“They’re standing up now,” said Michael. “You really can’t see all these women?”
The soft colors and erratic movements of the tendrils of mist as they swooped and soared reminded her of butterflies. Then each patch of mist started to swirl, and they coalesced into spheres like the one in front of Michael.
Charlie blinked, and realized what she was looking at: orbs. They were orbs. Of course.
“I’m seeing orbs,” she told him, glancing at him again just to be sure. “There’s one in front of you, by the way. It’s lavender.”
“Alicia’s in front of me,” Michael said, confirming for Charlie that the orbs were indeed spirits. “She says she’s cold.” His tone changed. “We’ll get you someplace warm,” he promised, and Charlie knew he was talking again to the spirit of the dead woman she couldn’t see.
“What are they doing?” she asked him, as the more distant orbs seemed to drift on the wind without any seeming direction. “The ones out there in the field?”
“Just kind of wandering around. Aimlessly. I’m not sure the rest of them see us. Alicia does, though. At least, she sees me.”
“Can she see me?” Charlie asked. “Or hear me?” The surprise of having another brand-new supernatural experience was still with her, but she was coming to grips with it, and the urgent need to find Giselle was fast reasserting itself. Any information that could be gleaned from these spirits might make all the difference.
“I don’t think so. She seems to be having trouble staying focused on me. I’m not sure how in tune with what’s happened to her she is.”
“For God’s sake, don’t tell her she’s dead.” Charlie had lively memories of him being just that blunt with spirits before, and the last thing she wanted to do was have him freak out any potentially helpful spirit. “Ask her how she came to be here in this field.”
Michael did, while Charlie watched the orbs floating over the parched ground with near total fascination. They looked more like airborne Japanese lanterns, she decided, than anything.
“She said she doesn’t remember. Hell, she’s crying again.” His voice changed once more, and she knew he was talking to the spirit, but Charlie had stopped listening.
And that would be because as Michael had spoken she had just happened to glance down, and what she saw riveted her attention to the exclusion of anything else.
Peeking out from beneath the pile of rocks on which the spirit of Alicia Dale had been sitting was a woman’s hand. To be specific, the tips of the phalanges bones of three fingers, one with gray slivers of flesh still adhering to it, another with a manicured fingernail semi-attached. They were curled slightly downward like they had been clawing at the dirt that covered the body they were presumably part of when they were stilled forever.
As she absorbed what she was seeing, Charlie’s heart lurched.
“Michael.” She interrupted whatever he was saying to the spirit, which she was too agitated at the moment to register, without ceremony. “Look down.”
After one glance at her face, he did.
“Jesus.” He looked up again, swiftly, as he seemed to listen to the spirit. His mouth tightened. His eyes went grim.
“What?” Charlie demanded.
“Alicia says she’s here. Under the rocks and dirt. She says others are here, too.”
“Dear God.” Charlie looked back down at the grotesque fingers. “I think we’ve found the killer’s dumping ground.”
By early afternoon, seven bodies had been located. One, Alicia Dale, had already been removed from her grave site, photographed, bagged, and placed in one of several Coroner’s vans that were now at the site. The dirt that had covered her was being carefully loaded into sterile containers for processing as well. Two other bodies had been fully uncovered, and were just waiting for the painstaking process of being extracted from their makeshift graves without compromising any of the evidence they or the killer might have left behind. Special equipment that would locate more bodies without digging up the entire field was en route, but Charlie felt fairly confident that most if not all seventeen of the missing women would be found.
The bodies were being uncovered manually—the only way to do it to preserve evidence. The grating sound of shovels digging in the dirt at four sites at once formed a constant, macabre backdrop to the cacophony of voices, footsteps, radio chatter, and arriving and departing vehicles. The chemical smell of the compounds used to preserve organic evidence hung strongly in the air. Dust was everywhere. The area swarmed with law enforcement: on hand was every nearby agency, from the local FBI to the Nevada Bureau of Criminal Investigations to the LVMPD.
None of the bodies, not even Alicia Dale, had been officially identified yet. The ones recovered so far were in such an advanced state of decomposition that a visual identification was impossible.
Charlie called up the case files, which included the missing women’s pictures, on her phone. Looking at them, Michael identified the four he could see: Alicia Dale, Mary Bayer, Kimberly Watters, and Jessica French.
“Kimberly is the only one I can get to talk to me, and she kind of goes in and out,” Michael reported after trying to get what information he could from the spirits. “She doesn’t remember anything about being abducted. She said she was supposed to meet a friend in the casino at her hotel, so she was getting dressed in her room. Next thing she knows she’s hanging by her wrists from a ceiling with like a grid in it and being tortured with a knife. She couldn’t really see anything because she was blindfolded. She said she was screaming, and then there was this horrible sharp pain in her stomach and she passed out. Next time she woke up she was here.” He grimaced. “I figure that pain is when she got killed. Probably stabbed to death. I know what that feels like: hurts like a mother.”
Having been there when he’d died, Charlie grimaced, too.
It was too late to save any of the women buried in the field. That their lives had been ripped away from them in such a way was more than a tragedy: it was an atrocity.
That was the thing about serial killers: none of them, not one that she had ever studied, felt any remorse, or had any feeling at all about the value of another person’s life.
Alicia was a thirty-year-old hairdresser from Omaha who left behind two young daughters. Kimberly was a twenty-nine-year-old dental assistant from Grand Rapids who left behind a fiancé. Mary was a thirty-three-year-old homemaker from Des Moines. She left behind a husband and son. Jessica French was a twenty-six-year-old graduate student from the University of Texas. There were still posters of Jessica being handed out on the Strip, courtesy of her frantic parents.
All human beings, all with lives, all taken.
They—and the other victims—had at least one thing in common: they’d all come to Las Vegas for a fun, exciting vacation, and they’d all vanished without a trace.
Victims of a serial killer.
I’m scared. Charlie faced the hard truth of it as she watched the bodies she knew were there under the ground being systematically uncovered. Most people went their whole lives without ever coming face-to-face with the kind of evil that a serial killer represented. But she, she had spent practically her whole life in the shadow of it. She knew that monsters walked the earth, monsters who raped and tortured and killed for no other reason than because it was their nature. The knowledge had seeped into her pores, invaded her bloodstream, curled through her brain and her heart, and made her afraid.
“You don’t have to do this. You can walk away, right now, and go home.” Prompted by whatever he was apparently able to read in her eyes, Michael told her that as she watched Jessica French’s remains being lifted from her grave site. The thing was, he was right, even though she shook her head at him: not happening. That was another truth. There was nothing binding her to this kind of work. She wasn’t a sworn law enforcement officer. She wasn’t anything.
Except an expert who maybe can help stop this guy before he hurts anybody else.
The photos of the faces of
Alicia, Kimberly, Mary, Jessica, and the other victims of this particular monster were emblazoned in her mind. There were so many more: Holly, her teenage best friend; Raylene Witt; Laura Peters; Bayley Evans. And others. Countless others.
That was why she wasn’t going home. They were why she was going to stay and help in the fight. With every bit of expertise she possessed.
Looking away as Alicia’s remains, now in a blue body bag, were lifted onto a gurney, she bent her mind to the task of finding a killer.
“Serial killer investigations with a single disposal site for the bodies involve a triangle of locations. What we have now are two points of that triangle. That’s why finding this dumping ground is such a good thing for us. It really tells us a lot.” Minutes later, she crouched in the shade of a canopy thrown up by one of the agencies and, with a stick, stabbed a point in the dirt. Then she looked up at Tony, Lena, and Buzz, who were standing over her in a circle, looking down. “The first location is the PFE, or point of first encounter with the victim. The second one is the BD, or body dump.” Charlie stabbed another point in the dirt. “The KS, or kill site, is the third point in the triangle. So far, that point’s unknown, but studies have shown that it will be closer to the PFE than the BD and in the same general direction. The killer—the fact that there’s a single body dump tells us he’s a local—will live somewhere in the center of the triangle.”
“What theory is that?” Tony sounded impressed.
“It’s a mathematical model called CGT—Criminal Geographical Targeting.” She stood up and pulled her phone from her purse. “I can plot it on my phone, if you’ll give me a minute. I just have to get the coordinates of where we are now—the BD—and where we’re positing the PFE took place, which for our purposes I’m going to say is the Las Vegas Strip.”
“Don’t tell me there’s an app for that.” Michael had returned from another attempt to coax information from the spirits.
“There is”—which was when she remembered that no one else knew he was there, and hastily tacked on for the benefit of the others—“an app for that, believe it or not. It’s called Map Expert.”
“Seriously?” Michael raised his eyebrows at her.
This time Charlie ignored him.
“I’ve never heard of it.” Lena took a deep breath. Beneath the fine layer of dust that coated her (and everybody’s) skin, she was as pale as paper. “But if it helps find Giselle, I’ll buy stock in the company.”
“Look.” Charlie held her phone out to them. With the coordinates punched in, two areas were shaded in red. “The kill site should be along one of these two lines.” She pointed to the far sides of the shaded areas. “Depending on where the kill site is, the killer will live within the shaded areas.”
“Can you e-mail that to each of us?” Tony asked, and Charlie nodded and started to do so. “When we get into some kind of an office, we’ll blow it up and print it out.”
“Done,” she said when she’d finished, and looked up. “There’s one more thing,” she added, remembering the information that Kimberly Watters had passed on via Michael. “The kill site will be relatively isolated. Far enough away from neighbors that screams won’t be heard. It won’t be in a subdivision.”
Tony looked at her, and Charlie thought she saw the knowledge that she must have obtained that information by otherworldly means in his eyes. She smiled at him.
Before anybody could say anything else, Renfro strode into their shelter.
He said, “I thought I’d give you folks a heads-up. A butt-load of TV trucks just rolled in.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“What do you want to bet that the body recovery efforts are playing out live on the local channels right now?” His tone rueful, Tony was behind the wheel of Renfro’s borrowed Jeep as they whizzed along a blacktopped highway through a whole lot of flat, scruffy land. Charlie was beside him, her sunglasses in place, her hair now twisted into a fairly windproof bun, praying that the sunscreen in the moisturizer that she used on a daily basis was up to the task of keeping her skin from cooking to a crisp in the broiling sun. Lena and Buzz were in the back, with Michael between them. There was plenty of room for him, as they were keeping as far away from each other as they could. The group sped down Blue Diamond Road toward the Pigeon Farm, following a pair of LVMPD homicide detectives and a quartet of uniforms in a big black SUV. The detectives considered Destiny Sherman the killer’s latest victim because of where she’d been found and were going straight from the body dump site to search her quarters at the Pigeon Farm. Opting to go along, Tony was planning to pull rank once they got there, hoping to get a crack at whatever evidence might be in Destiny Sherman’s room before teams of locals tramped through and contaminated everything.
“If the unsub sees it on TV, and if Giselle by some miracle is still alive, will that make him go ahead and kill her immediately, do you think?” The tension in Lena’s voice was palpable as she met Charlie’s gaze through the rearview mirror. Lena had been reluctant to leave the body dump because, as she had finally admitted to Charlie, she feared Giselle’s body might be found there. Charlie was almost certain Giselle wasn’t there. None of the graves were fresh enough, Charlie told her, but the overriding reason Charlie felt she wasn’t there was because if Giselle had been, given the time frame and the circumstances under which she would have died, Charlie would have been able to see her.
Now, in the Jeep, Charlie met Lena’s eyes. “If he’s not killing his victims immediately”—which he wasn’t, Charlie knew from torture victim Kimberly Watters—“then there’s a reason. Probably because he uses them to act out some kind of a ritual. Until he completes his ritual, he’ll keep Giselle alive if he can.”
“How do you know he’s not killing them immediately?”
Trust Lena to instantly hone in on that.
“You ever think I might appreciate getting a little credit here?” Michael drawled. “This ghost whisperer’s apprentice thing you’ve got me doing kind of sucks. I’m feeling like the hired help.”
Charlie ignored him. “The use of a separate kill site and body dump argues in favor of it,” she said to Lena. “This is a methodical killer. He has everything planned out. I’d be a lot more worried if we were finding that he’d left the bodies all over the place.”
Lena took a deep breath. The sense that the clock was ticking down was motivating all of them, and she was clearly feeling the stress most of all. Her eyes were dark and haunted, the skin around her mouth was pinched, and a few minutes ago Charlie had caught a glimpse of her in the rearview mirror chewing her perfectly manicured nails.
Buzz said, “You realize that Ms. Green gave us the number fifteen, and off of I-15 is where Destiny Sherman and the other victims’ bodies were found, right? Also, she said to look out for a moon landscape, and that’s sure what the terrain back there looked like to me.”
Charlie nodded, pleased that someone else had made the connection. “I told you, Tam’s good.”
“Hot, too,” Michael added. “Maybe a mite unfriendly.”
“I always thought psychics were a load of crap,” Lena said. “But I have to say, your friend was amazing.”
Lena’s eyes met hers once again in the mirror. The message Charlie read in them was one of silent thanks for her contribution.
“So suppose we go over what she told us.” Buzz glanced at Lena, then directed a pointed look at the back of Tony’s head. “How about we start with that blond woman throwing a shoe at somebody while yelling, ‘Get out, get out’? Anybody recognize anything like that?”
Buzz’s question was aimed at Tony, and his teasing tone made it clear that he was making an attempt to lighten the atmosphere—for Lena’s sake, Charlie knew.
If so, it succeeded. The smallest of smiles touched Lena’s lips.
“You know what you can do to yourself, Crane.” Tony’s response was good-humored. Charlie looked a question at him. Catching the look, he sighed. “My ex-wife has a temper. Toward the end of our m
arriage, these two came by my house—which I no longer own, because Rachel got it in the divorce—to pick me up because my car was in the shop. It was night, Rachel and I were supposed to have dinner, she didn’t want me to leave—she felt I always put my job before our marriage—and when I had to go anyway because something had come up in the case we were working on she totally lost it, threw her shoe at me, and screamed, ‘Get out, get out.’ ” He sighed again. “Which these guys are obviously never going to let me live down.” He flicked a glance at Buzz through the rearview mirror. “Of course, I don’t play Assassin’s Creed every chance I get. Now, that would be embarrassing.”
“I told you, I’m trying to beat the game,” Buzz defended himself.
Tony continued, “And as for the illicit love affair Ms. Green mentioned—well, that isn’t me, either.”
At that pointed remark, Charlie felt guilty. A reflexive glance in the rearview mirror at the cause of her guilty feeling—that would be Michael, whom she forgot she couldn’t actually see that way because his reflection didn’t show up in mirrors—revealed Lena and Buzz exchanging uncomfortable glances.
In other words, in that car, for that moment, there was a whole lot of guilt going around.
“Dudley’s talking about Pebbles and Bam-Bam back here, not you and me.” Michael’s voice was dry. He could see her through the mirror even if she couldn’t see him. “Jesus, babe, don’t ever play poker.”
Oh, right. Of course. Tam wouldn’t have mentioned Charlie’s personal business in front of anyone else. Tam was a friend, first and foremost.
Her Last Whisper: A Novel Page 24