The Last Victim (35 page)

Charlie’s eyes had widened as she listened. Everything he had said was a revelation, and while her mind pondered the ramifications she answered his question almost absently. “It had to be a form of astral projection. I don’t think I’ve ever done it before. In fact, I didn’t know I
could
do it.”

“You lost me, Doc.”

“Many people believe the soul can leave the body for brief periods while the body is still alive, especially while sleeping or under conditions of extreme emotion or duress. There’s actually a lot of literature backing it up.”

“Ye-ah.” Obviously dubious, he drew the word out. “So your soul and my soul met in the sky.”

His tone earned him a sharp look. “I don’t know why you sound so skeptical. You’re the one who’s dead and still walking and talking and causing problems.”

His grimace conceded the point. “ ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’ huh?”

She blinked at him, genuinely surprised. “That’s Shakespeare.”

“Believe it or not, I know that. I can read, Doc. Like I said, there wasn’t a whole lot to do in prison.”

At another time she might have marveled a little more, but just then her thoughts were finally coalescing to pinpoint the most important part of what he’d told her.

“The girl—the one you said you saw—what did she look like?”

“Blond. Pretty. A kid—maybe seventeen, eighteen. In a puffy pink dress.”

Holly
.

There was no one else it could have been.

Charlie’s heart started to pound.

“You actually saw her?”

“Clear as I’m seeing you now. She was coming toward you, saying something, but when she saw me she vamoosed.”

Charlie sucked in air. “What did she say?”

He shook his head. “I didn’t quite catch it all. Something about a bag. ‘It’s in the bag,’ maybe, or ‘where’s my bag,’ or something like that. Like I said, when she saw me she shut up and got out of here.”

Charlie was desperately turning the words over in her mind. Although she had dreamed of Holly a few times, she had not actually had a visitation from her since right around the time of her death. Which made sense, because she only saw the
recently
violently departed. Had Holly been trying to get in touch with her all this time, to tell her something? Or had this new string of deaths somehow brought Holly to her again? The only explanation Charlie could come up with for either was that Holly must have a message for her.

But what?

“Are you sure that’s all she said?” Charlie asked anxiously.

“That’s all I heard. The only part I got real clearly was
bag
. The rest could have gone a lot of ways.”

“Oh, my God, you can see her.” As that part finally sank in, Charlie regarded him with sudden excitement. “If she comes again, you can talk to her. Ask her what she wants.”

“You know, I’ve got just about zero hankering to play telephone with stray spooks.”

“But you can talk to her. I can’t.” Frantic to get him to do what she wanted, she tried to think of a way to persuade him; finally, she hit on a possiblity and took a deep breath. “There’s one more thing I can try to keep you here. I’ll do it, if you’ll help me.”

He looked at her without speaking for a moment. Then he nodded, a barely perceptible inclination of his head. “Now you’re talking my lingo.”

“If she comes back—her name is Holly—if she comes back, ask her what she wants. Tell her you’ll take a message to me. Tell her—”

“Whoa. Slow down. Suppose you tell me who she is first.”

Charlie looked at him, hesitating. She never willingly talked about that night to anyone—even unwillingly, she hadn’t so much as mentioned it for years. Forgetting it had been one of the goals of her life.
But if Garland was to understand how important his questioning Holly was, then he needed to know who she was, and what had happened to her.

So she told him. And found, when she had finished, that she was glad he knew. It was almost as if a weight she had not realized she was carrying around with her had eased. As if in the telling she had shifted some of the burden of it onto his broad shoulders.

For a moment he just sat there looking at her. Finally he spoke.

“You’re something, Doc, you know that? That’s the kind of experience that would turn most people into basket cases, but you—look at you. Dr. Charlotte Stone. Right after they first took me in to see you, and I discovered to my amazement that you were hot, I looked up all your degrees and credentials just to make sure I was getting quality service. I got to tell you, they impressed the hell out of me. Now they impress me even more. You took what happened and used it to make something of yourself. You should be proud,” he said, sounding uncharacteristically serious.

His words made what almost felt like a lump rise up in her throat. Charlie realized that this was the first time anyone had ever recognized and acknowledged what she had done, and for some idiotic, ridiculous reason it touched her to the core. Worn out and depleted from reliving those long-ago events and emotions, not wanting to speak until she was sure her voice wouldn’t sound croaky, she lay back limply against the pillows without replying, her eyes on him. Her breathing was slightly uneven, but she believed it was the only outward sign of distress she showed. However, he—she realized that although he had stayed perfectly still throughout her pitiful little recital, his face had gone tight and his shoulders were tense and his hands had clenched into fists by the time she had finished. The anger and pain and protectiveness he felt on her behalf were there in his expression, in his body language. She could read it plainly. It comforted her to a surprising degree—more than anything had comforted her in a long time.

“You’re not sitting over there crying on me, are you, Doc?” He peered at her, frowning.

That banished the maudlins in a hurry.

“No, I certainly am not.” She summoned the strength to refute it
strongly. One thing she prided herself on was, she never cried. Not once since those terrible days fifteen years ago. And she had absolutely no intention of starting now, with him.

“Good, because if you are, with me like this there isn’t a damned thing I can do about it.”

“Of course I’m not crying. I never cry. And if I were, and you were alive, just what do you think you could do about it anyway?” She adopted a slightly astringent tone, because allowing herself to be moved by him was a dangerous mistake, as she absolutely knew, and the last thing she wanted was for him to realize how he had affected her. “Pat me on the back a couple of times and say,
There, there, don’t cry
?”

“I’d make you feel better.”

“Oh? How?”

“If I were myself again, I’d crawl up there in bed with you and fuck all the bad memories right out of your head. Then I’d fuck you to sleep. I’d fuck you when you woke up in the morning, too.”

At that, Charlie’s breathing suspended. Her heart drummed. Her senses caught fire. Her whole body responded with a fierceness that caught her by surprise. Their eyes connected through the darkness, and there was no mistaking the heat in his.

This is bad
. She wanted him to do what he had described so intensely that she was shaky with it. The sad truth was, the only thing stopping her from going into his arms and doing anything he asked was that sex with him simply wasn’t possible.

But just the thought of it made her dizzy and hot and so aroused she burned for him. Which was stupid. And self-destructive. And stupid all over again. Because not only was sex with Garland something she was never going to have, it was something she never
should
have. Never should
want
.

Her chin went up. “What makes you think I’d let you?”

A smile just touched his mouth. “Oh, you’d let me, Doc. We both know that.”

Charlie could feel her bones melting. For a moment she was mute, so turned on and rattled because of it, she could think of nothing to say. Because the truth was—and he knew it, too—he was right.

Some long-buried instinct for self-preservation kept her from admitting it.

“I guess we’ll never know, will we?” She strove to inject some crispness into her tone—and even from her own perspective, failed miserably.

“I guess we won’t, at least not unless you want to try the astral thing again.”

She shook her head. The regret and sense of loss she felt at acknowledging that a brief, hot affair with her impossible ghost was something that was just not going to happen was way more intense than it should have been, she realized. “It’s not something I can do intentionally. I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“Yeah.” He got to his feet, and for the briefest of moments stood looking down at her. Whatever he was thinking, his face was shrouded enough in shadow that she couldn’t tell. But his mouth thinned out and his jaw hardened, and when he spoke again it was in a totally different tone. “What about that ju-ju, Doc?”

That sounded more like him.

“Meet me in the kitchen,” she told him. She really didn’t want to get out of bed and have him ogling her in her nightgown, which was just as feminine and skimpy as the one she’d taken off for him the previous night, because those were pretty much the only kind of nightgowns she owned.

If he somehow managed to stick around for more than the next few days, she was investing in heavy flannel.

He nodded, and headed for the door.

Charlie rose, snatched up her robe, put it on, and belted it tightly, then followed him.

The ingredients she found in the cabinets; the delivery system, under the sink.

The mixture of honey and oil she sprayed him with to ground him to the earth was an old Middle Eastern trick she had read about but never before had occasion to use. When he saw her pouring it into a plant mister and found out what she meant to do, his skepticism abounded—but as she pointed out, beggars couldn’t be choosers. She made him stand fully clothed in the shower for it, not wanting to get the gooey mixture on anything in the apartment. Since he wasn’t actually solid no matter how solid he looked, the spray passed right through him, coating the shower walls and floor but leaving him untouched.
When it was done, she ordered him out and turned on the shower to clean up the mess. Then she went to bed.

He went with her.

This time, instead of sitting on the floor, he took the other side of the bed. As she burrowed under the covers, ostentatiously turning her back to him, she did her level best not to think about his big body stretched out beside her, except on top of the bedspread. His purpose, of course, was to keep a watch out for Holly.

Hers was to sleep. Not that she expected to, with him taking up way more than his fair share of the bed.

But by then it was close to four a.m.—and despite everything, she was so exhausted that sleep she did, almost as soon as her head hit the pillow.

If she had any dreams, she didn’t remember them. According to Garland, she didn’t do anything more exciting than switch positions once or twice. And Holly didn’t show.

But Charlie did wake up knowing what Holly had meant.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

By early afternoon of the next day, Charlie was back in her own house in Big Stone Gap. Situated a little way down the mountain from the prison on the top of the ridge, Big Stone Gap was a coal mining town of about five thousand residents that had been devastated by a rash of recent layoffs from the coal company that, along with the prison, was the area’s primary employer. Despite the hard times, Big Stone Gap was as friendly as the prison was forbidding, and she loved it. Her house, which she rented from her next-door neighbors, was a classic two-story white clapboard farmhouse with an old-fashioned front porch and lots of gingerbread trim. It sat on a quiet street near the edge of town, with the wooded mountainside sloping up behind it and an acre backyard complete with a sunflower patch that was a constant draw for the aforesaid neighbor’s chickens. Not that Charlie minded, really. She had spent many an early morning before heading in to work sipping coffee at her kitchen table at the back of the house and watching through the window as the birds scratched around in her flowers for seeds and bugs. Watching them was both calming and amusing.

“Tell me this hasn’t been a total waste of time.” Kaminsky gave Charlie a disgusted look as Charlie sorted through the items she
had laid out on the kitchen table one more time. At Kaminsky’s suggestion—Charlie was so focused on the need to find whatever it was that Holly had been referring to that she wouldn’t have thought of it—Charlie was wearing rubber gloves, so as not to taint the items just in case one of them should prove to be important. Dressed in her usual black pants and sleeveless blouse—today’s was a soft mint green—Charlie was at least comfortable. While Kaminsky in her power suit—today’s was black—and sky-high heels looked hot, cross, and way too sophisticated for the country-style kitchen. On Tony’s directive, Kaminsky had accompanied her on the short flight back to Big Stone Gap to recover whatever item significant to the investigation might be found in “the bag.” Feeling her time could be better spent in other ways, Kaminsky wasn’t too happy about it.

“No more so than following any other lead,” Charlie replied, frowning as she touched each item in turn. She had been sure that “the bag” Holly had been referring to could only have been the sealed plastic bag full of Charlie’s belongings that had been returned to her by the hospital, where she had stayed after Holly’s murder. But in going through it, Charlie was coming up empty-handed. A brown fluffy teddy bear the hospital had given her; a manila envelope stuffed with get-well cards, all of which she had looked over and none of which seemed to contain a clue; a never-opened dental care kit containing a new toothbrush and travel-sized toothpaste wrapped in plastic; a tube of chapstick; a bottle of pale pink nail polish; a hairbrush; and a scrunchie offered not the slightest insight into the murders, as far as she could tell. Some of her clothes were there, too. Just looking at the yellow T-shirt and the jeans and sandals, the pretty flowered bra and pink bikini panties, made her skin crawl.