Her Last Whisper (30 page)

He sighed. “I was afraid of that. Babe, we got us a ghost.”

Charlie stared futilely toward the knee-high pile of rocks Michael had brought to her attention for a moment longer: still nothing. “What kind of ghost?”

He grimaced. “A woman. She’s sitting on the rocks.”

“Oh, my God.” Mindful of her own limitations, Charlie didn’t doubt him. Being a spirit himself, Michael could see any spirit who happened to be in his vicinity.

“Yeah.” His voice was flat. “You better give Dudley a shout.”

She looked at him with a frown. “Why?”

“ ’Cause I think I recognize her. I think she’s one of those missing women we’re hunting for.”

“Really?” Charlie sucked in air, stared harder at what to her was an empty tract of land, then started walking purposefully toward the rock formation he’d pointed out. If what Michael was looking at was indeed one of the missing women, the case might be about to break wide open. The ghost could even be the link that led them to Giselle Kaminsky.

Her heart started to beat faster.

“What the hell are you doing?” Michael sounded exasperated.

“Come on,” she said over her shoulder to him. “I want you to talk to her.”

“Wait, damn it.” He caught up, frowning at her as she kept walking. “I told you, you need to yell for Dudley. In case it’s escaped your notice, every other living soul around here is down in that gulley. Going over there alone’s a bad idea. I’m ectoplasm, remember? Something bad starts going down, I don’t know how much use I’ll be.”

“I can’t tell Tony that there’s a ghost I can’t even see sitting on a pile of rocks.” Her voice was impatient. “At the very least, I need to know more first. She might be some random spirit with nothing to do with the case at all.” It occurred to Charlie that whatever Michael might or might not be, he never failed to do his best to make sure that she stayed safe. Acknowledging that made most—not all, but most—of her anger at him fade. She would have been more concerned about her safety if it hadn’t been a blazingly bright day, with surroundings open enough to make it unlikely that a serial killer was concealing himself somewhere in the vicinity. She directed a quick look at Michael and a semi-mocking smile at him. “It’s sweet of you to worry, though.”

“Sweet?” He sounded revolted. “Fuck that. I’m trying to keep you alive here.”

“The faster I get some confirmation of who this spirit is and what she’s doing here, the faster I’ll yell for Tony,” she told him as she closed with determination on the rock formation where the ghost was apparently sitting. “Describe her.”

The look Michael gave her was dark with aggravation, but he said, “She’s a woman. With curly brown hair, an average face, a good bod with a nice rack. She’s looking at me right now. She’s figuring out that I can see her. Oh, here it comes, she’s standing up she’s so happy to see me. I’d be real excited, too, except she’s covered with fucking blood because she’s been slashed to death.”

“Poor woman.” Charlie shuddered.

“Yeah,” Michael said. “She’s coming this way.”

“What’s she wearing?” Charlie wanted to know. Not that she was interested in the ghost’s fashion choices: her attire might give
them some clue as to where she’d been when she’d encountered her killer.

“A dress.”

“Day or evening?”

“How the hell am I supposed to know? It’s black. Kinda tight. And short.”

“Evening,” Charlie decided, as, in a different, gentler tone that Charlie knew wasn’t directed at her, he said, “Nevada. Near Las Vegas.”

Charlie realized that he was answering a question posed by the spirit, whom she guessed had reached him. In fact, from the look of him he was holding her at arm’s length, his hands curved around her upper arms. She nearly smiled: the last time he’d hugged a ghost he’d gotten all wet. She guessed where blood was concerned he didn’t want to take the chance.

“Ask her name and—” Charlie’s voice trailed off. Beyond the rock formation, the hard, uneven ground began to shift, as though it was less than solid. She frowned, and stared. “The last thing she remembers,” she finished almost as an afterthought.

“She says her name’s Alicia Dale,” Michael reported after repeating the questions, although other than registering that was, indeed, the name of one of the missing women, Charlie wasn’t really paying attention anymore. “The last thing she remembers is falling asleep in her hotel room. She doesn’t remember anything that happened after that. And she doesn’t have any idea where she is.”

In several places—one, two, three, the spots popped up in rapid succession like mushrooms after a rain—the landscape began to emit a faint glow. Charlie squinted at them.

“She fell asleep in her hotel room in a short black evening dress?” Charlie frowned abstractedly as she tried to make sense of it. Then possible enlightenment occurred. “Oh, had she been drinking?”

In Las Vegas, coming home and passing out after a night out without bothering to undress was certainly not unheard of.

Michael said something to the spirit, then told Charlie, “She doesn’t remember. She says she’s been here for a long time.”

Charlie’s eyes widened as the glowing spots took on color, an
individual color for each spot, pastel blue here, soft yellow there, a deep rosy pink near a crevice.

“Michael.” Charlie barely managed to get his name out. She nodded toward the glowing spots of earth as he glanced at her inquiringly. “Look.”

He did, and said, “Holy shit. They’re coming out of the ground.”

Charlie felt cold all over.

“What’s coming out of the ground?” She watched, transfixed, as the glowing colors crept upward like lazy tendrils of fog reaching toward the sky.

“Women. More women. They’re sitting up right through the dirt, like they’re coming out of their graves. Three of ’em.”

Charlie glanced at him to discover a misty lavender sphere about the size of a basketball hovering at chest level in front of him. Surprised, she realized almost instantly that it could only be the spirit he was talking to. Her eyes shifted back to the field, and it was then that she truly understood what she was seeing: the pockets of glowing colored mist rising from the ground were the dead that were outside the parameters of her gift. Only now she
was
seeing them, both as a kind of mist and, in the case of the one in front of Michael, as a sphere. Perhaps, she thought, their colors were the colors of the auras the spirits had possessed in life. She had never seen such a thing before, and she guessed that she was able to see it now only because the change in the frequency of her vibration was enabling her to tap into more of the supernatural world.

“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.