Her Last Whisper

by Karen Robards

  The glare of the sun on the window made it impossible to determine who was behind the wheel. If it was Tam, what had she been doing for those missing three hours? And where was she now?

  “We’ve got six singers, four improvisers, four magicians, two clowns, two stand-up comics, an acrobat, a sword-swallower, a flamenco dancer, a knife-thrower, and a guy who makes balloon animals in the restaurants, which I guess counts,” Lena reported. “By adding performers to the checklist, that brings our previous fifty down to twenty-three. Which we have identified because they meet certain criteria, not because we have any direct evidence against them.”

  “That’s what criteria do—it winnows the pool.” Charlie was reviewing the security footage from Tam’s floor the morning she checked out. As she spoke, she fast-forwarded past the part where she walked Tam to her room, hugged her, and then left—no point in having everyone else watch her engaging in what looked like an animated conversation with air (i.e., Michael)—then kept going until Tam left her room. The time stamp said 10:41 a.m.

  She was carrying her purse, but didn’t have a suitcase with her. Charlie wasn’t surprised to see her return to her room at 10:56. Obviously Tam had run a quick errand downstairs. Then at 11:01 a.m. Tam left her room again, this time pulling her small leopard-print (typical Tam, who would never choose something as basic as black) carry-on behind her. Charlie watched her walk to the elevator. Someone inside the elevator must have seen her coming, because they held the door open for her. Tam stepped inside, and the door closed.

  “She left her room at check-out time.” Tony was looking at the footage over her shoulder. “What did she do for the next three hours?”

  “I don’t know. I’m going to try to follow her through the hotel.” Charlie clicked through the rest of the footage the hotel had sent—basically all their security video for that day—but could find no other image of Tam.

  She went back to check the elevator videos, meaning to follow Tam’s movements chronologically. Six elevators serviced that floor. She had footage for five of them. There was no video of Tam in the elevator. There was no video of the elevator Tam had gotten into.

  Charlie’s heart started to beat faster as she reported her finding aloud.

  “That ain’t good,” Michael said.

  Tony got on the phone to the Conquistador’s security office to see what had happened to the missing footage, while Charlie went back to the video of Tam leaving her room at 11:01, suitcase in tow. Everything about Tam from the soft swing of her red hair to the vibrancy of her pink jumpsuit to her confident stride in her delicate gold sandals looked perfectly normal.

  Charlie paused the video just as Tam stepped into the elevator. The angle of the camera made it impossible to see more than a slice of the interior. But what she did see made her frown.

  “The camera in elevator six is broken,” Tony reported as he ended his call. “It’s being replaced, but there hasn’t been any footage from it for the last week.”

  “There’s no such thing as coincidence,” Michael repeated grimly. “The guy either knew the camera was broken, or he broke it himself.”

  Re-examining the image of Tam getting into the elevator, Charlie was afraid he was right.

  Someone was already in the elevator when Tam got on: a man. Had he been waiting for her? With the axiom about coincidence revolving through her head, Charlie strongly suspected he had been. She could see a black dress shoe and, above it, the lower part of a leg in well-pressed black trousers. She could also see, at waist height above the man’s leg, the curl of one side of a silver bar-type handle, and beneath that, the fall of a white cloth that stopped some six inches short of the floor.

  Looking at the image, Charlie’s mouth went dry.

  “What does that look like to you?” Charlie pointed to the handle and cloth.

  Everyone except Lena was now gathered around her computer, and they all agreed it looked like a room service cart.

  When Lena heard that, her head came up.

  “Giselle ordered room service the night she went missing,” Lena said.

  Tony moved toward her. “Let’s look at that footage of the night Giselle disappeared again.”

  Lena brought the footage up, and they all watched as room service was delivered to Giselle in her room after Lena had left for the airport. It would have been a riveting moment, except the waitress who brought the meal on the cart was obviously not Destiny and, since Charlie insisted that the killers were a mixed-gender couple, obviously not who they were looking for.

  A video hour later (fast-forwarded through in a matter of minutes), a waiter showed up with an empty cart and knocked on Giselle’s door, presumably to pick up the remains of the meal. The door opened, and he pushed his cart inside, then reappeared with it piled with dirty dishes some ten minutes later. After that, there was no activity until just before midnight, when Giselle walked out of the room, dressed for a night on the town, and headed toward the elevator.

  “Pause that, right there,” Charlie said suddenly. “Can you enlarge it?”

  Then, as Lena did both of those things, Charlie pointed to something barely visible below the sleeve of Giselle’s sequined T-shirt, which had ridden up a bit when Giselle swung her arm forward as she walked: “Look. Did Giselle have a tattoo?”

  “No,” Lena breathed as they all stared at the image, a curved line of dark blue ink that was only visible in that one frame. “She didn’t.” A second later, Lena said what Charlie, and presumably the rest of them, had just remembered, “But Destiny Sherman did.” She stared hard at the woman on the monitor. “My God, that’s not Giselle. That’s Destiny Sherman. She’s wearing Giselle’s clothes, and a wig.”

  Charlie remembered the wigs on the shelves in Destiny Sherman’s room with a little thrill of horror.

  “How did I not see that before?” Lena couldn’t tear her eyes away from the monitor. “If she’s wearing Giselle’s clothes, whatever happened to Giselle had already happened.”

  “None of us saw it.” Tony’s voice was briskly businesslike. “Let’s go back to the last place where we’re sure it’s Giselle and take it from there.”

  Lena rewound to when Giselle opened the door to let the waiter in to pick up the used dishes. The camera recorded the door opening and the waiter pushing his cart inside, but showed no glimpse of whoever was inside the room opening the door.

  The shot before that, where the waitress delivered the food, showed Giselle opening the door then stepping out of view to allow the waitress in.

  “Are we sure that’s Giselle?” Tony asked. The footage showed Giselle’s face, so determining her identity wasn’t difficult.

  “Yes,” Lena and Buzz answered at the same time.

  “Okay. Then that”—Tony tapped the screen—“is the last time we’re sure Giselle was present and unharmed.” At his direction, Lena once again fast-forwarded through events until Destiny Sherman left the room dressed as Giselle. Then they fast-forwarded through more footage until Lena returned to the room shortly thereafter.

  “It had to be either the waitress who delivered the food or the waiter who picked up the dishes,” Buzz said. “One of them did something to her, and then managed to get her out of the room.”

  “It was the waiter,” Charlie said. “The primary will be a male.”

  Michael said, “She has to be stuffed in that cart. The way the white cloth hangs down to the floor you could hide almost anything, especially if you knew you were going to be putting unconscious girls in it and modified it so they’d fit.”

  He was right. Charlie was sure of it. There really wasn’t any other viable possibility. Her heart hammered as she repeated Michael’s observation to the others. Then a thought struck her and she added, “Tam mentioned an enclosed space and silver wheels. A room service cart fits.”

  “Do we have the other victims’ hotel bills?” Tony asked. When Lena answered in the affirmative, he said, “Check them for room service charges on the night each victim was l
ast known to be in her hotel.”

  “Yes,” Lena cried a moment later. “There are room service charges for all of them.”

  “Then we’ve got our guy.” Tony pointed at the man on the screen. “I need an identity. Stat.”

  “Oh, God.” Lena sounded sick as she stared at the picture of the waiter leaving the room with the cart piled high with dirty dishes and the white cloth billowing toward the floor. “Oh, God. Then Giselle’s inside there.”

  “We need a name,” Tony repeated, and they all went to work on identifying the waiter.

  Unfortunately, that wasn’t as easy as they’d first thought it was going to be. There was no clear shot of the waiter’s face. As if conscious of the camera’s location, he kept his face deliberately turned away.

  “He’s about six feet, one-eighty, average build, short dark hair,” Buzz reported after a thorough search of all pertinent footage. “That’s all we’ve got, boss.”

  “He almost certainly works for Acer Staffing Solutions. They provide waitstaff for the Conquistador and the other victims’ hotels,” Lena said. “Eleven of our top suspects work for Acer.”

  “How many of them match the description?” Charlie asked, and Lena started pecking away at her computer keys again.

  “Okay.” Tony was on the phone with his contact at the ME’s office. “Thanks.”

  He disconnected and told them, “They’ve finished preliminary tox screens on two of the victims. Both had Zolpidem tartrate in their systems. I’m going to extrapolate that they all do.” He looked around at their frowning faces, and translated that to “Ambien.”

  “Yo. Sleeping pills: the old school date rape drug. That would explain why the last thing those two girls remembered was falling asleep in their hotel room,” Michael said to Charlie, who barely remembered not to nod.

  “This is how it has to be going down: the victims order room service, the unsub, who presumably has picked them out as possible victims earlier and knows their room numbers, puts Ambien in their food in the kitchen, the victims eat, fall asleep, and when he goes to their rooms, supposedly to pick up the dishes, he grabs the victims and takes them out in the cart. Then they end up starring in his death porn.” Buzz sounded savage. “Destiny Sherman must have been inside the cart when he took it in to pick up the unconscious victims. She stayed behind to come out later in their clothes to fool the security cameras.”

  “We only have footage of that happening one time,” Charlie warned. “Although it’s a solid theory.”

  “The reason we only have footage of that happening one time is because nobody started looking for the other victims in time to keep the footage from being recorded over,” Lena retorted.

  “It doesn’t explain what happened to Ms. Green,” Tony said. “She didn’t order room service, and he didn’t come to her room. He appears to have been waiting for her in the elevator.”

  “Tam went downstairs again.” Charlie went cold all over as she thought about it. “If she encountered this guy, she may have had some sort of psychic flash about him. You’ve seen how she knows things. Maybe he spotted it. Maybe she said something to him.”

  “That fits with what we know,” Tony agreed.

  “Which means he was working at the Conquistador yesterday,” Charlie told Lena with a quick upsurge of excitement. “Screen for that.”

  A moment later Lena said, “I’m down to two names. They meet the physical description, they’re employed by Acer Staffing, they were working at the Conquistador the night Giselle disappeared, they’re locals, they have or have access to four-wheel-drive vehicles, and one’s an amateur improviser and the other is a clown. And, both were working at the Conquistador yesterday. On the negative side, neither lives in the grid and neither is named Joe.”

  “Names and addresses,” Tony said.

  “Robert Thomas Dobson, Jr. and Cory Bobbins Hill.” Lena picked up her phone. “I’ll text them to you, along with their addresses.”

  Tony nodded. “Find out if they’re at work today.”

  Lena made a call, then said, “Neither one of them is scheduled to work today.”

  “Okay. Let’s go check ’em out.” Tony was moving toward the door. “Charlie, you’re with me. Kaminsky, you’re with Crane. We’ve got Dobson, you’ve got Hill.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  The small ranch house in the Las Vegas suburb of Henderson was shaded by a single bushy olive tree. The woman who answered the door was young, with short blond hair and a baby on her hip. She shook her head in response to Tony’s request to speak to Robert Dobson.

  “He owns the house, but he doesn’t live here anymore. We’ve been renting here for over two years. I think he couldn’t afford the mortgage when the economy tanked, but he couldn’t sell it, so …” Her voice trailed off. She frowned, looking first Tony and then Charlie, both of whom were standing on the small concrete stoop, over curiously. “You’re part of that serial killer hunter team from the FBI, aren’t you? I saw you on TV.” Her eyes widened. “Is he involved in that?”

  Tony shook his head. “We’re just doing a routine check to see if any of the people who work in the hotels saw anything that could help us,” he lied with perfect aplomb, while Charlie cringed inwardly at the thought of what being recognized might do to their ability to find their quarry and Michael, who’d been vocal about his opinion that Charlie should have stayed back in the safety of the FBI office, said, “Think she’s going to run and call our boy the second she’s out of sight?”

  “He and his wife moved in with his mother, and then they got a divorce so I think it’s just him and his mother now. I have her address, if that helps,” she volunteered breathlessly.

  “It would,” Tony agreed, and smiled at her.

  “I’ll be right back. I’m Kelly Sims, by the way.” She returned his smile. Charlie could see that she was impressed with Tony’s good looks.

  “Special Agent Tony Bartoli, Dr. Charlotte Stone,” Tony made the introductions which, since Kelly had already recognized them, there seemed no reason not to do. “Nice to meet you, Kelly.”

  “You too.” Kelly smiled at him again and disappeared inside. A minute later she was back, offering Tony a scrap of paper with an address scribbled down on it. “We have to forward his mail sometimes.”

  Tony thanked her, and they left.

  “Do you think she’ll call Dobson and tell him we’re looking for him?” Charlie punched the address into the GPS as he backed out of the driveway.

  “I don’t know. We’re not going to get there faster than she can call, so let’s hope she doesn’t.” Tony sounded as calm as always.

  “If he lost his house, got a divorce, and had to move in with his mother more than two years ago, any or all of those could be the trigger event we’re looking for.”

  “Fits the time frame,” Tony agreed. Following the prompting of the GPS, they pulled onto the expressway.

  “Babe, you remember that breakfast we had with the voodoo priestess?” Michael asked musingly from the backseat. “Wasn’t the waiter’s name—?”

  “Bob!” Charlie gasped as the memory of the waiter who had stared at Tam’s cleavage exploded into her consciousness. Tony looked at her with surprise. Burningly conscious that he wouldn’t have heard Michael’s question, she added, “Bob was the name of the waiter who brought Tam and me our check at the hotel’s breakfast buffet. I just remembered it.”

  “Way to recover,” Michael applauded drily.

  “Robert Thomas Dobson. Cory Bobbins Hill. Either one of them could be a Bob.” Tony was quick on the uptake, as always.

  “Yes.” Charlie got more excited as she thought about it. “Tam charged our breakfast to her room. He would know her room number. She told him she was a psychic, told him a bunch of stuff about himself. Nothing about his being a serial killer, but she’s always accurate, and maybe it was enough to spook him.”

  “Or maybe she saw him again when she made that quickie trip downstairs and said something else to him
then,” Michael suggested.

  Charlie repeated that, and Tony nodded. He was already on the phone. “Kaminsky, did you get those pictures of Dobson and Hill yet?”

  “The Conquistador doesn’t have their pictures because they aren’t employees of the hotel. Acer Staffing doesn’t keep the pictures they do have of them on file: the only copies are on the employees’ badges, which the employees keep. So I requested a download from the DMV and I’m waiting for it to come through,” Lena replied. “You find Dobson?”

  “Dobson’s moved. We’re heading for his new address now,” Tony replied. “What about you?”

  “We just got here. It doesn’t seem like anybody’s home. But we looked in all the windows, the house doesn’t have a basement, and the detached garage was open. There’s nothing out of the ordinary anywhere in sight, and if he’s murdering women or holding them prisoner he’s not doing it here.”

  “Tony.” Charlie fought to stay calm as the GPS warned that they would be exiting left in two miles and she took a good look at the device’s map. “Dobson’s new address is in the grid.”

  An excited sound from the other end of the phone let them know that Lena had heard.

  “Yeah,” Tony acknowledged. “Meet us there.” He gave Lena the address. “Better get a search warrant. And get some backup on the scene, too. Tell them to get there, but hang back until we give the word.”

  Lena acknowledged that, and Tony disconnected.

  “This has got to be him.” Charlie’s palms felt damp. She’d done a good job of keeping her anxiety tamped down until now, when the denouement was at hand. But she was afraid, terribly afraid, of catching the killer only to find that they were too late, and Tam and Giselle were dead. At the thought of them suffering the fate Carmela Lynch and the others had suffered, she felt sick. Please God, not Tam. And not Giselle, either. “He meets all the criteria.”

  “Serial killer hunting as a science.” Tony glanced at her. “We wouldn’t be anywhere close to finding this guy without you.”