The Last Victim

by Karen Robards

  Just thinking about what had caused that brown discoloration made Charlie’s chest feel tight. Blood, of course, although she tried not to let herself picture what terrible injuries the victim must have suffered to have lost so much. If she did, if she let herself dwell on what lay beneath that sand, she would have to leave the scene, and there was still too much for her to do. Determined to combat the physical symptoms of PTMD (Post-traumatic Murder Disorder, a too-cute label for a potentially disabling, way personal syndrome she had just identified in herself and named), which were threatening to make themselves an issue, Charlie took a sip from the bottle of water someone had handed her not long after she and Tony had arrived at the crime scene. The water, which was tepid, unfortunately didn’t help. Whether the heat and thick humidity were to blame, or whether it was something else, Charlie was finding it hard to catch her breath as she watched the North Carolina Bureau of Investigation (NCBI) crime scene analysts at work. They were carefully removing the sand from a grave-sized area above and around the body and depositing it and anything they found in it in plastic bags for later laboratory analysis. The crime scene had already been measured, photographed, video-recorded, and visually searched by every group of investigators on the scene, from the NCBI to the local Nags Head police. Tony, Crane, and Kaminsky had made their own record. Now everyone waited for enough of the sand to be removed that the body could be lifted from the ground.

  Official identification had not yet been made—the body had not yet been completely uncovered—but Charlie, and the others, had little doubt it was Bayley Evans.

  Strands of the victim’s long blond hair were mixed with the sand. The color and length matched Bayley Evans’. A bloodstained hand and arm up to the elbow were just visible beneath the thin layer of sand that remained on the corpse’s right side. Clearly they belonged to a teenage girl. Apparently a handful of her hair had gotten pulled up through the sand somehow as she was being buried, so the ends had been lying on the surface. The hair had been spotted by a woman with a dog, which had led to a little digging and a horrified call to the police.

  Now here they all were. So many law enforcement types were on the scene that Charlie had long since given up trying to distinguish one group from another. NCBI investigators, Sy Taylor and the other local FBI agents, the FBI Special Circumstances team of Tony, Crane, and Kaminsky, the medical examiner and his team, the local Nags Head police department, Haney and the cops from Kill Devil Hills, the Dare County sheriff and his deputies, and numerous other officials who Charlie couldn’t even begin to identify all milled around doing whatever it was that they were supposed to do. It was a crowd scene of investigators, nobody was happy about the presence of the others, and to the obvious chagrin of everyone else, NCBI currently had jurisdiction.

  The shocked-looking woman who’d found the body now huddled with two friends just inside the barrier of uniformed officers and crime scene tape that was holding the growing crowd of gawkers at bay. The media was out in full force, with their reporters and camera crews set up as close as they were allowed, all broadcasting the proceedings as the on-camera talent gave real-time updates to the viewers at home. Overhead, a news helicopter circled, the sound of its beating rotors punctuating the jumble of voices and equipment and other ground noise with a steady thump-thump. The parking lot at the far end of the boardwalk was packed with vehicles, from police cruisers to an ambulance to the TV stations’ satellite-sporting vans. Even as Charlie glanced in that direction, she saw the medical examiner’s van bumping over the firm-packed sand beside the boardwalk, toward the grave. Charlie was almost sure that meant the body would soon be lifted out of the ground.

  So far, Bayley Evans’ phantom had not appeared to her. Charlie hoped and prayed that it was because her soul had already found its way to eternity and was at peace.

  Please, God, help her spirit find its way.

  The thought that they had failed to save her was shattering.

  “Looks like they’re getting ready to bring her up,” Crane said, confirming Charlie’s conjecture. Perspiring, his cap of curls frizzing in the humidity, his suit coat laid aside and his shirtsleeves rolled up, he stood beside Charlie, carefully filming the crowd at her instruction. The killer was present. Charlie not only knew it objectively, from everything she had ever learned about narcissistic serial killers who invariably returned to the scene of the crime, but she could feel it in her bones.

  She could feel him watching her.

  Her heart pounded in a slow, steady rhythm that throbbed all the way down to her fingertips and toes. Dread prickled over her skin like wave after wave of goose bumps. Glancing sharply around at the faces, she caught no one looking at her. Every eye appeared to be focused somewhere else.

  But the sense that she was being watched with malevolent intent was strong.

  She had been scanning the growing crowd ever since she’d gotten her wits together enough to realize that the killer wouldn’t be able to resist the opportunity to watch what was happening, but so far she’d seen nothing amiss.

  He was being careful. Anonymous. Just one more face in the crowd. But he was there.

  Who are you? Where are you?

  “Anything?” Still thin-lipped with anger at the local cops for not having immediately notified him about the discovery of the body, at the NCBI for winning jurisdiction, and at the situation in general, Tony stopped beside her. Since he knew she’d been watching the crowd, she had no trouble interpreting his question.

  Charlie shook her head. “But he wants to be part of the process. He’s here somewhere.” She kept her voice low. An island in the midst of barely controlled chaos, they were surrounded by investigators, and she didn’t want to be overheard.

  “Unless he’s smart enough to stay home and just watch what’s happening on TV,” Kaminsky added tartly. Like Tony and Crane, and Charlie, she was taking the death of Bayley Evans personally, and the chip she always seemed to have on her shoulder bristled larger than ever. She had shed her suit jacket in deference to the heat, and tucked her hair behind her ears. Since Crane had been assigned to Charlie, Kaminsky had been with Tony from the time they had arrived. She stopped on Charlie’s other side now, and from the woman’s teetering movements, Charlie realized that Kaminsky was having trouble with her high heels sinking into the sand. As hot as the sand was, though, removing her shoes and going barefoot was not an option, so Kaminsky had no choice but to deal.

  “It’s possible that for some reason he can’t be here. But if there’s any way he can, he’s here at the scene. This type of killer is compulsive that way,” Charlie responded.

  “Get the license plate numbers of every vehicle here,” Tony ordered Kaminsky. To Crane, who was still filming the crowd, he said, “Don’t miss a single face. We’re going to get this bastard before he kills anybody else.”

  “If this is Bayley Evans—” Kaminsky began.

  “It is,” Tony said grimly. “There’s not a doubt in my mind.”

  Kaminsky concluded, “—then we should have almost a three-week window before he goes after another family. I know we’re getting close. Damn it, if we’d just had a few more days …”

  “We’ll get him,” Crane said.

  “When?” Kaminsky snapped. “Before or after he kills somebody else?”

  Nobody replied directly, because of course there wasn’t any answer to that.

  “Don’t count on the time frame holding. He had this girl for less than four days. He’s escalating.” Voice tight, Tony cast one more raking look around the site, then strode off in the wake of the medical examiner’s van as it rolled by them to park within a few yards of the grave. With Tony gone, Kaminsky said to Crane, “Maybe something happened that made him kill this girl before he wanted to.”

  Crane looked at her. “Like what?”

  “How the hell should I know?” She looked at Charlie. “You’re supposed to be the expert at what makes loony tunes like this tick. What do you think?”

  “You c
ould be right. Something might have happened that threw him off his game,” Charlie replied. “I have no idea what.”

  “I guess we’ll never know, will we?” Kaminsky’s tone was savage. “Because we didn’t get to her in time, and now it’s too damned late.”

  With an impartial glare for both Charlie and Crane, she turned and strode off toward the parking lot, her gait made unsteady by her heels sinking into the sand.

  “I keep telling her she’s got to maintain some distance or she’s going to burn out,” Crane said accusingly as he watched her leave. “Of course, she keeps telling me to soak my head.” He glanced at Charlie. “I need to get some footage of the way the body is situated before they lift it out of the grave. And we have strict instructions that you’re not to be left alone. So if you don’t mind …”

  Charlie nodded and followed him. The last thing she wanted at this moment was to be left alone: the sense of a malignant gaze watching her was too strong. As a gurney was removed from the back of the ME’s van and placed beside the grave, Charlie cast another long, fruitless look around the crowd. She stood beside Crane, who was filming from graveside … and made the mistake of looking down into the partially excavated hole at the body. Two dark jumpsuited, white-surgical-gloved coroner’s assistants climbed in beside it and grasped it by the shoulders and ankles as she watched. As much as she wanted to, Charlie couldn’t look away as the body was handed up to another pair of assistants, and was then lifted completely out of the grave. Charlie’s stomach knotted as the stench of decay reached her nostrils. The last of the sand that had remained on the body fell away in a golden shower. During this process, the corpse remained stiff as a plastic mannequin. Rigor mortis had obviously set in. The only part of the victim that moved was her long blond hair, which was ruffled by the breeze. Matted with sand and blood, it rippled like a particularly gruesome banner. One arm lay frozen across her body. The other was clamped to her side as firmly as if it had been carved from wood.

  Charlie caught her breath as she watched what remained of Bayley Evans being laid out on the gurney.

  The girl was fully dressed, in what Charlie was almost certain were the clothes she’d been wearing when she’d been taken.

  Her eyes were closed. Her lashes were crusted with sand. She was the color of death, her skin grayish, with lividity already having set in. Her once delicate features were bruised and misshapen, as if she’d been beaten. A clump of black-colored sand that looked like coffee grounds clung to the left side of her mouth. More coffee-grounds-looking sand was caked in the gaping wound in her throat, which was cut from ear to ear. Her shirt—the upper half of pink summer pajamas—and her arms were brown with dried blood and frosted with sand. The blood had been wet when the body was put into the grave. Charlie knew this because of the coffee-grounds look of the sand, which was the result of it having been saturated with blood and then clumping as it dried.

  Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.…

  Holly had died the same way: she had been beaten, and her throat had been slit. Charlie had never wanted to know the details of what her friend had suffered in those days before she’d been killed, but somehow, over the years, that much had seeped past the defenses she had erected.

  Looking at what had once been Bayley Evans, Charlie felt the horror of it hit her like a tsunami. Shaken and sick at heart, she was assaulted by a wave of dizziness. The sight of the girl’s lifeless body was almost more than she could bear. It brought it all back, Holly, the rest of the Palmer family, the others. Unwillingly remembering the moment when she had connected with Diane Palmer’s eyes, Charlie shuddered. The water bottle dropped from her suddenly nerveless fingers. As if it were happening in slow motion, she watched it fall. The splash of water spilling from the plastic container as it tumbled to the ground sounded abnormally loud to her ears. The bottle hit with a thud, tipped over, and disgorged what was left of its contents into the sand. Charlie feared she might soon hit the ground in just that way. Her knees wobbled. Her chest tightened. Her throat worked. Desperate, she glanced around, then took a few thankful steps backward to sink down on a large plastic cooler that probably belonged to the crime scene technicians. She was still in the shadow of the boardwalk, but far enough away from the crew working on the body that she was no longer breathing in the scent of decomposition, or confronted with the terrible reality of the corpse. Crane was close enough that she could call out to him if she needed to. He was too busy to notice that she was no longer beside him, and since she was outside the bustle of activity around the body, no one else paid her the least bit of attention.

  For now, for just the few moments until she got her stuff together, that was what she needed.

  She was hot, so hot. Her blouse clung to her sweat-dampened skin. With one hand she brushed away little tendrils of hair that had escaped the knot at her nape and threatened to stick to her face.

  How unprofessional would it be if she were to keel over in a dead faint?

  Charlie concentrated on her breathing as the world continued to spin around her. When she felt like she might topple sideways off the cooler, she quit worrying about looking unprofessional, folded her arms on her knees and rested her head on them.

  “You faint, there’s not much I can do.” Garland’s familiar drawling voice was unmistakable. “Me trying to catch you before you hit the dirt probably ain’t going to work out so well.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Charlie’s eyes popped open. Garland crouched beside her, his mouth twisted into the slightest of wry smiles, his eyes focused watchfully on her face. He had appeared out of nowhere, and for an instant, the tiniest sliver of time, she was intensely glad to see him. But even as she registered that she felt stronger and safer and, yes, comforted by his presence, she remembered what he was. A member of the same vicious, conscienceless, sub-human fraternity that had done this to Bayley Evans, to Holly, to countless others over countless years. Had she actually been starting to care about him? Had she really been worried that he might have been whisked away to a well-deserved hell? Charlie scourged him with a look, and turned her face away.

  “Not over the whole hating-me-in-the-morning thing yet, hmm?”

  That snapped her eyes open and brought her head back around in a hurry. Appalled, she stared at him.

  “What are you talking about?” Conscious of the people all around her, she mouthed the words rather than spoke them.

  His smile widened, turned mocking. “Forgot what I told you right before you took your nightie off for me?”

  Charlie sucked in air. No, she hadn’t forgotten. She remembered it as vividly as if the scene were branded into her memory cells.

  He’d said, “You’re going to hate me for this in the morning, you know,” and then kissed her mindless. Right before she’d taken off her nightgown.

  Oh, God, it wasn’t a dream.

  As that horrified realization slammed home, she sat bolt upright. It was only as she saw the satisfied gleam in his eyes that she realized she’d forgotten all about being dizzy and sick.

  Her lips thinned. Her eyes narrowed.

  “You okay?” Tony loomed over her. Charlie hadn’t even realized that he was nearby. Garland’s eyes darkened, but that was all she noticed about his reaction because she jerked her gaze away from him and looked up at Tony instead.

  Focused on the real, live, good guy with long-term potential versus the ghost of a murderous psychopath who just happened, through some strange cosmic alchemy that she was never going to understand, to turn her on to her back teeth.

  At least the adrenaline rush from the shock of Garland’s revelation had knocked out most of her physical symptoms. Was that what he had intended? Or had he, as usual, just wanted to be as annoying as possible?

  “A little the worse for the heat, maybe,” she said, prevaricating only slightly. Garland stood up to his full height beside her, looking at Tony as if he didn’t like him very much. Charlie ignored him. Where Garland was concerned, s
he was a mess, and this was not the time or place to start sorting out anything to do with their hell-born relationship. Not quite ready to trust her legs yet, she kept her seat on the cooler as she spoke to Tony. “Listen, I think we really need to concentrate on why the perpetrator does what he does. The dance—he is most likely re-enacting something that actually occurred in his past, a real dance, a girl who rejected him. She would have been blond and pretty, a popular girl, and they both would have been teenagers. Bayley, the other girls, are substitutes for the original blond teenager who hurt him. He’s abducting these girls to give himself a do-over, and when his victim doesn’t behave according to the script in his head, he beats her because what she is doing spoils the fantasy. Eventually the fantasy is irretrievably destroyed and that’s when he kills her.”

  Tony said, “Unless it’s a copycat.”

  “If it’s a copycat, and I believe it is, he’s re-creating the pattern set by the original killer. The motivation that set off the murders would remain the same.”

  “So we’ll find our unsub at one of these dances.”

  “So what are we going to do, stake out every single dance up and down the southern half of the Eastern Seaboard over the next few weeks?” Kaminsky’s question dripped sarcasm. She had arrived in time to hear Charlie’s assessment of the killer’s motivation. “Do you know how many dances we’re talking about? To begin with, we don’t have the manpower.”

  “You need to go back and look at every bit of video footage you can find of any dances the three primary victims attended within a week of the attack on their families. The killer is there, interacting in some way with blond girls who fit the victim profile. He’s here today, watching,” Charlie said. “I’m sure of it.”