Her Last Whisper

by Karen Robards

  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—”

  Charlie didn’t hear the rest because the weeping shade, looking down at her corpse, began to scream.

  Charlie almost jumped. Only years of conditioning kept her still as the woman shrieked like she’d just been stabbed in the stomach—as, in the woman’s mind, no doubt she had been. Charlie realized that what she was watching was a loop, or a replay of things that had already happened. Usually, like now, it was a re-enactment of what had led to the spirit’s death. Screaming, the murdered woman doubled over, clutched her abdomen, and stumbled backward.

  “No! No! What are you doing? Stop!” The woman gasped between screams as blood poured through the spread fingers she had pressed against her abdomen. “Joe, why?” she cried, looking up in horror at something Charlie couldn’t see as she fell back through the wall.

  “What the fuck?” Michael landed beside Charlie as the woman disappeared, staring after the phantom just as, she realized, she was doing herself. She couldn’t answer him, but then, there really wasn’t much she could say other than the obvious: screaming dead woman bleeds and vanishes.

  Another round of nausea hit her. Taking more Tums was probably a bad idea: she didn’t know if it was possible to overdose, but she felt that she was perilously close to finding out. Though if she didn’t do something …

  Do not throw up.

  She tried deep breathing instead.

  “Nana! Michael, look, my grandmother’s here!”

  Charlie looked around to see that Alice was beaming beatifically at something at the far end of the room that Charlie couldn’t see.

  “There’s your ticket, then. Go on,” Michael told her. Alice paused just long enough to give him a dazzling smile before running across the room with her arms outstretched and promptly disappearing.

  “Dara was killed in a car accident a few hours ago,” Michael answered Charlie’s look. “She was fucking sixteen.” He grimaced. “Death’s one hell of a fickle bitch.”

  “Michael,” Hale called. He was once again pacing the room, patting his pockets even as he frowned at Michael. “I can’t go home without my keys. How will I get in?”


  “This gig ain’t what I signed on for,” Michael told Charlie with disgust, and, dodging the child on the tricycle, he headed for the mechanic. Under better conditions, watching her big, bad, tough guy ghost deal with a gaggle of needy spirits would have made her smile. But the atmosphere in the room was so heavy with grief and loss, and Lena’s situation was so heartrending, that she didn’t think she could have smiled if she’d tried.

  Her stomach heaved again, and she clenched her teeth.

  Breathe.

  “How about we ask our eminent psychiatrist what she thinks?” The barbed voice belonged to Lena. The reference to our eminent psychiatrist—that could only mean her.

  Jerking her gaze back to her live companions, hoping no one had noticed her lapse—fat chance, they were all looking at her—Charlie was just about to ask Lena what she was talking about when Tony rescued her.

  “It’s possible that we’re dealing with a serial killer, but I don’t think we ought to jump to conclusions just yet,” Tony said, then looked at Jones. “We’re done here, Investigator. Agent Crane will pick up the victim’s clothes and personal belongings on our way out. We’ll have someone get you a court order as soon as possible, but in the meantime we need this body to be held as possible evidence.”

  “Yes, sir.” Jones’s tone was the equivalent of a salute.

  “This woman makes eighteen. Nineteen if you count Giselle. It’s so obvious. How can you not see it?” Lena demanded of Tony. Charlie had had the other woman’s sharp tone and snapping eyes directed at her before, but she had never seen Lena being less than respectful of the man who was, after all, her boss.

  “I’m not saying it’s not a serial killer, I’m just saying that at this point we need to keep an open mind.” Tony’s reply was surprisingly soothing. “We’ll find your sister, I promise.” His gaze slid to Buzz and Charlie. There was a veiled message in his eyes, but by this point Charlie was too nauseated and headachey and wired and tired to even try to decipher it. She was also past trying to talk to the spirit of the dead woman on the loop if she should appear again, or dealing with any other stray spirits, or doing much of anything else. Basically, she just wanted to throw up and sleep, in that order. Besides, she’d spotted Michael down on one knee beside the little boy on the tricycle, who he had apparently somehow induced to stop to talk to him, and that was a distraction worth paying attention to. With a nod at Jones, Tony turned away from the gurney, concluding with, “Come on, we’re leaving.”

  “No, I—” Kaminsky started to protest, as Jones grabbed the body bag’s zipper and began yanking it up again. Charlie averted her gaze from the poor pale corpse as the zipper pulled the plastic closed around it.

  Tony said, “Walk, Kaminsky,” in a tone that made it an order, and Buzz started to take Lena’s arm, only to be angrily shaken off. Nevertheless, they both followed Tony. Charlie was getting ready to fall in behind them when a whisper, the softest whisper, curled through her head.

  “I don’t want to die.” It was a woman’s voice, terrified and pleading.

  She’d never heard the voice before. No spirit was there to produce it. Her first thought—that it belonged to the woman in the body bag—was wrong. The voices were not the same. This one had the smallest suggestion of an accent. Was it—Spanish? Yes, she thought it was.

  “Oh, please,” the voice begged, louder now. Charlie felt cold all over as everything went a little out of focus. Her heart began to slam in hard, fast strokes. Suddenly dizzy, barely aware of where she was or what she was doing, she grasped the edge of the gurney for support. She retained just enough clarity to understand what was happening: it was one of the voices that existed only in her head. One of those that Tam had said she was able to hear as a result of having nearly died. The voice went high and shaky as it continued. “I’ll do anything. Anything you want.”

  “Charlie?” Michael was beside her. “What’s up?”

  She heard him, she saw him—but not clearly. It was as if she was at the bottom of a swimming pool looking up through gallons of greenish water: he and his voice were distorted and indistinct. Just like everything else around her that was, or should have been, solid and real was distorted and indistinct.

  “Please don’t kill me! Please don’t kill me!” the voice cried. The words were followed by a shriek. A shriek that was so shrill and full of fear and pain that it felt like a knife stabbing through her brain. Charlie shuddered as every tiny hair on her body catapulted upright. Then there was a horrible gurgling sound. She knew what death sounded like when she heard it, and it was like that. Cold sweat poured over her in a wave.

  It suddenly became crystal clear that what she was hearing was some poor woman’s dying moments. The only question was, was it something that had really happened? A higher vibration—Tam had said that she was picking up the voices because she was operating at a higher vibration. That meant that the voice was real; that the horrible little snippet she’d just heard of a woman’s dying pleas was real.

  Charlie couldn’t help it: she gave a little moan of distress as her knees wobbled and threatened to give way.

  “Babe, I’m right here.” Michael grabbed for her as she swayed. She felt the electric tingle of his hands passing through her arms, heard his growled curse.

  She would have sunk to the floor right there and then, with the echoes of that terrifying death sound still swirling through her mind, if a hard arm hadn’t wrapped around her shoulders, supporting her, helping her to stay upright.

  It was Michael who had his arm around her. Or at least, she thought it was Michael: she could see him, hear his voice, and she clung to his presence like a lifeline. Then she frowned in confusion. It couldn’t be Michael. He had no substance. The arm around her, the solid, firm, supportive arm, belonged to Tony. He was there, too, at her side, she realized. She could feel his warmth, and his strength. The solid support of a flesh-and-blood man.

  “Charlie?” Worry for her darkened Tony’s eyes. Oh, God, he was coming into better focus: she could actually see him frowning at her, see the tension in his face. Having obviously stepped aside to make way for Tony, Michael was frowning at her, too. His hands hung, fingers flexing, at his sides. The electric tingle she’d felt—he’d tried to grab her and failed.

  “You hearing voices again? Is that it?” Michael demanded.

  In a desperate bid to get a handle on the worst of her symptoms, Charlie took a deep breath, and gave him an abbreviated nod. She was unable to pretend that nothing was wrong. The sense of vertigo that she was experiencing was just too strong.

  “What happened?”

  “Is she sick?”

  Buzz and Lena had returned, to frown at her. Even Lena looked concerned.

  “Goddamn it to hell anyway,” Michael said. “You can’t keep going through this.”

  “Should I call 911?” That was Jones. He was, Charlie was glad she was able to see, hovering around, too, although he was keeping a discreet distance.

  Charlie dug down deep. After all, she’d been dealing with spirits for most of her life. The voices—they were no more than a new wrinkle in an old experience. She was just going to have to learn to deal.

  “No. I got a little dizzy suddenly is all,” she achieved, and managed to straighten her spine so that she wasn’t leaning so heavily against Tony anymore. At the same time, she made an embarrassed grimace at Lena and Buzz. “It’s just … it’s been a long day.”

  “It has been. For all of us,” Tony agreed as he squeezed her shoulder comfortingly. Charlie would have pulled away from him, except her head still swam and her knees still felt weak. Fortunately, he didn’t seem inclined to let her go just yet. “Which is why we’re going back to the hotel and grabbing some sleep.” When Kaminsky looked like she was prepared to argue, he said, “Now. You’re not doing your sister any good by working until you can’t think straight. The local office is on it, and everything that can be done is being done. We’ll start fresh in the morning.”

  Lena sti
ll looked inclined to argue, but she didn’t, and Charlie suspected that Tony had given her a look that had sealed the deal.

  “You okay to walk to the car?” he asked Charlie quietly, and when she replied with “Yes, of course,” in as strong a tone as she could muster, his arm dropped away from her shoulders. Instead his hand curled, warm and strong, around her upper arm. She found that she was glad of the support as they headed for the elevators. Michael, on her other side, gave her and Tony a long, hard look, but didn’t say a word.

  It wasn’t until they were all in the elevator heading up that her vision cleared enough to allow her to see that Michael’s expression was bleak.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  By the time they walked out of the morgue, Tony was no longer holding her arm. Her dizziness and nausea had receded enough so that, as they’d stepped off the elevator, Charlie was able to pull away from him with a quick smile that thanked him for his support. She kept shooting lightning glances at Michael, who moved silently at her side, his expression now impossible to read. Crossing the shadowy parking lot toward the white Lexus, Charlie took a few deep breaths of the dry, faintly chilly night air and revived sufficiently to remember the one solid bit of evidence that she, personally, had gleaned.

  “I’m fairly certain that whoever killed that woman is named Joe,” she told Tony. “If he isn’t the actual murderer, then someone named Joe was definitely involved in her death.”

  Having stopped to collect the victim’s belongings, Buzz was behind them, trailing Lena, who had arrived in her own rental car and was cutting across the parking lot toward it. Tony had already directed Buzz to drive Lena back to the hotel—straight to the hotel, Kaminsky, was how he’d put it. Lena hadn’t argued, but from her brisk pace as she strode across the parking lot Charlie got the feeling that losing Buzz was up next on her agenda.

  Tony frowned. “You have one of your psychic experiences back there?”