Her Last Whisper (21 page)

Although the room was scrupulously clean, the smell was intense.

The queasiness that Charlie had been resolutely ignoring was now refusing to be ignored.

Dressed in a tan skirt and a white polo beneath a black blazer
(the better to hide her shoulder holster with) instead of one of her signature curve-hugging suits, Lena stood over the farthermost gurney, her head bent so that her black, chin-length bob swung forward to hide her face. At five-two, she was sensitive about her height, and as a result had a thing for killer heels: tonight’s were black, with platforms that gave her at least four additional inches. The sultry, exotic kind of prettiness that she shared with her sister was totally at odds with her aggressive personality. The determined jut of her chin was the only visible indication of that as she snapped pictures of the corpse with her phone.

“There she is,” Tony said as they headed toward her and the heavy door swung shut behind them with a
swoosh
.

Lena immediately looked up. Charlie just had time to register her red-rimmed eyes and the tight set to her mouth and hear her tell Tony, “This woman was wearing my sister’s bracelet,” without a greeting or any other preamble, before the onslaught hit.

A blond teen with Alice in Wonderland hair and big, lost eyes appeared out of nowhere. Gaze fixing on Charlie from across the room, she cried, “Can you tell me what time it is? My mom’s going to kill me if I miss my curfew.”

As Charlie registered that the girl’s jeans and tee were soaked with blood, a heavyset gray-haired woman in a pink-flowered housedress sat bolt upright on one of the gurneys, her upper body emerging right through the blue plastic bag that contained it. She blinked, looked around, and moaned, “The TV’s broken. Oh, no, what am I going to do?” Sliding off the gurney, she started walking toward Charlie. That’s when the knife protruding from the side of her neck became visible, as did the blood that covered her entire left side.

A thin young man with a gray hoodie and long, stringy black hair paced up and down along the far side of the room. He said nothing, just stared into space with a vacant look in his eyes. In the middle of his forehead was a dime-sized black hole. Over in the corner, another young man, this one with short brown hair who was wearing jeans and a tee like the girl, crouched with his head bent. There was no mark on him that she could see. Until he looked up: then she saw that the left side of his face was smashed in, enough so
that an eyeball dangled and she could see the white of his shattered cheekbone and jawbone amidst the gore. What she had thought at first glance was a graphic on his shirt wasn’t a graphic at all, she discovered after a second look: it was splotches and smears of blood. An elderly man and woman, holding hands, stepped through a wall, walked across the room, and disappeared through another, but not before Charlie saw the bullet hole between the woman’s eyes and the gaping wound in the man’s temple.

This convergence of the dead produced an energy field that hit Charlie like a wave. Her stomach gave a warning heave. Swallowing, she stopped walking. It was all she could do not to take a couple of steps back.

Forget queasiness. What she was experiencing now was full-on, stomach-churning nausea. She stuck her hand in her purse, fumbling blindly for the Tums.

“I think I dropped my keys,” a bald, florid-faced man told Charlie confidingly even as her fingers closed around the life-saving plastic bottle. At the same time, she visually tracked a tow-headed little boy on a tricycle pedaling furiously down the center of the floor. Flipping open the lid with a practiced thumb, she popped several of the lemony tablets into her mouth while at the same time watching both child and tricycle disappear into one of the tall metal cabinets lining the far side of the room. As she chewed, swallowed, and stuck the bottle back down in her purse, the bald man continued to walk toward her. Now only a few yards away, he was looking at her while he thoughtfully patted down the pockets of a light blue uniform that had
Terry Hale, mechanic
embroidered on the chest pocket. “I can’t seem to find them anywhere.”

It was only as she took a second look that she saw blood trickling from his mouth and nose and the black smudges of a tire track running diagonally across his abdomen, from which his intestines spilled in bloody loops.

“Can you help me?” he asked, and kept on coming.

For someone like her, Charlie reflected, morgues were the worst. They
teemed
with the spirits of the newly, violently dead. Not all bodies showed up in the morgue with their spirits attached, but many did, and a good number of those spirits stayed even after the bodies were processed and sent elsewhere. If she could see them, they’d died within the last seven days or so. Many, many more were around that didn’t fit those parameters that she couldn’t see, she knew. That was why the atmosphere was so charged.

“Jesus.” Michael was beside her, interposing himself between her and the bewildered mechanic, Terry Hale. Ignoring her dangerously unsettled stomach as well as the cold prickles that ran over her skin, she did her best to look past the importunate dead toward where Tony and Buzz were making a beeline for Lena, who stood beside the last gurney in the row. With so many living people in the vicinity, Charlie couldn’t react to the things she was able to hear and see that they could not. Fortunately, she had gotten used to remaining largely impassive in the face of spirit bombardment.

Heading toward her now, Alice in Wonderland cried, “It’s after midnight and—”

Gray-haired woman spoke over her: “The game’s on in twenty minutes! I have to—”

Blocked by Michael, Terry Hale had stopped walking. He frowned at Charlie and said, “Must have dropped ’em when—”

Alice continued, “—she’ll kill me if—”

Woman said, “—fix it before he—”

Terry Hale concluded with, “I got out of the truck.”

The girl, the woman, and Hale, clearly not yet having realized they were dead, were all talking at the same time, confusion in their eyes. They could see her, Charlie knew, which wasn’t the case with all spirits, including, she thought, the young man pacing the floor over by the wall. The boy crouched in the corner could see her, she was fairly certain, but instead of heading toward her he stayed where he was, wariness apparent in what was left of his face. Spirits seemed able to sense those who could see them and tended to be drawn to such people like moths to a light, which was why Alice, the woman, and Hale were now closing in on her so inexorably. Normally the living were invisible to the dead, just as ghosts were normally invisible to the living.

Unfortunately, in this matter Charlie wasn’t normal.

“What is this, Cirque du Spook?” Michael asked. He was looking around with an expression that made her think that he was seeing everything she was and then some.

“—I’m not home by twelve. But I don’t know where I
am
. Can you help me? Please?” As Alice neared, she reached toward Charlie with pale, beseeching hands. Michael stepped between them, grabbing the teen’s wrists before she could make contact.

“Don’t touch her,” he told the girl, and swept a warning glance around at the others.

“They can’t hurt me,” Charlie murmured just loudly enough for Michael to hear. Overprotectiveness seemed to be built into his DNA, however, and she was starting to get the feeling that fighting it was a waste of time.

“You got any guarantee of that?” was his response, thrown at her over his shoulder as the girl looked up at him and said, “Who are you?”

Her voice was squeaky with fright. Charlie couldn’t blame her:
he towered over the teen, a foot taller, his shoulders more than twice the breadth of hers. Anybody with a lick of sense would have found his sheer size intimidating, and from what she could see of his face, his expression was equally so. His hands were tanned and strong-looking as they gripped Alice’s fragile wrists.

“My name’s Michael.” To Charlie he said, “I got this, babe. Go do your thing.”

She didn’t reply. It was too risky to keep talking to him, with Tony and Buzz and Lena and the coroner’s investigator so near. But she felt as if a burden she hadn’t even realized she’d been carrying had been lifted, just a little, from her shoulders. As if he’d taken some of the weight of it on to his.

I’m not in this alone anymore
.

As she looked past Michael, past the apparitions that were now focused on him, she saw that there was a new one, a sweet-faced woman of about thirty that stood at Lena’s shoulder, quietly weeping. Tears ran in silvery tracks down her soft round cheeks. Casually dressed in khakis and a short-sleeved green camp shirt, she was attractive, with even features; soft, full lips; and shoulder-length nut brown hair that curled up at her shoulders. Except for the blood that soaked her clothes from her waist to her knees, she looked like a Midwestern schoolteacher on vacation.

“All of you, shut up,” she heard Michael say to the clamoring shades as she moved past him. Tact in dealing with the phantoms that beset her was not his strong suit, as she had previously learned, but she left him to it, glad that she was able to do so. The weeping woman was standing beside Lena looking down at the body on the gurney. The zipper had been pulled down to reveal the corpse’s face. As Charlie reached the end of the gurney, she saw that the toe tag was attached to a slender, pink-pedicured, well-kept female foot. Then, looking farther up the bag to the waxy, blue-lipped face the open zipper revealed, she confirmed what she had suspected: the weeping shade was looking down at her own corpse.

“—sure it’s the same one?” Tony was asking.

Lena clutched a clear plastic bag that contained what looked like a silver bracelet. She all but thrust it in Tony’s face.

“Of course I’m sure,” she said fiercely, shaking the bag at him.
“I gave it to her. For her birthday. It has spikes on it, see?” Lena touched one of them through the plastic. The bracelet interspersed heavy silver links with what looked like shark’s teeth, also in gleaming silver. Half a dozen of the curved, inches-long barbs dangled from the chain. She took a breath. “We were joking that if she ever got attacked, she could use it as a weapon. You know, like some women walking to their cars at night will use keys gripped between their fingers. As soon as I saw it, I knew it was hers.” She took a breath, and her eyes flicked to Charlie in silent acknowledgment of her presence before refocusing on Tony. “So I had to come down here and check, make sure the body wasn’t her.”

A subtle tightening in Lena’s face was the only indication of how hard that had been on her.

“Do you have an ID on the victim yet?” Tony asked Jones.

“No, sir. No, we don’t,” Jones replied. “The police department’s trying to ID her now.”

Tony nodded.

“Maybe this woman just happened to have the same bracelet. They can’t be that uncommon,” Buzz said. There was naked pain in his eyes as he looked at Lena, but his voice had lost the reedy thinness that had characterized it when he’d thought Giselle was the victim and was now steady.

Lena shook her head. Her eyes were hard as glass as she met Buzz’s gaze. “No. I bought it at a jewelry store near my condo before I came. There’s no way that a dead woman in Las Vegas has the same one.” She looked at Tony. “This woman’s been violently attacked. Beaten and stabbed. She was found in a drainage ditch just outside the city limits when the sun came up this morning. There was a storm yesterday, a downpour. The police think it washed her out of a storm drain where she’d been lying unconscious. Probably since early Sunday morning, according to the coroner’s report. She was still alive when they found her, but she died in an ambulance on the way to the hospital, so they brought her here.” Her nostrils flared. Charlie thought it was with the effort to keep from showing too much emotion. “Saturday night is when Giselle disappeared. A murdered woman who had my sister’s bracelet in her possession and
was attacked at around the same time she went missing? There is no way that’s a coincidence.”

“It doesn’t sound like it,” Tony agreed, and looked at Jones. “Do you have her clothes and other personal items here?”

Jones nodded. “Yes, sir. Bagged and tagged, just like her.”

“Would you get them together? Everything she had. We’re going to be taking them with us.” With a glance at the three of them, Tony added, “We’ll send them off to the lab first thing in the morning. See what they can tell us.”

Buzz said, “I’ll take care of it.”

The woman’s clothes and other possessions would be sent to the FBI lab in Quantico for rush analysis. Charlie had been with the team long enough to know that their cases got priority treatment.

Buzz looked at Lena. “We’ll need to send the bracelet, too.” His voice had gentled. Lena’s eyes met his, and for an unguarded moment her fear for her sister blazed out, visible to them all. What the lab would be looking for was, among other things, blood.

“I hope she was able to use it to scratch the bastard.” Lena’s voice had a vicious edge as she handed the plastic bag with the bracelet in it to Buzz.

“The victim was just brought in today?” Tony was talking to Jones. “Do you have an official cause of death?”

“Yes, sir, and stabbing.” Unbidden, Jones unzipped the body bag and pulled the edges apart to reveal the corpse’s thin bare torso. Charlie tried not to see too much: death had no dignity, as she had learned long since, but still the act of looking at a dead person’s nakedness seemed like a gross invasion of privacy.

“She has a tattoo.” Tony pointed to a small bird inked onto the woman’s upper arm. “That should help identify her.”

Lena positioned her phone, took a picture.

“There’re already pictures in the file,” Jones told her.

Lena took another one.

Charlie, meanwhile, focused on the details that were germane to the woman’s death. The large Y-shaped incision that ran from her collarbone down past her sternum was the result of the autopsy, so Charlie disregarded that. Her lower rib cage had suffered extensive
bruising, she saw at a glance, but what Jones pointed to almost with pride were the four deep slash wounds that laid open her abdomen. “That’s what killed—”