The Last Kiss Goodbye (22 page)

“A heads-up, babe. You’re staring at me with your eyes wide and your pretty lips parted. Now, me, I think it’s because you’re fantasizing about jumping my bones. But your friends might wonder.” The slow half-smile Michael gave her then really might have sent Charlie’s thoughts running along the lines of jumping his bones if his words hadn’t been so annoying. He was doing it on purpose, of course, just as he had been annoying her on purpose ever since, as a shackled and jumpsuited convict, he had first shuffled into her office. Snapping her mouth shut and dragging her eyes away from him even as she did a lightning mental review of every interaction she’d ever had with him, alive or dead, she came to an inescapable conclusion: in every way that mattered, he hadn’t changed a bit.

For him at least, death was no magic elixir washing away his sins. He was still whatever he had been before.

How bad a thing that was Charlie couldn’t quite decide. But annoying was definitely still there in the mix. So, unfortunately, was sexy as hell.

“Snakes,” she heard Kaminsky say, and the word jerked her attention back to the real world conversation like very few others could have done. “The bastard locked those three girls in Group Two in a room full of poisonous snakes.” Charlie wasn’t a fan of snakes. Merely thinking about it made her shudder. From reading the files, she had a vivid mental image of what Kaminsky was talking about—how the Gingerbread Man had coerced the girls in that group into killing one another by dropping snakes on them from a grating high above—but she needed a second to refresh her memory on what had been done to the previous group, the description of which she had obviously missed: oh, yes, Group One, the young boys, had died of thirst. No one knew whether or not the Gingerbread Man had offered to let one live if the others were killed, because no one in that group had survived. “Group Three was forced to choose who would be shot with an arrow. Group Four was menaced with a propeller; Group Five was locked in a trash compacter; Group Six faced suffocation; and Group Seven, as we know, was threatened with drowning.”

“Where are the survivors now?” Tony asked. Kaminsky hit a button, and a new screen popped up.

“Pretty much everywhere: I’ve got their addresses.” Kaminsky indicated a map of the United States on which five blue dots glowed. Two of them, Charlie saw, were clear across the country. Well, she couldn’t blame the victims for wanting to get as far away from what had happened as possible. In the aftermath of Holly’s murder, she had experienced that impulse herself. Only she had been afraid that no matter how far away she ran, it wouldn’t be far enough, which in the end had meant that she hadn’t run very far away at all.

Instead, she’d tried hiding in plain sight. And look how well that had worked out: she’d almost gotten herself killed, and had ended up all over CNN.

Tony was looking at the map with his brow creased. “So where are the experts?”

Kaminsky hit a button, and four green dots showed up on the same map. They were all within the tri-state area of North and South Carolina and Virginia, which put them much closer at hand.

“Kill grounds?” Tony asked next. Kaminsky tapped another button, and seven red dots showed up. They, too, were all within the same tri-state area. Four of the red dots nearly overlapped the green dots that represented the experts.

“It’s clear that the kill sights were chosen with proximity to the experts in mind,” Charlie pointed out.

“Were all the
You can’t catch me
messages hand-delivered to the intended recipient?” Tony looked at Charlie, who shook her head to indicate she didn’t know.

“The first one, to Eric Riva, was snail-mailed to him at the
Observer,
” Kaminsky answered. “The other three were hand-delivered.”

“Okay.” Tony nodded. “Maybe somebody saw something. Maybe there’s a description. Do we know the locations where the victims were last seen alive?”

“Not all of them,” Kaminsky answered apologetically. “Crane and I are working on it.”

“I found out where Omar’s is,” Crane volunteered. “The bar where you said Laura Peters was last seen, remember? It’s in Hampton, Virginia.”

“That’s about seventy miles from Richmond,” Tony responded with a frown. “We have information that Laura Peters was grabbed from right outside that bar. What about Raylene Witt and Jenna McDaniels? Do we know where he grabbed them?”

“Not yet,” Kaminsky said. “But we will.”

“Do we know why there wasn’t more of an outcry over the disappearance of Laura Peters and Raylene Witt?” Charlie asked. “Or if they were even reported missing?”

“Laura was, by her mother yesterday morning,” Michael said, surprising Charlie into looking at him again. “Google her name and a Facebook page listing her as missing comes up. Apparently the mother thought Laura was staying with her boyfriend. The boyfriend thought Laura had gone home to her mother. As for the other girl, I didn’t get that far.”

You were Googling?
was the question that came rushing to the tip of Charlie’s tongue, but she managed to swallow it just in time.

Michael’s lips quirked. “I figured if I could learn to work the remote I could learn to work a computer. I spent part of last night playing with the one in the room across the hall from your bedroom. I’m getting pretty fair at it.”

The room across the hall from her bedroom was the smallest of the three upstairs bedrooms, and Charlie had turned it into an office. She had a desk in there, along with a file cabinet and shelves of books. Her Mac Pro computer was on her desk, usually in sleep mode. Also in the room was a love seat that opened into a twin bed.

Last night, Crane had slept in there.

“You’ll catch flies,” Michael warned with a dawning smile.

Recollecting herself, Charlie pressed her lips together and dropped her gaze, which landed on her coffee cup. Automatically reaching for it, she remembered that Michael couldn’t drink coffee, and stopped
. If you only do what he can do, you won’t be doing much,
she told herself severely. But then she thought
, By now, the coffee’s probably cold.
So she didn’t want to drink it anyway, and that had nothing to do with Michael at all. Having come to that conclusion, she glanced a little furtively around. If anyone else had replied to her question, she had missed the answer. With an effort, she tuned back in to the conversation.

“The kill methods require planning, and a fairly elaborate setup,” Tony was saying. “He’d have to put some time into them. And some work, and some money. Which means he is either employed at something that pays fairly well, or he has access to money through family or some other means.”

“The killings occur on weekends,” Kaminsky pointed out. “That argues for someone who works, and works a fairly normal schedule, too.”

Crane said, “But he grabs his victims several days earlier. And, while there is only one killing ground for each group, the groups are fairly far apart in terms of location. So we know he is able to travel, possibly through his job, and that he has someplace to keep his victims until he is ready to put his death scenario into motion.”

“The physical description provided by the survivors is all over the map in terms of height and weight,” Kaminsky said, “but we know he is male, and that he wears all black clothing and what is probably a mask over his face that makes it look unnaturally white and skeletal. And he drives, owns, or has access to an old blue or gray van.”

“So who are we looking for?” Tony asked.

“I have no idea,” Kaminsky said as Crane shrugged. Kaminsky glanced at Charlie. “Fortunately, our team now includes a highly educated expert to help us figure this out. Any insights you care to share, Dr. Stone?”

The look Charlie gave Kaminsky should have withered her. It didn’t.

Transferring her gaze to Tony, Charlie said, “Like I said, the first group of victims needs to be checked out: something about them as a group, or one of them as an individual, has meaning for him him. I feel fairly confident that at the time of the murders of that first group he was living or working within a twenty mile or less radius of the kill site. Also, the method of coercion—how he terrified his victims into killing one another—is important. Why did he choose those methods? Were they particular fears of the victims, and, if so, how did he know about them? Are they fears of his, and if so, how did he come by them? Did he, perhaps, have an experience mirroring one of the scenarios? Or did a close family member? For example, did his father drown? Or was the Gingerbread Man himself, at a tender age, the victim of something involving a propeller, such as a lawn mower accident? Or—”

“Or maybe he’s just plain evil,” Michael interrupted. “No cause and effect, no traumatic childhood experience: just evil. That’s where your soft heart’s steering you wrong, buttercup: you want to think that people do bad things because bad things were done to them, and they’re broken as a result, which means that they can be fixed. That
you
can fix them. I’m here to tell you that it ain’t necessarily so, and that’s the kind of thinking you want to be careful of because it can get you killed.”

Charlie saw that for once he was being absolutely serious, and her brows contracted. A lightning-fast whisper of a question flickered through her mind—
Is he warning me about himself?
—before she noticed the gathering frowns on the faces of the three living beings she’d been talking to before Michael had butted in.

“Charlie?” Tony prompted. The look he was giving her was kind of weird, kind of questioning, and she realized that as far as Tony and Kaminsky and Crane were concerned she hadtotally spaced out in mid-spiel in front of them.

Damn it.

“Sorry, I had to stop for a moment to gather my thoughts,” she said, as with her periphery vision—because she was absolutely not looking his way again—she watched Michael smile with what she had no trouble identifying as sardonic enjoyment of her predicament. But she was
not
going to be distracted again, be that smile ever so maddening. Instead, she concentrated on Tony, and on getting out the rest of the facts about the killer that had been coalescing in her head.

“What we are dealing with here is a highly organized killer. He is almost certainly a white male, aged twenty-five to forty, intelligent, plans everything in advance, is a perfectionist with no tolerance for mistakes,” she continued. “He sees himself as dominant, controlling, and powerful, so I would expect to find him in a job where he has quite a bit of authority. He is a sadist with a God complex. He enjoys having the power of life and death over his victims.”

“If what that means is that he gets everything into place ahead of time, before he snatches the victims, then it’s probable, even likely, that by now he already has the killing grounds for the next group of victims prepared, is that right?” Tony frowned thoughtfully, her brief lapse forgotten, she thought.

“Yes,” Charlie replied. “He has almost certainly already prepared the killing ground for both groups of victims that remain to allow him to complete this year’s ritual.”

Tony slapped a palm down on the counter with satisfaction. “There you go. That gives us another possible way of finding him: find those killing grounds.”

Charlie nodded. “They should be within a few miles of the next two experts he’s planning to send a message to.”

“Only we don’t know who those experts are,” Kaminsky objected.

“No.” Charlie shook her head. “We don’t.”

“But you can make some guesses, right? Identify some possibilities?” Tony was looking at her intently. “That should help us narrow the places where we mount a search.”

“Yes, I can,” Charlie said. “But I have no way of knowing if I’ll be accurate. With the first three groups, he didn’t send a challenge to anyone at all that we know of. After that, he chose a reporter, a geneticist, a university professor, and a researcher. What the last three have in common is an interest in and a certain expertise in the workings of the mind of a violent criminal. But he could change his parameters for selecting the next individual he wants to involve in this case at any time.”

“Understood.” Tony’s eyes met hers with a touch of humor. Charlie realized that she was probably sounding a little pedantic.

“The thing is, this is such an anomalous case,” she explained. “I’m not sure how many of the rules apply.”

“Understood,” Tony said again, and slid off the bar stool. “If you’re ready, I’d like to get going for that interview with Jenna McDaniels.”

Charlie stood, too, and automatically began gathering mugs. “Give me a minute, and I’ll be right with you.”

“We’ve got this covered.” Crane took the mugs away from her.

“Then let me get my purse,” she said to Tony. As she left the kitchen, she heard him giving a brief recap to the others, prioritizing what they needed to do. With Michael trailing her—“I feel like a damned puppy on a leash,” he muttered, which made her smile—she was back with her purse and jacket in no time. All traces of breakfast were cleared away. Kaminsky stood at the breakfast bar tucking her laptop into its case, Charlie saw as she reentered the kitchen. Crane sat on a bar stool beside Kaminsky fiddling with the controls on a video camera. Tony was over near the sink talking on his cell phone, and as he saw her held up a finger to indicate that he would just be one more minute. Charlie nodded at Tony, then headed for the kitchen table. There was something she needed to do.