The Last Kiss Goodbye (31 page)

As she watched, video Michael rolled to his feet, snagging Candace with an arm around her waist and pulling her up with him. Laughing, she leaned into him while he nuzzled her neck. Then, close as a stamp to an envelope, she walked out of the frame with him. He seemed slightly unsteady on his feet. She was clingy and had both arms around his waist.

Candace Hartnell was slashed to death later that night. Early the following morning, Michael Garland was arrested and subsequently charged with the crime. Shortly thereafter he was linked with six previous knife murders of young women. The night she was watching had been the last night of freedom in his life: the five subsequent years had been spent in an assortment of jails and prisons. Charlie knew all that, knew, too, the overwhelming nature of the evidence pointing to his guilt that had been presented at his trial. The video she’d just watched, for example, was damning. It even showed him wearing the watch that had been found tangled in the covers with Candace Hartnell’s dead body: State Exhibit 27A.

Only Charlie was holding an identical watch in her hand. One, moreover, that had been identified as belonging to Michael by the Mariposa Police Department, which had arrested him hours after Candace Hartnell’s murder and had presumably taken it from him then as intake material. Michael had correctly described the engraving on the back to her before he’d ever gotten a look at it. It was sized to fit his larger than average wrist, and he insisted that it, and not the one in the pictures, was his.

That, to Charlie, raised at least a flicker of reasonable doubt as to his guilt.

Clicking off the video, she glanced his way. He was lying on his back beside her now, his head on a pillow, his hands laced behind his head. Instead of watching the video, he’d been staring up at the ceiling. As if he felt her eyes on him, he looked at her.

“After that, I took her back to her house and went psycho on her. Raped her. Cut her to ribbons with my handy-dandy hunting knife that I subsequently got rid of where no one could find it. Only I was too damned dumb not to get myself arrested, so I got nailed for her murder and six other murders besides. Does that answer the question you’re getting ready to ask me?” His tone was
almost
casual. His eyes were savage.

Charlie sighed. She’d read those details in his file when he’d first become a subject of her study and, up until less than a week ago, had seen no reason to question them. Now she discovered that she was ready to consider other possibilities.

“You want to tell me what really happened?”

“What, you don’t believe I went psycho and killed that girl? That’s the conclusion a jury of my peers reached. They were so damned sure of it I got sentenced to death.”

Tired of holding his watch, she slid it onto her arm. His eyes tracked the gesture, narrowed.

“I want to hear the truth, whatever it is,” she said.

His lips compressed. “Does it matter? At this point, what the hell does it change? Unless you’ve got some cure for dead I don’t know about.”

“Michael. Please. Tell me what happened.”

The look he gave her glittered with anger and frustration and a whole host of other emotions Charlie didn’t even try to analyze.

“You want the truth? Here it is: I had a few drinks, I picked up a girl in a bar, I went home with her, we got it on. No rape involved. Hell, I never raped a woman in my life. When I woke up, it was about four in the morning. She was asleep—not dead, no blood, not a hair on her head harmed; in fact, last time she had anything to say she gave me to understand that she was feeling pretty good. I wasn’t in any mood for the whole morning after thing so I put my clothes on and left. No, I didn’t wake her up to say goodbye. Hell, at that point I couldn’t even remember her name. But she was
alive.
So I’m driving home, and I guess I was speeding or something because I got pulled over by this damned little pissant of a cop. He arrested me on suspicion of drunk driving—no breathalyzer or anything, but he said I flunked his damned field sobriety test, which I didn’t. I guess he could smell the booze on me. So he takes me in and they lock me up, and while I’m asleep in their damned cell somebody comes across Candace—I found out her name pretty quick—sliced to pieces in her bed.” He grimaced. “After that, things went downhill on a greased slide.”

Charlie was remembering the evidence. “They found your DNA all over her, and her DNA all over you, which I guess makes sense if you’d just slept with her. There were dozens of eyewitnesses to you leaving the bar with her, as well as that video footage. Your watch—a watch that appeared identical to yours—was found in bed with her dead body, looking like it was ripped off your arm and broken as she fought for her life. According to all the evidence, you were the last person to see her alive. Plus, if I recall, she had your skin under her fingernails and you had scratches on your body.”

“The scratches were on my back! She was wild as hell, and when we were having sex, she scratched my damned back! That’s the kind of thing the prosecutors did: they twisted everything to make it sound like I was guilty. But I didn’t kill her. Why the hell would I kill her?” At something he must have seen in Charlie’s face, his brows snapped together. “Oh, that’s right: I’m a murderous psychopath. Who needs a reason?”

“Serial killers are compelled to kill,” Charlie explained with automatic precision. “The compulsion is their reason.”

The look he gave her was grim. “Like I said, she was alive when I left her.”

Charlie clicked back through the file for the information she wanted. “Her body was found at eight a.m. by her sister. Time of death was estimated at three to four hours previous to that.” She frowned. “That means she was killed between four and five a.m.”

“Like I said, I woke up around four and left her house—with her alive in it—as soon as I got my clothes on. Probably around 4:10.”

She was scrolling through his file. “You were logged in to the jail at 5:30 a.m.”

He made an impatient sound. “That dick of a cop kept me on the side of the road for a good hour.”

“If you left Candace Hartnell alive at 4:10, that means somebody else had to have entered her house and killed her within the next fifty minutes.” It might be unlikely, but it wasn’t impossible, Charlie decided.

“Yeah, I worked that out.” His voice was dry.

Having run through the pages of photos of the evidence and not found what she sought, Charlie frowned. “What about the clothes you were wearing? I don’t see them here, but they should have been introduced as evidence. The crime scene was apparently extremely bloody. You should have been covered in blood.”

“You’d think, wouldn’t you?” he said with disgust. “These are the clothes I was wearing—at least, the ghost version. Last civilian clothes I ever wore, except for a suit the lawyers scared up for my trial. They weren’t any more covered with blood when I got arrested than they are right now. The prosecution claimed it was because I killed her while nude, then showered, then dressed.”

Charlie considered: if there was no blood on his clothes, then the prosecution’s theory was the only one that fit. “You were convicted of killing six other women over the two and a half years previous to Candace Hartnell’s murder. How many of
them
did you sleep with?”

He snorted derisively. “None. Not one. Never even laid eyes on any of them. I swear to God. Yeah, I know they said my DNA was all over them and all that shit, but that’s not possible. Either one of those testing labs fucked up big-time, or somebody framed me. Why? How the hell do I know? Maybe some asshole cop or FBI agent wanted to clear up some old cases and I was the best option they had for sticking ’em on somebody. Or maybe somebody didn’t like me. Like I said, I don’t know.”

Charlie watched him carefully. “Every single murder was within a four hour drive of where you lived.”

“I don’t know what to tell you.”

“The murders started right after you got out of the Marine Corps, and continued over the entire period between then and your arrest. And you didn’t have an alibi for any of the nights those women were killed.”

He sighed. “I did have an alibi for some of them. I was living with a girlfriend for something like the last six months before Candace Hartnell was killed. We broke up the day before I hit that bar and the shit hit the fan. On the nights of two of the other murders I know for sure I was asleep in bed with Jasmine. Hell, I’d just opened my garage and I was trying to get that business going. I was working maybe eighty hours a week and I was tired—too tired to run around slicing up women in the middle of the night. Only the damned cops messed with Jasmine until they got her to agree it was possible that I snuck out of bed while she was asleep, killed those women, then got back into bed before she woke up in the morning. Which was total shit. But she was pissed at me anyway because of the breakup, and then they scared her to death of me. They kept telling her, ‘You’ve been sleeping with a serial killer. Do you know how lucky you are to be alive?’ That kind of crap.”

Charlie glanced back at the file. “So why’d you and Jasmine break up?”

“Not because she was afraid of me. Nothing like that. She wanted to get married, and I didn’t. Hell, I didn’t even mean to start living with her. She just sort of moved herself in.”

Charlie looked at him again. And only realized as she did so that she had been deliberately
not
looking at him as he talked about his girlfriend. She hated to admit it even to herself, but ever since she and he had started getting, uh, better acquainted, she’d been mentally poking around the fact that he’d had a girlfriend at the time of his arrest. The question that had burned unacknowledged in the back of her mind was, had he loved her?

From the tone of what he’d said, the answer was no, he hadn’t.

Not that it makes any difference,
Charlie told herself hurriedly.

“You got no call to be jealous of Jasmine, babe.”

His words were so on the money that they almost made Charlie jump.

“What?” Her eyes flared at him indignantly. “I am
not
jealous of your girlfriend. You’ve got to be kidding me.”

The hardness that had been hovering around his eyes and mouth relaxed as he gave her a slow, teasing grin.

“
Ex
-girlfriend. And I told you I could read your face like a neon sign.”

“You are the most conceited—” She broke off, flustered, hoping he couldn’t tell. The more she protested, the more convinced he would be that he was right, she knew. So she shot him a withering glance, and went for the best distraction she could think of: the DVD that the Mariposa PD had sent along with the (his?) watch. She had transferred it from her purse to her laptop case when she’d been packing for this trip, and now, with Michael beside her so that she could gauge his reaction to whatever was on there, was the moment to watch it. Whether or not Michael was a serial killer was something she needed to have settled in her own mind before this … this
connection
that seemed to be growing between them went any further. Most of the time, whether he was being charming or annoying or overprotective or sexy as hell, she didn’t think about what he had done, and that, she decided, was due to the sheer force of his personality. But when she did, when she actually allowed herself to remember the seven women he had been convicted of slaughtering, the chill of fear and revulsion that went through her was enough to stop her in her tracks, enough to make her think she needed to get out of the way and let divine justice take its course where he was concerned.

“What’s that?” he asked as she inserted the DVD into her laptop.

She told him. Neither one of them said anything as the screen sprang to life. The first shot was an identifying one: date and time, which placed the footage as running from 9:31 to 9:35 a.m. on the morning after Michael had left the bar with Candace Hartnell.

Then the camera was focused on Michael—the same younger, video Michael from the bar security tape. He was now seated in a small, gray, police interrogation room, dressed exactly as he had been the previous night, exactly as he was right at that moment on the bed beside her, as a matter of fact. Only the smiling seducer of the footage from the bar was replaced by a still to-die-for hot, but now obviously angry, man with bloodshot eyes and a night’s worth of stubble. Each wrist was cuffed to an arm of the straight-backed metal chair on one side of a small metal table, and almost the first thing Charlie noticed was that the watch he’d been wearing the night before was missing.

Which didn’t mean anything, she reminded herself as her pulse quickened a little in response. Whether the watch had been taken from him at the jail or whether he had left it behind at the crime scene, by this time it would have been missing in either case.

“So what did Candace do to piss you off?” The blue-uniformed cop on the opposite side of the table was leaning forward in his chair, his forearms resting on the smooth metal surface as he stared at Michael. The angle of the camera, which was positioned to capture the person being interrogated, recorded the cop’s beefy back, and the left side of a florid face beneath a close-cropped cap of reddish hair.

“What? Who the hell is Candace?” Glaring, Michael rattled his cuffs against the metal arm rails. “Look, I got things to do. How about you tell me how much the fine is and let me pay it and I’ll be on my way.”