The Last Kiss Goodbye (23 page)

“So, are you going to be working with us on this one all the way through?” Kaminsky asked her, her tone making it clear that she was hoping the answer was going to be
no.
Kaminsky was keeping her voice low, Charlie surmised, so as not to interfere with Tony’s conversation. It sounded to Charlie as if he was giving a superior a brief overview as to where the team was and what it was doing, but Charlie didn’t actually listen as she packed the DVD and letter that had come with Michael’s watch safely into a zippered compartment of her purse, then moved the rest of the mail to the console table.

Besides those items, nothing was urgent; even the bills could wait a few days.

“Looks like it,” Charlie replied, while Michael, having observed what she had tucked into her purse, said, “No point in wasting your time with that. What’s done is done.”

Last night’s anguish was totally absent from his tone. It was cool, casual. Equally, there was no trace of emotion that she could perceive on his face.

Even if he really was that indifferent to what was on the DVD, she wasn’t. And suddenly she was very sensitive to the cool weight of his watch on her arm.

Her eyes met his.

I owe it to you to check it out.

But, of course, she couldn’t say it aloud.

“We’re honored to have you, Dr. Stone,” Crane told her, with a reproving look at Kaminsky. “You’re a real asset to the team.”

Charlie smiled at him. “Thank you. And call me Charlie, please.”

“Charlie.” Crane was stowing the camera away in a case full of miscellaneous equipment. “And why don’t you go ahead and call me Buzz?”

His bright blue eyes gleamed at her from behind his glasses.

“Oh, please.” Kaminsky rolled her eyes. “What are we, the Waltons? Let’s try to keep it professional, people.”

“Hey,
Lena,
guess what?” Crane’s (no, Buzz’s) voice was as low as Kaminsky’s but that didn’t blunt the edge on it. Knowing how Kaminsky felt about being addressed by her first name, Charlie almost winced: nothing good was likely to follow. “Nobody thinks being reasonably friendly with coworkers is unprofessional except you.”

Kaminsky glared at him. “I don’t notice you going around calling Bartoli
Tony.
Or would that be because you’re only interested in getting
reasonably friendly
with Dr. Stone here?”

“Holy Mother of God, Lean Cuisine, you need to get a grip,” Buzz snapped. He and Kaminsky were exchanging glares when Buzz let loose with an only partly masked yawn. For a moment Kaminsky stared at him in astonishment. Then, very softly, she began to laugh.

“Hours getting too long for you,
Buzz Cut
?” she jeered.

Buzz looked embarrassed. “I’m a little sleep deprived, okay?” He glanced at Charlie. “You might want to get your computer checked out. It kept turning on all by itself the whole time I was trying to sleep.”

Michael chuckled. As Charlie made the connection—Michael had been on her computer in the room in which Buzz had been trying to sleep—her eyes widened with guilty knowledge. What Buzz or Kaminsky might have made of her expression she fortunately didn’t have to find out, because Tony had finished his call and was coming toward them.

“If you two don’t knock it off, I’m going to fire one of you.” Tony gave both of his subordinates warning glances. Kaminsky, still looking mad, didn’t reply, but Buzz muttered
“Sorry”
and Tony, with another hard look at Kaminsky, nodded.

“Ready?” he asked Charlie. Charlie nodded, and they headed toward the hall. He added, “I’d apologize for that little by-play, but you’ve seen it before.”

“It’s okay. I think they’re kind of cute,” Charlie replied.

Tony grinned. “For God’s sake, don’t let Kaminsky hear you say that. I really will have to fire her.”

Charlie laughed. “Don’t worry, I won’t.”

“Do you mind if we take your car?” Tony asked. “I’d like to leave the rental for Kaminsky and Crane.”

“That’s fine.” She was fishing in her purse for her keys as they approached the front door. Tony reached around her to open it for her.

“You planning to drive?” Michael inquired as she produced them. “’Cause I can tell you right now that Dudley’d like to have the keys, but I’m betting he’s going to be too politically correct to ask.”

Charlie’s fingers clenched around her keychain. Whether she’d been about to hand them over or not she had no idea, but now that he’d put the issue of gender equality into play she definitely would not. Lips compressing, she stepped out into the hot, brilliant sunlight, squinted a little, shaded her eyes with her hand, and shot Michael a blistering look as he appeared beside her.

“You’d want to drive, too, you—you
man,”
she mouthed, piling a fair degree of venom on that last word. With Tony so close behind them, her voice wasn’t even as loud as a whisper. But when Michael grinned, she was perfectly sure that he had understood.

“You’re right, but the difference is that
I’m
not worried about being politically correct,” he answered. “I’d just tell you to hand the keys over.”

Unable to reply because Tony, clearly assuming that she had stopped to wait for him, was sliding a proprietary hand around her arm now as he joined her, Charlie gave Michael a fulminating look. It was wasted. He wasn’t looking at her—or Tony. He was looking toward the street.

“Damn,” he said in a totally different tone, and then as Charlie followed his gaze she found herself staring in horror at the tide of reporters rushing at them.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Ken Ewell and Howie Martin, another deputy sheriff whom Charlie knew vaguely, had been parked in their marked cruiser outside of her house since shortly after dawn. They were ordered there by Sheriff Peel when media types had first started arriving in town. (That would be shortly before dawn.) Their mission was to keep the press on the public streets and off private property (such as Charlie’s yard and the yards of her neighbors), and to keep one of Big Stone Gap’s residents (that would be Charlie) from being harassed as the eyes of the nation that had been following on TV the effort to find Jenna McDaniels now turned to where and how she had been found. Although for the last hour there had been satellite trucks and carloads of reporters parked out in front of Charlie’s house, everything had been completely under control until Charlie herself stepped through her own front door.

Then all hell broke loose.

This Ken explained to Charlie in a breathless rush as he and his partner tried and failed to keep the press from completely surrounding her and Tony as they fought their way toward her garage, a detached, shedlike structure at the top of her driveway. By the time they reached it, Tony had his arm wrapped tight around Charlie’s waist and she had her head bent against his shoulder to avoid the intrusive cameras.

“Dr. Stone, is it true that you rescued Jenna McDaniels?”

“What can you tell us about her ordeal, Dr. Stone?”

“Hey, Charlie, look this way!”

“Wait, aren’t you the FBI agent who worked with Dr. Stone on the Boardwalk Killer Case?”

“Yeah, you’re right, it’s Special Agent Anthony Bartoli! Is this another serial killer case, Agent Bartoli?”

The press yelled those and what felt like a hundred other questions at them until Charlie and Tony (and Michael) reached the relative safety of the garage. With Ken and Howie trying to clear reporters from in front of the garage door—she and Tony entered through the people-sized one on the side of the small building—Charlie forgot about asserting her equality and being politically correct and whose car it was anyway and all other possibly pertinent issues except expediency, and handed Tony the keys to her blue Camry.

Bottom line was, he had more practice driving through a horde of reporters than she did. Besides, she understood herself well enough to know that if somebody jumped in front of her bumper, she would hit the brakes. And she’d seen Tony drive a sufficient amount to further know that he would not; she liked to think it was because he trusted whoever it was would get out of his way.

“That was a cluster fuck,” Michael muttered as the Camry made it out of the garage, around the dark blue Lincoln Tony had rented that was clogging up her driveway, and into the street, where it sped away from the media, all of whom had rushed to return to their vehicles to give chase. Ken and Howie had successfully blocked the pursuit by turning their car sideways in the street, but that wouldn’t hold the reporters back long, Charlie knew. Still, it might give them enough time to get to the hospital unimpeded. “Good call letting Dudley drive, by the way.”

The car was small, with lingering traces of new car smell (she’d bought it right before she had moved to Big Stone Gap, so it was only a few months old). It was as stiflingly hot as a blast furnace as the air-conditioning struggled to make a dent in the heat. Michael was in the backseat. Unwilling to do more than cast a quick glance around at him under the pretext of looking out the back window for chasing reporters, Charlie flipped down the passenger-side visor, which came equipped with a small mirror. Of course, she couldn’t see him in it: she had forgotten. But it didn’t matter: the image she’d gotten in that one glance was engraved indelibly on her mind. He was way too big for the cramped space. His legs were folded up in a way that would’ve been uncomfortable if he were alive, and his forearms rested on his knees. The disgusted expression on his face would have made her want to smile if she hadn’t been battling off shivery little flutters of déjà vu. This degree of media interest was actually not as bad as the frenzy that had engulfed her when she had been the teenage survivor of the murder of Holly and her family. It was not as bad as what she had been through in the aftermath of the Boardwalk Killer’s resurgence. But the memories it evoked—the terror, the helplessness, the sense of being both trapped and at bay made her wonder, suddenly, if maybe Michael wasn’t right. Maybe she should simply walk away from her work at Wallen’s Ridge, abandon her research, forget about her determination to find out the building blocks of a serial killer and how such monsters could be identified and stopped, and make a whole new life for herself in which serial killers were part of her past, not her present, and not her future.

The thought that it might be possible for her to do that briefly dazzled her.

But then she thought,
No. If I do that, if I walk away, all those horrible things that happened will have been for nothing. The deaths of Holly and her family, of the other victims, will be just that many more senseless killings. If what I am doing can save even one more life, then that’s what I have to do.

“You okay, babe?” Michael seemed to be able to read her thoughts with uncanny accuracy. She wasn’t sure she liked that. No, she was sure: she didn’t like it. Then she realized that, while she couldn’t see him through the mirror, he could see her. He was reading her face, not her mind.

Frowning, she gave a barely there nod by way of a reply. And snapped the visor back up against the ceiling so that he could no longer see her eyes.

Hah!

“If you can give me directions, I won’t have to stop and fiddle with the GPS,” Tony told her, and, glad of the distraction, Charlie did. Past the church where Michael was buried—as far as she could tell, Michael didn’t even give it a glance—and the Farmer’s Market and Miner’s Park, through the small downtown with its antique-style street lamps on every corner and Little Stone Mountain rising like a hulking, blue-gray sentinel above it, left at Traffic Light five (the lights were numbered one through eight) and finally into the hospital parking lot.

Unlike the town itself, which was light on traffic on Saturday mornings, the parking lot was crowded with vehicles. The hospital was a long, low structure of brick and white stucco with only sixty beds. There were at least that many cars in the parking lot. Charlie’s eyes widened as she saw the crowd of reporters gathered in front of the entrance. Satellite trucks from stations as diverse as their local WAPK to CNN had set up shop on the sweltering blacktop.

“Oh, boy,” Tony said, glancing at her. “I’m afraid there’s nothing for it but to brave the gauntlet.”

“Sneaking in the back isn’t going to work, either: looks like they got the place surrounded,” Michael added. Charlie could feel his eyes on her. “Look, you know you don’t have to do this. Dudley and the gang have been catching serial killers just fine without you. You can hole up in a hotel or something until this is over. If you want to help them, you can do it over the phone.”

She was tempted, of course she was, but only for a second. She gave a quick, negative shake of her head, and Michael said, “Fuck.”

By the time they reached Jenna’s room, Charlie was seriously wishing that there were another choice she could have made. Even after they fought their way through the reporters—the hospital’s security guards had been supplemented by deputies and local cops to keep the media out of the building—there was still the hospital itself to deal with. The area around the emergency room in particular was thick with the phantoms of the recently, violently departed. Even with Michael playing bodyguard, two of them rushed her the moment they realized she could see them. She never did find out what they wanted, because Michael scared them off before they reached her, and with Tony at her side she had to continue on. To make things worse, she found that she was the object of a great deal of unwanted attention from the living, too. At first she couldn’t understand all the sideways glances and nudges and not-quite-discreet-enough pointing fingers. Even though it seemed like almost everyone in the hospital recognized her and was interested enough in her to watch her for as long as she was in sight, that was, surely, only her own paranoia at work.