The Last Kiss Goodbye (15 page)

The sight of the bodies made Charlie feel sick at heart. It made her want to weep.

Poor girls,
went the refrain that kept running through her mind
.
She wondered if, when the sun had risen that morning, they had guessed this would be their last day alive.

“Life’s a bitch,” Michael said from behind her. “No point in getting all teary-eyed about it.”

A little annoyed because she was absolutely sure that she was
not
getting (outwardly anyway) all teary-eyed about it, she was startled by his apparent ability to read her mind. Charlie shot him a killing glare.

A corner of his mouth quirked up in response. Having apparently recovered from his earlier bout of the dismals—at least, if he was still upset, she couldn’t tell—he was standing right beside her, his big body protectively close. Although nothing short of torture would have gotten her to admit it, Charlie was glad he was there. The hiss of the wind moving through the towering trees that crowded close around the clearing, the ageless quality of the absolute darkness beyond the reach of the klieg lights, the swampy scent of the place, which she had smelled before on Jenna, were combining to slightly creep her out.

Given what he was, Michael was an unlikely antidote for a developing case of the heebie-jeebies, but for her he was.

“Everybody keep to the edge of the clearing. Nontechnical personnel, stay out of the way. Let’s try to preserve this crime scene as much as possible so we can get a good look at it when the sun comes up.” Tony called instructions from the side of the pit. Like the rest of the agents, he had traded his sport coat for an FBI windbreaker, and the big white letters made him easier to keep track of in the confusion than he otherwise would have been. Charlie watched as he turned to speak to a body retrieval crew in blue jumpsuits who were standing by, presumably until the photographers were finished taking pictures. Off to one side, a police department sketch artist was looking at the pit as she drew. Charlie assumed she was making a rough drawing of the bodies and their position in the crime scene. Two cops were setting tall tent stakes and stringing yellow crime scene tape from them around the edge of the clearing, leaving only a narrow pathway between it and the trees.

“Boss, I think I’ve found our point of egress,” Crane yelled, and Tony turned away from the pit to head toward him. Crane was on an upward slope at the right side of the clearing; since he was beyond the reach of the klieg lights Charlie could only locate him by his voice and the round glow of his flashlight. A moment later all she could see of Tony, too, was his flashlight. Several other flashlights converged on the spot, but it was too dark for Charlie to identify any of the people holding them.

“Being dead doesn’t have a whole lot of good points, but one of them is not having to worry about mosquitoes,” Michael said. “Just so you know, there’s one on your arm. I’d smack it for you, but that ain’t happening.”

Charlie had already slapped at a good half a dozen. After a hasty glance down, she slapped again.

“Damned mosquitoes,” Sheriff Peel said. “Perfect breeding conditions for them, though. All this standing water, and then it’s been hot as Hades.”

The rain should have cooled things off. It hadn’t. The day—typical for late August—had been baking hot, and even in these, the small hours of the morning, the humidity made the air feel almost too thick to breathe. There were two water-filled pits on the site, although as far as anyone could tell only one held bodies. Steam rose up from the surface of the water in both pits, from the piled shale and mossy rocks around the edge of the clearing, from the thick mulch beneath the huge pines and oaks and beeches, from the flat grassy area where Charlie (and Michael) stood with Sheriff Peel and Ken, who were at the bottom of the law enforcement food chain on this investigation and thus had nothing to do at this point, and Jerry Ferrell and his dogs, whose part was played out. The dogs, big, loose-limbed, floppy-eared bloodhounds, lay panting on the ground at Ferrell’s feet. They cast occasional suspicious looks at Michael, whom Charlie was almost certain they could see, but having been ordered by their handler to lie down and be quiet that’s what they did.

“You don’t think I ought to be getting on home to Debbie and the kids, do you?” Ken asked the sheriff uneasily as he, too, slapped at a mosquito. “Half the time, she doesn’t even lock the doors.”

“I were you, I’d wait for the rest of us,” Sheriff Peel said. “No telling if the guy who did this is still on the mountain. And starting tomorrow, you make sure Debbie locks them doors.”

“If you’ve finished with your pictures, I’d like to start getting the bodies out of the water now,” Frank Cramer, the medical examiner, called to the police photographers. He was an older, bald guy to whom Charlie had been introduced shortly after he’d arrived on the scene.

Tony and Crane were once again back within the glare of the klieg lights, Charlie saw. Tony was standing next to the ME looking down into the pit with the bodies, while Crane was now videotaping everything, with the purpose, Charlie knew, of allowing the team to play the footage over and over again in an exhaustive search for clues. Even as she looked at him, Crane panned the camera over her and the men she was standing with, then moved on to the cops and firefighters and coroner’s assistants and the rest of what seemed like a cast of thousands currently milling around on the sidelines. Charlie knew what he was doing: watch the watchers was one of Tony’s maxims. Sometimes it yielded surprisingly fruitful results.

Because a lot of times a killer would show up at a crime scene to drink in the efforts of law enforcement to find him. This killer in particular was likely to still be somewhere in the vicinity, Charlie knew. He would take pleasure in observing everything that went on in the aftermath of what he had done.

It was part of the power trip he was on.

One of the hounds—Mabel, Charlie thought her name was; the other one was Max—picked up her head and stared intently at the far side of the pit. Charlie followed her gaze curiously. What she saw when she did had her drawing in a sharp breath.

“You okay?” Ken asked.

“Damned mosquitoes,” Charlie echoed Sheriff Peel, and gave her arm another slap.

But mosquitoes weren’t what had caused her reaction. On the other side of the pit, just beyond the bright circle cast by the klieg lights, a girl sat with her knees drawn up to her chin, her arms wrapped around her legs, and her head bent and resting on her knees. A girl with long, curly dark hair that spilled around her body to almost brush the flat shelf of rock she was sitting on. A girl with bare feet, and bare legs beneath mid-thigh-length shorts and slender bare arms emerging from a sleeveless dark-colored top. A girl who looked to be soaking wet, with water streaming from her body.

A girl who hadn’t been there the last time Charlie had glanced that way.

A dead girl. The spirit of one of the two girls whose bodies were still floating in the pit.

Charlie felt her heartbeat speed up.

She looked fixedly at the girl, saw her shoulders heave, and guessed that the spirit was crying.

Every muscle in Charlie’s body tensed.

I hate this.

But finding out what she could from the newly deceased victims was the primary reason she had come. If she had only wanted to look over the crime scene, she could have waited until daylight. Or she could have looked at pictures. There had been no guarantee that the remaining girl’s spirit would be here, of course, but if she was still anywhere on earth at all, the place where she had been killed was the most likely for her to be found.

And here she was.

For a moment there, the small victory almost made Charlie feel good. Then the tragedy of what she was seeing reasserted itself, and her throat tightened.

All I can do for her is help find who did this.

“Excuse me, I’m going to go have a word with Agent Kaminsky.” Charlie chose that excuse because Kaminsky, heels and skirt suit ditched in favor of an FBI windbreaker along with black pants and sneakers that she had retrieved from her luggage when she’d changed at Charlie’s house before tackling the mountain, had just walked briskly past. Small as Kaminsky was in flat shoes, she still looked formidable with a shovel in her hands and not so much as a sideways glance to spare for anyone. Speculating on what Kaminsky might be going to do with that shovel was a waste of effort, so Charlie gave up on it almost at once. Instead she followed in Kaminsky’s wake without the least intention of catching up, skirting the dogs, dodging the fluid clusters of law enforcement types who were presumably engaged in one evidence-gathering activity or another, keeping to the shadowy edges of the clearing as she headed toward the crying girl.

“You see her, too, huh?” Michael was right behind her. His voice had a resigned quality to it. “I figured.”

Where they were, the darkness was obscuring enough that a quick nod in reply wasn’t going to work. Cops, deputies, FBI agents, rescue workers, coroner’s assistants, technicians—the clearing was swarming with official types. A steady stream of foot traffic moved continuously around the periphery as people went where they needed to go while trying to follow Tony’s directive to stay out of the crime scene as much as possible. But most of them were busy, doing their jobs, bustling from place to place. As far as she could tell, no one was paying any particular attention to her.

So she took a chance.

“I see her,” Charlie admitted, keeping her voice low. “I’m going to try to talk to her.”

“You know, I kind of guessed that when you started heading this way. Got your barf bag with you?”

That bit of sarcasm earned him a glower. “Shut up, okay? I’m talking to her, and that’s the end of the discussion.”

“Go for it. Knock yourself out.”

“Stay out of it,” Charlie warned, his blunt treatment of the other girl’s spirit still fresh in her mind. Then she had a corollary thought: “Unless I need you.”

“Try not to need me. Weeping women ain’t exactly my thing.”

“So get over it already. Weren’t you the one who just said life’s a bitch?”

“Then I guess it’s a good thing I don’t have to worry about it anymore, right?”

At that, Charlie made an exasperated sound under her breath and abandoned the conversation. Cool and heavy, his too-big watch had slid down her arm to lodge against her hand, and with exasperation she shoved it back up almost to her elbow, reflecting that of course any possession of his would be as annoying as he was. Then it hit her:
Maybe he really
isn’t
a serial killer
.
Maybe he actually
is
innocent, and this watch is proof.
Before she could even start to get all excited about that, a cool sprinkle of water distracted her as she passed too close beneath an overhanging evergreen branch and dislodged a shower of droplets that ran down her neck, making her flinch. In front of her, the long shadows cast by the trees seemed to twist in upon themselves like crooked, arthritic fingers. The smell of the woods—pine and moss and wet earth—was strong enough to supplant what was now the background note of the swampy scent of the water in the pit. Snatches of conversation rose and fell around her, their individual threads more discernible than before. The steady hum of the generator, the clank of metal on rock as a boat hook attached to a chain was readied for the removal of the bodies, the rustle of bright blue body bags being laid out by the side of the pit, filled her ears. The dead girl now looked almost more vivid than the living people on the scene. Charlie’s senses had heightened. It sometimes happened when she was in the close vicinity of the newly dead. She cast a quick, consuming look all around to try to make certain she wasn’t being observed. As far as she could tell, no one was paying the least attention to her. Still, the sensation she had of being watched could have come from anywhere, or nowhere, like her imagination. It could be the Gingerbread Man, who might be somewhere keeping an eye on the kill site. But she saw no one looking in her direction, and at the moment that’s all she had to go by. Concentrating on the spirit, who was only a few yards away now, Charlie did her best to block everything else out.

As she approached she could hear the girl crying. The sound tore at Charlie’s heart.

“I’m here to help you,” Charlie told her, positioning herself so that her back was turned to most of the people in the clearing as she stopped a few steps from the edge of the rock shelf the girl was sitting on. She ignored the sudden queasiness that attacked her stomach like clockwork. She had no intention of letting anyone—read Michael—know about it unless and until it got to the point where she couldn’t hide it anymore. Until then, she would power through and hope for the best. Thanks to the klieg lights, it wasn’t entirely dark where she stood, but the tangled shadows were thick enough to obscure a lot of detail. Another uneasy glance around found tiny pairs of glowing orbs shining among the trees: animal eyes, Charlie identified them even as she shivered. At least they accounted for the eerie feeling she had that she was being intently watched. Without looking up, the girl continued to sob pitifully. The sound made Charlie feel sick at heart. “Are you Laura? Or Raylene?”

The girl cried on as if she hadn’t heard.