Her Last Whisper (26 page)

“I told you before, he’s not a serial killer.” Honesty compelled Charlie to add, “I’m almost certain.”

“You told me,” Tam agreed with just a hint of derision. “It’s the
almost
that has me worried.”

“There’s evidence that he’s innocent.” Charlie touched Michael’s watch as she spoke: really, it, plus his word and her gut feeling, was all there was, but she wasn’t going to tell Tam
that
. “I’m having the DNA test results that were admitted as evidence in his trial rechecked as we speak. The lab should be calling me any day now. There’s something wrong somewhere, I know it.”

“Mm-hmm.” Tam sounded skeptical. “Just keep in mind that the legal system may sometimes be wrong, but the universe never is. He wound up in The Dark Place for a reason. He was being terminated for a reason. And the reason is, he’s done something
bad
, cherie. Really bad. Time to wake up and smell the coffee. He’s smokin’ hot, no doubt about it, but you need to remember what they say about judging a book by its cover: don’t.”

“I’m not—” Charlie began, only to break off as they reached the elevator banks and Michael caught up. She shot a look at him. He
was still flickering, but maybe a little less frequently and he was maybe a little less see-through each time he came back.

“I’m just wondering what your friend did to deserve being sent to the Dark Place.” Tam addressed the remark to Charlie so as not to look insane for talking to what, to the small crowd milling around them waiting for the elevators, would look like the empty space beside her. A flicker of Tam’s eyes in his direction, however, made it clear that the remark was directed at Michael. Charlie didn’t even know why she was surprised: a shrinking violet Tam wasn’t. If she wanted to know something, she was going to ask.

“No clue,” Charlie responded.

“I think that was meant for me.” Michael smiled at Tam. It was his patented charming smile, but there was a hint of something in his face that made Charlie remember the hard-eyed convict she had first met. “You wondering if I’m a stone-cold killer? Is that it? Why don’t you make like a psychic and find out for yourself?”

“I would, but I can’t read the dead like I can the living,” Tam said to Charlie. “I can only go by what they tell me when they show up.”

“Well, now, ain’t that convenient,” Michael drawled. “For a minute there, I was shaking in my boots at the thought that you knew all my secrets.”

“If you’re that worried, they must be terrible secrets,” Tam retorted.

“Maybe.” Michael smiled at her again.

“Would you two stop?” Charlie asked him in irritation, forgetting that to any of the roughly two dozen people waiting for the elevators who happened to be paying attention she was talking to the empty space and probably looking nuts because of it. Fortunately the elevator they were waiting for arrived just then, serving, she hoped, as a distraction. As they filed on, she said in a quiet, excusing aside to Tam that she was fairly certain Michael couldn’t overhear, “He has a tendency to play into what people think of him. When you act like you think he’s a bad guy, he’ll do his best to behave like one.”

Tam, who was behind her, leaned forward to say in her ear, “What makes you so sure he’s
not
one?”

Charlie almost said
I just am
, but that sounded so embarrassingly juvenile that she stopped herself before the words could get out. Besides, obviously Michael had done something to wind up in Spookville, and the question of just exactly what that was was something that she meant to address. With him, in private. When she got the chance. Which was not now.

Thus she maintained a dignified silence until they reached the sixteenth floor, and then spent the few moments until they got to Lena’s room giving Tam thumbnail background sketches of the Special Agents she was about to meet.

Tony answered her knock. In a navy suit with a white shirt and blue tie, he was his usual tall, dark, and handsome self. His smile as he greeted her was warmly intimate. Charlie couldn’t help it: at the sight of him, the memory of how she’d melted under his hands last night came flooding back. She felt instantly, ridiculously self-conscious. Reminding herself that all
he
remembered was a relatively chaste good-night kiss didn’t help.

If they’d been alone, she would have shot Michael a dirty look for so thoroughly muddying up her relationship with Tony.

“Hi,” Tony said. Then, “Come on in.”

Beyond Tony, she saw that Lena was perched on the edge of the armchair (the room was identical to Charlie’s). Buzz stood beside her in front of the window. The curtains were open, and the bright sunlight spilling into the room made a stark contrast to the tension Charlie felt the instant she stepped over the threshold.

“Tam, this is Special Agent Tony Bartoli. Tony, this is Tamsyn Green,” Charlie said as Tony closed the door behind them. After Tam and Tony shook hands, Charlie performed the rest of the introductions. At the sight of Tam, the expression on Tony’s face—a touch of surprise, coupled with sheer masculine appreciation for a woman so dazzlingly glamorous—was no more or less than what Charlie had expected: men always had that reaction to Tam. Buzz, too, was transparently impressed. Lena, on the other hand, looked Tam over with suspicion.

“I understand that you’re a psychic. Can you tell me where my sister is?” Lena asked abruptly as she and Tam finished shaking hands. She looked like she had barely slept: there were dark circles under her eyes. Her hair was still damp from the shower, and slicked straight back from her face. If she wore any makeup beyond a smear of pink lipstick Charlie couldn’t tell. She was on her feet now, and while she was fully dressed in a knee-length navy skirt and a grass green tee, her feet were bare, which made her look surprisingly small and vulnerable. Her mouth was tight, but there was so much pain in her eyes that it robbed her tone of any offensiveness.

Tam shook her head. “It doesn’t work like that. I get—impressions. Scraps of thoughts and feelings. Fragments of knowledge. Pictures of objects. Snapshots from a life. That kind of thing. I’m not going to be able to give you an address.” She glanced around the room, and Charlie followed her gaze: the bed was unmade and the closet door was open, revealing two small suitcases and a few garments on hangers. The remains of a light, mostly untouched room service breakfast took up most of the table beside the chair. The faint smell of coffee from the untouched cup on the tray hung in the air. “If you could give me something of your sister’s to hold, I’ll see what I can do.”

Lena didn’t quite roll her eyes, but her expression made her skepticism obvious. Charlie’s nerves tightened: she knew Lena, and she also knew that Tam was unlikely to react well to Lena’s particular brand of disbelief.

To Tony, Lena said, “I don’t have time for this.” She looked at Tam, then at Charlie. “I’m sorry, but I just don’t.” Her gaze swung back to Tony. She was talking a little bit too fast, clasping her hands together hard as she spoke. “I’ve been going over the hotel security tapes again and there’s a guy who might have followed her out the front door. We need to try to identify him. And—”

“I want to give Ms. Green a chance, Kaminsky,” Tony interrupted. His tone, his expression, everything about him was steadying. Charlie thought,
This is a man a woman could depend on
, then tucked the thought away to be examined later. “I think it’s a shot worth taking,” he said.

“She’s the real thing,” Charlie told Lena earnestly. “I promise.”

“It can’t hurt,” Buzz chimed in. “Believe me, I want to find Giselle, too.”

Lena’s gaze fastened on him like a hawk sighting prey.

“This might be a good time to trot out that party trick you used downstairs,” Michael said to Tam, who was starting to look affronted. He was still flickering, but the flickers were more widely spaced, as if they were slowing down. Charlie was really starting to feel confident that he was going to make it through. “Kaminsky’s a hard-ass, but she’s suffering here.”

Tam frowned at him. Her lips compressed. She gave a not-quite-nod
which was directed at Michael. Then she looked at Lena, and her expression changed.

“You grew up in a small house in California.” Tam spoke just as Lena, her attention still all on Buzz, opened her mouth, presumably to lambast him. “I see a red tile roof, Spanish tile. A white house. I see a woman who looks like you—Libby? Libby? Yes, Libby—backing out of the driveway in a tan car. The car is loaded with luggage—some is strapped to the roof—and there are two girls in the car, young girls, young teenagers, I can’t be sure of the precise ages. The one in the front seat has tears streaming down her face. She is looking back at the house, at the man standing on the front stoop watching the car leave. He is balding, a little tummy on him.” Tam made a paunch motion in front of her own stomach. “Paul. His name is Paul.” Libby is saying to the weeping girl, “Stop sniveling, Gigi. You’re not going to change my mind. The girl in the backseat is not crying. She’s a little younger, and she’s looking away from the man, from the house. Her expression is set. On her lap is a dog, a small golden dog with long floppy ears, a spaniel of some sort, I think. The name I’m getting is Jiff. Or Jin. A short
J
word. The girl’s arms are wrapped tight around the dog. The girl is—”

“All right, stop.” Lena’s voice sounded strangled. Her widened eyes were fixed on Tam. She sucked in a shuddering breath. “The girl was me. The day you’re describing is the day my family broke up and my mother started driving us toward the East Coast. My sister, Giselle, was in the front seat. She always hated being called Gigi, but my mother called her that anyway. And the dog was a cocker spaniel named Jip.”

“If that’s an unpleasant memory, I’m sorry to have recalled it to your mind,” Tam said. Charlie felt a flutter of pride: she’d never known Tam to be wrong, and clearly this wasn’t going to be the first time. “I can only report what I see.”

“It was accurate.” Lena looked shaken. “Accurate’s what I’m interested in.” Her eyes met Charlie’s. “Your friend got everything right.” Taking a deep breath, she focused on Tam again. “I have some clothing of my sister’s, some jewelry, her toiletries. She left everything except what she was wearing in the room when she disappeared.”

“Do you have her hairbrush?” Tam asked.

“Yes.”

“Does it have her hair in it?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Only her hair? You didn’t share it?”

“No.”

“If I could have that.”

Lena nodded. “It’s in the bathroom. I’ll get it.” She picked up an iPad from the foot of the bed and looked around at all of them. “I took this video of Giselle on Saturday, a few hours before I left for the airport. If you watch it, you can see what she was like.”

She pressed the button, handed the iPad to Tony, and then walked into the bathroom as the rest of them gathered around Tony to watch Giselle, clad in a black top with spaghetti straps—all that could be seen of her attire, because from the waist down she was hidden by the table at which she was sitting. Her black hair was twisted into a loose knot on top of her head, and she smiled broadly at the camera. Giselle then looked at the large, white-frosted cupcake with the single flaming candle that was being presented to her on a tray by members of a restaurant’s waitstaff. Two waiters and two waitresses in bright yellow uniforms placed it on the table, and began to sing “Happy Birthday.”

Giselle joined in, cheerfully off-key: “Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me, happy birthday dear me-e, happy birthday to me.”

As the singing concluded, Lena’s voice could be heard in the background urging, “Blow out the candle!”

Giselle did, the waitstaff faded away, and—still off camera—Lena asked, “Did you make a wish?”

“Yes.” Her dark eyes sparkling, Giselle grinned at the camera, or rather, presumably, at Lena, who was behind it. “And I’ll never tell what I wished for, so don’t even bother to ask.”

“I know what you wished for,” Lena retorted. “The same thing you’ve been wishing for on your birthday since you were fifteen: for us all to be one big happy family again.”

“Well, you’re wrong, Miss Smarty Pants.” Giselle playfully stuck out her tongue at Lena. “I’ve outgrown that.”

“Sure you have.”

Giselle said, “If you must know, I wished that we could both have our own happy families, so
there
.”

Giselle looked, and sounded, so much like Lena—a happier, less snarky version—that Charlie was riveted. Then, still out of sight, Lena went “Aww” at her sister with her trademark snark, and the video ended.

Charlie realized that she had a lump in her throat. She knew that, some eighty-odd hours after Giselle’s disappearance, if what had happened to her was anything other than a voluntary leave-taking, there was a strong statistical probability that she was dead. Twenty-four hours was the golden time period in which the recovery of abduction victims alive was still a realistic possibility, and they were well past that.

“Right after that I gave her the bracelet,” Lena now said. Charlie hated to meet her gaze for fear Lena might be able to read what she had been thinking in her eyes, but Lena was staring at the iPad and nothing else, and, anyway, Lena knew the score as well as she did. Lena was standing just behind Tony, and it was obvious that she’d been watching the last bit of the video. Her eyes were maybe a little brighter than usual, but other than that indication of a possible quickly banished welling of tears she looked composed. No, determined and focused. Like, say, a pitbull was determined and focused.

“What restaurant was that?” Buzz asked as Tony put the iPad on the table. Lena passed a small hairbrush to Tam, who accepted it with a nod of thanks and began pulling the loose hairs from it.

“The Polo Cafe,” Lena replied. “It’s downstairs. Coffee, sandwiches, pastries. We just wanted to grab a quick bite.” Like the rest of them, Lena was watching Tam set the hairbrush down then slowly roll the hairs she had removed from it into a ball with her fingertips. Tam’s abstract expression made it obvious that mentally she was already elsewhere.