The Last Kiss Goodbye (9 page)

And all you’d know about him is what you would know about any other death row prisoner who was your research subject.

She took a step back from him.

“Thank you, Charlie, for saving my life.” She mimicked his mocking comment from earlier, then faltered as she remembered that it wasn’t exactly his life that she had saved. “Or whatever.”

“Thank you. For saving my whatever. Though I have to say, you’re not looking any too happy about having snatched me off of the highway to hell.”

“The thing is, I keep asking myself how evil you have to be to find yourself on the highway to hell to begin with.”

The look he gave her was impossible to interpret. “I’ve got a question for you, buttercup: if you really think I’m so evil, then what the hell are you doing with me?”

His eyes bored into hers: she couldn’t hold his gaze. With a small grimace she turned away from him, spotted the glass over the candle, and, glad for something to do, carefully lifted it off.

“Let’s get this straight: I am
not
with you. At least, not on purpose.” She replaced her toothbrush and toothpaste in the glass and carefully sat it back on the ledge above the sink. Then she placed the candle beside it. In case, she told herself, she ever needed to use it again. Although whether such a thing would work twice she had no idea. “Just because you happen to have barged into my life does not mean that I’m with you.”

“I think it’s the sex that means that.” His voice was dry.

She threw him a quick, charged look.

“I—I—” Stuttering like that was idiotic. She was not the kind of woman who, when confronted with an awkward situation, stuttered. Her chin came up, and she turned to face him. “I’m not with you, okay? No way in hell am I
with
the ghost of a serial killer.”

“I’ll give you the ghost, but I’m no serial killer. Come on, Charlie, you know I didn’t kill those women.”

Surprised to find herself suddenly angry, she glared at him. “I do not know that.”

“Yes, you do, if for no other reason than because I’m standing here telling you so.”

A momentary lightness which she identified as hope fluttered inside her. “So I’m supposed to believe you in the face of all evidence?” Then she recalled said evidence and felt hope crash and burn. The case against him was overwhelming. Seven beautiful young women, brutally slashed to death. His DNA had been found on every victim and at every crime scene. Eyewitnesses had identified him. Security cameras had recorded him. He had no alibi for any of the crimes. The list went on and on. Even the fact that she was considering the possibility that he might be telling the truth concerned her. The stock in trade of a charismatic psychopath, which had been her diagnosis of him, was the ability to convince everyone around him that he was charming and likable and trustworthy. It was camouflage, similar to a chameleon’s ability to change its coloring to match its surroundings. She
knew
that
. Unless I’m wrong
.
Unless the cops and the FBI and the judge and the jury and the evidence and the whole damned legal system is wrong.
Listening to that tiny voice of dissent inside her head, Charlie gritted her teeth. If her emotions started trumping her intellect, there would be no place left for her that was safe and true. “In your dreams.”

His eyes hardened as they slid over her face. “You wouldn’t believe me if I swore it on a stack of Bibles, would you? I know you: when it comes to everything except your damned ghosts, you believe in the infallibility of authority, of evidence, of the man. If some damned court says it’s so then it must be. But here’s the best part: I don’t care what you think you believe, somewhere deep inside you know I didn’t kill those women. You wouldn’t be giving me the time of day otherwise, much less sleeping with me.”

“I am not—” Charlie began hotly, about to deny that she was sleeping with him. The word was
slept,
as in past tense. Singular.

“You did,” he interrupted ruthlessly. “Have a little faith in your instincts for a change.”

A sharp knock on the bedroom door made Michael swear.

“Dr. Stone?” Same man. Same summons. It was all Charlie could do not to grit her teeth.

“I’m coming,” Charlie called back, and, with a narrow-eyed look at Michael, started to suit the action to her words.

He didn’t move.

“Do you mind?” If she sounded a little cranky, well, she had reason:
mess
did not begin to describe the situation she had gotten herself into with him. And reminding herself that none of it, not one teeny tiny bit (well, okay, except for maybe the sex part), was her fault didn’t help at all. When he still didn’t move in response to that very pointed hint, she edged around him, because walking right through him was beyond her for the moment. “
I
have better things to do than stand around and argue with you. Like go talk to the man who keeps banging on the fricking door.”

“You’re determined not to believe me, aren’t you? Fine. If it gives you a thrill to imagine that you’re fucking a murderous psychopath, so be it. Seems a little sick, but probably that’s just me.”

Which was infuriating on so many levels, Charlie didn’t even know where to begin.

“You know what? I’m not talking to you anymore. I have a houseful of other problems to deal with.”

“Before you give me the silent treatment, think you could explain what you did with the whole glass and candle thing? So I know what to expect if anything should come up.” He was following her through the bedroom. Of course he was following her through the bedroom. After what she had done, for all she knew, he would be following her everywhere she went for the rest of her life. The only thing more horrifying than that thought was the one that he would not be. Who knew for how long the action she had taken would tether him to her? Days, weeks, years?

All she could be sure of was that he was here now. The future was up in the air.

In an effort to shake off the impossible-to-sort-out combination of anger and doubt and regret and relief that she was experiencing, her reply was coolly brisk.

“When you die, you’re supposed to move on, you know. That’s how it works. Sometimes spirits will stay for a few days, until they can accept that they’re dead, but then they go on to where they’re supposed to be. Since you weren’t leaving voluntarily, a portal was opening to transport you to”—in his case, she didn’t even want to try to put a name to his probable final destination—“the next place. That’s why you were flickering. What lighting the candle did was go ahead and open the portal all the way, and then when the resulting vortex got strong enough to pull you in I slammed the portal shut again by dropping the glass over the candle before it could actually take you. Slamming the portal closed like that makes the vortex collapse. It can’t open again, at least not in the same general area. In theory.”

“In theory?”

“Tam said that’s how it works. I’ve never done it myself, so I’m taking her word for it.” Stopping at her closet, keeping her voice down because if she could hear the hubbub in the hall—which she could—then it was pretty obvious that she could be overheard, too, she shoved the folding, shutter-style doors apart.

“Close your eyes,” she ordered.

“What?”

“Close your eyes.” Her hands were already at her buttons as she looked around at him. “I need to change my blouse. I don’t need you to watch.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” But when she glared at him, he obediently closed his eyes. Stripping off her damp and bloodstained shirt while casting him a suspicious glance—as far as she could tell his eyes were staying shut—she dropped the soiled garment into the laundry basket on the floor of her closet.

“Nice bra,” he said. “Sexy.”

It was, pale pink and lacy and low cut, carefully chosen along with a pair of matching panties because when she’d gotten dressed she had thought Tony might be seeing her in her undies later. That hadn’t happened, thanks in large part to the infuriating creature behind her. As she snatched a leaf green replacement blouse from its hanger, the look she shot him should have fried his eyeballs. If his eyes had been open to encounter it, that is. But they weren’t, and—

She couldn’t be sure they ever had been. In fact, she suspected that they had stayed closed, that he was merely teasing her. For all his faults, which were many and varied, he had never actually gone the creepy Peeping Tom route on her. Which, given what he was, would have been ridiculously easy.

“You’re not funny,” she said crossly, shrugging into her shirt. At that he opened his eyes and grinned at her. And got a look at her bra after all, between the parted edges of her shirt. “Hey, I didn’t say you could open your eyes yet.”

Knock, knock.

“Dr. Stone?” It was the same man again, sounding as if he knew she was standing right there on the other side of the door, a mere few feet away from him. Damn it, had she forgotten to lower her voice on that last exchange with Michael?

“Coming,” she called back. Finishing up with her buttons, she remembered something and gave Michael a quick, admonishing frown as she whispered, “By the way, you need to stay close. Collapsing a portal only works for a certain amount of space around it, apparently. Tam said, to be safe, we should consider that space about fifty feet.”

“Let me get this straight: now I have to stay within fifty feet of you?” His slow grin made her want to throw something at him. She knew how his mind worked: dirty thoughts abounded. “Works for me.”

“Yes, well, I’m not so sure it works for me. This is only temporary. Just until I can come up with something else,” she warned in an impatient whisper, and opened the door before he could reply.

“Dr. Stone.” A bullet-headed bald guy in a police uniform greeted her. Maybe five-eleven, fortyish, relatively fit–looking, he stood right outside the door with his fist raised, obviously having been about to knock again. If he was surprised that the door had opened so opportunely, he recovered fast. “I’m Detective Todd Sager.” He held out his hand. Stepping into the hall, Charlie shook it with a polite murmur. Sager continued, “If you could come downstairs with me, there’s something I’d like you to take a look at.”

“Sexy shoes, too,” the curse she was afflicted with said. “Oh, right, you had a hot date with FBI guy tonight. I get it. Wow, Doc, you were pulling out all the stops. Things had played out different, right now you might have been wrapping up your evening right over there in your bed.”

Since snapping
shove it
was not an option, she didn’t.

“Certainly,” she answered Sager. Having slipped back into her professional persona with the ease of long habit, Charlie managed a tight nod, and in response to Sager’s gesture preceded him toward the stairs. Her knees felt a little wobbly, and she had the beginnings of a killer headache: a reaction, no doubt, to the crisis-filled last half hour. A police photographer was busy taking pictures of the corner by the stairs where she had last seen Jenna. A record was being made of the wet spot on the floor where Jenna had crouched, plus the droplets of blood surrounding it. Charlie was busy processing the rise and fall of voices, the clicking of the camera and the rattle of metal and shuffle of footsteps, the swirl of activity around her and on the stairs and in the hall below when, just as she reached the top of the stairs, a woman’s piercing scream stopped her in her tracks. A startled glance at Sager was all that it took to tell her that the scream causing the hair to rise on the back of her neck was unheard by him. No one else seemed to hear it, either. Looking down, she could see that Jenna, eyes closed, swathed in blankets, was lying on a stretcher in the hall below. Surrounded by paramedics in a hallway filled to overflowing with cops, she looked like she was either asleep or unconscious. A square of white gauze covered the wound on her forehead. An IV drip had been inserted into her arm.

The scream was coming from a second dark-haired, wet, and bloody young woman. Flying across the hall toward the oblivious Jenna, the woman held a jagged rock in her upraised hand. Even as Charlie’s heart jumped, even as she started to call out and alert Jenna, alert the people around her, stop the terrible thing that was obviously getting ready to happen, she realized that what she was seeing wasn’t a living attacker at all, but a phantom.

A phantom whom, even as Charlie watched, went through the motions of bashing Jenna’s head in with the rock, slamming the jagged edge down into the pale forehead again and again and again. Without making a mark or disturbing so much as a hair on Jenna’s head. Since it had no corporeal existence, the phantom rock passed right through the living would-be victim’s flesh.

Even as the girl wielding it screamed over and over again, “You murdered me, you bitch! You murdered me!”

CHAPTER FIVE

Charlie’s mind was spinning. What the phantom was saying—accusing Jenna of murdering her—was so off the wall that it couldn’t possibly be true. Could it?

A low whistle from behind her told Charlie that Michael was witnessing the same thing. She almost turned to say something to him before she caught herself. As far as everyone else in the whole world was concerned, he—and the bloody, screaming phantom in the hallway below—was not there. If she wanted to retain any credibility at all, she could not let herself forget that.