Her Last Whisper: A Novel

by Karen Robards

  “So the first thing Dudley thinks to do is come running straight for you,” Michael said with disgust. Charlie tried not to watch too obviously as, grimacing, he managed to sit up. It cost him a lot of effort, she could tell. She let out the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding as he succeeded, then felt a renewal of worry as he sat there on the floor with his arms resting on his bent knees and his head hanging, as if that small action had sapped every bit of his strength. She’d never known Michael to be anything but whipcord tough, so to see him like that was disconcerting. But still, the fact that he could sit up was a good thing. It was definitely progress. She felt a spurt of hope.

  Maybe they would make it out of there before the hunter came back, after all.

  She asked Tony, “Are you saying her sister’s been murdered?”

  “She’s disappeared,” Tony repeated, clarifying, “No body’s been found. That’s one reason Kaminsky’s so frantic: she’s hoping her sister’s still alive and we can locate her in time to save her life.”

  “Oh, God.” What Charlie’s every instinct urged her to do was clap her hands over her ears and not listen to another word. The last thing she wanted, the last thing she needed, was to be drawn into another life or death search for a serial killer.

  “Not your problem,” Michael intoned without lifting his head.

  He’s right, she told herself. But her fingers tightened around her phone.

  Tony continued, “Apparently the two of them were together in Vegas on vacation.”

  “See there, Sugar Buns took a vacation, and she wasn’t the one who flat-lined.” Michael lifted his head at last. His eyes were still eerily black, but the lines around his mouth had relaxed a little and his jaw was not so tight. Except for the ashen cast to his skin, and those disconcerting obsidian eyes, he looked almost back to normal. “Good to know somebody’s got her priorities in order.”

  Charlie kept (most of) her attention focused on Tony. “So what makes Kaminsky think her sister is the victim of a serial killer?”

  “Listen to her message,” Tony recommended.

  There was no longer any way to try to avoid the true purpose behind his visit. Throat tightening, Charlie said, “You—she—wants me to help find this guy, right?”

  “Let’s see, didn’t you almost die the last time you got mixed up with Dudley and the gang?” Michael’s voice had acquired a real edge. “So I’d say your answer needs to be ‘a big thanks for thinking of me, but stupid really isn’t my middle name.’ ”

  “I came to see if I could take you to Vegas with me,” Tony admitted. “Tonight. The plane’s waiting at Lonesome Pine Airport right now.” Something in her face must have told him that she wasn’t exactly jumping for joy at the prospect, because he added, “I know it’s a lot to ask.”

  “Ya think?” Michael demanded savagely, those black eyes glittering as they fixed on Tony. “After you nearly got her killed the last time, jerkoff?” He shot a glance at Charlie. “Your answer’s no.”

  Charlie ignored Michael, and pressed the button that allowed her to listen to the first of her cell phone messages.

  “Goddamn it.” Michael’s attention had shifted to Charlie. “They were finding serial killers for a long time before they started dragging you into it.”

  The phone beeped, and the message started to play.

  “I need your help,” Kaminsky said without preamble. Her usually brisk voice was low and strained. “My sister’s missing. We’re in Las Vegas, at the Conquistador, and she didn’t come back to our room Saturday night. I thought maybe she met somebody, so I didn’t start getting really worried until Sunday night, when I called the police and got the local office involved. By Monday I was running the details of her disappearance through the FBI computer system. I got a match with three other women who vanished in Las Vegas over the past year. I did some more checking and there are actually seventeen over two years. Seventeen. Attractive young women who went out on the town and never came back. Some of them are officially listed as missing persons and some of them are in the police records as deadbeats who skipped out on their hotel bills and some of them popped up in the computer because they had round-trip tickets to Vegas and apparently never used the return part. There are so many similarities in the cases that I think we’re dealing with an active serial killer at work. I called Bartoli. He and Crane are coming.” Kaminsky’s voice wobbled. “Please come. I know I haven’t always been—” Her voice broke off. When it resumed it was fierce: “It doesn’t matter. I have to do everything I can to find her. She’s my sister.”

  As Kaminsky clicked off, Charlie could feel the other woman’s anguish so strongly that it seemed to be seeping through her pores into her bloodstream. A large part of her wanted to rush to Kaminsky’s side just as fast as she could. But—

  Charlie realized that the message had been loud enough to be overheard only when Michael growled, “I’d be crying my eyes out here, except she’s got the whole damned FBI to help her find her sister. She doesn’t need you.”

  Having turned away from the guards, Pugh moved to stand beside Tony. “Dr. Stone, I was told that you were the one who ordered the infirmary shut down.” He frowned at Charlie. “Is that correct?”

  “Yes,” Charlie replied, trying to keep her attention focused on Pugh rather than letting it be diverted by Michael, who was planting his booted feet and bracing his hands on his blue-jeaned knees and giving every indication that he was preparing to try to stand. She was sure that, as the hunter’s prey, he was as conscious of their continued vulnerability as she was. Even if the salt worked, they couldn’t stay where they were forever. He knew they needed to leave her office, and the prison, as soon as possible. Best case scenario, before the damned thing came back.

  But there was Michael. And the whole I-hear-disembodied-voices thing she had going on. And then there was her growing aversion to the idea of ever putting herself anywhere near an active serial killer again. Because, Charlie had discovered, she really, truly didn’t want to die. Once was enough: even though she didn’t remember much about it, what she had taken away from her recent near-death experience was the unshakable conviction that she never wanted it to happen again. Eternity was something she just wasn’t ready for.

  She might learn slowly, but by God, she apparently learned.

  “Why was that?” Pugh looked at her probingly. “What was it that made you suspect something was amiss in the infirmary?”

  Michael said, “Get your stuff together, babe. I’m going to be on my feet here in a minute and when I am we want to be able to make tracks.”

  Shooting a hooded, anxious glance at him, Charlie responded with a barely perceptible nod of acknowledgment.

  Stepping over to her desk with the intention of retrieving her laptop, which had all her files on it and which she really didn’t want to leave behind, she forced herself to focus on Pugh. “While Dr. Creason was treating my hand, I noticed that he was behaving oddly.” As she spoke, Charlie thrust her laptop into her purse, then began hurriedly gathering up the rest of her spilled belongings and stuffing them in there, too, skirting Michael, who gave her a sardonic look, as she bobbed and weaved around him snagging items from the floor. “It’s possible, as you suggested, that he was experiencing a reaction to a medication, or a gas, or something of that nature. I also noticed that one of the trustees was behaving oddly. I don’t know what was happening to make them behave as they were. I only know that I was convinced that something out of the ordinary was occurring, and needed to be contained until it could be evaluated.”

  She didn’t know that the hunter couldn’t track Michael like a bloodhound anywhere they went, but she was hoping it couldn’t. She did know that it knew where he was right now, and that gave her the willies.

  Tony was looking at her hand. “I noticed the bandage. You hurt yourself on the job today? What happened?”

  “She was attacked by an inmate,” Pugh told him. “We’re already re-evaluating our security proced
ures.”

  “A subject I was interviewing grabbed my hand and bit me,” Charlie said shortly. “It’s nothing.”

  “See, that’s the thing about them serial killers,” Michael’s drawl was pronounced as he fixed Tony with a hard look. “They’re downright dangerous. That’s why most of us like to keep our women away from them.”

  That was sexist, possessive, and otherwise offensive on so many levels that Charlie didn’t even know where to start to bristle. Unfortunately, beyond shooting Michael the most fleeting of dirty looks, there wasn’t any response she could make.

  “I’m sorry that happened to you,” Tony said with such genuine sincerity that she rewarded him with a smile. Moving nearer, he started gathering up her dropped items and handing them to her. The pink and flowery case of her Miracle-Go kit looked ridiculously feminine in his very masculine hand as he passed it over. Their fingers brushed: his felt solid and warm. “Let me help you with that.”

  “Fucking Boy Scout,” Michael muttered, seemingly to no one in particular. Then, to Charlie, he added, “What do you want to bet missionary is the only position he knows?”

  “You made the right call about the infirmary, Dr. Stone,” Pugh said to her at almost the same moment, which allowed her to pretend that she hadn’t heard Michael’s last remark at all, which actually was a far more effective way of dealing with him than glaring, as she had learned from experience. Pugh then asked, “And how did you feel while you were in the infirmary? Other than your hand, I mean? Headachey? Short of breath? Any kind of physical symptoms?”

  “I had a headache,” Charlie replied slowly, as if giving careful consideration to her answer, while she continued to scoop up her belongings. After all, what had happened in the infirmary had to be explained away somehow, and the truth just wasn’t going to cut it. The kind of scenario Pugh seemed to be suggesting worked for her. She decided to go with it. “And I was a little nauseous, now that I think about it.”

  Pugh said, “Ah,” but before he could expand on that another guard came rushing up.

  “Warden!” There was a whole boatload of urgency in his tone. His voice lowered as Pugh turned to look at him. “Something you ought to know!”

  CHAPTER SIX

  “What is it now?” Sounding testy, Pugh once more moved away to deal with whatever dire matter was being brought to his attention. Since it didn’t involve a hunter swooping down out of nowhere or some fresh crisis relating to Michael, Charlie didn’t even try to listen. She was, in fact, relieved to no longer be the object of his scrutiny. She lied when she had to, which, thanks to Michael and her ongoing ghost problem was more often than she would have liked, but she wasn’t all that good at it. She always felt uncomfortable, and sometimes it showed.

  “What’s with the salt anyway?” Tony asked, low-voiced, when, as he thought, no one else could hear.

  “Ants.” Desperate, Charlie managed to latch onto something halfway plausible. Maybe. Anyway, it couldn’t sound even a fraction as insane as the truth. “There were dozens of them in here earlier, and I hate ants. My purse had candy in it. When it fell they started swarming and”—okay, she was babbling; cut it short—“haven’t you ever heard that salt wards off ants?”

  “Ants,” Tony repeated. To his credit, he sounded only faintly dubious. “No, I hadn’t heard that.” He glanced around. “I don’t see any now.”

  “That’s because it worked,” Charlie answered. The note of triumph in her voice sounded genuine because it was genuine: she was proud of herself for coming up with such a fast and unassailable rebuttal. There were indeed no ants anywhere in sight: Tony couldn’t argue with that.

  Michael gave a grunt of laughter. “You know that sounded nuts, right?”

  Even as she flicked Michael the briefest of withering looks, she picked up a few coins and Tony handed her a couple of receipts and a nail file and that was it: the contents of her purse were once again back in her purse. The contents of her Miracle-Go kit were in there, too. Along with her laptop. The fact that everything was a jumbled mess and her purse was bulging and filled to overflowing was something she would deal with later. She did like things organized, but at the moment she had more urgent problems, like a giant murderous monster that could reappear at any second.

  “Thank you.” She smiled at Tony, then wasn’t able to stop her expression from changing as, with a look of grim determination, Michael surged to his feet. That brought him so close that she found herself staring at the T-shirt-covered center of his wide chest before automatically adjusting her gaze upward, over his square jaw and beautifully carved mouth and straight nose and chiseled cheekbones to his eyes. For the most fleeting of moments their eyes connected; his were still terrifyingly black. If she hadn’t known him, she would have taken an instant, instinctive step back: only the damned should have eyes like that. As it was, though, she took in the soulless eyes right along with the handsome, hard-planed face and the tall, powerful body, sweeping all of them with the kind of anxious glance a mother would throw over an injured child. He might be on his feet, but he was far from recovered. She got the impression that simply remaining upright was costing him every bit of strength he had.

  “Something wrong?” Tony asked with a frown, apparently correctly interpreting her changing face without any inkling as to the cause. He slid a supportive hand around her upper arm. It felt large and warm and comforting against her chilled flesh, but she was too jittery to do more than register it in passing.

  “N-no,” Charlie answered, already busy scraping salt out of the way with a hopefully discreet foot to make a path that would allow Michael to escape. From this point, everything needed to happen fast: once the circle was open, the hunter could pounce without anything to even slow it down. Barely repressing a shiver, she refused to let her thoughts go there. Both men were looking at her, and for a moment her attention was torn between them. Tall, dark, and handsome, stalwart and gainfully employed in a respected profession that required him to wear a suit and tie (her mother’s criteria for the kind of man Charlie should be on the hunt for), her perfect dream man, in fact, if only she had the sense to realize it, Tony watched her with concern. Taller, more powerfully built, gorgeous, golden (dead) Michael, with not one thing in his favor except that he was pure sex on the hoof and she genuinely liked him almost as much as she wanted to sleep with him, fixed her with an inimical gaze.

  So unsteady on his feet that he was swaying slightly, Michael shifted his eyes from her face to frown down at Tony’s hand on her arm, then looked at Tony in a way that would have been forbidding even if his eyes weren’t as black as night. Tony, of course, had no idea that Michael was even there. His focus was all on her.

  “This is hopeless. I’ll let the janitorial staff deal with it,” she said lightly, seeing that Tony was looking down at her busy foot even as she nudged the last few grains of salt aside.

  “Good idea,” Tony replied. “So, are you coming with me to Vegas?”

  Charlie’s eyes flew to his face. The thought of Kaminsky’s pain made her want to say yes, but there were so many factors to consider. “I—”

  “Let’s go.” Michael stepped through the opening she had made for him. “Chop-chop.”

  Instead of rushing for safety as she would have wished, he stopped just outside the circle to wait for her.

  This is no time to be gentlemanly! The hunter can’t hurt me, she wanted to scream at him, but of course she didn’t. Although he could only get ahead of her by about fifty feet, in these circumstances a fifty-foot head start was not to be despised. It would at least get him out of her office, where the hunter knew to look for him.

  “—am thinking about it,” she concluded quickly, pulling her arm free of Tony’s hold and hurrying past Michael toward the door. She added over her shoulder in as normal a tone as she could manage, “I’m just going to go outside. I’m feeling a little dizzy and I really need some fresh air.”

  “Charlie—” Tony sounded perturbed. She didn’t look back o
r even slow down. She was already edging through the crowd at the door. Her fingers curled around the cool hard curve of the horseshoe. Pulling it free of her waistband, she thrust it out of sight into her pants pocket, then kept a firm grip on it. If the hunter came back, she wanted to be ready.

  A shiver slid down her spine at the prospect.

  Please don’t let it come back.

  Pugh looked sharply at her as Charlie murmured “Excuse me” to get past him. Michael (being noncorporeal had its plus side) had already made it through the knot of men standing in and around the doorway and was once again waiting for her to catch up. Pugh automatically stepped out of her way, but then came after her as she speed-walked away from him, rushing down the corridor with Michael at her side. Tony was perhaps half a step behind Pugh. With thoughts in mind of how vulnerable Michael was to the hunter, she would have kicked up her pace to a flat-out run except she was afraid of attracting too much attention. Plus, the last thing she wanted to do was overtax Michael’s strength. It was clear that whatever the hunter had done to him had left him in a severely weakened state.

  Pugh said loudly, “Dr. Stone, wait! Did I understand you to say you’re feeling ill?”

  “A little light-headed. Nothing some fresh air won’t help,” Charlie threw back at him. The route to the nearest elevator bank required her to go to the end of the hallway where her office was located and then walk a short distance along the corridor that led to the infirmary—both places, she judged, where there was a better than average likelihood of encountering the hunter—before turning down the hallway that led to the elevator banks. Michael stayed beside her, matching his pace to hers even though his gait was growing unsteady. From that, and his increasingly ashen complexion, she knew that he was having real difficulty. A moment later, he gave up walking and went into what she called the ghost-glide, with his boots floating an inch or so above the floor.