The Last Victim (40 page)

He came, too, then, shuddering, driving deep and holding himself inside her shaking body and groaning with the intensity of his release.

For a long moment afterward neither of them moved. He was hot and damp with sweat and heavy as a slab of concrete on top of her. His arms were locked around her, holding her tight. His head had dropped to rest in the tender curve between her neck and shoulder.

I love the way he feels
.

Charlie was just having that thought, just resurfacing from the aftermath of the explosions that had detonated inside her, just becoming aware of how boneless she felt and how violently the storm still raged outside and how warm and cozy her bed was with him in it, when he shifted position. Her eyes snapped open as he rolled onto his back and pulled her with him so that she ended up lying on top of his chest. Folding an arm beneath his head, splaying a possessive hand over her ass, he looked at her.

Okay, so meeting his gaze was embarrassing. So was lying naked on top of him in a tangle of bedclothes while he casually fondled her bottom. Come to think of it, so was just about everything they’d done.

“So?” he asked, his eyes crinkling at her.

Charlie knew what he was asking. Her breath caught:
The earth moved
.

“Very nice,” she answered repressively, and felt her heart speed up as he gave her a broad smile.

“Don’t mess with …,” he began, but Charlie didn’t hear the rest of it because, out of nowhere, she felt a hand on her shoulder.

“Charlie.”
A man was speaking to her urgently. It was Tony’s voice, and he …

Charlie’s eyes widened.
“Michael.”
As she realized what was happening,
she clutched at him urgently, but it was already too late. He and the bed and her house and everything else dissolved around her, and then her eyes opened to find Tony leaning over her. His hand was on her shoulder, shaking her awake. Behind him were Kaminsky and Crane. All three were fully dressed, frowning, and Crane and Kaminsky were talking to each other while Tony concentrated on waking her.

After a horrifying moment in which she thought she might be naked and rosy with sex, Charlie realized it wasn’t so. She was once again wearing the pink pajamas that Michael had so recently taken off her. Lying curled up on the couch where she had fallen asleep. With a single lamp burning, and her laptop lying on the floor beside her.

Even as Tony withdrew his hand and Charlie blinked and sat up, she was aware of the most profound sense of loss.

Michael
.

“What is it?” she snapped, shaking her hair back from her face, glaring up at Tony like it was all his fault and then impartially at the other two, knowing that she sounded irritable and not able to help it. With every ounce of her being she longed to be back in the tumbled bed she had just left.

That was a one-time deal, you know. Don’t you even begin to let yourself think it’s ever likely to happen again
.

The thought made her heart bleed.

“I tried to wake you up.” Kaminsky sounded as cranky as Charlie felt. “I knocked, I came in, I shook you. You didn’t stir. I had to call the guys. Did you take a sleeping pill or something?”

“No.” Doing her best to push her recent sexfest out of her mind, Charlie took a deep breath as her head continued to clear. She brushed her hair out of her face with both hands, glanced around. The digital numbers on the cable box below the TV read 4:22 a.m. Out here in the real world, something—something major—was clearly up. “What’s happened?”

“There’s another victim.” Tony’s face was grim. “We’ve got to go. Get dressed.”

Charlie’s pulse started to pound in her ears. “Another victim? You mean—another family’s been attacked?”

“Bayley Evans’ cousin. Hannah Beckett. Her father and stepmother—Philip and Rosalie Beckett—are dead. Hannah’s missing.” Tony turned and walked out of the room, motioning to Crane and Kaminsky to follow him. He glanced back at Charlie over his shoulder. “You’ve got ten minutes. We’ll meet you downstairs.”

Left alone, Charlie dressed fast, then took a precious moment to do a quick walk-through search of the apartment, even turning on the kitchen tap. Nothing.

“Michael,” she called softly. She heard the urgency in her voice, and it stopped her cold. If she was going to survive this, she needed to start backtracking, fast. To begin with, he couldn’t be “Michael” to her. Not here in the real world, from which he might even now be gone. For her own sake, she had to do her best to keep what distance she could between them. Because if she didn’t, her heart was going to get way too involved, and the hard truth was that he wasn’t among the living anymore, and he couldn’t stay.

There was no sign of
Garland
anywhere. Facing the fact that there was nothing she could do about it and that she was out of time anyway, Charlie succumbed to one last temptation, and sent a hurried prayer winging skyward asking God to keep him safe. Then she went downstairs.

The crime scene was a largish brick ranch house at the very end of a cul-de-sac not too far from Kill Devil Hills’ small central business district. Very modern, lots of glass. The property was approximately an acre, with lavish landscaping, including a privacy barrier of loblolly pines, which meant the neighbors, whom the local police were already interviewing, had not seen or heard a thing.

When Charlie and the team arrived, making their way past an already established police perimeter and an army of arriving media, the bodies were still inside. The first gray fingers of dawn were just creeping up over the eastern sky as they entered the house. Immediately they were asked to safeguard the still-fresh forensic evidence by suiting up in paper jumpsuits, booties, and rubber gloves, which they did.

“Let them in,” Haney barked at the uniformed officer who tried to block their access to the master bedroom, where Haney and his
partner and various crime scene technicians seemed to be taking care to hug the walls as they worked. As soon as Charlie got a glimpse of the room, she saw why: the body closest to the door lay sprawled in a veritable lake of blood that had soaked into the once-plush beige carpet and turned it a hideous shade of brown. Blood splatter covered the bed, the walls, every available surface that she could see. It looked like an abattoir. The raw meat smell of fresh carnage hung heavy in the air. Charlie felt her stomach start to churn. As the cop guarding the door moved aside and Tony led the way into the bedroom, with all of them stepping carefully so as to avoid the blood, Charlie had just enough time to identify Hannah’s stepmother’s blond, bird-boned body crumpled near the foot of the bed before nausea hit her hard. The rest of the room seemed to recede as her eyes flew to a tall, slender man in a pair of blood-drenched blue pajamas who came walking out of the en suite bathroom to stare down in disbelief at something on the floor in front of him. Charlie stopped cold, told herself fiercely to breathe, and followed his gaze to the floor. With the bed blocking her view, all she saw of what was transfixing his attention was a man’s long, narrow bare foot and an ankle sticking out of blue pajama pants identical to the ones the man wore. The body to which the foot and ankle belonged lay on the floor on the other side of the bed. Charlie knew that what she was seeing was the spirit looking down at his own recently murdered corpse. Then the man apparently felt her gaze on him. His head came up and he looked at her. Even as he realized she could see him, Charlie recognized him from a set of pictures of the latest victims the team had been looking at on the way over. He was Hannah’s father, Phil Beckett, now deceased.

“There’s been a murder.” Beckett’s voice was croaky but surprisingly controlled under the circumstances, and Charlie remembered that he was—had been—a lawyer. Still, his eyes were wide with shock as they met hers. “It’s me. And Rosalie. A man … broke in. We’ve been killed.”

He came toward her, passing right through the solid structure of the bed, and as he drew near Charlie saw that he was hideously wounded. The front of his pajama shirt was in tatters, baring most of a thin chest laid open with long, vertical slashes that were scarlet with
blood and gore. Half of his right sleeve was missing, and the flesh of his forearm had been sliced to ribbons. An inches-long gash across his right cheekbone went right down to the bone.

“Hannah—it’s the same thing that happened to Bayley, isn’t it? God in heaven, look what he did to Rosalie!”

Charlie took an involuntary step backward as he stopped a few feet away, his eyes riveted on the body of his dead wife, and swallowed hard in an attempt to combat her rising nausea. Up close, the horror of what had been done to him was impossible to miss.

“I fought. I tried to protect them. I landed some punches. I think I broke his damned front tooth.” Anguish was plain in his eyes as he looked again at Charlie. “My wife … my daughter …” His face contorted with anger and grief. His voice rose. “That bastard has my daughter, doesn’t he? Oh, God, what can I do?” Turning, he dropped to his knees beside his wife, and tried to touch her with a hesitant hand. “Rosalie? Rosalie!”

Remembering where she was, knowing that she was surrounded by possible witnesses, Charlie didn’t say a word. Under the circumstances, there was nothing she could do to comfort him, so she didn’t try. Instead she turned on her heel and left the room. Her stomach was in full revolt, and she was afraid she was going to vomit where she stood if she didn’t get out of there. Blindly she strode down the hall that led to the bedrooms, meaning to rush outside and get some fresh air. But there were cops in the living room, and through the glass pane in the top of the front door she could see the bright glow of klieg lights that could only belong to the media stationed out front. Hanging a sharp right, she walked through the kitchen and found herself on the adjoining screened-in porch.

It was dark, shadowy, alive with the sound of insects and water dripping off trees from the recent rain. Fake grass carpeted the floor. Charlie knew, because she dropped to her knees on the bristly stuff and, lowering her head, took in great gulps of air.

The horror of what she had just seen stayed with her.

“Charlie?” Tony banged through the door behind her.

Charlie pushed to her feet. She turned to look at him, but discovered speech was beyond her for the moment. Her stomach heaved. Her head reeled.

“Hey. You okay? I know that was bad in there.”

His arm came around her shoulders as he peered into her face. Charlie made a wordless sound, and he pulled her against him, wrapping her in a steadying hug.

Charlie leaned against him as the only sturdy thing available, grateful for his presence. He was a good guy, handsome and strong, capable and genuinely nice, and she had a serious screw loose in her psyche to prefer the darkness to the light.

“Phil Beckett fought. He may have broken the killer’s front tooth.” Her words were breathy and rushed, but she was lucky to have gotten them out at all. The nausea was bad. Having spoken, she dropped her head down onto his shoulder and concentrated on not losing the coffee and power bar she’d half consumed in the car on the way over.

“What? How do you know that?”

Charlie wasn’t up to even attempting to answer at the moment. She just shook her head.

“Charlie?” Tony’s arms tightened around her. She took another deep breath. Then she felt something—call it a disturbance in the force—that made her look up. There, standing in the dark a few feet away, looking as solid as the man whose arms were wrapped around her but bigger and a whole lot badder, was Garland. His booted feet were planted apart, his arms were folded over his chest, and his expression as his gaze fixed on her oozed displeasure.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Just looking at him made her heart beat a little faster. Charlie gathered from the way he was eyeing the two of them that he didn’t much care for finding her in Tony’s arms … and was glad to see him anyway. Something inside her she hadn’t even realized was tense with worry eased.

Not good. In fact, bad. Then she had a corollary thought. If I’m not careful, this—whatever he is—is going to break my heart
.

“Charlie. How sure are you about the broken tooth?” Tony’s tone was urgent.

Ignoring Garland, Charlie pushed out of Tony’s arms, took a few unsteady steps toward one of the three plastic lawn chairs on the porch, and sank down on it. It was still dark, but more the charcoal of awakening dawn than the pitch-black of night. There was a warm breeze blowing in through the screen. It carried the scent of rain and wet grass on it. Her stomach was settling down a little bit, and she thought the fresh air might be helping.

“Fairly sure.”

“You have some kind of psychic experience in there?” His tone was slightly cautious.

Charlie sighed. She didn’t like people knowing even a little bit
about her ability, for all sorts of reasons, but Tony wasn’t exactly people, and anyway, he knew enough to at least take what she said semi-seriously, so what was she going to do, deny it?

“Phil Beckett spoke to me. That’s where I got the information.”

She could see from his expression that he was curious, that he wanted to know more, and resigned herself to an interrogation. But what he said was, “Okay,” and then, “Sit tight, I’ll be right back” as he turned and strode back into the house.

Charlie didn’t even look up at Garland as he came to stand beside her. She stared out at the night, at the swaying pines, black and tall, at the far end of the yard, at the hammock moving with the breeze closer at hand, at the lightening sky.

“You know, I’m starting to not like that guy,” he said reflectively, and at that Charlie did flick a look up at him.

“You sound like you’re jealous.” She was deliberately cool, deliberately off-hand, deliberately creating as much distance between them as she could, because she was horribly afraid that the alternative was going to make her life unbearable one day soon.

She could feel him studying her. “Except for being dead, I’m a pretty normal guy, and I just fucked you to Sunday and back. So, yeah.” He hunkered down beside her. “You want to tell me what’s with the attitude?”