Текст книги "The Last Victim"

Автор книги: Karen Robards

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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.

She realized she was breathing way too fast, and tried to consciously dial down what she recognized as her body’s instinctive fight-or-flight response.

Oh, God, please God, let my sighting of Garland have been an illusion, the product, maybe, of too much stress and too little sleep and food, or something similar. Then she gave an inner grimace. How sad was it that she would be thrilled to learn that she had just experienced a brief psychotic break in which she had conjured up an unwanted vision out of her imagination?

“I thought I saw a hummingbird,” Charlie managed, feeling like a fool even as she uttered the lie. Her voice sounded almost normal as she made a vague gesture in the direction of a cluster of hot-pink hibiscus on the other side of the garden, in the general area in which Garland had—or had not—appeared. “It’s gone now.”

“You into bird-watching?” Crane looked at her with interest. “A lot of people are.”

“I like hummingbirds.” That much was true, so Charlie found saying it somewhat easier. Her nerves were jumping like a thousand tiny grasshoppers under her skin as she tried, and failed, by means of discreet, darting little glances all over the place, to spot any further sign of Garland. If she hadn’t caught herself and consciously relaxed her hands, she would have been gripping the arms of her thickly cushioned, wrought-iron chair tightly.

“You see anything else interesting? Like our unsub?” Kaminsky’s tone was caustic.

“N-no.” Okay, stuttering wasn’t going to cut it. Neither was looking around every which way like a thief hiding from the cops. Whatever was going on with her sighting of Garland—and there was no way that she should have seen him, because there was no way he should have been able to return from the Great Beyond, or wherever the hell (probably literally) she’d sent him—he was gone now. She needed to focus on the here and now or risk having her companions think there was something seriously wrong with her. “Of course, I haven’t really had much time to look at anyone yet.”

“The unsub’s more likely to be an employee than a guest,” Bartoli said. “After we eat, we’ll walk around, take a look at the staff.”

“Think we should circulate his picture?” Crane asked.

Bartoli shook his head. “Not yet. If word gets out that we’re looking for someone, we’ll scare him off if he is somewhere on the premises—and maybe even scare him into killing the girl prematurely. We need to be real careful here.”

“This seems like a pretty good place for a predator like our unsub to hang out.” Kaminsky was glancing over the tables, which were now almost full. “Lots of families.”

“He’s an ephebophile, remember.” Charlie was glad to concentrate again on the reason they were there instead of worrying about the possible presence of Garland. “His primary purpose in frequenting a place like this is to find and evaluate teenage girls for how well they fit his criteria. The families are just collateral damage.”

“Ephebophile?” Crane looked at her over his menu.

“An ephebophile is someone who is attracted to post-pubescent children—teenagers,” Kaminsky replied before Charlie could. “Come on, Crane. Keep up.”

Just then the waiter arrived to take their order. Charlie realized that while her mind had been occupied elsewhere, everyone else had made their decision about what to eat.

Easy enough, she discovered: it was a buffet, so the waiter only wanted to know about drinks. Charlie could really have gone for a bourbon and Coke—or something even stronger, under the circumstances—but since the agents were on duty and thus not drinking, she settled for iced tea. While the waiter went to fetch the drinks, they hit the buffet. Getting in line, she surreptitiously swept her eyes over the men responsible for refilling the buffet dishes: no way any of them were the Boardwalk Killer. So far, in fact, none of the staff with whom she had come into contact even fit into the category of remotely possible.

Unless it was a copycat. Or unless everything she knew was wrong and science and statistics went totally out the window.

That was a world in which she couldn’t function. Everything in life and death had rules that governed them, including ghosts and serial killers. Banished ghosts couldn’t come back. And serial killers fit within certain parameters.

Or the universe—to say nothing of her head—had gotten seriously screwed up.

It wasn’t until Charlie got within range of the heavenly smells of shrimp and grits, slow-roasted barbecue and corn on the cob, fried chicken and pecan pie—that she realized how hungry she was.

Unfortunately, with her stomach now in a knot, she was afraid to put too much in it. The flash she’d gotten of Garland had caused it to clench up. The last thing she wanted to do now was fill it and risk an attack of full-blown upchucking if another spirit—and please God, if she had to have an encounter with a spirit, let it be another spirit—should show up.

“Is that all you’re going to eat?” Behind her in line, Bartoli looked down at her plate and shook his head. It held a spoonful of this and a little dab of that, because, sadly, that was all she dared attempt. “Getting to eat this well while on the job is a rare treat in our line of work. You probably want to take advantage.”

“I’m dieting.” Which was just one more lie she’d told him. Still, it was better than admitting the truth. He—all of them—would never believe the truth. Not for the first time, Charlie felt a surge of fierce resentment about the confining aspects of her unwanted ability. Her choices were extremely limited: lie, or tell the truth and have people think she was nuts; isolate herself, or suffer sudden-onset, flu-like bouts of debilitating illness every time she interacted with the newly, violently departed. Frequently being scared to death and grossed out by phantoms with horrific injuries were part of the package, too. To say nothing of the off chance of having a dead serial killer whom she had tried and failed to banish from this plane of existence come hunting for her, possibly with vengeance on his mind. Charlie gave an inward snort. Anyone who thought it would be fun to be able to see ghosts didn’t know the half of it.

God, did you ask me if I wanted to be able to see dead people?

“You ate a Big Mac for lunch!” Kaminsky, in front of her, turned around to point out.

Instead of grinding her teeth, which was what she really felt like doing, Charlie managed a saccharine smile. “Which is why I’m dieting now.”

“Better you than me.” Kaminsky turned back to the buffet with a shrug.

“You’re pretty slim. You should be able to handle a Big Mac and a decent supper,” Crane told Charlie cheerfully. “Especially considering your height. Now, if you were short, you might have something to worry about.”

Kaminsky’s head snapped around. “Is that some kind of a dig at me, Crane?”

Crane looked as taken aback as if one of the shrimp on his plate had suddenly snapped at him. “No.”

“Because if it is, you know what you can do with yourself.” Well-filled plate in hand, Kaminsky turned and marched back toward their table. Crane looked at Charlie and Bartoli, who were behind him, with an expression of bewildered appeal. Its silent message was, What did I do?

“You dug your own grave,” Bartoli told him with a shrug. “Women and weight don’t belong in the same conversation.”

“Holy Mother of God,” Crane said in disgust, and turned away to follow Kaminsky back to the table.

Charlie lifted her eyebrows at Bartoli. “I take it there’s something going on between those two?”

“He was engaged to her sister for a while this spring. Broke it off two weeks before the wedding. Kaminsky wasn’t happy, to say the least. I doubt the sister was, either, but the sister’s not my problem, thank God.”

He gave her a crooked smile as he said the last part. Looking up at him, Charlie registered that the top of her head just reached the base of his nose and that his shoulders were broad and his body was lean and fit in his FBI-guy suit, and felt a pleasant little tingle of attraction. Bartoli was a good-looking man who was gainfully employed, and she liked him. She’d had more than one relationship that had started off with a lot less going for it than that. Probably she ought to think about—

“Miss me, Doc?” drawled an unmistakable voice in her ear. Garland! Charlie jumped so high and so fast that her plate went flying. It landed with a wet plop right in the middle of a big crystal bowl full of scrumptious-looking banana pudding, spilling its contents across the creamy surface. Yellow blobs of pudding went flying everywhere. Wide-eyed with horror, Charlie watched them land on a couple of individual ramekins of crème brûlée, a carrot cake, a plate of petits fours, and a chocolate pie.

“I am so sorry,” she gasped to the servers on the other side of the table, to Bartoli, to the diners around her in line. “I just—I don’t know what happened.” Even as she turned seven shades of red and stammered out more apologies, she glanced covertly around for Garland.

He was nowhere to be seen.

The sun was setting in a swirl of pinks and oranges over the purple waters of the Sound. Tiki torches were lit and their flames swayed in the breeze. Candles glowed like hundreds of fireflies from the centers of the white-clothed tables. Posh people in their Friday-night-out clothes were everywhere: in line at the buffet, sitting at the tier upon tier of tables, walking along the verandah and paths. The band was playing now. Charlie recognized the song: “Forever Young.”

There were lots of sounds, lots of auditory and visual stimuli. Maybe she’d made a mistake.

Maybe it hadn’t been Garland that she’d heard at all.

Even as she told herself that, and hoped, desperately, she’d just imagined it—first, Garland’s appearance, and second, his voice—she knew better: she didn’t know how or why or where exactly, but she was now as sure as it was possible to be of anything that he was there.

Toying with her like a cat with a mouse.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“No worries, ma’am,” one of the servers (who clearly didn’t know the half of it) assured Charlie, while the other nodded his head. They whisked away the ruined pudding and got busy cleaning up the mess she’d made, while Bartoli gently pulled her away from the scene.

“I can’t believe I did that,” she told him, genuinely mortified, even as her gaze darted hither and yon in a fruitless search for Garland. Others in the buffet line who had witnessed her clumsiness made sympathetic faces at her as Bartoli took her back to the first buffet table and supplied her with a clean plate and silverware. “I’m not usually such a klutz.”

“Anybody can have an accident. Didn’t you get some of that shrimp stuff?” His tone was soothing as he pointed out a dish she’d helped herself to before. Charlie dutifully scooped up another serving. She didn’t miss the speculation in his eyes when he thought she wasn’t looking, however. Bartoli was wondering what was up. Well, she would be, too.

“I must have caught my foot on something.” She tried really, really hard to sound rueful. “It happened so fast, it’s hard to be sure.”

“No harm done.” He grinned as he watched her drop a spoonful of corn pudding onto her plate. “You seem to have had your share of bad luck since we met: you’ve tossed your cookies twice, lost your plate to a bowl of banana pudding, and Kaminsky tells me you fell down hard enough that it made you scream in the shower last night.”

“Did she tell you how she came to my rescue?” It was an effort, but Charlie managed to keep her tone light as she finished restocking her plate.

“She might have said something about it.”

Better to turn the conversation away from her own misadventures, Charlie thought as she led the way back to their table, than let him start really thinking about them and possibly realize the whole series of disasters had started when a certain convict had died under her ministrations. Kaminsky made a useful red herring.

“So, is Kaminsky married?” Charlie asked.

“No. None of us are.”

“Why not?”

He shrugged. “We work too much. We travel too much. At least two of us are hard to get along with.” That crooked smile appeared again. “And no, I’m not telling you which two.”

Charlie laughed, which helped to ease some of the tension that had her shooting wary looks at every moving shadow. Chill, she warned herself fiercely as they reached the table and sat down. If Garland’s here, he’ll show himself again soon enough, and then you’re just going to have to deal. In the meantime, there’s no point in making the others think there’s something wrong with you.

“We were beginning to wonder if you two got lost,” Crane greeted them a little too heartily.

“I dropped my plate and had to start over.”

Charlie, at least, had become immediately aware that Kaminsky and Crane had broken off an argument upon her and Bartoli’s arrival. Stabbing a fork into her pulled pork and lifting it to her mouth, Kaminsky was still glowering.

“This place seems to attract an older crowd than Bayley Evans and her friends.” Bartoli sounded thoughtful. He was looking around as he ate. “It’s expensive, too. Not the kind of place you’d expect a group of teenage girls to want to hang out.”

“Maybe they came with their families,” Crane suggested.

Bartoli shook his head. “According to her friends, they came in a group. Six of them. I just assumed the venue was the attraction, but now I’m not so sure.”

“Excuse me.” Kaminsky summoned their waiter with a slightly raised voice and a smile. When he reached them and looked at her inquiringly, she continued, “My teenage niece was here last Friday night and said she had a wild time. This doesn’t look like the kind of gathering she’d call a wild time. Was something special happening last week?”

The waiter smiled. He had introduced himself as Keith, Charlie remembered, as in Hi, I’m Keith, and I’ll be your waiter tonight. Keith was a cute blond guy in his early twenties, maybe a college student. Young enough to have plenty in common with a pack of teenage girls, Charlie thought. Old enough that they’d probably thought he was cool. Or hot. Or whatever teenage girls thought about cute guys these days.

“Kornucopia played last Friday night,” Keith said with enthusiasm. The blank looks around the table must have told him they didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, because he added, “They’re a boy band, real popular with the high school girls. They drew a big crowd, so management will probably do it again. Only we couldn’t serve alcohol, you know, because of the age thing, so I don’t know how much profit they made. If they didn’t make a lot of profit, I guess it might’ve been a one-off.”

“Tell me about them. How many guys are in the band? And how old are they?” Kaminsky asked.

“Um … four guys. Hank Jones, Axel Gundren, Ben Teague, and Travis Fitzpatrick. I don’t know how old they are exactly. Like, twenty-five, twenty-six, most of them.”

“Are they a local band? Or regional? ’Cause I’ve never heard of them; but then, I’m not from here.” Kaminsky’s tone stayed light.

“Mostly they play around this area. I guess you could call them regional.”

“You seem to know quite a bit about them. You a fan?” Bartoli tried to mask the sudden keen interest in his eyes with a friendly smile, but Charlie saw it.

“When they play, the girls show up.” Keith shrugged. “What’s not to like?”

Kaminsky laughed, and thanked him as another table beckoned and he hurried off.

Crane said, “Now, there’s a lead.”

Kaminsky looked around the table with a superior smirk. “Sometimes all you got to do is ask.”

“A band.” Bartoli’s eyes gleamed. “Good work, Kaminsky. When we’re done here, pull together information on them.”

“You thinking maybe they’ve played somewhere near where the other two families were attacked?” Crane asked.

Bartoli shrugged. “Won’t know until we check it out.”

“It won’t be the band members,” Kaminsky asserted. “They’re too young. At least, according to Dr. Phil here.”

Charlie shot her a withering look, but refused to engage.

“They’re only too young if this is actually the Boardwalk Killer,” Charlie said. “If it’s a copycat, the mid-twenties would fit the statistics.”

“You don’t think our guy’s the Boardwalk Killer, do you?” Bartoli asked curiously.

Charlie met his eyes. The truth was, she didn’t want to think it was the Boardwalk Killer. The idea that the predator who had stalked her nightmares for years was back, that he was nearby, that he was once again slaughtering families and preying on innocents, and might at any moment discover her presence and turn his sights on her was terrifying enough to make her blood run cold. But there were other, research-based reasons why it was unlikely to be him, and it was to these she clung.

“He would be too old now,” she said. “It’s very rare to find a serial killer older than forty. And there’s the time gap: where has he been for fifteen years?”

“Both are good points,” Bartoli said. “But I think we would be foolish to discount the possibility.”

“It doesn’t have to be the band members themselves. It could be someone connected with them,” Crane mused. “If the band’s traveling around, they’ll have people working with them, won’t they? Maybe we’re looking for a roadie, or someone like that.”

“I’ll check out everybody connected with the band, too,” Kaminsky promised. “How big an entourage could they have?”

Charlie told her, “Look for someone with a history of sex offenses against underage females at any time over the last ten years. A poor relationship with his parents. Hypochondria or other attention-seeking maladies. Probably someone working with him will have noticed that he can’t take criticism, so you could ask about that.”

They had all finished eating by that time.

“I’ll just give them all a questionnaire to fill out, shall I?” Kaminsky responded caustically. “Let’s see, I can start with, How much do you hate your mommy and daddy? Then, how about, Do you get sick a lot?”

Charlie’s eyes narrowed. “You want to find this guy? Those traits are markers. Think of them as the equivalent of a trail of bread crumbs leading to a particular destination, which in this case is the killer.”

Kaminsky hooted. “Oh, wow, now we’re Hansel and Gretel.”

“A background check should do it, coupled with a few interviews,” Bartoli said to Kaminsky before Charlie could reply. “Just keep it as low profile as you can. We don’t want to spook this guy. And remember, we’re all on the same team here.”

Kaminsky made a face. “Yeah, I know.” She shot Charlie a look. “Bread crumbs. I got it.”

“You up to a dance, Dr. Stone?” Bartoli asked. Charlie’s gaze shifted from Kaminsky to him, and her eyes must have given away her surprise, because he smiled. “Don’t look so shocked. I want to get this crowd on video. Kaminsky’s going to walk around recording us dancing from one angle, Crane from another, and between them we should be able to get a picture of almost everybody who’s here, including the staff, without alerting anyone to what we’re really after. Then we can take the video back with us and go over every frame.” He looked from Crane to Kaminsky. “Any questions?”

Crane shook his head. “Sounds like a plan.”

“Should work,” Kaminsky agreed.

“You brought cameras?” Charlie hadn’t seen any such equipment.

“iPhones,” Kaminsky replied impatiently. Then Bartoli was on his feet pulling back Charlie’s chair for her. See, he’s a gentleman, too. Relationship material if I ever saw it. She stood up, and when he held out his hand she placed hers in it. His grip was warm and strong, and he held her hand firmly as he pulled her after him toward the dance floor. Strictly business, she knew, but it felt personal.

She liked holding his hand, she discovered.

I should definitely pursue this.

“Aren’t they such a cute couple?” Kaminsky trilled behind her. Charlie knew that the comment was part of their cover, that Kaminsky had her phone out and was filming as she followed them, that it was all in service of the urgent cause of finding Bayley Evans, but still she cringed inwardly. With what felt like all eyes on her, she felt slightly uncomfortable and way too conspicuous. “Won’t Aunt Bessie be excited when we show this to her? Are you getting them, Buzz?”

“Oh, yeah.”

Apparently Crane was enthusiastically filming, too.

Charlie felt about as relaxed as a taxpayer undergoing an audit. She wasn’t used to being in the spotlight. In fact, she had spent years deliberately avoiding it. Add to that a degree of shyness about her newly minted possible attraction to Bartoli, and her near certainty that Garland was there somewhere, and the very last thing she wanted was to be the object of attention.

But there didn’t seem a whole lot she could do about it.

A moment later they were stepping onto the dance floor. There were maybe a dozen couples on it, gliding around the smooth wooden surface to the torchy strains of “We’ve Got Tonight.” People stood around the edge of the dance floor, sipping colorful cocktails and chatting in groups and watching. Tightly packed tables ringed the area: more watchers. The band, the buffet line, the layers of tables on the terraces, and even a nearby parking lot that, from the looks of the vehicles in it, was reserved for the use of service trucks, were within view. Kaminsky and Crane should be able to capture almost everything going on outside with their cameras. Of course, it was dark now, but the moon hanging just above the horizon was as round and full as a glow-in-the-dark tennis ball, and between it and the garden lighting and the tiki torches, visibility wasn’t really a problem.

“I warn you: I’m not much of a dancer.” Bartoli smiled at her as he pulled her into his arms.

“Me neither.” Smiling back at him, Charlie settled a hand on his wide shoulder, and found herself appreciating with a kind of half-amused irony the fact that what her hand was resting on was a suit jacket. What you want is a man who goes to work every day wearing a suit, she could almost hear her mother (who had never—that Charlie knew—taken her own advice) saying. Not that she meant to be influenced (ever) by her mother; but still, she would be the first to acknowledge that stability was a good thing in a man.

“Last time I danced like this was at my wedding,” Bartoli said.

Charlie stumbled a little. Her eyes flew to his face. “I thought you weren’t married.”

He steadied her. This wasn’t the plaster-yourself-against-the-guy-and-sway kind of dancing that she remembered from high school. This was more formal, with a few inches of space between them and one of his hands holding hers while the other rested on the small of her back. During medical school and her residency, she had attended enough formal events, including enough of her classmates’ weddings, that she was familiar with the steps. Still, she had to dredge them up from deep in her memory, and pay attention, or Ms. Klutz came back. She’d been doing her best not to reinforce the too-clumsy-to-live image that the incident with the banana pudding had probably permanently solidified in his mind, but his announcement had caught her by surprise.

“I’m divorced. Married my college sweetheart when we graduated. It lasted a little over a year.”

“I see. Was it a bloodbath that had you swearing off women for the rest of your life?” She was trying for light, but maybe that came off as a little flirty. For whatever reason, his hand tightened on hers.

“Not at all.” There it was: the same sort of awareness of her in his eyes that she was experiencing for him. A preliminary, maybe-this-could-go-somewhere kind of thing. “It was all over a long time ago. We were just too young.”

“So who’s the special woman in your life now?” That was subtle. Well, maybe not, but before she made up her mind whether to explore a potential romantic connection with him further, she needed to know certain essential facts.

“There isn’t one.” He smiled at her, and Charlie was once again struck by how good-looking he was. “What about you?”

“You two! Look this way and smile,” Kaminsky called before Charlie could reply. A little startled, glancing around, Charlie discovered that she and Bartoli had danced about a quarter of the way around the floor, which had brought them within close range of Kaminsky. She was smiling and waving—and filming—from the sidelines. Charlie suddenly wondered if any of what she’d been thinking about Bartoli had registered in her face, and if so, if it had been caught on film.

Just considering the possibility made her go warm with embarrassment.

“Kaminsky and Crane are having way too much fun filming us.” Bartoli’s tone was rueful. She got the feeling that he knew exactly what she was thinking, which didn’t help. “Tomorrow, I guarantee you, when we’re taking this thing apart, they’ll have even more fun with the play-by-play.”

With her gaze still on Kaminsky, Charlie made a face. “Let’s hope we get something usable out of it.”

“I’m hoping we might.” There was a note in his voice—something warm and almost humorous—that drew her eyes to his face. “But we don’t want to talk shop right now. Too many ears.”

“I—” she began, meaning to finish with something like couldn’t agree more. But instead of Bartoli’s lean, dark features, the face she found herself looking up into as she spoke was the sex-on-the-hoof gorgeousness that was Garland.

The smile he gave her as their eyes connected chilled her blood. “New boyfriend, Doc?”