Her Last Whisper

by Karen Robards

  She was trying to settle her expression into a not-guilty look as they reached the small community of Pahrump.

  Minutes later, they’d passed a giant Gold Town sign, a McDonald’s, a couple of strip malls, and were pulling up to the Pigeon Farm. The long, low clapboard buildings were painted gray, and there was a gazebo at the edge of the parking lot. A sign out front bore an image of a pair of sexy female legs kicking out of a broken eggshell. Life-sized figures of a cowboy and cowgirl with cut-out openings for customers to put their faces in invited visitors to take a picture. All in all, the ambience was a cross between a mid-range hotel and a Cracker Barrel.

  The woman who answered the door was pleasantly plump, gray-haired, and grandmotherly in a pair of pink polyester slacks and a flowered blouse. If she introduced herself Charlie missed it: she was too busy looking around as they stepped inside. The interior was all white walls and leather couches and framed prints—not exactly tasteful, not high end, but except for its large size and an excessive number of couches it could have been a living room in any ordinary suburban house. Hanging in the heavily air-conditioned air was the faintest scent of—potpourri? perfume? If business was being conducted on the premises, there were no apparent signs of it. No gathering of half-dressed females. No nervous johns.

  It was not what Charlie had been expecting.

  Michael’s eyes twinkled at her. “First visit to a whorehouse, eh?”

  Charlie shot him a withering look. Obviously not for you.

  The twinkle morphed into a grin. “Think I’m dumb enough to admit to that?”

  With a sniff, Charlie directed her attention elsewhere.

  “Looks like we missed the lunchtime rush,” Buzz said in a low voice. He was watching Lena, who was prowling around restlessly. “Mid-afternoon’s always slow. Things should start picking up again around five.”

  Charlie frowned at him. She was just thinking that Buzz of all men didn’t seem like the type to possess that much insight into the workings of a brothel when she remembered what he’d said about investigating them as part of a case. Her brow cleared.

  Michael chuckled. “If I’d said that, you’d be giving me a dirty look. Him you give the benefit of the doubt. You’re supposed to be a woman of science, Doc: where’s the fairness in that?”

  Her eyes raked him. The obvious answer, that tall, hard-muscled, surfer-god gorgeous Michael exuded sexuality in a way that was unimaginable from smaller, wiry, nerdy-cute Buzz wasn’t something that she was going to tell him even if she’d been able to talk to him.

  So she gave him a snarky quirk of her lips instead.

  By that time Tony had identified himself and explained what they wanted, which was then backed up by one of the detectives proffering a search warrant. Moments later they were escorted along a corridor lined with doors. Most were closed, but some were open, and in some of the open ones attractive young women in skimpy outfits ogled the men as they passed.

  “You didn’t call us out for a lineup, Mrs. J,” one of the girls complained. She was giving Tony in particular a sultry look. “Did you tell them about our discount for cops?”

  “They’re here about Destiny,” Mrs. J replied, which made it clear that everyone knew Destiny was dead. She clapped her hands. “In your rooms, all of you.”

  The girls all said some variation of “Oh,” disappeared inside their rooms, and closed the doors with near simultaneous snaps.

  Okay, then.

  “We’re going to need to talk to them,” Tony said.

  “They get scared, it’s going to be bad for business,” Mrs. J replied. “Destiny had the weekend off when she was killed. They don’t know anything.”

  “We’re still going to need to talk to them.”

  Mrs. J’s mouth did the sour-lemon thing.

  Destiny’s room was in an annex accessed by a covered walkway. Six rooms off a central living area, each with its own bath. According to Mrs. J, Destiny had lived there full-time, as did most of the girls. At first glance, her quarters looked pretty much like any bedroom anywhere. A queen-sized four-poster with a pretty pink bedspread—and fur-lined handcuffs attached to the posts. A dresser with a clear glass vase filled with riding crops. A wicker magazine basket overflowing with sex toys. Charlie averted her gaze, only to accidentally get a closer look at the pictures hanging on the walls. They were pretty graphic, and she glanced away.

  “You haven’t lived till you’ve tried some of them toys.” Michael’s grin was positively wicked now. “Or the handcuffs. They’re always fun.”

  Charlie ostentatiously turned her back on him.

  “Has anybody used this room since Ms. Sherman was last in here?” Tony asked. The uniforms were all business now, with one of them starting to rummage through dresser drawers while another slid open one of the two closets that took up the far wall. Glancing that way, Charlie thought for a startled moment that severed heads were lined up on an array of shelves built into one side of the closet. Then she realized that what she was seeing were Styrofoam wig forms holding an astonishing array of wigs. The other half of that same closet contained what Charlie concluded were costumes, from the glimpse she got as the cop riffled through them. The second closet, opened by another uniform, appeared to contain Destiny’s own street clothes.

  “No.” Mrs. J shook her head. “It’s been locked. She and I had the only keys.”

  “From the looks of things, she, um, serviced the S&M crowd?” Only the faint clearing of his throat indicated that Tony might feel a little uncomfortable.

  Mrs. J nodded. “She was a specialist. The customers loved her. We billed her as our Kitten with a Whip. There’s a brochure with her in it beside the bed.”

  Lena, who was wearing thin plastic gloves passed out by one of the uniforms, picked up the brochure, which featured a generously endowed topless woman riding a mechanical bull on the cover.

  “Yee-haw,” Michael murmured, and she saw that he was looking at the brochure, too.

  Charlie narrowed her eyes at him. Glancing up, he met her gaze and grinned. “Hey, I’m dead, not blind.”

  Lena unfolded the brochure to reveal a big, glossy photo of Destiny Sherman in thigh-high black boots, a black bustier with garters and stockings attached, and black kitten ears—and nothing else—holding a whip. Charlie had a momentary flashback to the wholesome-looking young woman whose spirit she had seen in the morgue.

  Glancing away, she tuned back in to Tony, who continued with Mrs. J. “She have any regulars?”

  “A few. Mostly we get tourists coming through, though. We call ’em one and dones.”

  “We’re going to need a copy of your records. Customers and employees.”

  Mrs. J frowned. “I don’t know—”

  “I can have a court order here in half an hour.”

  “There’s no need for that.” Mrs. J’s response was grudging. “I’ll give you what I’ve got.”

  Feeling like a voyeur but knowing that it was her job to notice as much as possible, Charlie pulled on her own pair of thin plastic gloves. Then she walked around the bedroom and bathroom, and tried to work up a psychological profile of the woman who had lived in this room.

  She was doing her best to integrate a collection of Beanie Babies into everything else she’d seen when one of the detectives turned on the big, boxy, old-fashioned TV that sat on a stand against the wall directly opposite the foot of the bed. Naked, writhing bodies filled the screen. The unmistakable sounds of sex permeated the room. The woman was in dominatrix gear, and the man—Charlie turned away as the sound of a cracking whip and a long, ecstatic groan filled the air.

  With her periphery vision Charlie caught a sudden movement, and glanced around in time to watch Lena punch the button that turned off the TV. In that same glance Charlie also discovered that every single man (and ghost) in the room was staring at the screen with interest.

  As the TV went dark she and Lena exchanged purely feminine glances fueled by an identical thought: men are pigs.

/>   Then Lena hit the button popping the DVD out.

  “I can’t imagine that she’d watch that for fun,” Lena remarked as the TV whirred with the effort to eject the disc. “So my guess is that it was probably part of her last session with a cust—”

  She broke off, staring down at the disc as it emerged. She had such an arrested expression on her face that Charlie stepped closer to look, too.

  The round paper label at the center of the disc read Dynasty Films.

  Tam was right again, only instead of the old TV show this was hard-core porn.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  A few hours later, the four (five) of them were in a small office on the second floor of the FBI’s sleek, modern headquarters in Las Vegas. On their way out of Pahrump the team had grabbed a drive-through lunch at McDonald’s, then stopped by the hotel for a quick shower and a change of clothes (to get rid of all the accumulated dust) before heading over to the FBI building. Pictures of the eighteen victims hung on the whiteboard that took up the whole right wall of the room, which was a bland beige rectangle with a big window at the back and a couple of long tables now serving as desks. Michael stood in front of the pictures, studying them. While Lena was getting the computers set up to her liking, Buzz printed out the gridded map that Charlie had e-mailed them. Then he clipped it to the other end of the whiteboard, leaving the center clear. Complete with street names and neighborhoods, the map in theory should have made possible kill sites as well as the unsub’s residence easy to locate. But the area involved was way too large to make a lightning-strike-fast, door-to-door search feasible, and any lesser undertaking ran the risk of spooking the unsub without finding what they were looking for. They needed more specific information.

  Charlie took a moment to pull Tony aside and tell him the new pieces of information revealed by the spirits of Alicia and Kimberly.

  “I’ve learned that the last memories of both women involved falling asleep in their hotel rooms. Kimberly Watters was hung by her wrists from a ceiling with some kind of grid set into it and tortured with a knife. All the victims probably were, as most serial killers have a killing routine that they follow religiously.” She left out the bit about Kimberly being stabbed to death, because upon reflection that had been pure speculation on Michael’s part. Cause of death needed to wait for the autopsy. “Kimberly was blindfolded but not gagged, which is why I think the kill site is relatively isolated. The killer wasn’t worried about anyone hearing her screams.”

  As she finished, Tony met her eyes for a moment, then said quietly, “You got that from talking to their ghosts.”

  It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll say one of the detectives told me.”

  “Thank you.” Charlie gave a little shrug. “If word got out that I can see the dead, nobody would take me seriously anymore. I’d lose all professional credibility.”

  He nodded. “I’m honored that you trust me enough to tell me.”

  Charlie smiled at him.

  Before she could say anything else, John Morris, one of the local FBI agents, stuck his head in the door and said, “Bartoli, you and your guys might want to come out here and look at this.”

  The four of them exchanged glances, then followed Morris down the hall to a small lounge area. Several agents were standing around a flat-screen TV affixed to the wall. As soon as she stepped through the door, Charlie realized what they were watching: coverage of the dump site. On CNN.

  Oh, joy.

  “… at least seventeen young women have been found in a stretch of desert just outside Las Vegas. They came to Sin City as tourists, eager to visit the casinos, enjoy the shows, see the sights, and partake of all the glittering amusements the self-proclaimed Entertainment Capital of the World offers. Then they simply—disappeared. Some of them weren’t missed. Some were the subjects of desperate searches by frantic family members. Today all of them were found.” The broadcaster, Courtney Bennet, a pretty blonde whose name Charlie knew because of the banner posted beneath her picture as she spoke, paused portentously. “In this barren expanse of scrubby ground that you see behind me, in shallow graves lay the victims of a serial killer who preyed on unsuspecting female vacationers. The authorities are calling him the Cinderella Killer—”

  “Wait, we are?” Buzz threw a questioning frown around the room.

  Morris shook his head. “We aren’t.”

  Tony shrugged. They weren’t, either.

  “—because the last sightings of a number of these young women occurred as they left their hotels around midnight, only to vanish forever.”

  Lena took a deep breath. “How does she know that?”

  Charlie felt her chest tighten. If the story was on CNN, it was everywhere, and the possibility that the unsub might miss it was remote. That couldn’t be good news for the investigation—or, if she was still alive, for Giselle. “The missing persons files. Remember? Someone must have given them copies.”

  Lena had gone through the files at least as thoroughly as Charlie had: she knew all the details that were in them.

  Lena rounded on the local agents. “Who’s been talking to the media?” she demanded fiercely.

  “Sure as hell not us.” Morris looked alarmed at Lena’s vehemence. “Must be somebody at the PD.”

  “They need to shut up,” Lena growled. “Everybody needs to shut up and get to fricking work. Standing around watching TV with our thumbs up our butts isn’t going to help us find this guy.”

  She stomped out. With a frowning glance at the surprised-looking agents who were staring after Lena, Charlie followed her.

  “Kaminsky’s got a point,” she heard Tony say as she hurried from the room. “We need to clamp down hard on the information leakage. There may be a woman still alive out there and at this bastard’s mercy.”

  “She’s dead, isn’t she?” Lena asked quietly when Charlie caught up to her. “Giselle.”

  Charlie looked at her with compassion. Lena was wired with anxiety even if she was doing a yeoman’s job of holding it together.

  “I don’t know.” She gave Lena the answer she deserved: the truth. “Her body wasn’t at the dump site, so not necessarily.”

  “Just because they didn’t find a fresh grave doesn’t mean she’s not there.” The look Lena gave Charlie was stark. “Maybe her grave’s hidden. Maybe they haven’t come across it yet.”

  Charlie shook her head. “I would know if she was there,” Charlie told her. “Trust me, I would.”

  Lena frowned at her, but then Tony and Buzz caught up with them, as did Michael, who said, “I thought I’d give you and Sugar Buns some girl time,” earning a quick frown for his trouble.

  Once everyone was back inside their temporary office, Tony shut the door and turned to look at them.

  “Okay, guys.” His voice was crisp. “Let’s get cracking. What do we know?”

  “All the victims except Destiny Sherman were staying in hotels in and around the Strip when they disappeared,” Lena said. “Eleven different hotels among seventeen victims. Eighteen victims if you count Giselle.” She paced the room, her arms folded, a look of deep concentration on her face.

  Tony nodded at Buzz, who wrote all but Destiny—hotels on the whiteboard.

  Michael said, “Destiny Sherman was a hooker. It’s possible that she was at a hotel the night she ran into this guy. You know, moonlighting.”

  Charlie slid him an approving look and repeated his observation, prompting Buzz to add a question mark in parenthesis beside Destiny’s name.

  “I heard from a detective that two of the victims were last known to be asleep in their hotel rooms,” Tony said. Charlie waited, but he didn’t continue with the information about how the victims were tortured, and she guessed that it was to spare Lena additional distress. At this point, knowing that wouldn’t help in the search anyway. It only added to Charlie’s profile of the killer.

  “The victims share a physical type,” Charlie added, “but there i
s no common pattern to family situation, educational status, or anything like that. So at this point the assumption is that he is choosing them by physical type.”

  Lena said, “The unsub has access to a four-wheel-drive vehicle. Large and covered enough to carry a body, so we’re probably talking about an SUV of some kind.”

  “He’s a local,” Buzz said, writing as he spoke. “Most likely a native of the area. Certainly he’s lived here long enough to know it well.”

  Tony said, “He likes using a knife.”

  Charlie said, “He’s familiar with the dump site. He visits it fairly frequently. He may be watching the body recovery now.”

  The stipulations came thick and fast. Buzz wrote them down.

  “There was a crowd gathered around out at the body dump site last time I talked to someone on the scene, which was about an hour ago,” Tony said. “We’ve got somebody filming everything.”

  “We’ll comb through the footage,” Buzz said. “We’ll stake the site out.”

  “We don’t have time.” Lena’s voice was tense. “We’ve got to figure this thing out yesterday.”

  There was a moment of silence as the stark reality of that sank in.

  “So,” Tony said. “What else?”

  “He’s heterosexual,” said Charlie. “Between the ages of twenty-five and forty. White male. He’ll have a job, probably something fairly menial. He will not inject himself into this investigation, and will avoid being questioned if possible. He’ll blend in to his surroundings. His neighbors would probably describe him as a nice guy. If there is an available parent, it will be a mother—dominant. He’s a sadist—he likes inflicting pain—but it may not be obvious, although he may have killed pets or small animals in the past. There will have been a stresser—a job loss, a divorce, the death of a parent, some kind of trigger—in his life around the time of the first murder.” Charlie frowned, thinking hard. “The first seventeen victims were tourists. That tells us that he is careful, methodical. He doesn’t want to dirty his nest. The fact that Destiny Sherman was a local tells us that there is something different about her.”