Her Last Whisper

by Karen Robards

  “Let’s see, I think it was you saying something along the lines of If he dies, it will break my heart that made me think that. Or maybe it was the way you kissed me.”

  “What I said was, gets destroyed, not dies,” Charlie pointed out with far more composure than she was feeling as she pulled her brush from her purse and ran it through her hair. The advantage of having lived with the man (ghost) for six weeks or so now was that she’d gotten used to him watching her groom, so having his eyes on her as she made repairs to her appearance no longer bothered her. “For the record, I said that because I was trying to persuade Tam to save you.”

  Having finished with her hair, she took advantage of the shiny brass to reapply her lipstick.

  “And you kissed me like I was holding water and you were dying of thirst because …?”

  “You’re a hot guy.” As she finished up with the lipstick and restored it to her purse, she deliberately kept her voice light. “I didn’t say I wasn’t attracted to you.”

  “Are you really going to do this?” Michael said after a moment in which his eyes never left her. She, on the other hand, was religiously watching the descending floor numbers. Thank goodness they were on number three, with only two to go!

  “Do what?” Her tone was short. She really, really did not want to have this conversation. Not until she’d had time to get her thoughts together and regroup. Not until she felt less vulnerable.

  “Give me the cold shoulder because you’re scared to admit you’re crazy in love with me. After all we’ve been through?”

  That snapped her head around. She glared at him. He smiled beguilingly at her.

  “I am not giving you the cold shoulder,” she clarified, refusing to be beguiled. “I’m just getting on with the next item on today’s extremely full to-do list.”

  “Does that mean you’re not denying that you’re scared to admit you’re crazy in love with me?”

  “That means I’m not in love with you.” She cut right to the chase. Now that he wasn’t in imminent danger of disappearing forever and she wasn’t going nuts over the possibility, her mind rejected the idea as if it were a snake trying to slither through her front door. Her heart, on the other hand, gave an odd little throb, which she absolutely refused to so much as acknowledge.

  The elevator stopped and the doors opened. Charlie didn’t think she’d ever been so glad to walk out into a crowded, noisy hotel lobby in her life.

  “You can keep fighting it all you want.” His voice in her ear was maddening. “Thanks to you, I’ll still be here when you get tired of denying it.”

  Charlie’s lips compressed. Her spine straightened. Resolutely ignoring he-who-was-once-again-the-bane-of-her-existence, she strode across the lobby in search of Tony.

  He was waiting with Buzz, right where he said he’d be. Reliable: she liked that in a man. Almost as much as she liked alive.

  “Ready?” His eyes assessed her as she joined them. He was looking tired, as she had no doubt she was herself. But on Tony tired looked good. The faint lines around his mouth and eyes gave him a certain gravitas. “Get all caught up with your friend?”

  She nodded. “She’s staying here. When I left her, she was heading for bed.”

  “She?” he asked with a lift of his brows, as Buzz greeted her with an abstracted wave. Buzz’s curly hair bore evidence of his having run his hands through it multiple times: it looked like he was wearing a frizzy brown dandelion on his head. Instead of tired, he looked wired. He was all but bouncing from foot to foot.

  Charlie nodded again, as Tony’s tone reminded her of how complicated her life was becoming. Good guy FBI agent versus bad boy ghost shouldn’t even have been a contest. The unfortunate thing about it was, at the moment it really wasn’t.

  Michael gave Tony a narrow-eyed look, but didn’t say anything.

  Nobody said much as they headed for the front entrance, where the valet had the car waiting. The Conquistador’s spectacular fountains were shooting toward the night sky, forming a colorful wall of water that pulsated in time to Celene Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.” That the tune held a certain irony under the circumstances didn’t escape Charlie, but she refused to dwell on it. Given that it was September, which wasn’t a big tourist month, she was surprised at the size of the crowd watching the water show. The area in front of the hotel was packed with people of all sizes, shapes, and descriptions.

  “She told you she’s found something. Hasn’t said word one to me.” Buzz was obviously continuing a conversation he and Tony had been having as they piled into the white Lexus that had been provided for them at the airport, courtesy of the local field office. Tony drove, Charlie was in the front passenger seat, and Buzz sat in the back behind Tony. Michael was behind Charlie. He was being so silent that she would have pulled down her visor and flipped open the makeup mirror to check on him, except—oh, wait—that was pointless because she wouldn’t be able to see his reflection in the mirror.

  “I am her boss.” Tony’s voice was dry. “She was returning my call.”

  “Yeah.” Buzz’s tone clearly said that he knew that wasn’t the reason. “I must have called her a dozen times since we got here. She hasn’t returned any of them.”

  “She’s probably trying to distance herself a little bit from you right now.” Charlie turned sideways in her seat to look at Buzz. She could also—funny how that worked out—see Michael. He was looking out the window at the bright blaze of light that was Las Vegas. Broodingly. She frowned. “If I were you, I would concentrate on being her helpful colleague rather than her boyfriend for a bit.”

  “How about we just concentrate on finding her sister?” Tony suggested pointedly.

  “Did Lena say anything specifically about the lead she found?” Charlie asked.

  “No.” Tony shook his head. “Only that it was the first solid thing she’s turned up.”

  “I keep hoping this is all a mistake.” Buzz’s voice sounded hollow. He was cracking his knuckles and jiggling one leg as he spoke. “But it’s not, is it?”

  “It’s not looking that way,” Tony said.

  They rehashed what they knew about certain aspects of the case—the time Giselle was last seen (exiting the Conquistador around midnight Saturday), the characteristics she shared with the other possible victims (attractive, busty brunette under thirty-five), other scenarios for her disappearance that did not involve a serial killer (leaving voluntarily; accident; abduction by someone who was not a serial killer)—until they arrived at the Clark County Coroner’s Office, better known as the Las Vegas morgue. Charlie was surprised to see that the building looked like a church, complete with a stained-glass window set into a wall.

  “It’s a church?” Buzz asked, clearly as surprised as Charlie.

  “It was a church. It’s been remodeled.” It was obvious that Tony had been there before. A few minutes later they were inside being greeted by Coroner Investigator Kevin Jones. He looked to be around thirty-five, average looks, height and weight, with dark brown hair worn in a military-style cut, mild blue eyes, and a pasty complexion. He wore a short-sleeved white shirt with multiple pens and a small flashlight in his chest pocket, and black pants with his badge on his belt.

  “Your agent is downstairs,” Jones told them after Tony made the introductions. The smell of death was strong even in these well-kept outer offices. Charlie got busy trying to convince herself the sickish-sweet scent wasn’t already making her stomach start to act up as, at Jones’s gesture, they followed him past the glass-walled work cubicles, which were largely empty at that hour, and into an elevator. “I was the one who gave her a call when I started cataloging the victim’s personal possessions. She’d stopped by yesterday, left a photo of the woman you’re looking for and a list of what she was wearing, and this fit the bill.”

  “Giselle Kaminsky—is that the name of the victim?” Buzz’s voice went high and reedy. His face turned absolutely white.

  “Haven’t ID’d her yet,” Jones said che
erfully as the elevator stopped and the doors opened. A rush of cold air immediately enveloped them. Charlie shivered inwardly as they walked out into a small corridor. She was starting to hear a humming sound in her ears, and she could feel the cold and smell the stench of death on what was almost an organic level. The grayish-white light cast by the fluorescent fixtures overhead suddenly grew way too bright. Even as she squinted in reaction, she realized that her senses were heightening.

  Which meant, of course, that the dead were near. This was how they always affected her.

  If they were in the morgue, they would be the newly, violently dead. She would be able to see them.

  She could hear the thumping of her own heart, feel the warm rush of blood through her veins. The familiar miasma with its sense of being part of two worlds enveloped her. Reality took on a whole new dimension.

  I hate this. Oh, God, why did you visit this ability on me?

  “You’re turning kind of green around the gills,” Michael said grimly.

  “Kaminsky wouldn’t have said she had a lead if she’d found her sister’s body.” Tony gripped Buzz’s arm in a way that was clearly meant to be steadying.

  “Oh. Right.” Buzz still looked pale. Then Jones pushed one of two brushed-steel double doors at the end of the corridor open and stood back with a gesture inviting them to precede him. They walked into a large, low-ceilinged, white-walled room with multiple ventilation fans rattling away in boxlike aluminum housing. The temperature would have done a refrigerator proud, and the reason for that was immediately apparent: six bodies in blue plastic body bags were lined up on gurneys against the far wall. At least three of them had already been autopsied. Charlie could tell because of the clear plastic bags containing their organs that were stored neatly in open bins attached to the gurneys.

  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.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  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.