The Last Kiss Goodbye (13 page)

Sager was saying, “Yeah, go ahead, I guarantee you we’ll be doing the grunt work anyway” in a low voice to the fingerprint technician, who apparently wanted next to begin work on the table and chairs. While the technician nodded and turned away to start scooping up the foam peanuts, which he dropped into a plastic Ziploc bag, Charlie said, “It’s like a game to him. A challenge. As soon as I saw the words
you can’t catch me,
I knew who it was.”

“This guy knows who you are, too.” Michael’s voice was flat. “And that ain’t good.”

A commotion from the front hall distracted all of them. Hoping it was Tony and crew, Charlie started forward, only to fall back with disappointment when three strangers walked into her kitchen. The tall, burly, gray-haired man in uniform she had seen before: Wise County Sheriff Hyram Peel. The two men in dark suits were, of course, FBI, although not the agents she was anxiously awaiting. Introducing themselves as Agents Greg Flynn and Dean Burger, they were part of the team that had been involved in what apparently had been a massive search for Jenna McDaniels. While other agents had gone to the hospital to secure her, they said, they had been detailed to talk to Charlie.

She was just beginning to tell them her part of what had happened when Michael exclaimed, “Damn, that’s my watch.”

Distracted from her recital of events, Charlie quit talking to frown at him. He had been leaning against the breakfast counter looking grim. Now he was standing upright, staring at the table like there was something on it that was getting ready to leap at him. Automatically she followed his gaze to find that, now that the technician had finished scooping up the last of the foam peanuts—he was shaking them in a plastic bag with fingerprint powder—it was possible to see a man’s matte silver watch still resting inside the overturned package she had received.

“I told those damned clowns that it wasn’t my watch they found next to that dead woman.” Michael’s charged gaze shifted to Charlie. “Did they believe me? Hell, no. But look at that: there it is. That’s my watch.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

“Pick it up. Look at it.” Because Michael was talking to her, because of the intensity of his tone, because of the emotion she could feel rolling off him, Charlie completely forgot about Agents Flynn and Burger. “It’s got
Semper Fi
engraved on the back of the case. Go ahead, check it out. It’s my damned watch.”

Semper fi,
Charlie recalled, was the Marine Corps motto. She was familiar enough with his file to know that Michael had spent eight years as a marine.

“Uh, Dr. Stone, you were saying?” Flynn prompted.

Realizing that she had broken off in mid-sentence, Charlie dragged her eyes away from Michael and sought desperately to recall where she had stopped. Flynn was frowning at her. He was a stocky, muscular man of about forty, with short brown hair and average looks. There was impatience in his narrowed brown eyes.

“Jenna was obviously traumatized,” Charlie picked up the thread, and with that launched back into her story.

Even with Flynn and Burger both looking at her, even as she talked, it was impossible for Charlie not to watch, out of the corner of her eye, as Michael moved over to the table. His big hands wrapping around a chair back, his powerful shoulders bunching so that the muscles strained against his shirt, he stared down at the watch. Of course, it was impossible for him to touch it, much less pick it up. His hands would pass right through.

“How in hell is that thing turning up now?” Michael looked, and sounded, angry, and more as if he was talking to himself than her. “All this fucking time, and it turns up
now
?”

“Thank you,” Flynn said, and Charlie realized that she had stopped talking again. Fortunately it was in a place where Flynn could conclude that she had finished with what she had to say. He nodded toward the galley part of the kitchen, where Ken and Sheriff Peel were quietly conversing. Charlie noted in passing that the kitchen faucet was no longer running: someone had obviously turned it off. She was only glad that Michael no longer seemed to need whatever strengthening effect it had on him. “Is that Deputy Ewell? Didn’t you say that he was the first person on the scene here?”

“Yes.”

“Excuse us. We have a few questions for him.” With a nod at her, Flynn and Burger headed toward Ken.

A quick glance around told Charlie that everybody was now busy doing something else. She moved over to the table and frowned at Michael questioningly.

“Look at it.” He nodded at the watch. “Tell me if it doesn’t say
Semper Fi
on the back of the case.”

Although as far as she could tell none of the other roughly half-dozen people in the room were paying the least bit of attention to her, Charlie knew that all it would take would be for her to start talking aloud, supposedly to herself, for that to instantly change.

Picking up the watch—it was cool and heavy, with all kinds of fancy little dials on the face and an expandable wristband—she turned it so she could see the back of the watch face. Engraved on the smooth metal surface was the Marine Corps motto.

“Semper Fi?”
There was tension in Michael’s face.

Charlie nodded. His gaze returned to the watch.

“Goddamn it. Of course the thing would show up now, when it’s too fucking late.” He sounded almost savage.

Charlie picked up the box the watch had arrived in. Fortunately, cutting through the layers of tape that had been wrapped around it had left the return address intact. It read
Mariposa Police Department.

Her fingers tightened on the box.

I wrote to them. Of course.

Tiny Mariposa, North Carolina, was where Michael first had been arrested, for the last of the seven murders with which he had subsequently been charged. As part of her research into the backgrounds of the men she was studying, Charlie had sent the department an official request for access to any materials/information/files they still had concerning him.

This was their reply. In addition to the watch, at the bottom of the box was a DVD, and tucked to the side was a tri-folded sheet of letter-sized paper.

Charlie pulled it out.

“What the hell
is
this?” Michael growled as she unfolded the single, typewritten sheet. The letter was brief and she read it quickly. “Some kind of cosmic joke?”

“Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you not to touch anything on the table until I’m done here.” This interruption by the fingerprint technician, who had been standing a little distance away while his gloved hands busily rifled through the now powder-coated foam peanuts, almost made Charlie jump. “Could you put that back, please?”

“I’m sorry.” She managed a smile for him. Then, with Michael in mind, she added, “Um, I just got this material from the Mariposa Police Department and I needed to look at it. I wrote to them, you know, about a month ago, concerning a research subject I was studying.” She put the letter down on the table, open and positioned for Michael to read. He flicked her a glance.

“Don’t let go of that damned watch.”

She barely managed not to nod. Mouth tight, he leaned forward to read the letter.

The technician said in an apologetic tone, “That box was out on the table, wasn’t it? It’s possible that the perp touched it. I need to test it for fingerprints.”

“I understand.”

Charlie set the box back down on the table. The watch she slipped onto her own wrist. She was fine-boned, with long, slender limbs, and the watch, sized for a big man’s solid forearm, was way too large for her. The expandable metal band was not adjustable, so there was nothing to do but wear it as it was. As it slid up her arm, as she felt the weight of it and the glide of the cool metal against her skin, a prickle rippled along her nerve endings. It felt weird to have something real and solid that belonged to Michael touching her.

It was almost like having him touch her himself.

“Sorry,” she told the technician again. He nodded. It was clear that he was waiting for her to step away from the table, but she wasn’t ready to do that until she saw Michael’s reaction to what he was reading.

Having read it herself, she already knew what the letter said:

Dear Dr. Stone,

In response to your inquiry about County Inmate #876091, Michael Alan Garland, I am sending you a copy of what we have retained in our files. In addition, I am enclosing our department’s video records concerning him, as well as a man’s wristwatch that was tagged with his name and was found during the course of our recent move. As far as I can tell, this is the only personal effect of his still in our custody. Because of misfiling by a clerical worker, it was inadvertently left out of the bag containing his personal effects that was passed on to the FBI some years ago. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused, and hope that you will now pass it on to whoever should have possession of it.

Thank you.

If you have any additional questions, please feel free to contact me.

Sincerely,

Betty Culver

Executive Assistant to the Chief

Mariposa County Police Department

“Son of a bitch,” Michael said. Charlie didn’t say anything, but he must have felt the weight of her eyes on him, or else she must have made some small sound. Because his head came up, and he looked at her then, his eyes blazing.

“They found a damned watch exactly like this next to the body of the last chick I’m supposed to have sliced to ribbons. It was broken, had her blood on it. They said it was mine, ripped from my wrist in the struggle. I told the stupid bastards it wasn’t.”

Charlie’s heart lurched. What he was telling her was that this watch was evidence of his innocence. Weighed against all the evidence of his guilt, it was a small thing, but still—it was something tangible.

If he was telling the truth. If he wasn’t somehow playing her.

Charismatic psychopaths had a genius for playing people, she knew. They were so good at it that it wasn’t even embarrassing to the people who studied them when they, too, fell victim to their lies.

The Mariposa Police Department had identified the watch as belonging to Michael right there in the letter. Plus, he’d known that
Semper Fi
was engraved on its back.

How could he have manipulated something like that?

She didn’t think he could have. She didn’t see how it was possible.

How important a part a watch like the one she was wearing had played in his case was something she would have to check into.

For now—it wasn’t nearly enough to persuade her.

Sway her a little, maybe, but not persuade her.

Still, it was something.

“Fuck.” The blaze in Michael’s eyes had hardened and cooled. “What the hell difference does it make now, right? It’s done.”

Shaken by the glimpse she had just gotten into what lay beneath the tough guy exterior, Charlie felt as if the earth were shifting beneath her feet, as if she were no longer standing on solid ground. Before she could formulate a response, the sound of new arrivals, coupled a moment later with a familiar voice behind her, distracted her, causing her to glance around.

“I’m Special Agent Tony Bartoli. This is Special Agent Lena Kaminsky. Special Agent Buzz Crane.”

Bringing a whiff of fresh air with him into a room that was now overwarm and smelled faintly metallic, from either the aerosol spray or the fingerprint powder, Tony was there, in her kitchen, at last.
Thank God.
Raindrops gleaming on his hair and the shoulders of his jacket, he was shaking hands, first with Sager and then with Sheriff Peel, Ken, and Agents Flynn and Burger, as he introduced himself, Kaminsky, and Crane. As apparently all of the law enforcement types in the house converged on the newcomers, the room felt suddenly small and crowded. Relief welling up inside her, Charlie cast one more worried glance at Michael. Still tense with anger and whatever other clearly negative emotions he was experiencing, he looked at the new arrivals, too, with a less than welcoming expression. But at least the raw pain she thought she had glimpsed at the backs of his eyes was gone, and he seemed more or less his usual badass self. In any case, there was nothing she could do for him at the moment, Charlie concluded. That being the case, her focus had to be on what was most important: catching a serial killer.

With that firmly fixed in the forefront of her mind, she hurried toward Tony, Kaminsky, and Crane.

“Hey,” Tony said when he saw her, taking the hand she held out for him to shake—anything more intimate, like, say, a quick hug or a kiss on the cheek, would be unprofessional, and anyway she wasn’t a huggie/kissie kind of person—and giving her a slow smile in which the memory of the very sexy good-night kiss they had so recently shared lingered. His coffee brown eyes crinkled around the edges when he smiled, she noted in passing, and his long mouth stretched and quirked up at the corners to reveal even white teeth. He had black hair, cut short and brushed back, and a lean, mobile face that, while not as flat-out gorgeous as Michael’s, was nonetheless handsome enough to merit a second look. At the moment he was faintly red-eyed, with more than a hint of five o’clock shadow darkening his jaw, which wasn’t surprising considering that it was now well after one in the morning and he had been going since seven a.m. She knew that for sure because seven a.m. (yesterday now) was when the four of them had risen to meet for breakfast before going over some files for what she had thought would be the last time; later, they’d driven to the airport to catch the private plane that had brought her back to Big Stone Gap.