The Last Victim (13 page)

His eyebrows went up. “The hereafter?”

Okay, heaven she wasn’t promising him. “You know, the afterlife. Eternity. Or … whatever.”

“Whatever. Yeah, that sounds about right.” His voice was dry.

Tilting the candle into the flame, she watched the wick catch fire. “There should be a white light—”

“We’ve been over this already. Take it from me, there is no fucking white light.”

“You just haven’t found it yet.” Holding the candle, she turned to face him. The faintest scent of jasmine wafted upward.

“Too bad. I’m sure as hell not going looking for it.”

“Why not?”

“Because it damned well isn’t there. And I wouldn’t trust it if it was.”

As the scent of jasmine grew stronger, Charlie had to work hard to corral her guilty conscience. “So what
is
there?”

“Mist. Fog. A constant, purple twilight.” He gave her a long look. “There’s things in it. People—I can’t see ’em, but I can hear ’em screaming. It’s like they’re being hunted down or something. Whatever’s hunting them—I think it’s hunting me.”

A flash of fear darkened his eyes. Whatever could make a man as big and bad as Garland look scared, Charlie didn’t want to meet.

Then she remembered: he wasn’t a man anymore. Where he’d found himself, big and bad probably didn’t matter.

She had no idea what did. But none of it was her problem. The universe had been rolling along just fine for many millennia before she’d come along, and the whole Great Beyond deal had to have been
fine-tuned by now. It was up to a higher power to sort things out vis-à-vis Garland. She just had to trust in the process.

“You have to go back. There’s no other choice.” Mentally squaring her shoulders, holding the candle carefully so that the flame wouldn’t go out, she moved toward him.

He didn’t budge. “Sure there is. And I just made it.”

Eyes narrowing, Charlie was forced to stop because he was in her path. Theoretically, she probably could have walked right through him. Unless she had to, though, she wasn’t about to make the attempt. “What do you mean?”

“I’m staying here.”

“You can’t.”

“Sure I can.”

“No, you can’t. Even spirits who linger almost always move on within about a week. Uh, you want to get out of my way, please?” There was no point in arguing with him. The discussion would be moot in a couple of minutes anyway. All she had to do was position the candle behind him, and then herd him toward it. She felt a little bad about resorting to what amounted to psychic force, but in the end she had no doubt that it would be the best thing for both of them. She would be rid of a phantom serial killer, and he would be where he was supposed to be in the eternal scheme of things. “I need to set the candle down on the table. It’s dripping wax.”

“This helps you to not throw up?” His tone was skeptical, but he stepped aside.

“It does.” Moving past him, Charlie set the candle down on the glass-topped dining table, made sure the flame was burning strongly, then headed back into the kitchen.

“You left the burner on.”

“I know.” She was back at the stove. No longer blocking the door, he was all the way inside the kitchen now, watching her curiously. Not a hint of suspicion in his face.
Get thee behind me, guilt
. Pulling a slender wand of sage incense from her pocket, she held the tip of it to the flame. It caught with a crackle and a flurry of sparks.

“What the hell is that?”

“Incense,” she told him over her shoulder.

Inhaling the earthy scent, Charlie waited a second to make sure
that the incense was burning strongly enough to be effective before shutting off the burner and turning to face him. His eyes fastened on the smoldering stick in her hand.

“You’re starting to weird me out here, Doc.” Then, as the smell of sage grew stronger, and slender white tendrils of smoke rose from the tip of the stick to waft in the air, his gaze shifted to her face. “That crap stinks worse than three-day-old roadkill. Are you seriously telling me
that
stops you from throwing up?”

Waving his hand in front of his face, he tried to ward off the aroma. It was clearly bothering him, but he just as clearly had not yet figured out that anything was majorly amiss. Charlie wet her lips. Her heart thumped. What she felt was a kind of dreadful anticipation. The sage would drive him not only from the apartment, but from this earthly plane entirely, while the jasmine candle would open a portal to the other side. At least, that was how it had been explained to her by her gurus in ghostbusting, and she knew from experience that at least the sage worked. The key was to refuse to think about what eternity might be like for Garland.

This is the way it’s supposed to be
, she told herself defensively. But she couldn’t help feeling bad for him nonetheless.

“I’m sorry, but you need to go now,” she said firmly. Careful not to get too close too soon, Charlie inched toward him, taking tiny baby steps, waving the burning sage so that the smoke formed a barrier between them. “Your time here on earth is over. You have to move on.”

“What the fuck?” As the smoke reached him, Garland’s eyes widened. Then his face contorted. From his expression, by waving the sage at him she was assaulting him with the ghostly equivalent of mustard gas. Throwing up an arm, he started backing away from her and it. “Goddamn it, Doc, put that stuff out. You hear me? I’m not kidding.”

The budding threat in his voice was clear.

It took every bit of resolution she had, but Charlie kept going. “The light is there, waiting for you. That’s the purpose of the candle, to draw it near. You should be able to find it if you look.”

“Jesus Christ, this is some kind of voodoo shit you’re pulling on me, isn’t it?” His mouth twisted as if he were in pain even as he continued
to back away. His heel caught on the threshold between the kitchen and the eating area, where tile floor turned to carpet. “Oh,
God
. Don’t do this, Doc.”

Her stomach clenched. “I’m really sorry, Garland, but it’s for the best, I promise you.”

“For you, maybe.” Panic flared in his eyes as she kept coming, waving the incense, backing him inexorably through the kitchen doorway toward the table. The candle was close enough now to start pulling him in. Charlie could see the ends of his hair starting to move toward it, could almost feel the gentle suction herself.
“Ah.”
He made another pained sound, and it was all she could do to close her heart to it. “Damn it to
hell
, that hurts.
Put that thing out!
”

“I’m
sorry
,” she said again, meaning it, hating that he seemed to be suffering. Garland’s pained resistance was something she hadn’t anticipated. But she couldn’t stop now. The thought of having a ghostly serial killer, whom she had just seriously pissed off, left behind in the land of the living to wreak terrible vengeance on her was enough to keep her advancing, waving her wand even though she felt like she was running over Bambi with an eighteen-wheeler. “Look for the light.”

“Don’t fuck with me, Doc,” he warned, flexing his wide shoulders menacingly, baring his teeth at her. The powerful muscles in his arms bunched as his hands shot out as if to grab her. Charlie jumped and almost dropped the incense as he batted thin air just inches away. When he realized he couldn’t get to her, his eyes blazed with fear and fury combined. Thank God the power of the smoke was strong enough to hold him at bay! He was maybe a yard away, but he might as well have been on the wrong side of steel bars. “Don’t make me do something I don’t want to do.”

“Are you threatening me?” she shot back, summoning every last scrap of bravado she could. Getting a glimpse of his violent side should have made her feel better about what she was doing, but it didn’t. As she continued to drive him backward, she felt like a murderess. A scared murderess. Her heart thundered. Her stomach twisted. Her hand shook. Barely managing to hang on to the incense, she waved it at him; at this point there was simply nothing else she could do. Smoke swirled past him. It was being drawn toward the
candle just like he was. His hair flowed backward now, as though being sucked by a vacuum. The skin on his face seemed to have tightened, so that his high cheekbones looked like blades. He looked huge, terrifying, insane. Probably because, she reminded herself grimly, he was all of those things.

Forget Bambi. Think Voldemort on steroids
.

“Hell, yeah. Whatever you’re doing’s not going to work, and I’ll … 
Ah
.”

“Just
go
,” she almost wailed as, wincing in pain, he broke off in mid-threat. Gritting his teeth, bracing as if in resistance to the force pulling him backward, he seemed to be doing his best to battle a strong wind she couldn’t feel.

“I can’t believe you’d do this to … 
Ah. Put it out. Ah
.”

Charlie’s throat tightened with pity at the same time her heart lurched with fright. By this time she was so agitated she was practically jumping out of her skin. Fear, pity, regret, determination—she had no clue which emotion was strongest.

“For God’s sake, stop fighting it. You’re only making it worse.”

He opened his mouth as if to say something, then looked sharply around behind him. Following his gaze, Charlie saw that the candle flame was almost perpendicular to the table now, blowing backward in the vortex that had been created.

“Jesus, do you hear that? Do you hear the screaming?”

“Garland,
please
.” She felt tears starting in her eyes. “Go toward the light.”

“Fuck the fucking light.”

He was moving again, inch by inch, clearly against his will, being pulled backward by a force too powerful to resist. Shaking, breathing hard, sick to the core at what she was doing but knowing she had no choice, she had him backed up all the way to the edge of the table—when suddenly he lunged at her, breaking through the barrier of the smoke, eyes wild, mouth twisting violently. Squeaking, Charlie jumped like a scalded cat, but retained enough presence of mind not to drop the incense, not to back off, and not to scream. He slammed into her, grabbed her, smashed her against him, which given his degree of muscularity should have felt something like being smacked hard into a stone wall. She saw him coming, saw herself being enveloped
by him, knew the attack was happening as it happened. But besides a single microsecond in which she seemed to experience an uncannily real sensation of physical contact and an accompanying quick, instinctive burst of terror, all she actually for sure
felt
was a kind of electric tingle, a surge of energy, a blast of air.

“Think you’re going to
—” he snarled in her ear before breaking off abruptly. Letting go, whirling around, he jerked and screamed like his heart was being ripped from his body.

Even as Charlie clapped a hand over her mouth to keep herself from screaming, too, he was gone.

Just like that.

Left with nothing to see but the now perfectly ordinary-behaving candle, Charlie let her shaking hand drop and took a deep, hopefully calming breath.

It’s over
.

Then without warning her knees gave out, and she sank in a boneless puddle to the floor.

CHAPTER TEN

By eight p.m. the following day, Charlie was so tired she was drooping in her chair. Her armless, ergonomic, rolling and swiveling chair that was pulled up in front of the white plastic desk on which rested a state-of-the-art computer with a huge, merciless monitor displaying image after image of what seemed to be every male in every crowd scene that had ever gathered in connection with the murders, or who had ever paused to gape at or had even passed by one of the crime scenes, present and past. She had spent the last few hours in what she had come to think of as the War Room at Central Command (the bedroom office in the RV) poring over every bit of photo footage from newspapers, television, surveillance cameras, cell phones, previous investigation archives—all the evidence of record that had captured pictures of those who had turned up to watch the proceedings at the sites where the murders had occurred, or, later, the primary targets’—the girls’—bodies had been found.

All of which had been triggered by her own observation, to Bartoli that morning, that the killer would almost certainly return to the scene of the crime. “We should be watching the watchers,” was what she’d said.

So she’d gotten to watch them until she was about ready to fall out of her chair. By now the smell of coffee and old food and stale air that permeated the small space made her feel like she couldn’t breathe. Her head ached unmercifully. She was seeing purple spots in front of her eyes from staring for too long at the computer screen. Her back hurt. Her butt hurt.

The brilliant sunlight outside the one small window she could see beckoned. She longed to decompress by going for a run.

But because Bayley Evans was still out there somewhere, hopefully still alive, still with a chance, Charlie was, like the others, prepared to keep doing what she was doing for as long as it took.

“How’s it coming?” Bartoli walked into the room, a welcome interruption. Blinking in an attempt to get her eyes focusing normally again, Charlie pushed back from the desk to peer up at him. He looked tired, with lines around his eyes and mouth that Charlie hadn’t noticed before, and an intriguing suggestion of five o’clock shadow darkening his chin. His black hair had developed an unruly wave, his tie was slightly askew, and his mouth was tight. Entering behind him, Crane was sweaty and rosy-cheeked and suffering from a bad case of dandelion hair. He had lost his suit jacket and rolled up his sleeves in deference to the heat. Bartoli, on the other hand, still wore all parts of his charcoal suit and looked surprisingly cool despite it. They brought with them the smell of fresh sea air—something Charlie hadn’t had a whiff of since Bartoli had ushered her into the RV shortly before eleven a.m. that morning, having first taken her on a quick tour of the two other current crime scenes, during which, thankfully, she had encountered no earthbound spirits, the dead having presumably passed on. She and Kaminsky, who’d been with her since Bartoli had dropped her off at the RV and at that moment sat at the adjoining desk feeding her computer images, had even eaten lunch—McDonald’s, which a sheriff’s deputy had gone out to get at around one—at the tiny table in the kitchen area.