So I thought I’d get him to contribute some more of his thoughts by inviting him to try to catch me. That worked so well I decided to invite the researchers I most respected to contribute to the project as well.” Charlie could see him looking at her in the rearview mirror again. Feeling his eyes on her made her skin crawl. How had she missed the fact that he was insane? The only excuse she could come up with for herself was that she had known him years ago, before she’d gone to medical school, before she’d become a psychiatrist and started studying serial killers. “You’ve come the closest to catching me. I should have expected it. You were my most brilliant student, Charlie.”

  “Thank you,” she said, doing her best to keep the irony out of her voice. Charlie reached past the pain in her head and the dread that was making her feel shaky all over and forced herself to concentrate. Wherever David was taking them, when he got there he was going to turn into the monster he was at his core. If she had any chance of talking him out of killing them, she was going to have to do it soon. “You know, I could help you with your research, David. We could continue it together. It takes my work and expands on it in a way that is truly groundbreaking. I feel you are on the verge of some major breakthroughs. I could help you get there.”

  To her dismay, David laughed. “You can’t pull that one on me, Charlie. I know you through and through. I watched you when you were my student, when you were my intern. I knew you had that encounter with the serial killer who murdered your friend in your past. I thought maybe you were like me. But by the end, I knew you weren’t. Then, when I started to think about including you in my project, I started watching you again. You know how many nights I spent outside your house looking in? A lot. That night I sent that girl running down to you I hung around to observe how you’d handle it. I thought maybe you had developed more—let’s call it ruthlessness—over time. But you took care of her, stayed with her until the ambulance people took her away. I was right there, looking in the back window at first, standing by your front door later, watching as you put yourself at risk for her.”

  He paused to shake his head, and Charlie thought, Raylene. He’d been outside her door when Raylene had appeared, and Raylene had been attached to him. If Charlie had gone out her front door, if she had seen him then, she would have known.

  “But you’re still not what I hoped you’d become,” David concluded almost sadly, “You’re one of those people who doesn’t have it in them to kill.”

  There was a change in his voice that made Charlie fear he was starting to get jazzed by the prospect of killing her. Beside her, one of the girls gave a little gasp and turned her head. Cha
rlie didn’t know whether to hope they woke up or not. It all depended on what was going to happen.

  Talking past the tightness in her throat, she tried a new tactic. “David, I can help you if you’ll let me. You know my friend and I aren’t here alone. Special Agent Bartoli and Special Agent Crane are here, too.” Charlie prayed once again that they were all right. She didn’t know what had blown up, but it had been big and the men had been close. Thankfully, David wasn’t aware of that, and she wanted to keep it that way. “They already know you’re the man they’re looking for. You’ve been using Ben Motto’s house as a staging area, haven’t you? There will be all kinds of evidence there: DNA, fingerprints, the works. They have other evidence, too, that points to you. Irrefutable evidence. What I’m telling you is, you can’t get away with this. You’re going to get caught no matter what happens to me, to us. I’m a psychiatrist. I can testify on your behalf. I can help you avoid the death penalty, help you stay out of prison. I know you. I can be your friend, and your doctor, and your advocate. And I will.”

  David looked at her in the mirror again. “You’re trying to talk me out of killing you, I know. And I don’t want to. I never meant to. But now I have no choice. I knew yesterday, when your friend back there called me to ask about Tommy’s death, that the FBI was on to the connection with traumatic deaths at a young age in the researchers’ pasts. I knew they only would have started looking into that if they’d found out about the link to violent deaths in the victims’ pasts. I knew they would find Dr. Pelletier, whom I intended to be the next researcher I invited to join the study, and the study site I had set up for the next set of subjects. I was afraid if I didn’t take steps, they might keep digging until they found me. So I’ve decided to quit for a while, and let things die down. The plan was to keep them—you—busy by taking these three girls so everyone would be frantically searching for them, while I cleaned up a few odds and ends around here. You almost spoiled things for me.”