“The universe speaks to me, remember?” she said lightly, throwing Michael an
eat dirt
look. “Plus, somebody walking past was carrying a brochure.”
“Yeah, I thought so,” Michael said.
The look Tony gave her was searching. Of course, he knew she
was,
ahem
,
a little bit psychic, even if he didn’t know the half of it. One day, Charlie told herself, she might even sit him down and tell him the whole truth. Minus the part about Michael, of course.
She was never going to be able to tell anybody about Michael.
The Grief Connection was the group’s name. It was printed on a sign affixed to the open door of a room that was already filling up with people, dead and alive. Rows of molded plastic chairs, a speaker’s podium, a table with coffee and pastries, that was it. According to the social worker getting ready to lead that day’s session, open meetings were held every weekday from nine to ten a.m. It was run like an AA meeting. People came, shared the source of their grief, and found comfort. No, there were no records of who attended the meetings, and there were certainly no security cameras. But she was able to give them a list of the meeting leaders, and a number they could use to contact the parent organization for more information.
“What are the chances that Jenna, Raylene, and Laura all ended up in one of these sessions together?” Buzz whispered as they stood at the back of the room watching the meeting get under way.
“It’s the only thing that fits.” Tony’s gaze swung to Charlie. “You want to give Jenna a call when we get out of here and see if she can confirm being at one of these meetings the day she was kidnapped? I’d do it, but I think it’d be better coming from you. Crane, when we get back to the hotel, see if you can find out if any of the other victims went in for some kind of grief counseling.”
Charlie nodded, and Crane said, “Will do, boss.”
As they watched the elderly woman Charlie had observed on the street stand up and start to share her story of loss—her husband of fifty-two years (who she had no idea was right beside her) had been killed in a traffic accident the previous week—Charlie said thoughtfully, “The Gingerbread Man almost had to be at that same session. How else would he know that those girls had suffered that kind of loss?”
“Maybe they have regulars, and one of them will remember a weird guy who stared at all the participants, trying to decide who he was going to kidnap and kill.” That was Michael, who was standing beside her looking both pissed off (that would be at her) and seriously formidable, which she assumed was his way of making sure that the spirits she couldn’t see steered clear.
None of the participants in that morning’s meeting looked like he could remotely fit the bill, Charlie determined with a glance.
After the organized part of the meeting was concluded, when the participants were milling around the refreshments table, Tony asked the social worker about regulars. She pointed them out, and they went to talk to them. They got nothing.
They were just leaving the meeting when Tony got a call from Kaminsky, who’d been kept abreast of the possible grief counseling connection via a text from Buzz. Charlie, who was in the act of phoning Jenna, knew instantly from Tony’s expression that something was up.
“Kaminsky thinks she’s figured out the identity of the next expert the unsub’s going to contact,” Tony said as he disconnected. “We need to head back to the hotel.”
Jenna wasn’t answering her phone. As they sped back to the hotel, Charlie left a message asking the girl to please return the call as soon as possible.
The makeshift War Room was a small conference room down a short hall off the lobby. It was windowless, and Kaminsky had set it up with a system that had her facing a half-dozen laptops placed side by side on the long table that, along with the eight chairs around it, was the room’s only furniture.
“It’s Dr. Anthony Pelletier,” Kaminsky burst out excitedly as the others walked into the room. She was seated in a padded leather chair, but stood up as they entered. On one of the laptop screens was the frozen face of the esteemed neuropathologist who had made a name for himself studying the effect of brain disease on criminal behavior. From the look of him on the screen, Kaminsky had hit pause in mid–phone call. “He’s the only one of the experts on the list you gave me who was involved in a violent death when he was young. His eighteen months older sister was killed in a house fire when he was seven. Apparently the two of them were found unconscious at the bottom of some stairs by firefighters. Dr. Pelletier was able to be revived; the sister was not.”
“Sounds like you got it,” Tony said, nodding at Kaminsky to resume the call. “No way can that be a coincidence.”
Kaminsky hit a button, said, “Sorry to put you on hold, Dr. Pelletier. Here’s our team leader, Special Agent Anthony Bartoli.”
“Dr. Pelletier.” Tony slid into the seat beside Kaminsky. “I’m sure Special Agent Kaminsky has filled you in on what’s going on.”
Pelletier nodded. Charlie had never met him, but she was familiar with his work. In his late thirties, with a round, jovial face and short, reddish hair, he looked like anything but the distinguished researcher he was.
“Everything’s been fine,” Pelletier said in reply to Tony’s question about whether he’d noticed anything out of the ordinary over the last few days.
Tony nodded. “We’re going to be putting surveillance on you. I’ll have people in place within the hour. Around your home, office, you personally. They’ll stay out of sight, but they’ll be there.”
Pelletier looked a little startled. “You really think a serial killer’s going to be contacting
me
?”
“Yes,” Tony said uncompromisingly. “And right now you’re our best hope of catching this guy, so we’d appreciate your cooperation.”
“Sure,” Pelletier agreed, and they ended the conversation with him looking alarmed but game. No sooner had he hung up than Jenna called Charlie back: she hadn’t attended the Grief Connection counseling session the morning of the run, she said, which caused Charlie momentary consternation. Then Jenna added that she had stopped by the session briefly to drop off flyers about the run, and had stopped to talk to a couple of people near the door about the tragedy in her own life. It was possible that she could have been overheard, she said, although she didn’t remember anyone who seemed particularly interested in her. She also didn’t remember seeing Laura, or Raylene, although they could have been there. She hadn’t been paying much attention, and she hadn’t stayed long.
“That’s got to be it,” Charlie said as she recounted the conversation to the others, who agreed.
“All we can do is look at any security video we can find from the surrounding streets that morning,” Tony said. As it had already been collected and was in the process of being reviewed, that base was pretty well covered.
“Look who all I’ve talked to this morning,” Kaminsky said as Tony, after refusing Kaminsky’s offer to contact the deputy director of the Bureau on Skype, went out to make the call to set up the arrangements for what needed to happen with Pelletier.
Kaminsky punched a button, and immediately faces appeared on all of the screens.
Charlie recognized four of them at a glance. The other two she had no clue about.
“I left messages for Dr. Underwood and Dr. Myers yesterday”—Kaminsky pointed to two of the screens—“and both called back this morning to confirm that at a young age they were present at the violent death of someone close. Dr. Underwood had a friend hit in the chest with a ball at a baseball game—I know, bizarre—and Dr. Myers’ cousin was accidentally shot and killed when they were together.” She looked around at Charlie and Buzz. “Which means all four of our experts share that common experience. Include Dr. Pelletier—although he is not technically one of our experts
yet—
and we’ve got a clean sweep.
Plus,
I’ve talked to Ariane Spencer”—she pointed to the pretty blond teen on the third screen—“who was, if you recall, the surviving victim from Group two … (that was the snakes)—” Kaminsky broke off to shudder. “—and Andrew Russell, the Group five … trash compactor, remember? … survivor”—she pointed to the fourth screen—“and Saul Tunney, the Group six … grain silo … survivor”—his was another of the faces Charlie recognized—“and they all confirm that they were present at the violent death of someone close, previous to what happened to them with the Gingerbread Man.”
“What about grief counseling?” Buzz asked. “Did they get any?”
“I don’t know.” Kaminsky sounded faintly aggrieved. “When I was talking to them, grief counseling wasn’t part of the picture.” She made a face. “Well, I guess I get to call them all back.”
“You called Ken Ewell?” Charlie was frowning at one of the faces on the screens. The deputy sheriff from Big Stone Gap seemed like an unlikely contact for Kaminsky to need to make.
“He called me,” Kaminsky corrected. “Apparently they have a surveillance video of what looks like a gray van on the road leading into Big Stone Gap on the night of the murders. He’s e-mailing it to me.”
“Maybe we can get a license plate,” Buzz said hopefully.
“Like our luck is ever that good,” Kaminsky replied. Then she pointed to the last screen. “This is a parent of—”
She broke off as Tony came back into the room. An envelope was in his hand, and the expression on his face as he looked at Charlie—directly at her, instead of at the three of them in general—was concerned.
“This came for you,” Tony said as he handed the envelope to her. “It was delivered this morning. The clerk at the front desk thought it might be urgent, so he gave it to me to give to you.”
Charlie accepted the envelope. It was one of the cardboard, black and gold, overnight delivery envelopes from FedEx. The name on the return label was unknown to her, she saw as she ripped it open.
Inside was another envelope, a white business-sized one. On it, in spidery black handwriting, was nothing more than her name: Dr. Charlotte Stone.
The flap was unsealed. Inside that was a single sheet of paper. Even before Charlie unfolded it, her heart started to slam in her chest.
She knew,
knew,
in every cell of her body, who it was from.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
YOU DIDN’T CATCH ME
was what the message said.
“The Gingerbread Man,” Kaminsky breathed, as Michael, who had been looking over Charlie’s shoulder, said, “Fuck,” and Charlie looked down with growing horror at the small, stiff square of paper that had been tucked inside the folded sheet.
It was a Polaroid photograph of three young girls lying, apparently unconscious, in a wire cage.
“Oh, my God.” Charlie dropped the picture like it stung her fingers. The images of the girls—they looked to be young teens—burned itself into her brain. Someone—Buzz—took the letter from her, while Tony picked up the photo, holding it very carefully by the corner with a tissue he’d acquired from somewhere, and positioned it so they all could see.
“He’s escalating again,” Charlie said. For the first couple of seconds she’d looked at it, she’d thought—hoped—that what she was seeing was one of the groups of victims he had attacked in the past. But she didn’t think so. In fact, she was as sure as it was possible to be that this was a new group of victims.
“Find out who those girls are,” Tony ordered, and Kaminsky nodded.
“Since we know Dr. Pelletier is the expert the Gingerbread Man’s most likely to contact, we can catch him,” Buzz said. “Pelletier’s at the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine, right? Isn’t that in Roanoke? We can be there in a couple of hours, catch the SOB when he drops off the letter.”
“Unless he’s smart, and mails it, like he just did to you,” Michael said dryly to Charlie.
Charlie repeated that, minus the snark.
Frowning, Tony was looking down at the photograph he still held in his hand. “Even if he drops it off in person, by the time he does, at least two of these girls are going to be dead. And we may be totally wrong about the identity of the expert. Or he may not even contact an expert this time. As the change in timing proves, he’s flexible enough to make adjustments to his game plan.”
“I think our best bet is to try to identify him, and the place we need to look is where the first Gingerbread Man murders occurred.” Charlie was thinking it through as she spoke. “He’ll have some kind of roots there. Probably a connection to one of the first group of victims.”
“We don’t have time to dig into all that.” Kaminsky’s voice was tight as she looked up from the laptop, where she had been frantically working. “He’s already got those girls. That means we have—at most—two more days. Or we might not even have that. He’s already changed the timing on us.”
“You got anything on the identities?” Tony asked Kaminsky while he passed the photo to Buzz, then said to him, “We need to get that, and the letter, to the lab.”
“I’ll see to it,” Buzz said, while Kaminsky answered, “Nothing yet. I’m checking all the databases, but nothing’s instantaneous, you know.”
“I have a psychic friend whom I know to be very accurate,” Charlie said. With lives at stake, and possessing information she felt might be important, concealing her chats with Tam no longer mattered. “She called a couple of days ago to warn me that I’m in danger near dark water. It seems to me that if I’m in danger near dark water, then near dark water, or any water that can turn dark—like Buggs Island Lake, for example—is where the danger has to be. It’s possible she’s gloamed on to a different danger, but I don’t think so. I think the danger I’m in comes from the Gingerbread Man, and the Gingerbread Man will be found near water that is or can be dark.”