The Last Kiss Goodbye (12 page)

Charlie shot Michael a narrow-eyed
mind your own business
look. Replying to him was, of course, out of the question.

So she continued talking to Tony instead.

“—have a survivor, we have an envelope with handwriting on it as well as other possible trace evidence, we have a knife that may or may not be a murder weapon, we have—”

“We’re out the door,” Tony interrupted her to say. “Thirty minutes, max.”

That was exactly the response Charlie had hoped for. Tony and his team were as invested in the apprehension of serial killers as she was in the studying of them. She knew how good they were at their jobs because she had watched them work: on the very day that Michael had been killed, Tony and his team had come to her and asked for her help in finding the Boardwalk Killer, the serial killer who had murdered her best friend, Holly, and Holly’s family when she and Holly were only seventeen. Charlie had been staying the night with Holly at the time, and had hidden from the killer and survived. When the Boardwalk Killer had resurfaced after fifteen years, she had been reluctant (okay, afraid) to get involved—but she had done it anyway. As a result, the Boardwalk Killer had been captured, and, not incidentally, Charlie had been freed of the secret terror she had lived with ever since she’d survived the attacker who had killed Holly: that the Boardwalk Killer would, sooner or later, come back and kill her, too. And in the process, she had been enormously impressed with Tony and his team.

Now there was another madman, more victims, fresh horror. Another serial killer who had turned his eyes toward her. Simply thinking about it made Charlie imagine that she could feel the darkness closing in.
Her
darkness, her own private one, the one that came from looking evil in the face and barely surviving. The darkness of her own mortal fear.

She could feel a tightening in her chest.

I don’t know if I can go through this again.

Tony was saying, “Did you say the local police are there now? Could you let me speak to whoever’s in charge?”

Stay in the moment.
“That would be Detective Todd Sager.”

Passing her phone to Sager, Charlie told him, “This is FBI Special Agent Tony Bartoli, from the Special Circumstances Division out of Quantico. They’re an elite team whose sole purpose is to track and catch serial killers. They’re on their way here right now.”

“Well, hell, there goes the neighborhood,” Michael said with disgust, leaning back against the breakfast bar and folding his arms over his chest. Charlie shot him an angry look. Serial killers were evil by definition, and no matter how much he proclaimed his innocence, Michael was a convicted serial killer. She ought to hate him. She ought to fear him. She definitely ought to have let him go to his just reward when she’d had the chance.
He
was one of
them
.

You know I’m innocent
. Oh, God, she didn’t. The sad truth almost certainly was, he had said the words she needed to hear, and she just wanted to believe.

“Oh, so now you’re mad at
me
?” Michael said. “Nice.”

“I don’t think—” were the first words Sager said into the phone. Then he was silent, listening, finally nodding. “I’ll pass the word.” He looked at Charlie. “Special Agent Bartoli wants to speak to you,” he said, and handed the phone back to her.

“Sit tight. We’ll be with you shortly,” Tony told her, while Sager barked at the other cops in the room, “Everybody, change of plan. We’re going to wait until Special Agent Bartoli’s team gets here to go forward.” He pointed to two cops near the back door. “Get out there and tell those guys outside to hold up. If we’ve got a crime scene, the last thing we want to do is contaminate it.”

“You want I should finish up with the door?” The technician who was dusting for fingerprints asked. Kneeling on the floor below him, another cop was measuring the distance from the edge of the door to an area of damage in the door’s lower third that hadn’t been there previously and that Charlie assumed was the result of something like a hard kick. Looking at it and realizing how ridiculously easy it had been for a killer to gain access to her house made her skin crawl. What had she been thinking, to imagine that she could live in a world where there was no need to keep a gun for protection, or to have a burglar alarm or something more than an ordinary, run-of-the mill lock on her doors? When had wishful thinking become her
modus operandi
? “In this rain, I wouldn’t want to wait.”

Sager hesitated. Then he nodded. “Go ahead.”

When this guy’s caught, I’ll be safe again. And there will be one less monster in the world.

That was the thought that steadied Charlie’s nerves, calmed her down, helped her pull herself together. Mentally, she took a deep breath and stood tall.

I’m not a scared teenager anymore. I’m an expert on serial killers. So this time the Gingerbread Man has messed with the wrong expert.

“Did Jenna tell you where she had come from?” Charlie asked Sager as, Tony having disconnected, she slid her phone into her pocket again. If she didn’t have her emotions totally under control yet, well, she was working on it. Under the circumstances, there was no shame in taking a few moments to adjust.

Sager shook his head. “No. At least, she wasn’t real specific. She was crying too hard to get anything of much value out of her, but she did say she ran down the mountain. Since she wound up at your back door, I figure she must have come down Big Rock Trail. Muddy as it’s bound to be, she must have left some tracks. I figure we can follow them back.”

Charlie nodded. Big Rock Trail was the dirt path that she favored for her almost daily runs. Starting only a few yards beyond her back fence, it wound up through the thick piney woods of Smoke Mountain all the way to the top of the ridge. She would have worried about the downpour washing away any tracks Jenna might have left, except for the fact that at this time of year the canopy was so dense she couldn’t imagine much rainfall got through. Sager was apparently aware of that, too.

“The screamer said Teen Queen killed her,” said Michael. “You say the killer is somebody called the Gingerbread Man. Want to explain to me what’s up with that?”

Charlie caught herself just as she was about to answer, and almost had to bite her tongue to hold the words back. The glare she gave him this time was downright threatening. Fortunately Sager was talking to the fingerprint technician who apparently—from the fact that he was closing the back door—had finished, as had the cop who had been measuring the damage on the door and was now on his feet writing something on a clipboard. Point was, Sager wasn’t watching her; otherwise, no telling what he would have made of her fierce scowl at nothing.

“Ooo,” Michael said. “There’s that
you’re really pissing me off now
look of yours. You were always giving me that one back at the Ridge. Turned me on then. Turns me on now.”

Bite me,
her eyes said, but having a one-sided argument, she was discovering, only actually worked for the side who could talk. She might be seething inside, but Charlie was proud of her own self-control: she fell back on the one weapon she had that she knew from experience actually kind of bugged him, and ignored him. Pointedly.

“So what can you tell me about this Gingerbread Man?” Sager asked her as two of the cops he’d been talking to headed across the kitchen for the hall, signaling to a couple of others who fell in behind them. In response to her look questioning this mini-exodus, Sager said, “They’re going to be putting together some equipment so we can head up the mountain.” He added hastily, in response to what she could only assume was a change in her facial expression:”We won’t actually go until Special Agent Bartoli’s team gets here.”

“Did I hear you say there’s a serial killer in town?” Freed from the cop who’d been questioning him, Ken came over to join Sager. Both of them looked at Charlie expectantly. At the breakfast bar, Michael lifted his eyebrows at her. The silent message she took from that was
: So, see, I’m not talking. You want me to keep it up, you talk.

“Fine. Um, yes.” After that first snapped-out slip of the tongue, she was careful to moderate her tone and direct her reply to Ken and Sager rather than Michael: “The Gingerbread Man is fairly unique in the annals of serial killers in that he doesn’t actually kill the majority of his victims himself. What he has done historically is kidnap three people at a time and force them to kill one another. He appears to try to match them in terms of gender, with a lesser correlation in age and body size although there seems to be a degree of correlation with those factors, too. Sometimes the victims know one another, sometimes they don’t. In both of the last two years, he has kidnapped three disparate groups of three people within a period of about a month. Then he goes dormant for another year. As far as I know, the group in which Jenna McDaniels was a part is the first group for this, the third year. There have been five survivors if you include Jenna McDaniels tonight, which I do, and much of what we know we’ve learned from them. The survivors consistently tell us that they were put into some kind of confined area together, given weapons, and told they would all be killed unless they started killing one another. They were promised that the last one standing would be released alive provided that whoever survived had participated in the killing of at least one of the other victims. The Gingerbread Man appears to keep his promise, although it’s difficult to tell because only two of the survivors have admitted to investigators that they actually killed anyone. But they were released by the Gingerbread Man, which indicates that they fulfilled the conditions he set for them.”

“So if Teen Queen was let go because she was the winner in a cage fight to the death, why was she screaming her head off about a man with a gun who was chasing her?” Michael asked.

So much for him not talking. Well, she hadn’t expected it to last. Charlie looked at him, put her nose in the air, and deliberately transferred her attention to Sager, who said slowly, as if her words were just starting to compute for him: “Are you saying that Jenna McDaniels herself might have killed those other two girls she was telling us about?”

Bingo,
Charlie thought, but that was one more answer she couldn’t give.

“If she did, it was because she had no choice,” she ended up saying. Revealing what she knew through the phantom girl wasn’t possible, so she couldn’t definitively say yes. “In the environment in which the victims find themselves, it’s strictly kill or be killed.”

“Come on, Charlie, talk to me,” Michael said impatiently. “You really think you’re going to be able to treat me like a potted plant?”

Since she caught herself shooting him a dirty look in response, the inescapable answer was, obviously not. She gave up: because he’d asked a legitimate question as opposed to simply being annoying, she would try to answer. To all appearances, she hoped, she was simply providing additional information to Sager and Ken.

“The first two survivors were simply let go. The last two, not counting Jenna, were apparently chased by the Gingerbread Man after he released them. All three, and I’m including Jenna in this, reported that he was armed with a gun. All three reported that when he let them go, he told them to run, then came after them. They were sure he was going to kill them, too.”

Ken said, “Since there are eyewitnesses, I’m assuming law enforcement has a description of—what did you call him, the Gingerbread Man?—on file somewhere?”

“He wears a mask,” Charlie answered. “We have eyewitness descriptions of that.”

Michael said, “Don’t serial killers usually have butch names like the Boardwalk Killer and the Bind, Torture, Kill Killer? I mean, when I was on trial the news channels were calling me the Southern Slasher, for cripe’s sake. What is this guy, the sissy serial killer? Where’d anybody come up with a name like the Gingerbread Man?”

“It’s from the nursery rhyme,” Charlie answered, and immediately gave herself a mental smack—she would save the glare at Michael for a time when it wouldn’t simply serve to underline the fact that as far as anyone watching was concerned she was conversing with thin air—and transferred her gaze to Sager and Ken. “The reason he’s called the Gingerbread Man is from the nursery rhyme. You know, ‘Run! Run! As fast as you can! You can’t catch me, I’m the Gingerbread Man!’ Because he told several of his surviving victims to run, and because four times that I am aware of he has sent or left a letter addressed to someone in authority or an expert he wants to match wits with, saying
‘You can’t catch me.’
” She finished a little lamely, “I just thought you’d want to know.”

“Debbie reads that nursery rhyme to the kids.” Ken sounded appalled.

Michael said, “So what you’re telling me is that now the sick bastard wants to match wits with
you
?”

Charlie gave a truncated nod. The icy little prickle that snaked down her spine as she acknowledged the truth of that was something she couldn’t do anything about.

Soldier through the fear.
She had done it before. She could do it now. No, she
would
do it now.