“Like I said, he’s a sick fuck,” Michael said. Charlie flicked him a glance—with one arm tucked behind his head he looked comfortable enough, although his broad shoulders were too wide for the narrow couch—then focused her attention on the others, who actually were trying to contribute something productive to the discussion.
“Omar’s—the bar Laura Peters left right before she was abducted—is right around the corner from Pembroke Avenue, where Jenna McDaniels was picked up,” Kaminsky was still peering at her computer screen.
“Which leaves us with the question: did he go there targeting them, or did he pick them at random?” Tony asked.
“There has to be a common denominator among the victims.” Because she was basically thinking aloud, Charlie looked at Tony without really seeing him. “What makes him choose them? Laura Peters couldn’t swim, for instance, and he chose to subject that group to death by drowning. The question we need to ask is, did he
know
Laura Peters couldn’t swim? And if so, how did he know it? And what about the others? Did he choose the death scenarios he placed them in according to their fears? If so, how did he know his victims, and what they were afraid of?”
“Raylene Witt was a manicurist at Hollywood Nails in Hampton. Maybe at some point she did the other girls’ nails,” Buzz offered.
Tony looked at him.
“I’ll check it out,” Buzz added hastily. Then he made a face. “She couldn’t have done them on the day they disappeared, though, which was the only time Jenna McDaniels was in Hampton. Raylene had called in sick on Wednesday, which is the day she disappeared, and wasn’t scheduled to work again until Saturday. Only, because she lived alone, no one knew she had disappeared.”
“Maybe there’s a twenty-four-hour clinic or pharmacy or something over there near that bar where Laura got nabbed and the street where Teen Queen got picked up. Maybe the screamer was over there because she was sick. Because it makes sense that they were all taken from the same area.” Michael was frowning up at the ceiling rather than looking at Charlie. She knew that, she realized crossly, because
she
was looking at
him.
But his comments bore repeating, so she did.
“I’ll check that out, too,” Buzz said.
“You know what, I think I may have just found a common denominator for these last three victims.” There was barely suppressed excitement in Kaminsky’s voice. “They were all in terrible car accidents when they were young. Raylene Witt’s mother was killed when a drunk driver hit the family car. Raylene was six years old. Her injuries were minor. Laura Peters was in a car crash when she was twelve. A friend’s mother was driving a group of four girls to a birthday party. Kylie Waters and Sara Goldberg—who were both twelve, too—were killed.” (“There you go,” Michael said, his gaze shifting to Charlie. “Kylie and Sara.” Remembering the two little girls who had come for Laura, Charlie thought,
Yes, that sounds right
. Those little girls, who were presumably her close friends at the time they were killed, would have come to take Laura to the light. Presumably.) “Then there’s Jenna McDaniels. At the age of sixteen, she was on her way to a dance when there was a rollover accident. The boy driving, Tommy Stafford, who I’m presuming was her date, was killed.”
“Could be coincidence,” Buzz cautioned.
“Ain’t no such thing as coincidence,” Michael said. He was looking at the ceiling again.
“All right, we want to check into first responders, hospital personnel, anybody who might have been on the scene of all three accidents,” Tony said. “If that’s a coincidence, it’s a pretty big one.”
“I’ll get on it.” Kaminsky typed something into her laptop.
The pilot’s voice came over the intercom, telling them to prepare for landing. They were on the ground not long afterward.
“Oh, for God’s sake, are you still pouting?” Charlie hissed at Michael, taking advantage of a semi-private moment as Tony talked to the flight crew, Kaminsky placed a phone call, and Buzz went to fetch the rental car. Michael was standing grim-faced and silent on the tarmac beside her.
“Pouting?” The look he slanted down at her was sharp with disbelief. “I don’t pout.”
“Oh, yeah? You could have fooled me.”
Then Buzz pulled up in the rental car and any chance of further conversation, at least on her part, was gone.
“Just so you know, babe, fooling you ain’t that hard,” Michael said by way of a parting shot. Surrounded by the living again, Charlie couldn’t do more than skewer him with a dirty look in reply.
A little more than forty-five minutes later, with Tony at the wheel of their rented SUV, they were on the University of South Carolina’s campus driving down Sumter heading for their meeting with David Myers. Charlie cast a fond look at the Horseshoe, the quadrangle that was home to some of the campus’ most historic buildings, admiring the huge oaks with their festoons of gray Spanish moss and the lush lawn where a handful of students lounged in the shade. Then they rounded a corner, and a moment later they were pulling into the parking lot of the very modern building that housed David Myers’ office.
“So, you went to college here, huh?” Michael asked as they walked through the suffocating heat of the parking lot into the welcome chill of the building. “What, was this guy your college sweetheart?”
Glad as she was that he seemed to have gotten over being mad at her, Charlie didn’t care for the subject. Since it previously had been raised right after Michael had seen Laura go off with her two dead friends, and he hadn’t commented at the time, Charlie had been hoping he’d been too wrapped up in what he had just witnessed to pay attention when she’d been admitting to a relationship with David Myers. Obviously, no such luck.
A firming of her lips was her only reply. Clearly he took that for the
yes
she really didn’t want to give him, because interest sparked in his eyes.
When the door to David Myers’ office opened in response to Tony’s knock, Charlie thought she was prepared.
She should have known that she wasn’t.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
For a moment, for the briefest sliver of time as she found herself looking at David, Charlie was twenty-one again and achingly vulnerable. She had an instant mental image of herself, slim in blue jeans with her waist-length hair pulled back from her face by a barrette so that the silky fall of it rippled down her back, as she had looked on the first day of spring semester of her senior year in college. That was when she’d come to work for Dr. David Myers as his research assistant. By the end of that semester she had absolutely hero-worshipped him.
At least now she was mature enough to realize just how young and foolish she had been. But still, as she came face-to-face with David again, the memory was more embarrassing than she had expected it to be.
“Charlie!” He greeted her with apparent delight, smiling broadly as his gaze swept her. “You look fantastic.”
“Hello, David.” Burningly conscious that she was the object of the undivided attention of every other member of her group even if none of them (except Michael) was blatant enough to be openly watching her, she smiled her coolest, most professional smile and held out her hand. When he shook hands with no more than the appropriate degree of friendliness, she found herself devoutly glad that he seemed determined to keep things professional, too. “I’d like you to meet—”
“Holy hell, he wasn’t a student when you were here anymore than I was,” Michael said in her ear as she, trying her best to tune her bête noire out, performed the introductions. “What, were you boinking your professor?”
Actually, yes she had been. Her psychology professor, to be exact. Only a few times, toward the end of the semester. And the last time they had set eyes on each other, when he had broken off their budding relationship because he was getting married to the woman he’d been engaged to, unbeknownst to her, all along, and then going to England to accept a fellowship at Oxford, she had told him she loved him and begged him to stay.
None of which she said out loud. That last part at least she never intended to share with anyone. Seen in the bright light of eleven years later, it was downright humiliating. Worse, it was stupid.
It was also one more example of her unerring instinct for choosing the absolutely wrong man.
His office was different than the one he’d had when she’d worked for him. Bigger. Not quite as messy. Of course, he was a full professor now, instead of a freshly minted, thirty-year-old Ph.D. in his first year as an assistant professor. Except for a well-trimmed mustache and goatee, he looked pretty much the same: a shade under six feet tall, with a slim build that showed no signs of softening around the edges and short coffee brown hair. A few gray hairs at his temples and some lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth that hadn’t been there before were the only real indications of the passage of time. Even the Gamecocks tie and blue dress shirt he wore tucked into blue jeans could have been the same.
Charlie took comfort from the knowledge that she looked—and was—totally different from the academically accomplished but otherwise clueless girl that he had known.
“The Columbia Police Department took the letter the day after I got it,” David answered Tony’s question, which referred to the whereabouts of the
You can’t catch me
message David had received. Tony sat in the chair across from David, who was ensconced behind his cluttered desk in what Charlie, in psychiatrist mode, recognized as his deliberate assumption of the power position. Charlie and Kaminsky sat on a tweedy love seat in front of the window. Buzz perched atop a small stool nearby. Michael leaned against the wall near Charlie. “I don’t know if they still have it, or if they passed it on to the FBI. At first the detectives here thought they were dealing with just a bizarre double homicide. It was a couple of weeks before the connection to the previous murders was made and the FBI was called in. I spent quite a bit of time working with the detectives and the FBI to try to identify the killer”—he glanced at Charlie with the faintest of smiles—“and I even tried to enlist the help of the illustrious Dr. Stone here, whose work with serial killers I have followed with interest and admiration, but the fact is we made no appreciable headway. Of course, now that your elite team of serial killer hunters is on the job, presumably we can hope for better luck.”
“Do you have any idea why you were chosen to receive that letter?” Tony asked.
David shook his head. “No, not really. I mean, I’m fairly certain it was because of my book. I’m the author of
Criminal Psychology: Understanding the Deviant Mind,
you know—it’s the textbook of choice in most criminal psychology courses, so there’s wide access to it.”
“A fifteen-year-old boy survived the attack,” Charlie said. “Had you ever met him before?”
“Saul Tunney.” David turned his attention to her, and Charlie recognized that particularly intent gaze as the one he got when something truly interested him. “A remarkable young man. No, I’d never met him before, but we stay in fairly regular contact now. He’s actually planning to matriculate here at USC when he graduates high school.” He made a face at her. “I had to do quite a bit of talking to get him into regular counseling, but I did it. I’ve been acting as kind of a mentor to him. As horrible as what happened was, it doesn’t seem to have done any permanent psychological damage to him.”
“What about the two deceased victims?” Tony asked. “Had you ever met either of them?”
“No.” David shook his head. “I’m sorry.”
“Did you know Dr. Jeffrey Underwood or Eric Riva prior to receiving that letter?” Kaminsky asked.
“I knew
of
Dr. Underwood, of course.” David glanced at Charlie. “I’ve been aware of his work for years, as I’m sure Charlie has. It’s really very impressive.” Charlie nodded in agreement. “I did not know him in any other capacity. And I had never heard of Eric Riva until I found out—weeks after I was dragged into the case—that he had been the first recipient of the killer’s taunt.”
“Do you have any idea why the Gingerbread Man chose a Charlotte newspaper reporter to send that first letter to?” Tony asked. “It doesn’t seem to mesh with his selection of three widely heralded experts in the criminal psychology field as the recipients of the next three letters.”
David’s expression brightened. “Now, that I can tell you. We—the previous investigators and I—believe it was because Mr. Riva had written several newspaper stories about the ordeal suffered by the three boys in an earlier attack. I posited that the killer had read those articles, which I felt meant that at that time he had to be living somewhere within the readership area of the
Charlotte Observer.
I still think that.”
Tony nodded. Remembering the file David had sent her to look at when he had asked her to consult and that she had sent back when she’d declined, Charlie said, “Could we get a copy of the file you put together on the case, do you think? As well as anything else you have that you think might help us.”
“Yes, of course,” David said. Then he smiled a little ruefully at Charlie. “Once the killer is caught, I’m hoping to turn my experiences with this into a book. So if you would treat everything in that file as confidential I would appreciate it.”