The Last Time I Saw Her

by Karen Robards

  But Tony’s gaze slid to her as she turned toward him, so she got no chance to judge. All she got was a glimpse of the jaw-jut thing guys did sometimes in a kind of silent warning to other guys.

  “Check in this afternoon,” Tony told her, then flicked another look at Michael that was too brief for her to read and moved away toward the group that was emerging from the interview room. Johnson, now in handcuffs and clearly about to be escorted away, was in their midst. Tony said something to the group and disappeared into the interview room. Meanwhile, with a guard at each elbow, Johnson headed their way.

  They were all walking in the same direction, but the guards were hurrying Johnson along. As Johnson came abreast of them, Michael gave him the stink-eye. Johnson visibly quailed. Then they were past each other, and a moment later Johnson and his escort rounded a corner and were out of sight. Michael and Charlie reached the elevators and stopped.

  Charlie said under her breath, “You know, you just made life a whole lot safer for everybody on death row, except, wait, there is no one left on death row.”

  One corner of Michael’s mouth quirked up. “I know, right?”

  Then the elevator arrived, and on the ride down they discussed logistics and came to a consensus: Charlie would drive her car, Michael would drive Hughes’s—Hughes’s keys were in his pocket—and they would go first to the Pioneer Inn, where Charlie would leave her car and Michael would change clothes. Then they would head out in Hughes’s Shelby, the thought of which sent an anticipatory smile curling across Michael’s lips.

  Nothing of importance was said until they were out of the building and heading across the parking lot. It was a beautiful Indian-summer day, sunny and just cool enough to call for a long-sleeved shirt or the lightest of jackets. On such a perfect day it was hard to imagine that such evil as they had been dealing with existed. Sadly, though, it did, and Charlie said one more prayer for Bree and the two boys who had yet to be found, then another one for the dead.

  “So are you going to tell me what you and Dudley talked about?” Michael asked as they walked toward her car. The Shelby was parked all by itself in a far corner, presumably so it wouldn’t run the risk of getting dinged. Michael had already spotted it: she’d seen his face brighten when he did.

  Men.

  “I told him about you,” Charlie said.

  Michael slanted a surprised look at her. “What about me?”

  “That you’re not Hughes. That you’re a spirit who’s taken over Hughes’s body. A revenant.”

  “What?” Michael gave her an astonished look. “What did he say?”

  “He was surprised.”

  “I bet he was. Don’t tell me he believed you?”

  They reached her car. Charlie retrieved her spare key and turned to face him. “Of course. I’m extremely believable. Are you telling me that if I’d told you something like that, you wouldn’t have believed me?”

  “Babe, if you’d told me something like that back before I died, I would have thought you were bat-shit crazy.” Michael caught her chin, turned her face up to his, and bent his head to drop a quick kiss on her mouth. When he lifted his head, he grinned down at her. “Cute, but bat-shit crazy.”

  “Obviously Tony is more perceptive than you are,” Charlie said with dignity as she opened her door and got ready to slide inside. “He did have a brief moment there when he wondered if maybe you were a really slick con artist trying to pull a fast one on me. But we got past that.”

  “No wonder he was looking at me like he wanted to break out the handcuffs.”

  “That wasn’t the only reason. The DNA results came back and the lab called Tony because I no longer have my phone: Rick Hughes is your identical twin brother, which means he’s probably also the Southern Slasher.”

  —

  “So this body I’m in belongs to my identical twin brother. Who wears silk boxers and some kind of girly-smelling aftershave and is a lawyer.” Michael stood in Hughes’s room at the Pioneer Inn in said silk boxer shorts, halfway through changing his clothes. Charlie was ensconced in the surprisingly comfortable armchair in the corner, admiring the view.

  The room itself was nice: large, lots of dark wood, green-striped wallpaper, heavy forest green draperies that were open to allow the afternoon sunlight to flood the room, a king-size bed. Hughes had not brought many personal items: a few changes of clothes, toiletries, a laptop. His briefcase had been on the bus, and Charlie had no idea what had happened to it. Presumably it had been logged as evidence somewhere. But Michael looked around as if trying to get a sense of who Rick Hughes was. As far as Charlie was concerned, he was the monster who had murdered seven women and gotten Michael killed. But Michael seemed to be having trouble getting his mind around that.

  “Yes,” Charlie said, trying not to let herself get distracted by broad shoulders and brawny arms or a wide chest that tapered down into narrow hips. Or six-pack abs bisected by trim-fitting silk boxers in a sexy shade of maroon. Or long, powerful legs—okay, she’d just officially gotten distracted. She refocused. “He’s also a murderous psychopath who almost certainly killed all those women.”

  “I don’t know.” Michael frowned at her. “I can’t believe I was followed around by a guy who looked exactly like me and I never noticed. No one noticed. He almost had to have been inside that bar where I picked up Candace Hartnell. Or maybe he was outside and followed us. I guess that’s possible: he might not have been seen if he was waiting out there in the dark.”

  Charlie had seen the security video from the bar that had shown Michael meeting and leaving with Candace Hartnell. From what she could tell, it wasn’t a big place, and it was in a fairly rural area, and, yes, one would think somebody would have noticed two identical men, especially when they were as big and heart-stoppingly handsome as Michael. But—

  “Then there’s the watch.” Michael sounded like he was talking at least halfway to himself. “Where did he get the watch? And how could he have known that my watch”—Michael nodded at the heavy silver bracelet dangling from Charlie’s wrist—“would be lost by the damned idiots at the Mariposa Police Department, not to be found until after I died?”

  Charlie frowned. That was a coincidence. A striking coincidence, now that she thought about it. Because if Michael’s watch hadn’t been lost, then two watches would have been introduced into evidence at his trial. His, with Semper fi engraved on the case, and the broken and bloodied one that had been found in Candace Hartnell’s sheets. His would have been exculpatory—

  “And there’s you,” Michael’s eyes met hers. “Why the hell would he come here looking for you?”

  Charlie’s new cell phone rang, interrupting before they could explore that thought any further. That she even had a cell phone was due to a pit stop she (well, actually they) had made by Walmart on the way to the Pioneer Inn. They’d done a quick dash in and out because Charlie had felt an urgent need to pick up a temporary phone so she could stay in touch with everything that was going on. Much as she was looking forward to spending the day with Michael, she was discovering that simply totally abandoning a search for missing hostages and serial killers was beyond her. On the drive from Walmart to the inn she’d called Tam to give her the number in case something came up, and she’d called Tony, too, for the same reason. Both calls had gone to voice mail, and her new phone now rested on the end table beside her as she waited for one or the other of them to call back.

  This was Tony, calling back. Smiling as she listened, Charlie felt a flood of relief.

  “They found the pickup. The two boys are safe, and Torres, Ware, and Doyle are back in custody.” Charlie reported what Tony had just finished telling her to Michael, who, having been drawn by the call, was standing beside her, looking down at her as she curled in the chair.

  “That’s good. I’m glad,” Michael said, while Tony, on the other end of the phone, asked sourly, “That him you’re talking to?”

  Charlie noticed that he didn’t refer to Michael as Hughes. />
  “Yes,” she admitted.

  “Well, hold on to your hat. I’ve got some other news for you. I had some state-of-the-art, don’t-tell-the-bean-counters-how-much-it-cost testing done, using blood Hughes donated to an office blood drive right before he came up here. I had it compared to blood test results from Hughes’s identical twin who was actually convicted of being the Southern Slasher. Hughes never had chicken pox.”

  Charlie was momentarily at a loss. “What?”

  “There were antibodies to the Varicella-zoster virus—chicken pox—in the blood of the twin who was convicted of being the Southern Slasher: Michael Garland. At some point in his life, Michael Garland had chicken pox. Rick Hughes did not. Blood left at the crime scenes by the Southern Slasher had the antibodies in it. Which means the right twin was convicted of being the Southern Slasher: Michael Garland, not Rick Hughes, killed those women.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Disconnecting, Charlie stared at Michael.

  He clearly was able to read in her face that something was up, because he frowned down at her.

  “Did you ever have chicken pox?” she asked him. Her voice was only a little high-pitched.

  His frown deepened. “I think so. When I was a little kid. Why?”

  “Hughes never had chicken pox.”

  “You want to get to the point here?”

  “The genetic material left by the killer at the scenes of the Southern Slasher murders contained antibodies to the Varicella zoster virus, which is chicken pox. Hughes never had chicken pox. His blood doesn’t have any antibodies to chicken pox in it. You did, and yours does. Hughes didn’t do it.”

  Feeling her chest tighten like it was being squeezed in a vice, Charlie watched as he took that in.

  Then his face hardened, his mouth thinned, and his eyes flared at her.

  “So I guess that makes me the Southern Slasher, huh?” Not a trace of intonation in his voice.

  The evidence was there, and it was damning. The evil-twin thing had been so perfect, just the explanation for Michael’s innocence she’d been searching for—but it was wrong. She had wanted it to be true so badly that she’d been guilty of the classic researcher’s mistake, using evidence selectively to arrive at the desired outcome. But the cold, hard truth was this: Rick Hughes might be Michael’s long-lost identical twin, but the Southern Slasher was not Hughes.

  Which left Michael.

  Charlie looked up at him, at the beautifully cut mouth, the straight nose, the square jaw, broad cheekbones and forehead, the thick, tawny hair. Eyes that were a hell-born black instead of their usual sky blue beneath straight dark brows. Intimidatingly tall and powerfully built. Outrageously handsome. Demonstrably dangerous. Able to break necks and sever spinal columns with ease. She’d seen him kill without hesitation or apparent compunction, although every time he’d killed since they’d been acquainted it had been to save her.

  “Scared of me, babe?” There was a sneer in his voice. And something else, too: bitterness. A trace amount only, but it was there, in his voice and his face.

  Charlie decided.

  “In your dreams,” she said, putting the phone down and standing up. That brought her so close to him that their bodies brushed. She was immediately enveloped by the heat coming off him. His hands settled automatically on either side of her waist. Hers flattened against his chest. For a moment, the tiniest moment, she allowed herself to be distracted by the sleek warmth of his skin, the firm resilience of his muscles. Then she got a grip and met his eyes. “Guess what, pretty boy? I know you didn’t kill those women, so you can go ahead and drop this whole badass vibe you’ve got going on.”

  He looked at her. His face was still grim. Then one corner of his mouth twitched. “ ‘Pretty boy’?”

  Charlie nodded. “Really pretty. Even Lena thinks so.” He was making a face as she went up on tiptoe to kiss him. “Remind me to tell you about it sometime,” she murmured, and pressed her mouth to his.

  His arms came around her, and he kissed her back, and the magic that was them, the blazing sexual chemistry, the electric charge that sparked from his body to hers, ignited the air. He kissed her dizzy, and undressed her, and took her to bed. They made love until the sunlight slanting across the bed turned golden, until Charlie was so sated she could hardly move, until just lifting her head from Michael’s shoulder where it rested was an effort.

  But she did it.

  They were lying sideways across the bed. Naked. On top of the fitted forest green bottom sheet, the top sheet and the other covers and pillows having been long since lost to the foot of the bed or the floor. He was flat on his back with an arm folded behind his head. She was tucked against his side. Stroking a hand down his chest, she took a moment to enjoy the tensile strength of his muscles and the damp warmth of his skin as well as the sheer masculine beauty of him. Bottom line: the guy was seriously hot, and she was seriously smitten.

  His eyes were open. He was watching her look at him, and all that watching was having an interesting effect on an interesting part of his anatomy. But that was a diversion to be explored later. For now, there was something she needed to know. Propping an arm on his chest, rearing up higher so that she could see his eyes, she met his gaze.

  His eyes promptly dipped to ogle her bare breasts that were hanging like ripe fruit just above his chest.

  “Hey.” She snapped her fingers to get his attention. “Eyes on the face.”

  He complied. His eyebrows rose questioningly at her.

  “I love you,” she said.

  His eyes narrowed slightly. His hand that had been lightly stroking the curve of her waist slid down to her hip and tightened.

  “I know,” he said.

  The look she gave him then was downright threatening. “That is so not going to be our code for I love you, too.”

  The grin he gave her was so charming her toes curled. “I just wanted to see what you’d say.”

  She frowned, pointedly waiting.

  “I love you, too,” he said.

  “There you go. That wasn’t so hard, was it?” As he shook his head she regarded him meditatively. “Michael.”

  He huffed out a breath. “Jesus, there’s your we-need-to-talk face. No, we don’t. There’s lots of other things we can do.” His hand slid suggestively over her butt, fondling and squeezing.

  “No.” Reaching for the top sheet, she dragged it back from the crevice between the mattress and the footboard it was lost in and wrapped it around herself as she wriggled around until she sat cross-legged on the mattress beside him. “I want to know why you ended up in Spookville.”

  He regarded her unsmilingly. For a moment she thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then he said, “Could have been a lot of things. Who knows?”

  “You know.”

  Picking up her hand, he carried it to his mouth and kissed her palm, then let his lips crawl down the sensitive skin on the inside of her arm. “I know how soft your skin is. How sweet it smells. How—”

  She yanked her arm away from him. “Just so you know, what you’re doing here is classic avoidance. When individuals opt to avoid a subject, it’s usually because it’s something that carries a great deal of pain for them. Quite often there’s shame associated with it, too, and—”

  Michael growled and sat up. “Would you stop with the shrink shit, please?”

  “Will you tell me why you were sent to Spookville?”

  Their eyes warred.

  Michael said, “I was wrong. A bulldog’s got nothing on you.”

  “Michael. Please. I need to know.”

  He looked at her. His face tightened. His jaw grew hard. “Babe, you ever think that maybe you don’t want to know?”

  She regarded him steadily. “Whatever you did, I know that it wasn’t evil. So I’m not worried.”

  He snorted. “You got any more of those rose-colored glasses you’re wearing on you? Because I could sure use a pair.”

  She just looked at him.


  “Fine,” he said. Stretching out a long arm, he snagged a pillow from the floor and flopped back down on the mattress with it stuffed behind his head. Catching a corner of the sheet she was wrapped in, he pulled it over himself so that he was minimally decent. He slanted a look at her. “You remember I told you how Sean died?”

  She did. As a member of Marine Force Recon in Afghanistan, pinned down by a vicious enemy, Michael had been forced to shoot his mortally wounded buddy to survive.

  “Yes,” she said. Her hand crept into his. His fingers entwined with hers, but she wasn’t sure it was a conscious act on his part. He was staring up at the ceiling.

  “After that, our unit was broken up, and I was given another assignment. Black ops stuff. There were a few of us. We worked with military intelligence. Our job was to facilitate the mission by going in clandestinely and taking out high-value targets. Wet work. We’d already been doing some, Sean and Hoop and Cap and me, but this took it to a whole different level.” He glanced at her, and must have decided that she wasn’t following because he spelled it out. “We were assassins, babe. We killed up close and personal. Sometimes a lot of lives could be saved if a particular leader or bomb maker or someone like that was taken out individually. That’s what we did. That’s what I did. Went in, eliminated the designated target as quietly and with as little collateral damage as possible, and got out. I was good at it and I had no problem with what I was doing. Remember how you were always asking me if I felt remorse? No, I never did. It was my job. Most of the people I served with, Sean and Cap and Hoop and everybody else, they had people they loved, people who loved them. Families, people they wanted to go back to. I was different. Fundamentally different, do you understand? Like there was a giant coldness inside me. I didn’t love anybody, didn’t have anybody I wanted to get back to, didn’t give a fuck about anybody or anything. I could do what needed to be done, and afterward I could sleep at night just fine. I always wondered if the military knew that about me, and that’s why I was given the job they gave me.” He looked at her again then. “Just so we’re clear, I did that for a little over two years. I killed whoever they told me to kill. No mercy, not a bit. And no, no fucking remorse.”