“Unless he didn’t know she was a local,” Michael interjected. “That’s possible. Vegas is a big place. If he spotted her around a hotel, he might have thought she was just another tourist.”
Good point. Charlie didn’t say that aloud, but she repeated Michael’s observation, and added, “I think his name or nickname might be Joe.”
“We need to consider the information we got from Ms. Green,” Tony said. “I think we all agree that what we’ve been able to confirm of what she said was accurate enough so that the rest should be included.”
Everybody nodded, and Buzz played the relevant portion of the recording of Tam’s reading so they could all hear it, pausing the recording to repeat the pertinent points and jot them down as necessary.
“The number 15—which we think was I-15; a moonlike landscape, which we think was the dump site; dogs barking; an old sign with something to do with a shell on it; a flock of birds; a bar with an eagle over the door; red, white, and blue; a small, enclosed space; silver wheels. And a dynasty, which we’re thinking is Dynasty Films.”
“Anything else?” Tony raised his eyebrows as he looked at them. “What about surveillance video?”
“Only on Giselle,” Lena said. “The other cases are too old. And I’ve watched it a dozen times. Nothing jumps out at me.”
Tony said, “All right, that’s enough to go on. Here’s the plan: Kaminsky, run through the computer employee, guest, subcontractor, whatever, lists of all the hotels the victims were staying at on the night they disappeared. Screen for gender, age, and race, the same name appearing at more than one hotel, for residence within the area Charlie mapped out for us, for priors, for ownership of an SUV, for the name Joe. The more markers that turn up on an individual, the higher he goes on our hit list.”
Kaminsky nodded. “Will do.”
“Might want to rescreen the girls,” Michael said. “Maybe they had more in common than looks. Forget family situation and all that stuff. Maybe they were all into S&M or something.”
A good suggestion. Charlie repeated it.
“Not Giselle,” Lena and Buzz said in unison. Lena looked daggers at Buzz—the obvious implication was that she wasn’t happy about how he knew about her sister’s sexual proclivities—who threw up his hands in surrender.
“You know, if I’d married Giselle then figured out how I feel about you, we would be in a mess,” he burst out.
Lena’s eyes blazed at him. “Keep the personal out of this, Crane.”
“Damn it—” Buzz began.
Tony cut him off with a snap of his fingers. “Both of you, save it for after this investigation is over. Or I’ll put you both off of it.”
There was no mistaking that he meant it.
“Sorry, boss,” Buzz muttered, while Lena gave a jerky nod.
“Screen the others for something like an S&M connection,” Tony directed, continuing as if there’d never been an interruption. “Anything. Maybe they all like to knit. See if they went to any of the same shows, bars, or restaurants. If we find the common denominator, we get our guy.”
“I’ll also do a cross-match with the names of the johns we got from the Pigeon Farm,” Lena said, her demeanor once again totally professional. She grimaced. “This is going to take some time. If I do everything exactly right, and the program works the way it should, maybe the rest of the day. Maybe longer.”
“Since Destiny Sherman was the latest victim, and the only local, I think we should concentrate on her,” Charlie said. “We know she had some contact with Giselle because of the bracelet. It’s possible that Destiny knew the unsub, or encountered him in such a way that she became a danger to him. He may have killed her because she saw him with Giselle, something like that. If we investigate her—it might give us a quicker path to the killer.”
Tony nodded. “I’ve got an address for Destiny’s mother. Buzz, you’re with me. Let’s go talk to her, see what we can find out.”
After they left, Lena got busy loading names and running programs to screen for the designated criteria, while Charlie went through the victims’ files again, futilely looking for any missed connection between them. Then at Lena’s suggestion she watched the surveillance video of Giselle, hoping that fresh eyes might discern something new. They didn’t. There were several snippets of Giselle in casinos and nightclubs, although not on the night she went missing. The rest was mostly footage of Giselle around the hotel, confirming what they already knew: since coming to Las Vegas, she’d come in, gone out, eaten at some of the restaurants, shopped in the shops. On the night she’d gone missing, there was footage of Lena and Giselle going into their room, then Lena leaving about an hour later. Giselle had stayed in, ordered room service around eight, then left, dressed for a night on the town, at around midnight.
And vanished.
“I’m not picking up anything,” Charlie said finally, leaning back in her chair. She was at one table in front of a computer screen. Lena was at the other, also in front of a computer screen. Michael had disappeared when she’d started watching the video for the second time. Not as in, poof, gone, disappeared: he’d walked out the door. He’d stopped blinking, so she wasn’t worried about him in that way anymore. Wherever he’d gone, it was close by, and he’d be back.
“Big surprise.” Lena sounded discouraged.
Charlie looked at her. “Not having any luck with that?”
Lena snorted. “More like, too much luck. So far, those eleven hotels have 682 employees in common, and the search is barely a quarter of the way through. Apparently they share a staffing service. And use some of the same subcontractors.”
Checking out as many people as that extrapolated out to be would take weeks, not days, even if they used the entire resources of the local FBI office and the LVMPD.
Charlie tried not to think what that would mean for Giselle.
“While the computer’s doing its thing, I’m going to see what I can find out about Dynasty Films,” said Lena. For the first time in hours, a hint of a smile tugged at her mouth. “And somebody needs to watch the DVDs to see if anything relevant is on there, like our victims.”
“Somebody meaning me, I suppose.” Charlie sighed. “Fine. Hand them over.”
Lena did.
Charlie was watching the last of the DVDs when Michael returned. There were three of them, each about fifteen minutes long, and because her purpose was to try to identify any of the victims among the performers or anything else that might have some bearing on the case, she couldn’t just fast-forward through them. The DVDs were S&M pornography, and the principals were definitely not actors. But they weren’t the victims, either, and nothing—setting, props, highly dubbed sexual noises—had anything to do with the case as far as Charlie could tell. Coming up behind her, Michael took one look at the action on the screen, grinned, and settled into a chair slightly behind her. She got the feeling that he was having more fun watching her face than he was watching the film. She would have said Go away if she could have. Since she couldn’t, she settled for ignoring him. Loudly.
Charlie sat through the credits. They listed everybody involved, but since everybody involved used obviously fake names, like Big John Johnson, the whole exercise was useless. She cast Michael a dark glance.
His grin widened. She was expecting some coarse remark, but instead he said, “FYI, the Scooby gang’s all over TV in there. CNN’s busy telling the world that Special Agent Anthony Bartoli heads one of ViCAP’s cracker jack teams, and they’re in Las Vegas right now hunting the Cinderella Killer.”
Charlie’s eyes widened. “Oh, no,” she breathed.
“What?” Lena looked up. “Did you find something? If so, it’s more than I did. Dynasty Films makes porn, but there’s no obvious connection to the case that I can see. There’s a members-only section, but it requires a sign-in and so far I haven’t been able to crack it.”
“I didn’t find anything, either,” Charlie said. “Anyway, that’s not it. I think I just heard somebody pass
ing by out there in the hall say that we’re all over TV.”
“You’re getting good at this,” Michael said. “Probably she won’t notice that you couldn’t hear anything that was said out there in the hall because the door’s closed.”
The news made Lena’s face tighten. “Bloodsucking scum,” she growled, and stood up abruptly.
Charlie assumed that bloodsucking scum referred to the TV people.
Before Lena could do whatever it was she meant to do—Charlie guessed it was check out the TV coverage for herself—her cell phone rang.
Its ringtone—Lena’s ringtone—was “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.”
Michael laughed. “Did not see that coming.”
“Giselle changed my ringtone,” Lena ground out, obviously responding to Charlie’s startled expression. She took one look at the number, and answered the phone: “Kaminsky.”
Charlie could hear the other side of the conversation well enough to follow it. The caller was the FBI lab technician who had been given the job of checking out Destiny Sherman’s clothes and everything else she was in possession of when she died.
“We’ve identified a substance on the spikes on the bracelet,” the technician said. “Blood and skin cells. Belonging to Destiny Sherman.”
The bracelet the technician was referring to was Giselle’s, Charlie knew.
“That’s not surprising,” Lena replied. “Destiny Sherman sustained multiple slash wounds. She was bleeding.”
“From the way the blood and skin cells were distributed on the metal, the more likely explanation is that she was gouged with the bracelet.”
Lena’s brows knit. “Really,” she said slowly. Then she thanked the technician, disconnected, and looked at Charlie, her expression thoughtful. “I need to go to the morgue.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“You’re a glutton for punishment, you know that?” Michael growled as Charlie followed Lena into the cold storage unit where Destiny Sherman’s body was being kept. Because of the court order requiring that it be held, it was stored separately from the other corpses. This was helpful to Charlie: she wasn’t facing the onslaught of spirits that had overwhelmed her before.
On the way in, they’d only passed two ghosts, both blood-soaked adult males with what looked like bullet wounds. Neither had paid any attention to her. She’d returned the favor, and so far the nausea that spirits always brought with them hadn’t hit her.
She expected that to change the moment Destiny Sherman’s spirit put in an appearance. Having argued against Charlie making a return visit to the morgue until the taxi had dropped them at the building’s door, Michael was well aware that she wanted him to talk to the spirit, getting as much information as he could. Given that Destiny’s spirit was on a loop that might be difficult. Still, Charlie knew that he would try, however grudgingly.
“Unzip the bag, please.” Lena made the request of Coroner Investigator Glenn Heinz, who’d preceded them into the room.
The resultant loud zipping sound made Charlie think of a chainsaw. One that was tearing through her head. Her eyes widened at the instant onslaught of pain.
The sudden headache was so bad it made her feel sick. Her stomach churned. The degree of distress she was feeling meant that something was definitely up.
She didn’t know what she looked like, but she felt like she’d just turned fifty shades of pale as she lifted a thankfully icy hand and pressed it against her temple.
“I can’t catch you if you collapse,” Michael warned grimly. His mouth was tight. His eyes slid over her as if he expected her to crumple to the floor at any moment.
Charlie gave him a look that silently ordered him to turn his attention to the corpse. She gritted her teeth and got a grip. She was there to help the investigation, not hinder it.
Destiny Sherman’s body was naked, and with the zipper on the body bag in which she lay pulled all the way down, it was fully exposed. As Charlie had observed many times, there was no dignity in death.
The woman’s flesh was that particularly corpselike purple-tinged white that dead bodies turned after having been dead for a while. Her lips were blue, and drawn back to reveal glimpses of her teeth. Her eyes were closed; the lids looked sunken and bruised. Her whole body looked sunken and bruised.
The edges of the wounds to her abdomen were crusted and black and horrifying. The other details of what time had done to the corpse were so disturbing that Charlie’s mind simply glossed over them. What she was looking for was a scratch or scratches deep enough to draw blood.
“I don’t see any injuries that look like they might have been made by Giselle’s bracelet,” Lena said, and looked to Charlie for confirmation.
Charlie would have shaken her head, but the headache had grown too intense. Instead she held her head still and said, “Me neither.”
Michael was looking at her, not the dead woman. “You’re white as a damned sheet.”
“Turn her over,” Lena instructed Heinz. The corpse had passed beyond rigor mortis, so the coroner’s investigator was able to comply without too much difficulty. Charlie tried not to see the limp flop of dead limbs.
As the body was shifted, the rank smell of death combined with formaldehyde fanned through the air, strong enough to make even Lena wrinkle her nose.
Almost as soon as the body was on its stomach Lena said, “Look there,” and pointed at four parallel scratches in the center of Destiny’s back, just below the nape of her neck. Charlie focused despite the headache and saw that they were about an inch apart, six inches long, and looked deep. They would have hurt—and bled.
“Somebody attacked her with Giselle’s bracelet.” Lena glanced at Charlie, her voice suffused with suppressed excitement. “How could we have missed it?”
“We weren’t looking for injuries that might have been caused by your sister’s bracelet,” Charlie replied with credible evenness as Lena pulled her phone out of her purse and sent a brief text—Lena had called Tony and Buzz on the way over, and they were on the way, so Charlie presumed the text was to them. Lena started taking pictures. “At the time, we—” Charlie broke off abruptly as the weird, disoriented feeling that she had been experiencing only since she’d died overwhelmed her.
Oh, no.
“The scratches are in the autopsy report,” Heinz said, but Charlie barely registered the words. She felt dizzy. She could hear the throb of her own pulse in her ears. The chainsaw headache was back, sawing her brain in half.
“Damn it—” Michael loomed close, but the rest of what he was saying to her was lost.
“I don’t want to die.” A woman’s soft, Spanish-accented voice was terrified and pleading.
Charlie didn’t know what she looked like, but Michael said, “Babe,” and reached for her. Uselessly, of course. His hands passed right through. She never even felt the tingle, or heard anything else he said, even though she could see his lips moving and knew, in some abstract way, that he was cursing a blue streak. As unobtrusively as possible, Charlie took a couple of steps away from the gurney and pressed her back against the freezing cold wall.
Then the same terrified voice she had heard before whispered through her head.
“Oh, please. I’ll do anything! Anything you want.” There was a pause, not even long enough for Charlie to sneak in a breath. The high-pitched, frightened voice continued, “Please don’t kill me! Please don’t kill me!”
A hair-raising shriek followed, then that hideous gurgle Charlie remembered from before: the death gurgle.
Cold sweat broke over her in a wave. The voice was the same one that she’d heard the last time she’d been here. Then she’d wondered where it was coming from. Now she knew: it was attached to Destiny’s body. What that meant, exactly, she was too sick and dizzy and disoriented to even try to figure out.
“Charlie.” As the horrible gurgling sound faded away, Michael swam into focus. He was leaning over her, his eyes boring down into hers, his face hard with concern. “You’re hearing those d
amned voices again, aren’t you?”
Charlie managed a truncated nod, and this time when he cursed she heard it.
She glanced around. If Destiny’s spirit had been going to show, it would have done so already. If it had been nearby, Charlie would have been far more nauseated than she was. The spirit was gone, she concluded, claimed by the Great Beyond. Glancing past Michael’s shoulder, Charlie saw Lena still taking pictures of the corpse, and felt another wave of dizziness gathering strength.
She really didn’t want to hear the voice again.
“I’m going to wait for you upstairs,” she told Lena. Without waiting for the other woman’s reply, she propelled herself out the door and to the elevator by sheer force of will. She rode up leaning against the wall with her eyes closed. By the time she reached the ground floor the worst of the symptoms had receded, and she was able to find a chair in the reception area and sink down on it and breathe. Michael stood over her, his body tense, his face harsh.
She knew how much he hated the fact that there was nothing he could do to help her.
A moment later Tony and Buzz strode through the door. They checked on seeing her.
“Lena’s downstairs. Last door on the left.” Charlie was proud of herself: she sounded perfectly normal.
Buzz nodded and strode off without a word.
Tony hesitated, frowning at her. “You okay?” he asked.
“She’s just peachy-keen, Dud,” Michael answered for her. “Can’t you tell?”
“I’m fine. I just needed some air,” Charlie replied, and waved a hand toward where Buzz was holding the elevator. “You go on.”
Tony hesitated a split second longer, nodded, and left.
By the time he, Lena, and Buzz returned Charlie had largely recovered. Having delivered himself of his opinion on her continually putting herself in the way of both serial killers and bad psychic experiences, Michael stood with his back to her. He was staring out the window at the fuzzily lit parking lot, and, beyond that, the inky blackness of the night.
Her Last Whisper Page 26