The Last Victim (4 page)

“If you wouldn’t mind, Mr. Pugh, we need to speak to Dr. Stone alone.” Bartoli’s tone was polite but adamant. Pugh looked a little put out, but he nodded.

“Certainly. I understand. Um, if you’ll have Dr. Stone call down to my office when you’re ready to leave, someone will come to escort you out.”

“Will do. Thank you.” Nodding affably, Bartoli escorted Pugh to the door and closed it behind him. Left alone with the agents, Charlie leaned back against her desk and waited. Something told her that whatever she was getting ready to hear, she wasn’t going to like.

“Maybe she ought to sit down for this.” Crane shot Bartoli a nervous look as Bartoli rejoined them.

“She’s right here in front of us. She can hear you.” Bartoli’s response was dry.

“What is it?” Anxiety quickened Charlie’s pulse as she looked from one man to the other. “And no, I don’t want to sit down.”

“We’re from the Special Circumstances division, out of FBI headquarters in Quantico, and we’re here because we need your help,” Bartoli told her. “We’ve got a serial killer on our hands, and we’ve come to ask you to assist with the investigation.”

Charlie felt her stomach tighten. Although her life was dedicated to figuring out everything there was to know about serial killers, who they were, what triggered them, if the urge to commit multiple murders was biological or psychological, if there was a marker or common characteristic that could possibly be used to identify them before they killed, etc., her work was purely academic. Objectifying the source of fear (i.e., serial killers) and learning all there was to know about it while keeping it at a safe psychological and physical distance was a classic post-traumatic stress disorder defense mechanism, she knew, but that was how she dealt with her past. The uncomfortable truth was that being confronted with the reality of a serial killer loose in a community of innocent people still made her feel as helpless and terrified as she had as that seventeen-year-old who had failed Holly Palmer.

“I’m happy to help in any way I can.” She crossed her arms over her chest. The creeping coldness that was stealing over her was a result of the out-of-control air-conditioning, of course, and nothing else. “If you want me to put together a profile of the perpetrator, I’ll need some basic information. The number of known victims, their age and gender, along with any other characteristics they have in common, how they were killed, where the bodies were discovered—”

“We don’t have a lot of time,” Bartoli interrupted, holding up his hand to stop her in mid-spiel, and Crane nodded agreement. “Last night a seventeen-year-old girl was snatched from her home in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. Her family—mother, stepfather, a younger brother—was murdered. This is the third family to be hit like this in less than two months. In both previous cases, the missing girls were found dead approximately one week after their families’ bodies were discovered. Evidence suggests that they were kept alive during
the period of time between their abduction and when we found their bodies. This girl—her name is Bayley Evans—I figure we have five to six days left to maybe recover her alive.”

Listening, Charlie felt her palms grow damp. Her stomach began to churn. Her ears started to ring. Impossible as it seemed, the scenario he described sounded just like …

“Is this some sort of joke?” she demanded.

CHAPTER THREE

Charlie’s voice sounded hoarse to her own ears. She would have straightened away from the desk if she hadn’t suddenly needed it for support.

“I wish it were,” Bartoli said, while Crane shook his head. Bartoli continued, “We want you to come with us to Kill Devil Hills, look at the crime scene, see what you can come up with. Give us whatever insights you can.”

“No.” Charlie’s chest felt tight. The floor seemed to heave beneath her feet. Crane had been right, she should have been sitting down for this. But how could she have imagined …?

Bartoli’s expression softened fractionally.

“Look, we know what happened to you,” he said. Moving closer, he rested a hip against the desk beside her and folded his arms over his chest in rough approximation of her posture. Mirroring: that’s what he was doing. It was an easy way to establish rapport with a subject, but unfortunately for him she was well aware of the technique. Deliberately she allowed her arms to drop. But her subconscious took over again as her fingers curled around the edge of the desk and held on. “We know what you went through the last time this creep crawled out of the woodwork. We know this is tough.”

“It’s the same MO,” Crane told her. “We think it might be the same guy. We think the Boardwalk Killer is back.”

A wave of dizziness hit Charlie, and she had to swallow hard before she could speak.

“No,” she said again. She realized she was breathing way too fast. God, was she going to hyperventilate?
Please, not here. Not in front of them
. The Boardwalk Killer was the name the media had bestowed on the slayer of Holly and her family. Because Holly’s body, like those of the other five girls he had snatched after slaughtering their families, had turned up under the boardwalks that are ubiquitous in Atlantic Coast beach towns. “It can’t be him. It’s been fifteen years. Serial killers almost never start up again after that long a period.”

“I don’t know what to tell you.” Bartoli shrugged. “Maybe he was out of the country. Maybe he was in jail. Maybe he had some kind of illness that kept him housebound. It might even be a copycat. The thing is, though, we don’t have time to waste trying umpteen different ways to come at this. We think it’s the same guy. You saw him. You lived through one of his attacks. You’re the
only one
who saw him and lived through one of his attacks. That makes you the best person available to help us. If you need to go home to pack a bag, we’ll take you. If you need to contact people, let them know you’re leaving with us, that’s fine. Whatever arrangements you need to make, whatever makes this work for you, we’ll help. But we need to get going as soon as possible. Preferably within the hour.”

“I can’t do it.” Charlie shook her head, knowing even as she said it that refusing was the only choice she could make. Time and much effort on her part had papered over the gaping wound in her psyche left by that night, but it was still there, still raw and weeping and capable of causing her a horrific amount of damage if she allowed it to be ripped open again. “I’m sorry, but no. I’ll do what I can from here, but I can’t go with you. I can’t get involved in this in a personal way.”

“We need you.” Letting his arms drop so that a palm rested flat on her desktop (mirroring again? Charlie wondered as she became aware of her own posture; if so, it was more subtle this time), Bartoli leaned in, held her gaze. The intensity in his eyes made Charlie want to close her own. Anxiety tightened her stomach, dried her mouth.
“Aside from your personal history, you’re the foremost expert on serial killers in this part of the country. Your assistance with this case was requested by the Bureau, and has been cleared through official channels all the way up to the top dog in the Justice Department. Bottom line is, you’ve been assigned to us for as long as we need you. And you’re the best hope Bayley Evans has.”

“I’ve been assigned to you? Without anyone asking me?” Charlie’s voice sharpened with welcome indignation even as the image of Holly as she had last seen her rose in her mind’s eye.
Oh, God. Another girl’s life might depend on what I do next
. She was suddenly bathed in cold sweat.

I’m not strong enough
.

“Temporarily. Until this case is over. Technically, I guess you’re free to decline.”

“I want to help.” Even while she said it, she shook her head in dogged refusal, because she couldn’t, just could not, expose herself to that kind of life-destroying horror again. She was doing her part in the war against evil by learning all there was to know about the enemy, with the intention of sharing that knowledge with the world so it could be forewarned and, thus, forearmed. She should not be expected to go to battle in the trenches, too. Charlie had to force the next words around the lump forming in her throat. “I’ll do a profile. I’ll—”

An eruption of shouts out in the hallway was punctuated by a man’s bloodcurdling scream. Even muffled by walls and a steel door, the disturbance cut through her words, riveting the attention of everyone in the office, making Charlie’s heart jump.

“What the hell?” Bartoli straightened from the desk abruptly. Clanging metal, running footsteps, and more shouts were followed seconds later by a frenzied pounding on Charlie’s closed office door.

“Dr. Stone! Dr. Stone!” a man yelled through the panel. “Come quick!”

Such a summons was unprecedented. Alarm flooding her veins, Charlie rushed to jerk open her door. A guard—Parnell, according to his name tag—jiggled from foot to foot with nervous excitement, pointing down the hall the second he set eyes on her. Looking in the direction in which he pointed, Charlie saw that, just on the other side
of the mesh double doors, a cadre of jostling guards had congregated, while more hustled a chain-linked contingent of inmates away. Obviously agitated, the remaining guards seemed to be focused on something on the ground.

“What’s hap—?” she began, only to have her question cut off as Parnell grabbed her arm and physically pulled her from her office.

“Warden says you should come now!” He was already in motion, breaking into a run, towing her down the hall with him.

“Hey, wait a minute!” It was Bartoli, yelling after her from her office, sounding alarmed on her behalf. As if he thought Parnell was kidnapping her or something.

“It’s all right,” Charlie called back to him, even as she ran with the guard.

“Dr. Stone! We’ve got a man severely injured here! You’re a medical doctor, you know something about emergency care, right?” Looking around at her as she reached the closed mesh gates, Pugh crouched beside what Charlie realized, from his orange uniform, was an inmate lying on the floor.

“Yes,” she replied, her eyes on the injured man. As one of the guards hurried to open the double doors to let her through, she was peripherally aware of Bartoli and Crane running up behind her, flashing their badges to get past the guard, negotiating the complicated procedure of passing through the clanging metal cage right along with her. Charlie stayed focused on the scene unfolding in front of her: a little distance beyond the fallen man, guards were dragging another inmate, this one apparently unconscious, toward the intersecting corridor that led to the main part of the building, where the cells, among other things, were located.

“What happened?” Breathless, she asked the question Parnell had interrupted earlier as she rushed through the last door and dropped to her knees beside Pugh. Adrenaline surged like a double shot of speed as she assessed the victim with the triage mentality of a first responder. With a sense of shock she recognized the injured man as Garland. He lay motionless, sprawled on his back on the concrete floor, blood pumping from his chest. The front of his jumpsuit was already wet, shiny, saturated scarlet. His eyes were closed. His skin was ashen.

“Mr. Garland,” Charlie called to him urgently even as she pressed
two fingers to the pulse beneath his ear, while Pugh said, “One of the other inmates stabbed him.
Do something
.”

Charlie could feel only a faint, irregular pulse, but it at least meant Garland was still alive. Moving fast, she unzipped his jumpsuit to the chain around his waist and yanked it open to reveal the wound. A muscular, supremely fit man with an inch-long slit just above his left nipple, which was probably going to kill him, was her lightning-quick assessment. The rhythmic way the blood gushed from his chest was ominous, but it told her that his heart was still beating. Although it had been hard to tell at first glance, she saw that he was breathing on his own as well.

“It was Nash who done it. They’re taking him to the hole,” one of the guards—Johnson, she saw with an upward flick of her eyes—said to Pugh. The way he grimaced told Charlie that he thought he was in big trouble for letting the attack happen. She guessed the warden had been on this side of the gate, on his way to his office in the first of the five buildings that made up the huge prison complex, when the assault had gone down, and that the commotion had drawn him back to the scene.

“Nash was with the group we was taking to the library,” another guard added. The library was on the same side of the mesh doors as Charlie’s office and the interview rooms, so clearly the attack had happened as Garland was coming out and the library group was going in. “He jumped at Garland so fast, wasn’t nothing nobody could do. Just, boom, like that, and it was done.”

“We got the shiv,” a third guard volunteered. “About six inches long, sharp as a razor blade.”

“Goddamn it. Find out where it came from.” Pugh’s face was suffused with anger as he looked at the guards. Spotting the feds looming behind Charlie, his complexion went from dark rose to magenta in about half a second. His eyes bulged and his jaw worked. Charlie saw all this in passing even as she slapped her hand flat against Garland’s wound and laid the other one on top of it, putting her weight into it, applying as much pressure as she could in an attempt to stop the bleeding. His chest was wide, warm, firm with muscle—and slippery with blood. So much blood.

“Put the whole damned place on lockdown,” Pugh snapped, and
one of the guards started barking the necessary orders into a handheld radio.

It was no wonder Pugh was upset: a violent death inside the prison meant an outside investigation, Charlie knew, and knew, too, that such an investigation was the last thing the warden wanted. Just a month before she had arrived at Wallens Ridge in June, the Bureau of Prisons had concluded an investigation into the death of an inmate who had supposedly committed suicide in his cell. The inquiry had been ugly, and the final report was still pending.

With the FBI agents observing, there would be no hiding this.

“Move back,” somebody said above her. The voice was authoritative: she thought it belonged to Bartoli, and that he was talking to the nervous guards, but she was concentrating too hard on Garland to glance up and make sure. “Give her some room to work.”