Текст книги "The Last Victim"

Автор книги: Karen Robards

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Jockey’s Ridge is the tallest natural sand dune on the East Coast. Located in Nags Head, the park surrounding it comprises 426 acres. Part of it is maritime forest. Except for some tall grass and a few scrubby bushes, the rest is rolling waves of white sand that reminded Charlie, as she stood near the end of the weathered, 384-foot-long boardwalk, of a picture she had once seen of the Sahara. It was evening by that time, past nine p.m., which meant the sun was hanging low in the west and long shadows stretched out everywhere, but the temperature was still so hot that even the wind blowing off Roanoke Sound felt suffocating.

The sand was thirty degrees hotter.

A young woman’s body was buried in that sand, in the shadows beneath the raised end of the boardwalk, beside one of the sturdy pillars that elevated the decklike platform into a scenic overlook providing a clear view of the dunes and the choppy blue waters of the Sound below. Charlie stood near enough to the burial site to smell the chemicals that were being used to preserve the more perishable bits of trace evidence being painstakingly lifted from the sand. She could see the shape of the body being revealed by the sand’s slow removal. She could see the horrible brown discoloration that clumped the once-white sand together in places so that it resembled coffee grounds.

Just thinking about what had caused that brown discoloration made Charlie’s chest feel tight. Blood, of course, although she tried not to let herself picture what terrible injuries the victim must have suffered to have lost so much. If she did, if she let herself dwell on what lay beneath that sand, she would have to leave the scene, and there was still too much for her to do. Determined to combat the physical symptoms of PTMD (Post-traumatic Murder Disorder, a too-cute label for a potentially disabling, way personal syndrome she had just identified in herself and named), which were threatening to make themselves an issue, Charlie took a sip from the bottle of water someone had handed her not long after she and Tony had arrived at the crime scene. The water, which was tepid, unfortunately didn’t help. Whether the heat and thick humidity were to blame, or whether it was something else, Charlie was finding it hard to catch her breath as she watched the North Carolina Bureau of Investigation (NCBI) crime scene analysts at work. They were carefully removing the sand from a grave-sized area above and around the body and depositing it and anything they found in it in plastic bags for later laboratory analysis. The crime scene had already been measured, photographed, video-recorded, and visually searched by every group of investigators on the scene, from the NCBI to the local Nags Head police. Tony, Crane, and Kaminsky had made their own record. Now everyone waited for enough of the sand to be removed that the body could be lifted from the ground.

Official identification had not yet been made—the body had not yet been completely uncovered—but Charlie, and the others, had little doubt it was Bayley Evans.

Strands of the victim’s long blond hair were mixed with the sand. The color and length matched Bayley Evans’. A bloodstained hand and arm up to the elbow were just visible beneath the thin layer of sand that remained on the corpse’s right side. Clearly they belonged to a teenage girl. Apparently a handful of her hair had gotten pulled up through the sand somehow as she was being buried, so the ends had been lying on the surface. The hair had been spotted by a woman with a dog, which had led to a little digging and a horrified call to the police.

Now here they all were. So many law enforcement types were on the scene that Charlie had long since given up trying to distinguish one group from another. NCBI investigators, Sy Taylor and the other local FBI agents, the FBI Special Circumstances team of Tony, Crane, and Kaminsky, the medical examiner and his team, the local Nags Head police department, Haney and the cops from Kill Devil Hills, the Dare County sheriff and his deputies, and numerous other officials who Charlie couldn’t even begin to identify all milled around doing whatever it was that they were supposed to do. It was a crowd scene of investigators, nobody was happy about the presence of the others, and to the obvious chagrin of everyone else, NCBI currently had jurisdiction.

The shocked-looking woman who’d found the body now huddled with two friends just inside the barrier of uniformed officers and crime scene tape that was holding the growing crowd of gawkers at bay. The media was out in full force, with their reporters and camera crews set up as close as they were allowed, all broadcasting the proceedings as the on-camera talent gave real-time updates to the viewers at home. Overhead, a news helicopter circled, the sound of its beating rotors punctuating the jumble of voices and equipment and other ground noise with a steady thump-thump. The parking lot at the far end of the boardwalk was packed with vehicles, from police cruisers to an ambulance to the TV stations’ satellite-sporting vans. Even as Charlie glanced in that direction, she saw the medical examiner’s van bumping over the firm-packed sand beside the boardwalk, toward the grave. Charlie was almost sure that meant the body would soon be lifted out of the ground.

So far, Bayley Evans’ phantom had not appeared to her. Charlie hoped and prayed that it was because her soul had already found its way to eternity and was at peace.

Please, God, help her spirit find its way.

The thought that they had failed to save her was shattering.

“Looks like they’re getting ready to bring her up,” Crane said, confirming Charlie’s conjecture. Perspiring, his cap of curls frizzing in the humidity, his suit coat laid aside and his shirtsleeves rolled up, he stood beside Charlie, carefully filming the crowd at her instruction. The killer was present. Charlie not only knew it objectively, from everything she had ever learned about narcissistic serial killers who invariably returned to the scene of the crime, but she could feel it in her bones.

She could feel him watching her.

Her heart pounded in a slow, steady rhythm that throbbed all the way down to her fingertips and toes. Dread prickled over her skin like wave after wave of goose bumps. Glancing sharply around at the faces, she caught no one looking at her. Every eye appeared to be focused somewhere else.

But the sense that she was being watched with malevolent intent was strong.

She had been scanning the growing crowd ever since she’d gotten her wits together enough to realize that the killer wouldn’t be able to resist the opportunity to watch what was happening, but so far she’d seen nothing amiss.

He was being careful. Anonymous. Just one more face in the crowd. But he was there.

Who are you? Where are you?

“Anything?” Still thin-lipped with anger at the local cops for not having immediately notified him about the discovery of the body, at the NCBI for winning jurisdiction, and at the situation in general, Tony stopped beside her. Since he knew she’d been watching the crowd, she had no trouble interpreting his question.

Charlie shook her head. “But he wants to be part of the process. He’s here somewhere.” She kept her voice low. An island in the midst of barely controlled chaos, they were surrounded by investigators, and she didn’t want to be overheard.

“Unless he’s smart enough to stay home and just watch what’s happening on TV,” Kaminsky added tartly. Like Tony and Crane, and Charlie, she was taking the death of Bayley Evans personally, and the chip she always seemed to have on her shoulder bristled larger than ever. She had shed her suit jacket in deference to the heat, and tucked her hair behind her ears. Since Crane had been assigned to Charlie, Kaminsky had been with Tony from the time they had arrived. She stopped on Charlie’s other side now, and from the woman’s teetering movements, Charlie realized that Kaminsky was having trouble with her high heels sinking into the sand. As hot as the sand was, though, removing her shoes and going barefoot was not an option, so Kaminsky had no choice but to deal.

“It’s possible that for some reason he can’t be here. But if there’s any way he can, he’s here at the scene. This type of killer is compulsive that way,” Charlie responded.

“Get the license plate numbers of every vehicle here,” Tony ordered Kaminsky. To Crane, who was still filming the crowd, he said, “Don’t miss a single face. We’re going to get this bastard before he kills anybody else.”

“If this is Bayley Evans—” Kaminsky began.

“It is,” Tony said grimly. “There’s not a doubt in my mind.”

Kaminsky concluded, “—then we should have almost a three-week window before he goes after another family. I know we’re getting close. Damn it, if we’d just had a few more days …”

“We’ll get him,” Crane said.

“When?” Kaminsky snapped. “Before or after he kills somebody else?”

Nobody replied directly, because of course there wasn’t any answer to that.

“Don’t count on the time frame holding. He had this girl for less than four days. He’s escalating.” Voice tight, Tony cast one more raking look around the site, then strode off in the wake of the medical examiner’s van as it rolled by them to park within a few yards of the grave. With Tony gone, Kaminsky said to Crane, “Maybe something happened that made him kill this girl before he wanted to.”

Crane looked at her. “Like what?”

“How the hell should I know?” She looked at Charlie. “You’re supposed to be the expert at what makes loony tunes like this tick. What do you think?”

“You could be right. Something might have happened that threw him off his game,” Charlie replied. “I have no idea what.”

“I guess we’ll never know, will we?” Kaminsky’s tone was savage. “Because we didn’t get to her in time, and now it’s too damned late.”

With an impartial glare for both Charlie and Crane, she turned and strode off toward the parking lot, her gait made unsteady by her heels sinking into the sand.

“I keep telling her she’s got to maintain some distance or she’s going to burn out,” Crane said accusingly as he watched her leave. “Of course, she keeps telling me to soak my head.” He glanced at Charlie. “I need to get some footage of the way the body is situated before they lift it out of the grave. And we have strict instructions that you’re not to be left alone. So if you don’t mind …”

Charlie nodded and followed him. The last thing she wanted at this moment was to be left alone: the sense of a malignant gaze watching her was too strong. As a gurney was removed from the back of the ME’s van and placed beside the grave, Charlie cast another long, fruitless look around the crowd. She stood beside Crane, who was filming from graveside … and made the mistake of looking down into the partially excavated hole at the body. Two dark jumpsuited, white-surgical-gloved coroner’s assistants climbed in beside it and grasped it by the shoulders and ankles as she watched. As much as she wanted to, Charlie couldn’t look away as the body was handed up to another pair of assistants, and was then lifted completely out of the grave. Charlie’s stomach knotted as the stench of decay reached her nostrils. The last of the sand that had remained on the body fell away in a golden shower. During this process, the corpse remained stiff as a plastic mannequin. Rigor mortis had obviously set in. The only part of the victim that moved was her long blond hair, which was ruffled by the breeze. Matted with sand and blood, it rippled like a particularly gruesome banner. One arm lay frozen across her body. The other was clamped to her side as firmly as if it had been carved from wood.

Charlie caught her breath as she watched what remained of Bayley Evans being laid out on the gurney.

The girl was fully dressed, in what Charlie was almost certain were the clothes she’d been wearing when she’d been taken.

Her eyes were closed. Her lashes were crusted with sand. She was the color of death, her skin grayish, with lividity already having set in. Her once delicate features were bruised and misshapen, as if she’d been beaten. A clump of black-colored sand that looked like coffee grounds clung to the left side of her mouth. More coffee-grounds-looking sand was caked in the gaping wound in her throat, which was cut from ear to ear. Her shirt—the upper half of pink summer pajamas—and her arms were brown with dried blood and frosted with sand. The blood had been wet when the body was put into the grave. Charlie knew this because of the coffee-grounds look of the sand, which was the result of it having been saturated with blood and then clumping as it dried.

Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.…

Holly had died the same way: she had been beaten, and her throat had been slit. Charlie had never wanted to know the details of what her friend had suffered in those days before she’d been killed, but somehow, over the years, that much had seeped past the defenses she had erected.

Looking at what had once been Bayley Evans, Charlie felt the horror of it hit her like a tsunami. Shaken and sick at heart, she was assaulted by a wave of dizziness. The sight of the girl’s lifeless body was almost more than she could bear. It brought it all back, Holly, the rest of the Palmer family, the others. Unwillingly remembering the moment when she had connected with Diane Palmer’s eyes, Charlie shuddered. The water bottle dropped from her suddenly nerveless fingers. As if it were happening in slow motion, she watched it fall. The splash of water spilling from the plastic container as it tumbled to the ground sounded abnormally loud to her ears. The bottle hit with a thud, tipped over, and disgorged what was left of its contents into the sand. Charlie feared she might soon hit the ground in just that way. Her knees wobbled. Her chest tightened. Her throat worked. Desperate, she glanced around, then took a few thankful steps backward to sink down on a large plastic cooler that probably belonged to the crime scene technicians. She was still in the shadow of the boardwalk, but far enough away from the crew working on the body that she was no longer breathing in the scent of decomposition, or confronted with the terrible reality of the corpse. Crane was close enough that she could call out to him if she needed to. He was too busy to notice that she was no longer beside him, and since she was outside the bustle of activity around the body, no one else paid her the least bit of attention.

For now, for just the few moments until she got her stuff together, that was what she needed.

She was hot, so hot. Her blouse clung to her sweat-dampened skin. With one hand she brushed away little tendrils of hair that had escaped the knot at her nape and threatened to stick to her face.

How unprofessional would it be if she were to keel over in a dead faint?

Charlie concentrated on her breathing as the world continued to spin around her. When she felt like she might topple sideways off the cooler, she quit worrying about looking unprofessional, folded her arms on her knees and rested her head on them.

“You faint, there’s not much I can do.” Garland’s familiar drawling voice was unmistakable. “Me trying to catch you before you hit the dirt probably ain’t going to work out so well.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Charlie’s eyes popped open. Garland crouched beside her, his mouth twisted into the slightest of wry smiles, his eyes focused watchfully on her face. He had appeared out of nowhere, and for an instant, the tiniest sliver of time, she was intensely glad to see him. But even as she registered that she felt stronger and safer and, yes, comforted by his presence, she remembered what he was. A member of the same vicious, conscienceless, sub-human fraternity that had done this to Bayley Evans, to Holly, to countless others over countless years. Had she actually been starting to care about him? Had she really been worried that he might have been whisked away to a well-deserved hell? Charlie scourged him with a look, and turned her face away.

“Not over the whole hating-me-in-the-morning thing yet, hmm?”

That snapped her eyes open and brought her head back around in a hurry. Appalled, she stared at him.

“What are you talking about?” Conscious of the people all around her, she mouthed the words rather than spoke them.

His smile widened, turned mocking. “Forgot what I told you right before you took your nightie off for me?”

Charlie sucked in air. No, she hadn’t forgotten. She remembered it as vividly as if the scene were branded into her memory cells.

He’d said, “You’re going to hate me for this in the morning, you know,” and then kissed her mindless. Right before she’d taken off her nightgown.

Oh, God, it wasn’t a dream.

As that horrified realization slammed home, she sat bolt upright. It was only as she saw the satisfied gleam in his eyes that she realized she’d forgotten all about being dizzy and sick.

Her lips thinned. Her eyes narrowed.

“You okay?” Tony loomed over her. Charlie hadn’t even realized that he was nearby. Garland’s eyes darkened, but that was all she noticed about his reaction because she jerked her gaze away from him and looked up at Tony instead.

Focused on the real, live, good guy with long-term potential versus the ghost of a murderous psychopath who just happened, through some strange cosmic alchemy that she was never going to understand, to turn her on to her back teeth.

At least the adrenaline rush from the shock of Garland’s revelation had knocked out most of her physical symptoms. Was that what he had intended? Or had he, as usual, just wanted to be as annoying as possible?

“A little the worse for the heat, maybe,” she said, prevaricating only slightly. Garland stood up to his full height beside her, looking at Tony as if he didn’t like him very much. Charlie ignored him. Where Garland was concerned, she was a mess, and this was not the time or place to start sorting out anything to do with their hell-born relationship. Not quite ready to trust her legs yet, she kept her seat on the cooler as she spoke to Tony. “Listen, I think we really need to concentrate on why the perpetrator does what he does. The dance—he is most likely re-enacting something that actually occurred in his past, a real dance, a girl who rejected him. She would have been blond and pretty, a popular girl, and they both would have been teenagers. Bayley, the other girls, are substitutes for the original blond teenager who hurt him. He’s abducting these girls to give himself a do-over, and when his victim doesn’t behave according to the script in his head, he beats her because what she is doing spoils the fantasy. Eventually the fantasy is irretrievably destroyed and that’s when he kills her.”

Tony said, “Unless it’s a copycat.”

“If it’s a copycat, and I believe it is, he’s re-creating the pattern set by the original killer. The motivation that set off the murders would remain the same.”

“So we’ll find our unsub at one of these dances.”

“So what are we going to do, stake out every single dance up and down the southern half of the Eastern Seaboard over the next few weeks?” Kaminsky’s question dripped sarcasm. She had arrived in time to hear Charlie’s assessment of the killer’s motivation. “Do you know how many dances we’re talking about? To begin with, we don’t have the manpower.”

“You need to go back and look at every bit of video footage you can find of any dances the three primary victims attended within a week of the attack on their families. The killer is there, interacting in some way with blond girls who fit the victim profile. He’s here today, watching,” Charlie said. “I’m sure of it.”

“So you keep your ass with the group, Doc,” Garland told her. “No more sitting on coolers off by your lonesome.”

Charlie didn’t even glance his way.

“We’ve been through the crowds,” Kaminsky said. “If he’s here, we’re missing him.”

“He’s here,” Charlie repeated with certainty.

“We need to cross-reference,” Tony said. “Kaminsky, when we get back—”

“I’m on it,” Kaminsky said before he could finish.

Crane joined them. “According to the victim’s body temperature, the ME estimates time of death at around four a.m.”

Charlie knew that after death the human body cooled by about one degree per hour. Of course, the heat of the sand would have complicated the calculation, but any competent ME would have taken that into account.

“She wasn’t killed here, which means that after four a.m. the unsub transported the body here. Then he had to bury it without anyone seeing him. It would have taken him at least half an hour to dig that hole, and he would have done it while it was still dark,” Tony said.

Kaminsky whipped out her iPhone and pressed a button. A moment later she had what she wanted. “The sun rose at five thirty-seven this morning.” She looked at Tony. “Wherever he killed her had to have been within about a half an hour’s drive of here.”

“He not only had to bury the body before dawn, but he had to be near enough to get back here quickly when the body was discovered, without knowing precisely when that would be.” Charlie’s mind raced. “So he has some sort of a shelter within about half an hour’s drive, and I’m guessing that’s where he keeps the victims. Something in an RV park, maybe, or a campground. Something mobile.”

“I’ll have the local guys get a list of nearby facilities.” Tony picked up his cell phone and started texting.

“You want my two cents, I’d say he’s listening to a police radio or scanner,” Garland said.

Charlie looked at him, momentarily surprised that he’d even felt motivated to contribute, much less that the contribution had been useful. Then she remembered that she was the only one who could see or hear him, dragged her eyes away, and repeated the observation to the others.

Kaminsky frowned at her. “You saying you think it’s a cop?”

“Anybody can have a police scanner,” Tony reminded them. He had finished with his text, and Charlie presumed that local FBI agents were now scrambling to identify any RV parks or campgrounds in the vicinity, and check them out.

“He’s a narcissist. He’s watching what we’re doing right now. He’s been following the investigation through the media. It makes sense that he’d have a police scanner. He shows up whenever the bodies are discovered, and that’s how he knows.” Charlie was thinking aloud. “And so far nobody has noticed him. He could be a cop. Or a reporter.” She grimaced. “Or just an ambulance chaser. But whoever he is, he’s here, and he blends in.” Even as she spoke, she swept another look around. He was there, she could feel it, and yet she couldn’t spot him.

The knowledge was both frustrating and terrifying.

“We’re wasting time here. Let’s get going.” Tony held a hand down to Charlie. “Need some help?”

“He’s here,” she said one more time, scanning as much of the crowd as she could see. “Right here with us.”

“Since we don’t know who we’re looking for, the best thing we can do is go back and compare today’s video with video from the dances.” The very reasonableness of Tony’s voice told Charlie that he was feeling the frustration of it, too. “Whoever is in all those places makes our suspect hit parade.”

It made sense, and Charlie knew it. Still, knowing the killer was there and not being able to identify him was a bitter pill that she was finding hard to swallow. Taking Tony’s hand, she let him pull her to her feet, then smiled her thanks at him. All the while, she was supremely conscious of Garland’s narrowed eyes on them. It was obvious he didn’t much like what he was seeing. Charlie was mad at herself because she even noticed.

What do I care what he thinks anyway?

Answer: I don’t. This is not a relationship, and he is not a man. And even if he were a man this wouldn’t be a relationship.

They were moving away toward the parking lot when Charlie glanced around again and saw that the coroner’s assistants were pushing the gurney with Bayley Evans’ body on it toward the van. The procession was almost abreast of them. Nobody had yet covered the girl with a sheet.

Charlie knew this because she looked. It was automatic, instinctive, and a mistake. Her heart lurched. Her chest tightened and her throat ached.

“Jesus,” Garland muttered. Charlie realized that he was beside her and staring at Bayley Evans’ body, too. Serial killers did not have the right to look sickened at another serial killer’s atrocity, she thought with a sudden burst of fury, and shot him a look of loathing.

“What?” He caught her look. It took him only a second to correctly interpret it. His face tightened. “You really think I’d do something like that to a woman?”

Charlie didn’t answer. There were too many people around.

But if she had answered, the only thing she could have said was Yes.

Because there was no way she was foolish enough to let her heart override what she knew.

Sometime before they reached the SUV, she realized that Garland had disappeared.

On the way back to Kill Devil Hills, everybody was out of sorts and snappy, Charlie included. The local FBI called back: two campgrounds and an RV park existed near Jockey’s Ridge, but a search had yielded nothing suspicious. After that, nobody felt like eating; Crane ordered a pizza anyway. While he and Kaminsky went into the house to wait for the delivery person to arrive, Charlie reluctantly told Tony that she needed to go back to the Meads’ for just a minute. It was after ten p.m., they were all exhausted, disheartened, and weighed down with failure and sorrow for Bayley Evans, but there was something she needed to do and she wasn’t about to go out in the dark alone. Tony gave her a long look, but didn’t ask questions, which was one of the things she truly liked about him. Instead, he escorted her over to the Meads’ house.

This time, one of the two cops in the car out front had a key. She’d already told Tony that she needed to go upstairs alone, so he waited in the living room with the officers while she trudged up the stairs.

Now that there was no more need for Julie Mead to cling to earth, Charlie meant to help her go home.

However, when she reached the master bedroom, Julie Mead was not there. Charlie called her, softly, but got no answer. She also didn’t feel the least bit sick to her stomach, which was what finally convinced her that the spirit was truly gone.

A glance in Trevor’s bedroom told her that it was empty, too. What Garland had said he’d seen—Trevor’s father coming for him—apparently was true.

Not that she didn’t trust Garland’s word, but for Trevor’s sake she’d wanted to make sure.

I hope Bayley and her family are all together somewhere.

The deep sadness she felt for them was oppressive. Her heart ached. And the worst part about it was, this dubious gift she had been given hadn’t changed a thing.

“So when were you planning to tell me that you’ve got some psychic ability?” As Tony escorted her back over the boardwalk between the two houses, he asked the question in such a casual tone, it took Charlie a second to process what he was saying.

Then she stopped dead, which meant he had to stop walking, too. He was beside her, and her hand was tucked companionably into his elbow. They were close enough so that when she looked sharply up at him, she should have been able to read his expression. But it was very dark, with the moon and stars almost completely obscured by a bank of heavy black clouds that had blown in over the last hour. The air smelled of rain to come, and the crash of the waves hitting the shore promised a storm.

She couldn’t tell what he was thinking, because his face was deep in shadow.

But all of a sudden she knew where that question had come from, and she pulled her hand free of his arm.

“You got that from the background check, right?” She couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen it earlier: of course that’s why he’d never really questioned how she knew what she knew.

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you ask me about it before?”

“I was waiting for you to tell me.”

“What, that I see dead people?” Angry, she resumed walking toward the house.

He fell in beside her. “Do you?”

She jerked a look up at him. “Yes. Sometimes. Not that it ever does anybody any good.”

He caught her arm, pulled her to a stop. “It’s not your fault we weren’t able to save Bayley Evans.”

She gave a bitter little laugh. “Isn’t it?”

“No.”

Then, to Charlie’s surprise, he bent his head and kissed her. It was a hard kiss, thorough, plenty of tongue. After the first moment of shock, she slid her hand behind his head and kissed him back. Her body reacted with a tingling warmth that told her there absolutely was promise in there somewhere.

What her body didn’t do was melt or burn. No fireworks went off against her closed lids. Her world did not rock. All her preconceptions about herself and men did not shatter.

But still, it was a very nice kiss.

When he lifted his head, though, Charlie was annoyed to discover she was feeling a tad cranky.

“So what was that about?” she asked, striving to keep the crankiness out of her tone.

She thought he was studying her face, but again, it was too dark to really be sure. “I wanted to get it out of the way.”

Okay, cranky was definitely happening. Nothing she could do. “Oh, goody. I like your motivation. You want to tell me why you wanted to get it out of the way?” She pulled free and started walking again.

He laughed, and caught up. “You came to us on a temporary basis. I want to make it permanent.”

Whatever she had been expecting, that was not it. “What?”

“I’m offering you a job. Come be a permanent part of our team. Between the psychological insights and the psychic stuff, you’re unique. You’ll give us a weapon in this war against the monsters out there that we’ve never had before.”

Charlie frowned at him. “Which means you kissed me because …?”

“I wanted to, and I don’t kiss people I work with. If you accept the job, and I’m hoping you will, our relationship is strictly professional from here on out.”

“That’s certainly an incentive.” She couldn’t quite keep the tartness out of her voice.