The Last Time I Saw Her Read Free Page A

trial.
    For all intents and purposes, identical twins had identical DNA.
    The DNA evidence left at the crime scenes had been the strongest evidence tying Michael to the murders.
    Michael had always claimed that he was innocent. Of course, guilty men had been proclaiming their innocence from the world’s beginning, but by the time he’d disappeared she’d pretty much come to believe him. The man—ghost, whatever—she had come to know would never have brutally raped and killed seven women. It just wasn’t in him.
    So maybe here was the answer. Maybe this man who looked exactly like Michael was Michael’s identical twin who shared his DNA and who was the
real serial killer.
    On that horrific thought, her eyes locked with his, and at what she saw in their wrong-color depths, Charlie suddenly felt cold all over.
    Michael had always told her that her face was way too easy to read.
    Moving closer, Hughes reached out to take hold of her upper arm. She was wearing a long-sleeved white shirt, thin and silky, with black pants. She could feel the strength of his fingers through it.
    Like Michael, he was a big guy. Big enough to seem menacing even if all he did was stand there gripping her arm. Big enough that she might have some trouble getting away from him if he didn’t want to let her go.
    “Something wrong, Dr. Stone?” he asked.

CHAPTER TWO
    He was close enough that he loomed over her.
    Looking up into that hauntingly familiar face, Charlie felt a flash of disorientation. She wanted to throw herself into his arms and pull sharply away from him at the same time. A tide of longing cut by a quick infusion of fear. It was uncanny and even kind of horrible to look up into the face of someone she knew so well—and know that it wasn’t him she was seeing at all. Being afraid of Michael—that seemed impossible now, given everything that had passed between them. Only—was she? But of course if she was afraid, it wasn’t of Michael: it was of this guy.
    She had a sickening moment in which she found herself remembering how easily and quickly Michael had been able to kill when it suited him to do so.
    A strong man could break a neck in a matter of seconds, she’d discovered.
    Impossible to know whether or not Rick Hughes possessed similar skills. Stupid to assume he did not.
    This is not Michael.
She had to mentally formulate the words again to counteract what her eyes were telling her.
    She’d come face-to-face with so much danger lately that having her heart start to pound and her pulse start to race and her breathing start to quicken felt almost normal.
    Didn’t mean she had to like it. But whether she liked it or not, that’s what was happening to her now. She
was
afraid—of this man who
wasn’t
Michael.
    To hell with this.
    She’d spent enough time being afraid to last a millennium. She was done with being afraid.
    It was daytime. Late afternoon in a public cemetery. They were in Big Stone Gap, the kind of Mayberry-esque small town where if she screamed every neighbor within earshot would come running, and given all the houses lining the street and the occasional car driving past and the leaf blower and the sounds of hammering and sawing she could hear from the not-so-distant town square, where booths were being assembled for the fall festival scheduled for that weekend, someone was bound to be within earshot. Her taxi with the driver in it was still waiting at the curb, for God’s sake.
    Real serial killer or not, Hughes was not going to murder her where she stood.
    “No, of course there’s nothing wrong.” She pulled free of his grip. He didn’t try to stop her. Tearing her eyes away from his face was harder, but she did it, and glanced toward the taxi idling at the curb. The driver, a stranger who’d come with the cab she’d hailed at the airport, had his head resting against the seat back and appeared to be napping. He’d rolled the windows down, presumably to catch the woodsmoke-scented breeze.
    He would