The Last Victim (15 page)

“I was hoping it would take a while.” Bartoli whipped the SUV out onto the road, shifted into drive, and steered around the news vans that were partially blocking the way. Flipping down the passenger visor, Charlie watched through the inset makeup mirror as the news crews broke ranks and raced for their vans to follow. “I was hoping they would focus on the local search headquarters in town and leave us alone.”

“Think we’ll be lucky enough that they’ll just identify Dr. Stone as a noted serial killer expert we’ve brought in and leave it at that?”

“No.” Bartoli’s face registered no emotion. “So far, we haven’t caught a single break in this entire investigation. No reason to think we’ll catch one now.”

“You think they’re going to publicly identify me as the sole survivor of the original Boardwalk Killer murders?” Charlie’s heart started pumping hard at the prospect. The nightmares that had haunted her for years seemed suddenly way closer to reality than she could bear to think about: ice-cold terror filled her veins as the scene at the Palmers’ popped into her brain. If the killer knew she was here, knew that there was a high probability she could identify him, what would he do?

Come after me
, was her immediate, visceral response. Her second thought was,
I should have stayed away
.

Panic made her chest feel tight.

I need to get out of here. I need to hide
.

Then she thought of Bayley Evans, and managed to get a grip.
She needs me
.

“I’d say there’s a good chance.” Bartoli’s tone was grim.

“You think maybe we should contact the press, explain the situation, ask them not to out her?” The last one to do so, Crane hastily fastened his seat belt with a
click
as, reaching the closest intersection, Bartoli jetted through it just as the light was changing, drawing an indignant honk from another motorist. The purpose, Charlie figured, was to lose any remaining reporters. The near miss inches from their rear bumper as the emptying-the-beach traffic resumed its stampede toward town made Charlie’s lips purse. Then, looking in the mirror in time to catch the news vans screeching to a stop on the other side of the intersection, she silently gave Bartoli kudos for his maneuver.

“Tell me you’re not actually naïve enough to think that would do any good.” Kaminsky shot Crane a derisive look.

“I think that if they find out who Dr. Stone is, whether because we tell them or through some other means, it’s way too good a story to hope they’ll keep it quiet,” Bartoli intervened. “If the news breaks, we’ll just have to step up our protection efforts. For one thing, Kaminsky, you may need to move into Dr. Stone’s suite with her.”

“I don’t think that would be necessary,” Charlie objected hastily, appalled at the prospect.

“I’m right across the hall,” Kaminsky protested at almost the same time, sounding equally appalled. Breaking off, the two of them exchanged measuring glances in the makeup mirror.

“I feel perfectly safe with Agent Kaminsky across the hall,” Charlie said. “In order to function optimally, I need sufficient rest, and I don’t sleep well unless I have a certain amount of privacy.”

“Anyway, the walls are thin as paper. I can hear everything that goes on in there, believe me,” Kaminsky put in. Once again the two women exchanged measuring looks. Charlie was left wondering what, exactly, Kaminsky had heard. Not Garland; that would be impossible. But maybe her part of their conversation? Well, if it came up, she would just have to claim that she’d been on the phone.

“We’ll see how it goes.” Bartoli didn’t sound convinced.

Kaminsky rolled up the window finally, as they headed south down N.C. 12, also known as Beach Road, toward Nags Head. To the left, the view was simply spectacular: sand dunes, rolling ocean, purpling sky. To the right, colorful, tightly bunched beach communities
thinned into funky little clusters of houses dotted with convenience stores, gas stations, and the occasional strip mall. Toilets, showers, bathhouses, and picnic shelters lined the seventy miles of beaches. The archipelago they were traveling through narrowed the farther south they went, until it was no more than a long, curving finger of bridge-connected land, and soon they could see both Albemarle Sound on the right and the Atlantic Ocean on the left. Either the news vans weren’t allowed to leave the area immediately around Kill Devil Hills or Bartoli had successfully lost them, because they weren’t being followed anymore. After about twenty minutes, Charlie felt confident enough of that to relax.

“Did anybody interview those two persons of interest I found? The ones living in RVs in local campgrounds? Martin Blumenthal and D. L. Jones, who were in a mental hospital and a prison, respectively, for the last fifteen years?” Kaminsky asked.

“I did,” Crane said. “Neither is the right age. Plus, Jones is black, and both have alibis.”

“I knew that was too easy,” Kaminsky responded gloomily.

“Here we are.” Bartoli pulled off into a lushly green enclave marked with a discreet sign announcing their destination: the Sanderling. It was, Charlie had learned from various bits of conversation on the way, one of North Carolina’s finest resorts. Charlie flipped up the visor in order to get a better look at it. A line of cars preceded them, making their progress necessarily slow. The long drive through acres of manicured lawns was shaded by twin rows of giant oaks bearded with lashings of silvery Spanish moss. Masses of brilliantly colored flowers lay in lavish beds backed by gray stone walls. A golf course complete with players teeing off and carts zooming around the paths was visible in the distance. Charlie’s eyes widened as they rounded a bend and what looked to be an eighteenth-century plantation house came within view. Arriving cars pulled beneath a canopied porte cochere, where red-jacketed valets ushered the occupants out before parking their vehicles. A steady stream of well-dressed patrons trooped up the wide steps to the wraparound verandah and from there to the front door.

“Hope you brought your wallet, boss.” Kaminsky’s tone made it clear that she was getting the same sense of this-place-is-way-expensive
that Charlie was. Glancing back, Charlie saw Kaminsky was using the tinted window as a makeshift mirror to smooth her hair.

“Crane’s paying.” Bartoli didn’t crack a smile as he flicked a glance at Crane in the rearview mirror, but Charlie could still see his eyes: they twinkled.

“I’m not the one with the Bureau’s Amex,” Crane replied. “Or the expense account.”

“Eat light,” Bartoli ordered, sounding as if he was only partly joking. “I don’t know if you heard, but Uncle Sam’s cracking down on expense accounts these days.”

“Guess I can forget about ordering that bottle of Dom Perignon, then.” Kaminsky’s tone was dry.

“I thought you couldn’t drink alcohol,” Crane said. “What with being a Scientologist and all.”

“You thought wrong,” Kaminsky retorted even as Charlie, upon hearing the other woman’s religious affiliation, experienced an “ah-hah” moment. She was kind of fuzzy on the details, but she was pretty sure Scientologists didn’t believe in psychiatry, which explained a fair amount about Kaminsky’s attitude toward her. “Anyway, just because I was raised as a Scientologist doesn’t make me a Scientologist now. I’m nonpracticing.”

“I don’t think you can do that,” Crane said, as the SUV reached the head of the line at last and pulled to a stop beneath the scarlet canopy.

“You don’t know anything about it,” Kaminsky answered caustically. “And you’re never going to.”

Then the driver’s door and Charlie’s were opened simultaneously by a pair of solicitous valets. As Charlie slid out, she spotted an old man following the couple ahead of them up the stairs. Her eyes widened. Since the man was semi-transparent and being ignored by everyone else, Charlie felt safe in assuming that he was an apparition. She sighed inwardly. Seeing a dead man was par for the course for her, but it didn’t mean she had to like it. Her stomach gave an uneasy rumble, but at least it was only a rumble: the connection was too slight to bring on full-blown nausea. As she joined Bartoli, she couldn’t help but eye the old man carefully. There wasn’t a mark on him that she could see, but obviously he had died in some violent fashion several
days previously (recent deaths usually bore signs of the manner of it, and spirits rarely stayed earthbound for longer than a week). Either he was attached to the building itself, or to one or both of the couple walking up the stairs ahead of him. They were middle-aged, attractive, absolutely ordinary-looking in every respect: the chance that they were murderers or that he was a murder victim was remote, Charlie decided. Probably the old man had been killed in an accident or … who knew. In any case, this particular ghost had his back turned to her, had no idea she could see him, was in no apparent distress and did not seem to require her help. He was, therefore, no concern of hers, and the last thing she wanted was to make him her concern with so many witnesses, including the three FBI agents accompanying her, on hand. So she studiously ignored the apparition as he entered the building in the couple’s wake, and looked the other way as they, their otherworldly third wheel in tow, were ushered through to what, from its dark-paneled coziness and the sounds of clinking glasses emanating from it, seemed to be a bar. By the time she again tuned in to her group’s conversation, the four of them had arrived at the hostess’ table and their SUV was heading for the parking lot.

A few minutes later Bartoli had paid for their admission and they all sported half-dollar-sized red hearts with the day’s date stamped on the back of their hands.

Just as Julie Mead had described it, Charlie thought, looking down at hers, but of course she couldn’t say that.

“I still don’t see how you could know the perp had a heart stamped on the back of his hand,” Kaminsky muttered in her direction as a tuxedoed waiter led them through a side door, across the verandah, and down into a patio area. There, dozens of glass-topped tables were set up in concentric rings centered on small circular flower gardens that were interspersed at regular intervals along the trio of descending brick terraces. They overlooked an emerald green expanse of marsh grass and, beyond that, the dark blue water of Albemarle Sound. A slight breeze blew in off the water, and that, coupled with the encroaching twilight, lifted the humidity and mitigated the heat to the point where it had become pleasant rather than enervating. The smell of slowly roasting meat hung in the air, courtesy of a couple of black
iron roasters smoking away near a long line of buffet tables. In a gazebo near a wooden dance floor that had been laid down atop a swimming pool, a live band was tuning up.

“What can I tell you? I’m good like that,” Charlie answered back. As the hostess seated them at one of the upper tables, waiters roamed the terraces lighting small votive candles in glass jars in the center of the tables. Charlie was just accepting her menu from their waiter when the tall bronze ibis sculpture in the center of the circular garden in front of them started shooting water from its beak.

“It’s a fountain,” she remarked in delight as the others looked at it, too.

No sooner had the words left her mouth than, on the other side of the garden, Garland materialized.

CHAPTER TWELVE

It took Charlie just a second to make sure she was really, truly seeing what she thought she was seeing. Yes, there he stood, dressed in jeans and a white tee, exactly as she had last seen him, still gorgeous enough that under any other circumstances just setting eyes on someone who looked like him would have made her heart go pitty-pat, seemingly solid as a stone wall, his booted feet planted apart, his fists clenched and his shoulders tensed as if, maybe, he was expecting to be attacked. Positioned between two tables of four almost directly opposite from where she was seated, with the lushly colored, perfumed garden between them, he glanced around, his movements edgy. He seemed to be a little disoriented, a little confused. The occupants of the tables closest to him laughed and sipped their drinks and looked at the menus they were holding, clearly oblivious to his sudden arrival. He was maybe thirty feet away, and it was getting dark and the fountain shot fine drops of silvery spray into the air between him and her, but that in no way interfered with Charlie’s view. There was no mistaking Garland for anyone else.

He doesn’t know I’m here
.

But even as Charlie had the thought Garland’s head whipped
around in her direction as if—horror of horrors!—drawn by the power of her gaze.

Their eyes locked before she could gather her wits enough to try to duck behind the menu, or hide beneath the table, or
something
.

After that it was too late to do anything at all but sit there like a rabbit frozen in place by the proximity of a hound.

Of course he saw her.

Garland’s eyes widened as he obviously registered her presence, his whereabouts, the whole nine yards, in an instant. Then they narrowed. His face hardened. His lips thinned. In short, he looked pissed.

Then he vanished.

Poof! Like he’d never been there.

Charlie couldn’t believe it. It was the most unexpected of reprieves.

But her jittery heart didn’t seem to have caught on to the fact that he was gone, because it just kept right on pounding.

Charlie only realized that she must have caught her breath and stiffened in her chair upon spotting Garland when she became aware that the others were looking at her curiously.

“Is something wrong?” Bartoli asked. He was seated beside her, as handsome and desirable a dinner companion as any sane woman could ask for, his black hair waving back from his high forehead, his well-formed features bronzed by nature and candlelight, his strong jaw showing just the beginnings of five o’clock shadow, his warm brown eyes filled with concern for her. Yet here she was, having a hard time bringing him into focus. Why? Because every atom of her being was focused on the whereabouts—or not—of Garland.

Spirit, spirit, go away. Don’t come again another day
.