Her Last Whisper (29 page)

His enjoyment of the wild ride was evident, and she remembered him mentioning that he’d once owned a motorcycle; he’d also once been a Marine, although she hadn’t yet had the chance to access his military records so that she could go over them in detail (she meant to, because if there was any evidence of psychopathy it should have been showing up by then and there should be clues in the records). The smart money was on the fact that before he’d been sent to prison he’d been extremely physically active, and Charlie found herself reflecting on exactly how miserable the years he’d spent in confinement must have been for him. Then the thought of those lab results stabbed through her like a knife, and she glared at the back of his head with its motionless mane of tawny hair.

In spite of everything, her gut still said he was innocent, but it was entirely possible that her damned gut was one hundred percent wrong.

“What do you know about Destiny Sherman?” Addressing his question to Renfro, Tony practically had to shout to make himself heard as they hurtled through an intersection and then turned onto a wider road identified by a sign as I-15. Charlie pushed Michael out of her thoughts and strained to hear the reply.

“Destiny was a local girl,” Renfro shouted back. The Jeep rattled along, weaving in and out of light traffic, the ride bumpy and loud as the hot desert wind whistled through the backseat and the sun blazed down out of the cloudless blue sky. In the distance, the deeper blue of a mountain range stood against the sky like the blade of a serrated knife. Charlie found herself glad that she was wedged in so tightly between Tony and Buzz. With hard-bodied Tony on her right and wiry Buzz on her left, she wasn’t going anywhere. They served as human air bags as she was jostled from side to side. She found herself ducking her head against Tony’s shoulder more than once to dodge airborne grit. “Lived out in Pahrump. Twenty-eight years old. No criminal record.”

“Boyfriend? Married?” The wind kept Tony’s bellow from sounding as loud as Charlie knew it was.

“Not married. No word on a steady boyfriend. She worked out at the Farm.”

It took Charlie about half a beat longer than it took Tony to make sense of that. He was already asking, “The Pigeon Farm?” when she made the connection: Renfro had to be referring to one of the better known of the legal brothels that flourished just outside of Las Vegas, prostitution being illegal in Clark County where Las Vegas was situated but not in most of the surrounding counties.

“Destiny Sherman was a hooker?” Buzz blurted in surprise.

Even as Charlie had an instant visual image of the wholesome teacher-type she’d seen in the morgue, it hit her that hooker equaled sex worker: one of those who, according to Victim Facilitation Study criteria, was at relatively high risk of falling victim to a serial killer. Her heart started to beat faster.

“Yep,” Renfro yelled back.

“Great,” said Lena. “That’s going to widen the pool of suspects.” It wasn’t a shout but the wind carried it perfectly audibly to the backseat. “If we can even identify most of them, that is.”

There was a moment of silence. Then Buzz said, “They keep records of their customers at The Pigeon Farm. That should help.”

Everybody except the driver looked at him. Lena leaned into the space between the middle of the front seats to frown back at him. Tony shot a quizzical glance his way. Michael turned his head to look down at him with a speculative grin.

“How do you know that?” Lena asked the question the rest of them were thinking. The big round sunglasses she was wearing made it hard to be certain, but Charlie was pretty sure her expression was accusatory.

Buzz’s cheeks had reddened under the scrutiny. “Before I joined Special Circumstances, I was a regular old FBI agent, remember? We took part in a racketeering investigation. A few Las Vegas–area brothels were asked to cooperate. They did. The Pigeon Farm was one of them. Turns out, they keep records.”

“If that’s the case, we can find out who her customers were,” Tony said. “That would give us one more place to look.”

Charlie quietly told him about Destiny Sherman’s high-risk ratio according to the Victim Facilitation Study criteria. Given the rushing
of the wind she didn’t think Lena would overhear—no point in increasing her anxiety levels when there was nothing she could do with the information—but Lena did overhear and glanced back just as Tony said, “Yeah, I don’t think there’s much doubt any longer that we’re hunting a serial killer. I got the background check on Giselle Kaminsky this morning and went over it. She had a stable job, an apartment, a cat that she left at a kennel. A number of ex-boyfriends, including Romeo over there on your left, but none that have any record of threatening her. There’s nothing in her life that would suggest she took off voluntarily, or that someone she knew wanted to do her harm.”

That was actually bad news because it meant the odds that Giselle was dead went way up. Despite the hot blaze of the sun, Charlie felt suddenly cold.

“I can understand why a serial killer might target Destiny Sherman,” Lena burst out, and Charlie knew that the same thought must have occurred to her. It was hard to tell with the sunglasses obscuring Lena’s eyes, but Charlie got the impression that Lena was looking at
her
like she could provide an answer. “But why Giselle?”

Charlie tried. “There’s a connection somewhere. Giselle had to have crossed paths with this guy, and so did Destiny Sherman and all the others.”

“But
where
?” Lena’s hand, which was resting on the console between the seats, clenched tight in frustration.

Charlie shook her head. “All the women almost had to have encountered him in the same place, or in the same manner. As soon as we find where they intersected, we’ll have our suspect. When we get done here, we need to sit down and figure out every single place your sister went while she was in Las Vegas.”

“I’ve been over everything we did.” Lena’s jaw was tight. “There was nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing.”

“Then we look at the ordinary,” Charlie said.

“There’s a common denominator somewhere.” Tony’s voice was grim. “There always is.”

“We have to cross-reference her movements with the other women’s movements as much as possible.” Charlie tried not to think about how little they actually knew about the other women’s movements
before they had disappeared: the trails on most of them were way cold. There were going to be huge gaps in the web they needed to weave, but Lena didn’t need to hear that. Charlie said, “We’ll get it done.”

“We’ll find this guy,” Buzz told Lena. “We always do.”

Left unspoken, the question nevertheless hung in the air: but would they find him in time?

“Hang on, this is where we have some fun,” Renfro yelled. Before Charlie quite grasped what was happening they left the highway with a sudden swerve of the wheel and started bouncing over the cracked, uneven surface of the Mojave Desert. The ground was khaki brown, concrete hard, and so rough that she had to keep her jaw clenched to stop her teeth from rattling. Rocks and undersized, scruffy bushes were scattered across the endless small undulations that stretched with few interruptions to the horizon. A number of Joshua trees and spikey cacti dotted the landscape, and the occasional small bluff rose up out of the dirt to interrupt it, but it was mostly flat. Renfro just managed to avoid hitting the larger fissures and car-sized boulders that lay in wait for the unwary, but with each one it seemed it was a close call. Even with her seatbelt on, Charlie was flung around like a stuffed toy.

“Okay?” Tony asked when she slammed into him for what must have been the dozenth time.

“Yes.” Charlie unclenched her teeth long enough to reply even as the Jeep hit a rut and went airborne again and she bounced off him and Buzz. With an inarticulate sound of concern Tony wrapped a hard arm around her shoulders and pulled her close to his side. Charlie grabbed onto him, wrapping her own arms around his waist. The firm muscles beneath her hands and even the subtle scent of his body seemed way more familiar than they should have, and for that she knew she had Michael’s little stunt to thank. She shot her
bête noir
a dark look, which since his back was turned he didn’t see, but as they continued to get rattled around like die in a box she settled into Tony’s embrace gratefully. Even so, by the time the Jeep jerked to a halt her tailbone ached from repeatedly being slammed down onto the seat and her head felt like it was about to fall off her shoulders.

“Here we are,” Renfro announced with unimpaired cheerfulness, hopping out of the vehicle and gesturing toward the spot at the bottom of an arroyo that had been roped off with yellow crime scene tape. A number of vehicles with off-road capabilities like the Jeep were parked nearby, all of them bearing tags from one official law enforcement agency or another. Down in the arroyo, which began just beyond their front wheels, about half a dozen officers, a couple of uniforms and the rest in plain clothes, walked the length of a drainage channel carved into its bottom toward a big, dark, concrete-lined hole at the base of a twenty-foot-high bluff. Up on their level just inside the crime scene tape a police videographer recorded the scene.

“That’s the drainage ditch?” Buzz stared down at the narrow trail of what looked like dried mud at the bottom of the arroyo, as, still rattled from the ride, they all stayed put for a moment. “I had a whole different picture in mind. More concrete, less dirt.”

“You must be a city boy,” Renfro replied, turning back to wait for them.

Charlie gave Tony a quick smile of thanks as his arm dropped away from her and they, Lena, and Buzz climbed out of the Jeep. Already on the ground, Michael looked from Tony to her with the slightest of frowns as the four of them joined Renfro, but said nothing as they all began to walk toward the crime scene tape.

Renfro continued, “This area is used for recreational off-roading. You know, ATVs and dirt bikes and that kind of thing. It’s prone to sudden, heavy rainfalls. They put in a drainage system to direct the water when that happens so no one is caught in a flash flood.”

“How far are we from the nearest road?” Tony asked.

“About four miles,” Renfro replied. “And that would be the one we came in on.”

“So Destiny Sherman almost certainly didn’t walk here,” Buzz said, looking around at what was basically a whole lot of nothing as far as the eye could see.

“Not likely,” Renfro agreed. “Almost had to have come in on some kind of four-wheel-drive vehicle. Or a dirt bike. Something like that.”

“Or a horse,” Lena said.

Without the breeze created by the Jeep’s movement to stir the air, it was broiling hot. Charlie could actually feel heat radiating up from the ground. Her skin felt like it was coated with dust, and trying to brush some of the grit off with her fingers just made it worse. Out of the corner of her eye she watched a small brown lizard skitter up the side of a knee-high pile of rocks. Thinking of the snakes that might be hidden among all those rock formations, she vowed to be extremely careful where she stepped and put her hands.

“Thing is, no vehicle was found.” Renfro cast a quick look at Lena, who appeared untroubled by the thought of snakes if, indeed, it had even occurred to her that they might be present. As always, she was wearing her high heels, but she was striding along with as much confidence as if she’d been walking on a sidewalk. Luckily the ground was hard enough so that her heels weren’t sinking in. “And no horse, either. Which our guys are taking to mean that she was brought here by somebody.”

“From the preliminary examination that was done of the site after she was picked up, she wasn’t attacked here,” Lena said.

“So she was attacked elsewhere and brought here. You think the unsub left her for dead?” Buzz asked.

Tony shrugged. “Seems likely.”

Renfro made a face. “If so, it was his bad luck that she wasn’t. She made it to that drainpipe, where our guys think she holed up deep inside for a couple of days, probably going in and out of consciousness, until that big rain we had Monday night washed her out.”

They’d reached the crime scene tape barrier by then, and stopped, looking toward where the officers were picking their way along the sides of the arroyo, taking obvious care to stay off the bottom. Charlie understood: any evidence that had been in the storm drain with Destiny Sherman would probably have been washed down into the silt on the bottom of the creek bed. They didn’t want to risk disturbing it any more than it already had been. Now that the case was officially classified as a homicide, they would be sifting through that silt for clues.

“Hey, Gregg, I brought company,” Renfro cupped a hand
around his mouth to yell, and one of the plainclothes officers looked up at them and waved in answer.

“Let’s go.” Tony ducked under the crime scene tape.

Renfro, Buzz, and Lena followed. Charlie would have followed, too, except Michael stopped her.

“Hold up a minute,” he said. “I need to ask you something.”

Looking at him, she was reminded that he didn’t sweat. He didn’t get covered in dust, either. He looked tanned and healthy and Marlboro-man handsome and more alive than she felt, standing there with the blazing sun beating down on him. It occurred to her that she hadn’t seen him flicker in a while, which at least eased one worry that had been taking up real estate in her mind.

Because she was still ticked at him, and also majorly conflicted, her reply was terse. “What? I don’t have time to chat right now.”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “Much as I enjoyed watching you getting all cuddly with Dudley, this ain’t personal. Look toward the south.”

He nodded toward an expanse of rocky, uneven terrain that stretched away toward a high mesa in the distance.

“So?” Following his gaze, Charlie was just thinking that the land in front of her looked as bleak and inhospitable as the surface of the moon, when she remembered Tam’s words and registered the import of that thought with a tingle of sudden interest.

Michael said, “You see anything around those rocks over there?”

Charlie frowned some more in the direction he indicated. Then she pushed her sunglasses up on top of her head, squinted against the sunlight, and tried again. Nothing but rocks, desert, and sky. “No.”