The Last Victim (16 page)

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.