The Last Time I Saw Her (5 page)

Of course,
overprotective
could have been Michael's middle name. But that didn't mean he wasn't right.

Studying serial killers is my life's work,
came her automatic, inward protest.

So change your life.
God, that caustic rejoinder sounded so much like something Michael might have said that it sent a shiver through her. Was she really going to start hearing him in her head now?

“I appreciate you making the time to see me today.” Hughes had taken a seat in one of the two white plastic chairs that faced her desk. With his arm slung over its back, he turned halfway around to watch her. He dwarfed the small chair, and she was reminded again of what a large man he was. Besides angry,
wary
was how she felt in his company, she decided, as she stopped at the coffeemaker she had just that morning added to her small, windowless, and Spartan office. Other than her desk and chair, the only furnishings were the two plastic visitors' chairs, a tall black file cabinet, an easel with a dry-erase board with data concerning her research subjects, a couple of pictures, and, as of approximately two hours ago, a folding table that held the new coffeemaker.

Because, see, she had a plan.

“I didn't have much choice, did I.” Her tone made it a statement rather than a question. A borderline unfriendly statement. Whatever quirk of chemistry that had set off sparks between her and Michael from the first time he had shuffled in chains into her presence was missing here and now. No matter how much Hughes looked like Michael, she felt not the smallest degree of attraction to him.

He said, “You could have held me off until Monday.”

“I'm busy on Monday. It works better for me to go ahead and get this out of the way today.” Having already made the coffee, she filled two cups, saying as she did so, “I haven't had any coffee today, and I find it much easier to concentrate when I have. I hope you'll join me in a cup. I have sugar, and artificial sweetener, and nondairy creamer if you care for any of that.”

“Black's fine.”

He accepted the cup she handed him without further comment, and it was all she could do to suppress a triumphant smile as he took a sip.

Gotcha,
she thought as she sat down behind her desk. This was the easiest, most efficient way she could think of to obtain a DNA sample from him: already, with that one sip, he would have left DNA on the cup.

If he was Michael's identical twin and the possible source of the DNA on the Southern Slasher's victims, she meant to find out. That coffee cup would be heading for the lab as soon as he left. She'd already made arrangements for a messenger to pick the cup up, and for rush testing.

She took a sip of her own coffee and put her cup down on the desk.

“Was there a reason you were parked in front of my house last night?” she asked, expression bland, tone perfectly polite. Tony's background check had also turned up the fact that Hughes drove a black Shelby GT Mustang. There couldn't be two cars like that in Big Stone Gap.

For a moment, Hughes looked startled. Then he carefully set his cup down on the part of her desk that was closest to him—the action was designed to give himself time to come up with a response, she thought—and smiled ruefully at her. She might almost have fallen for the deliberate charm in that smile if she wasn't already acquainted with Michael's original, and infinitely more charming, version: it was the smile of a guilty man caught out.

“There's not much to do in this town at night,” he said, still smiling at her. At least he was too smart to deny it. As for making her think he was the man she'd glimpsed through the twilight, his confession didn't: again, the car had been pulling away before she'd seen—what she'd seen. “I ate at the inn, drove around, and ended up outside your house. I thought about knocking on your door and asking if we could go ahead and get started on some of this, but I had a feeling I might not be welcome.”

Ya think?
But she didn't say it out loud.

The memory of that sense of foreboding she'd experienced last night was still fresh in her mind.

“You know how it is after you've been away from home for a while. Last night I had a million things to do. And I still do.” Charlie gave him a brief, uncharming smile of her own, then followed up with a pointed look. “As I told you, I can only spare an hour. Shall we get started?”

“Of course.” Hughes leaned forward in his chair, his hands clasped between his knees, his gaze suddenly intent on her face. “Let me start by asking you this: How well did you know Michael Garland?”

For an unguarded moment, as a thousand varied images of Michael flashed through her mind, Charlie didn't reply. That was an impossible question to answer even if she'd wanted to. Her heart said,
As well as it's possible to know anyone in any universe,
but her head warned that maybe, just maybe, she was fooling herself and she didn't know him at all.

See, the thing was, if any objective researcher (such as herself, before she'd committed the ultimate folly of falling in love with her subject) had been asked to choose between suspecting Hughes or suspecting Michael of being the Southern Slasher, Michael would have been the winner, hands down.

From an abusive childhood to a documented history of violence, Michael had so many of the markers of the serial killer he'd been convicted of being that his file would have stood out for her even if she'd been reviewing it without knowing anything else about him. There was no speculation involved about whether or not his DNA—or at least DNA that was a perfect match for his—had been found on the victims: it had been. There was so much other evidence against him—including security video of him leaving a bar with his last victim only a couple of hours before she was found murdered—that any sane investigator would consider the case a slam dunk.

Which, for the court system, was what it had been.

It was only her personal observations, her personal interactions with him, her personal feelings toward him that had persuaded her that he was innocent.

Plus the small anomaly in the evidence that was his watch. A broken and bloodied watch identical to the one she now wore on her arm had been found with the body of the Southern Slasher's last victim, Candace Hartnell. Michael had picked her up in a bar, had sex with her, and then left less than an hour before the woman had been found slaughtered. The watch Charlie wore had the Marine Corps' motto, “Semper fi,” engraved on the back of its case. The watch that had been found with Candace Hartnell had no such engraving. Michael insisted that the unbroken, unbloodied, and engraved watch was his. If that was true, then Michael was innocent, and Charlie believed it was true.

I'm not wrong,
she told the part of her mind that still remained coolly detached from her heart.

That detached part of her mind argued:
You feel that way because he told you he didn't do it. Because of the watch. Because you're in love with him.

Charlie was briefly stymied. Then, slowly, she realized: it wasn't only her heart telling her that he was innocent.

I feel that way because I'm a highly skilled psychiatrist whose specialty is compiling forensic profiles of serial killers. Tops in my field, the winner of a NARSAD. Clinical observations are an important part of what I do, and my clinical observations of Michael have led me to conclude that he is not a serial killer.

Bottom line:
I'm an expert, and I believe him.

So there.

“I met with him three times in a clinical setting. I interviewed him, tested him, observed him,” she replied. “He presented no outward indicators of antisocial personality disorder”—the catchall diagnosis most commonly associated with serial killers—“his tests were inconclusive”—largely because he'd been messing with her by giving less-than-truthful answers as she'd administered them—“and he came across as intelligent and personable.”

“Charismatic psychopath” was what her original diagnosis of Michael had been, but she wasn't going to tell Hughes that. Anyway, she had since concluded that her diagnosis had been influenced by her preconceived view of him as the convicted serial killer he had been presented to her as.

“Did he ever talk about his background?” Hughes asked.

“No.” Not willingly, anyway, and not under clinical conditions. Certainly she wasn't about to share with Hughes anything that he couldn't find out by reading Michael's files. “What background information I have on him is in his file.”

She knew it by heart: Michael had been given over to foster care at the age of seven months; he was adopted by Stan and Susan Garland at age three; his adoptive parents divorced when he was five; his mother remarried when he was seven; the ensuing marital relationship was abusive and included frequent documented domestic violence calls, until one night when Michael was eleven he shot his stepfather to death to defend his mother and himself. His mother subsequently rejected him, giving up her parental rights. Michael was sent to a Georgia state juvenile facility until he ran away at age fourteen. Those were the facts. The damage that had been done to a sensitive child was something that she'd only once or twice glimpsed in his eyes.

Hughes sat back in his chair. “I guess what I'm trying to do is figure out how it is that he looks so much like me.”

It was all Charlie could do to keep her face impassive. Was that statement intended as a kind of fishing expedition to find out how much she knew—or suspected—about his possible genetic relationship to Michael? Hughes sounded perfectly sincere in his bewilderment, but—
Be careful. You need to think this through.

She supposed it was possible that he'd never known about Michael before he landed the murder case he was investigating. There she paused, seized by a sudden thought:
If there even is a murder case.
Because that was an enormous coincidence, too. What were the chances that a man who looked exactly like Michael, the convicted Southern Slasher, should land another murder case possibly involving the Southern Slasher?

Her brain was not up to higher math at the moment, but she thought the chances were roughly between slim and none.

So what was Hughes's end game in coming here?

Her best professional analysis of his motivation yielded
no clue.

Hmm.

“I can't answer that,” she said.

“No, I suppose you can't. What is it they say about everybody having a double somewhere?” He flashed that ruefully charming smile again. As far as she was concerned, it missed its mark by a mile. “Looks like I found mine.”

There was actually no validity to that premise, and there were no scientific studies to back it up. But Charlie didn't say so. At this point, she was doing her best to soak in any little clue that might help her determine why Hughes was here.

Hughes picked up his coffee cup, drank, and continued, “In your opinion, is it likely that Garland had a partner or some kind of associate with him when he killed?”

“No. I feel that it's highly
un
likely.” If her tone was short, Charlie couldn't help it. Michael's personality was such that if he had been a killer, he would have killed alone. But he wasn't, so that point was moot.

“What do you know about his military background?”

“Very little.” At least…God, it really would have helped if she'd gotten some sleep: her brain just wasn't up to speed today. The truthful answer was that she knew nothing she cared to share. She tried to get the conversation off on another tangent. “What was the date of the murder your client's been charged with? Knowing that could help me provide you with some insight.”

He told her the date, which was approximately ten months before Michael was killed.

“Mr. Garland had been in custody for over four years at that point,” she pointed out. “Even if he'd had an accomplice and the accomplice was the perpetrator, it would have been nearly impossible for the murder you're interested in to be similar enough to the others to be identified as the Southern Slasher's work if it was committed by anyone other than the Southern Slasher. Given the length of time separating the crimes and the fact that one of the principals was absent, the methodology would have changed, probably to a significant degree.”

“So maybe it was a copycat,” Hughes said. “Serial killers get copycats, right? Like rock stars get groupies?”

Before Charlie could answer, her cell phone rang. She would have ignored it, but a glance at the screen told her that the caller was Tony. If Tony was calling her, she assumed it was important.

“Excuse me, I need to take this,” she said, and went out into the hall. Johnson and another guard whose name she didn't know lurked near the library. When they looked her way inquiringly, she waved them off:
I don't need anything.

“I wanted you to know that we found a juvenile record on Hughes,” Tony said without preamble. “It's been expunged, but it's there.”

Charlie felt a flutter of excitement. “What did he do?”

“Set a neighbor's house on fire, apparently.”

There it was: a marker. Fire-starting was classic. Her heart beat faster.

“Details?” she asked.

“I'm working on getting hold of the complete file. But I wanted to go ahead and let you know that there is something there, so you should probably stay away from the guy until we can get this pinned down.”

“Too late. He's in my office. I gave him coffee.”

“You gave him coffee?”

“To get his DNA. On the cup,” Charlie explained. “It's sitting on the edge of my desk as we speak. I've already made arrangements to have it rush-tested at a lab I trust.”

“Charlie—”

“Could you do something else for me? Look into this murder he's here investigating?”

She thought she heard a sigh. The sound made her smile.

Tony said, “You're determined to wade in here, aren't you?”

“Yes. Look, I have to go. I had to excuse myself to come out into the hall and talk to you. I'll call you later, okay?”

“This isn't your—”

“Thanks, Tony.” With that, she disconnected before he could say anything more.

Another piece of the puzzle had just fallen into place, and she felt a warm little glow of vindication. There were always early markers with serial killers. The trick lay in finding them.

“What files do you need?” she briskly asked Hughes as she walked back into her office. Now that she had his DNA sample and Tony was having him checked out in greater depth, she was ready to be rid of him. Looking at him bruised her heart. Being suspicious of him was nerve-racking. And this cat-and-mouse game they were playing—well, that she was playing; she hadn't yet decided what he was doing—required almost more mental energy than she was capable of mustering, especially in her sleep-deprived, grief-stricken state.

If he was what she thought he was, there would be plenty of time to deal with him as he deserved later. When the DNA results came back.

He watched her walk back behind her desk. “Whatever you have on Michael Garland. Everything.”

Charlie gestured at the cardboard box full of papers that she'd had copied for him that morning. It sat on the floor beside the file cabinet. It was a large box, and it overflowed with material pertaining to Michael. By the time he'd gotten to her, Michael had been through a lot of interviews, a lot of testing, and a trial, the verdict of which he had been in the process of appealing. That meant tons of stuff.

But she wasn't handing over everything. Like, for example, Michael's watch. It was tucked up beneath the long sleeve of her lab coat. She touched it reflexively, like a talisman, her fingers searching out its heavy silver band. It was hers now, the only tangible thing of his she had.

“I want something in return,” she said.

Hughes frowned at her. Again, that frown was pure Michael, and it pinched at her heart. “Like what?”

“A copy of your file on the murder that brought you here.”

He pursed his lips. “I don't know if I can do that. There are confidentiality issues involved.”

She wouldn't take no for an answer. “Consider me a consulting expert. Which, since you're here asking me questions and preparing to review my files on Mr. Garland, is what I technically already am.”

“The court order in my briefcase doesn't say anything about me having to give you something in return for what you're legally required to turn over to me.”

They looked at each other measuringly. Going through all the material she was giving him on Michael was going to take days, maybe weeks, and he had to know that. To get what she wanted, which was a chance to review his file, she was prepared to sweeten the pot.

“I'm familiar with the details of the Southern Slasher murders. I can look at the murder your client is accused of committing and tell you the similarities and differences much faster than you can wade through all that. In fact, I can give you an accurate assessment of the likelihood of the perpetrators being the same by Monday. If you give me the file.”

Hughes frowned.

“I don't—” he began, but before he could get any further the sudden loud shriek of an institution-wide alarm going off made Charlie jump.

“What the hell?” Hughes said, as Charlie realized what the alarm had to be.

“Fire alarm,” she informed Hughes, who was grimacing at the earsplitting whoops. Grabbing her purse, she headed for the door, passing him on the way. She had to raise her voice to be heard. “They're anal about clearing everybody out, so we have to go. Come on.”

She knew the procedure: everyone in the administrative wing proceeded down the stairs to the west parking lot. As this was the least restricted part of the prison except for the visitors' area, they weren't herded into the exercise pens or the rec yard or other confined outdoor spaces. Instead, civilians such as herself simply milled around on the asphalt until the all-clear sounded. Once they were out of the building, prisoners were segregated from the others and guarded in a designated area until they could be returned to their cell blocks.