The Last Kiss Goodbye (21 page)

“Sure thing, boss,” Crane said as he handed Charlie a cup of coffee. Charlie dosed it liberally with Sweet’N Low from the sugar bowl on the counter, pointed Crane to a cabinet when he bemoaned the lack of real sugar, declined a doughnut (despite Michael telling her, “Take it. You need to eat.”), discreetly did up another blouse button when she judged that everyone (read Michael) was looking elsewhere, and allowed her attention to be directed to the laptop screen as Tony gestured at it and said, “Kaminsky, bring us up to speed, would you please?”

Kaminsky put down her coffee cup.

“First, there are seven separate groups of three victims each, for twenty-one known total victims of the Gingerbread Man.” Kaminsky tapped the screen, which displayed what looked like a bulletin board with small photos grouped together by threes. “Of that number, there have been sixteen fatalities. Five survived the attacks, including Jenna McDaniels.” She pointed to a line-up of five photos at the far side of the screen: the top one was of Jenna. “Three attacks occurred in each of the last two years and one attack—that would be Jenna McDaniels’ group—has occurred so far this year. The time frame for all of them is August/September. If the Gingerbread Man stays true to pattern, the attack on the McDaniels’ group is the only the first this year. We can expect three more victims to be kidnapped approximately ten to fourteen days from now. The next kill date should be two weekends away, on either Friday or Saturday. That’s the pattern.”

“So we’ve got about ten days to find this guy before he starts up again,” Crane said, and Kaminsky nodded. “Always supposing he stays true to the pattern.”

“Any idea how he chooses his victims?” Tony took a bite of a doughnut. From the corner of her eye, Charlie saw that Michael was watching Tony almost broodingly, and frowned. Surely he wasn’t looking like that because he thought the other man had been ogling her cleavage. After all, he had been doing the same thing. Then she had another thought: she was thinking of her pesky ghost strictly as Michael now. Calling him “Garland” no longer entered her head. And what that said about the changing state of their relationship she didn’t even want to contemplate.

Kaminsky shook her head. “I’ve listed the victims’ names, ages, genders, races, marital status, occupations, and hometowns, and any other known identifying characteristics. I can’t find a pattern in the criteria he uses to select them—yet.”

Charlie said, “If I’m remembering correctly”—she scanned the identifying information for each group to confirm it—“each group is roughly similar in composition. For example, the first group was made up of boys aged twelve, thirteen, and fourteen.”

Kaminsky nodded. “That’s right. Group Two was three fifteen-year-old girls. Group Three was teenage boys again—two fourteen-year-olds and a sixteen-year-old. Group Four was a departure in that two of the victims were adults and one was markedly dissimilar from the other two—two women in their forties and a fifteen-year-old boy. Group Five was a sixteen-year-old girl, a seventeen-year-old girl, and seventeen-year-old boy. Group Six was a fourteen-year-old boy, a fifteen-year-old boy, and an eighteen-year-old girl. Group Seven—well, that was the group last night. Raylene Witt and Laura Peters were both twenty-one. Jenna McDaniels is twenty.”

“Who are the survivors?” Tony asked, polishing off his doughnut with a last, super-sized bite then wiping his fingers on a napkin. Michael was still watching him as he chewed and swallowed, Charlie saw. But when she took another sip of coffee, Michael’s eyes, glinting with some emotion she still couldn’t quite pinpoint, flickered to the cup she had just set down, where they lingered. It took a second, but then Charlie had an epiphany: she realized that Michael wasn’t ticked off at Tony at all. He was envying them their breakfast.

Of course, he missed eating.

She hated the idea of that.

Michael must have felt her gaze on him, because he looked up then, saw her expression, and frowned at her.

“So what’s up with the big sad eyes you’re giving me?” he demanded suspiciously.

Charlie altered her expression in a hurry.
No idea what you’re talking about,
was the first part of what she hoped her expression conveyed. The second, which she already knew he was about as likely to pay attention to as he was to suddenly sprout an angelic halo, was
Hush.
Then, as Kaminsky started talking, Charlie wrenched her gaze away.

“Ariane Spencer, fifteen at the time, from Group Two.” Not quite touching the screen, Kaminsky pointed to what looked like a yearbook photo of a pretty blond teen. “Matthew Hayes, sixteen, from Group Three.” The kid was wiry, with spiky black hair and a small silver ring piercing a nostril. “Andrew Russell, seventeen, from Group Five.” This boy had very short brown hair and thick black glasses. “Saul Tunney, fifteen, from Group Six.” He had a round, earnest-looking face and blond waves. “And, last but not least, Jenna McDaniels from Group Seven.”

“So what we’ve got are seventeen teenagers ranging in age from fourteen to eighteen and five adult women, if you count Jenna McDaniels at twenty as an adult,” Tony said.

“Did any of the victims know one another?” Having polished off his meal, Crane had come around the breakfast bar so he could look at the computer screen, too. Leaning toward it, he started to rest a hand on the counter. It passed right through Michael, who grimaced. Snatching his hand back, Crane straightened with a sharp
“Ah!”
and started rubbing his fingers.

“Counter shocked me,” he said defensively in response to the surprised looks he got from the others. “Damned static electricity.”

“Boo,” Michael growled after him as Crane moved on down to stand on the other side of Kaminsky.

Involuntarily, Charlie smiled.

Michael was smiling, too, as he met her gaze. After a second his eyes darkened. Then they moved down to her lips.

“When you smile like that, all I want to do is kiss you,” he told her. “Damned shame I can’t. But I’m working on it.”

He was trying to get a reaction out of her, Charlie told herself. She knew he took a great deal of pleasure from teasing her, rattling her composure, provoking her, turning her on. The only defense she had against him was to not respond. So she didn’t. At least, not outwardly.

But there wasn’t a thing in the world she could do about the instant mental image she had of his mouth covering hers. Just like there wasn’t a thing in the world she could do about the way her body suffused with heat.

“I think some of them did know the others in their group.” Looking away from Michael, who, having clearly seen something that interested him in her face, was now watching her like a cat at a mouse hole, Charlie concentrated on Crane instead as she picked up the thread of the (important, real-world) conversation. “Which ones and what the relationships were exactly I don’t recall right off the top of my head.”

“We need to find that out.” As Tony spoke he looked at Kaminsky, who nodded.

“What strikes me is that all the males are kids. I’m betting that seventeen-year-old boy was undersized. This guy’s afraid to tangle with a grown man. Which makes me think he’s not a real big guy himself, and probably doesn’t have any military or police background. No combat training or anything like that,” Crane said.

Tony made a face. “I don’t think we can rule out a military or police background on the basis of that. A grown man is harder for anyone to deal with than a woman or a child. And it may be that grown men aren’t this guy’s thing.”

Crane shrugged. “Good point.”

“Forget the damned victims. You’re the key,” Michael told Charlie. His face had hardened, and the look he gave her was suddenly grim. “You want to figure out who this guy is, figure out how he knows
you.
”

CHAPTER TWELVE

Charlie cast a surprised look at Michael: she hadn’t expected him to have tuned out the conversation, exactly—knowing him, that would have been expecting too much—but she equally hadn’t realized that he had been following it to such an extent. Certainly she hadn’t expected him to make such an astute observation. As soon as the words came out of his mouth, she realized that he was right.

“Faster this guy’s caught, faster I quit having to worry about you getting yourself killed. And the faster Dudley there goes back to where he came from,” Michael replied to the look she gave him.

Remembering in the nick of time that she had an audience, Charlie didn’t respond to that by so much as the flicker of an eyelash. Instead, she looked at Tony as she repeated Michael’s suggestion aloud. Only she expanded it to include figuring out how the Gingerbread Man knew all the experts to whom he had sent his message.

“That’s a really good idea. Four’s a much more manageable number to start an investigation with than twenty-one,” Tony said thoughtfully. “Who’re the experts?”

“Dr. David Myers, who as I told you last night wrote the definitive text on criminal psychology. Dr. Jeffrey Underwood, research geneticist and professor at Wake Forest School of Medicine. And Eric Riva, a reporter who wrote a series of articles about the case for the
Charlotte Observer.
That would be the primary newspaper in Charlotte, North Carolina,” Charlie said.

“And you,” Kaminsky added, giving Charlie an inscrutable look. “Dr. Charlotte Stone, certified forensic psychiatrist, one of the top serial killer experts in the country.”

“Who needs to find a new specialty,” Michael said, while Charlie, ignoring him, said to Tony, “I think what we need to ask ourselves is how the Gingerbread Man came to know about each of the experts. For example, I don’t think anybody outside of academia or the forensic psychiatric community has ever heard of
me.
So that should narrow the list of possible suspects right there.”

“Are you kidding? You’ve been all over TV,” Kaminsky shot Charlie an incredulous glance. “For a few days there, practically every news channel and talk show host in the country was covering the Boardwalk Killer case twenty-four seven. You included.”

“The girl who lived,” Michael told her on a satiric note. “Think about it: as a theme, it’s classic.”

Considering the source, this clear reference to Harry Potter came as a shock. Michael had told her before that there wasn’t much to do in prison besides read and work out, but at the time they’d been talking about Shakespeare. Charlie decided that her mind had just officially been blown by the eclecticism of his literary choices.

“Prison library,” Michael explained, clearly able to correctly interpret the look on her face. “If they had it, I read it.”

“You
were
all over TV,” Crane was saying to her when she forced her attention to return to the living. “Including CNN. Anybody in the whole world practically could know who you are and what you do.”

Charlie hadn’t realized. Or, rather, she hadn’t let herself realize. Probably, she decided, because she hadn’t wanted to know.

“I forgot about that.” Okay, that sounded lame.

“You’ve been busy,” Michael said excusingly.

“So let’s consider the other three,” Tony said. “How could this guy know them?” He looked at Charlie. “How did you know who they were?”

She said, “I knew their identities from looking over the case for Dr. Myers. I knew him, of course, and I had heard of Dr. Underwood, but I had never heard of Eric Riva before Dr. Myers sent me the case files.”

“Eric Riva was the first person to receive the Gingerbread Man’s
You can’t catch me
message, right?” Tony asked. When Charlie nodded, he said, “Let’s start with him.” He looked at Kaminsky. “Find out how widely read those columns he wrote were. And how he came to write them in the first place.”

Kaminsky nodded. “I’m on it.”

“I would say the first group of victims is the most important, too,” Charlie said slowly. “Something caused the Gingerbread Man to start with that group. I would posit that either he knew one of the victims in some way, or that he saw himself in one of the victims. Something traumatic may have happened to him at that age.”

“Check them out, too,” Tony directed, and Kaminsky nodded.

Then, remembering Raylene Witt’s appearance in her front hall—to be there, the spirit almost had to have been attached to someone or something nearby—Charlie added, “One more thing. We know the Gingerbread Man chased Jenna down the mountain. He—or a confederate, although I am almost one hundred percent certain we’ll find he works alone—kicked open my back door and entered my kitchen to leave the note and the knife for me to find. He may very well have walked around to the front of the house after that, and may even have come inside with the rescuers. We should check for video or photos of the front of my house—maybe one of the neighbors whipped out his phone and took pictures of the ambulance crew, or of Jenna on the stretcher, for example. We should compare fingerprints from the front door and hall with fingerprints on the back door. Also, we should probably get as complete a list as we can of who was on the scene.”

Tony looked at Kaminsky and Crane. “Got it covered, boss,” Crane said.

“Anybody up for grisly details?” Kaminsky cast an inquiring glance around.

“No,” Michael said. As Charlie glanced at him in some surprise it struck her that, for a supposed serial killer, he didn’t seem to have a real high tolerance for gore. In her experience of him, every time he’d been exposed to it—take Laura Peters’ bashed-in head, for example—he had seemed more bothered than she would have expected the typical serial killer to be, because serial killers have no ability to empathize with anyone. Had he been faking an empathetic response? Maybe, but she didn’t think so: the reactions were too consistent. Then she remembered his descriptions of her inkblots: they had been gory enough. Of course, she had suspected at the time that he was messing with her, and even if he hadn’t been, that had been before he was killed. Maybe death had changed that part of him. Maybe death had changed everything about him. Maybe, in death, he was not the same bad-to-the-bone person that he had been before.