The Last Victim (6 page)

She shuddered.

“You sure you’re okay?” Bartoli stayed close beside her as she carefully stepped back from the corpse. His intentions were good, she realized, but she wished he would go away. This was something best recovered from in private. There was nothing more she or anyone else could do for Garland. He would go on to a better—or in his case, quite possibly a worse—place. Anyway, what happened to him now was out of her hands, and she wanted nothing more to do with it. From the way Bartoli continued to frown at her, it was obvious some of her upset showed. Except for him, and Crane, who had moved out
of the way with them, everyone else was concentrating on the dead body, which she couldn’t even think of as Garland anymore because she knew that what remained was an empty husk and Garland himself was not there. His blood was already growing cold, and she realized with a frisson of horror that she knew this because it coated her hands to the wrists, and dripped from her fingertips. Watching the droplets fall to form tiny, bright red polka dots on the gray concrete floor, she felt her stomach turn inside out. Bartoli’s frown deepened. “You’re white as a sheet.”

“Having a patient in your care die never feels good,” she admitted. It was absolutely true, and perfectly explained her distress without her having to go into the whole I-see-dead-people thing.

“You did all you could.” His tone was sympathetic, but the look he gave her was borderline weird.

“Probably you want to go somewhere and wash up,” Crane suggested. He was giving her a weird look, too.

Charlie sighed inwardly. Okay, so they had clearly gotten a load of her little conversation with Garland’s ghost and were wondering about it. At the moment, she wasn’t up to creating a plausible lie to explain it away.

“Yes, I do.” Charlie genuinely welcomed the suggestion, not only because getting Garland’s blood off her hands had just become item number one on her agenda but also because it gave her an excuse to go off by herself until she recovered her equilibrium. Never, not once in the last fifteen years, since she had been so unnerved by what she was seeing that she reported her visions to her mother, and the police, and anybody else who would listen, in the wake of the Palmers’ murders and wound up being hustled off to a psychiatrist’s office for a mental evaluation, had she told anyone about her ongoing encounters with the spirits of the dead. Over time, she had figured out she didn’t see all spirits, only those who had died recently, and violently, and were in her general vicinity, and then only for the typically brief period in which they still clung to earth. Shocked to find themselves dead, many of those forced out of their bodies without warning were confused, she had learned, and didn’t know where to go or what to do. Usually, for about a week they hung around some person or object
to which they were attached, till they had acclimated enough to their new state to move on. Her ability to see them, which she thought of as a curse rather than a gift, had first manifested itself when she was four and a childhood playmate had been hit by a car in front of the apartment building in which they lived. Her little friend had loitered about the apartments for several days missing his mother. Charlie had talked to him and played with him without fully realizing he was dead. Her mother had been perplexed at Charlie’s new “imaginary friend”; Charlie supposed she had never called the boy, Sergio, by name, and thus her mother had not made the connection but that was all the notice anyone took of it at the time. Maybe she wasn’t always the sharpest knife in the drawer, but Charlie had only become convinced that she could see actual dead people when first Holly’s mother and then Holly herself had started appearing to her right after the horror in the Palmers’ house. Even then, it had taken her a while to catch on to what was happening. Because Holly and her mother had come to her at night, the traumatized teenager that Charlie had been then had convinced herself that the terrible visions she was having were nothing more than hideously real-seeming nightmares. Mrs. Palmer had appeared first, materializing beside Charlie’s bed in the middle of the night some twenty-four hours after the murders, when Charlie had still been in a safe house in the protective custody of the police. Dressed in the bloody nightgown she had been wearing when she was killed, the wound that had killed her visible as a horrifying black smile slashed across her throat, Diane Palmer had wrung her hands while begging Charlie to please help find Holly, who at the time was the subject of a frantic police search. Holly herself had appeared a few nights later, dressed in something that she had never to Charlie’s knowledge worn—a bubblegum pink, bouffant prom dress—with her long blond hair twisted into fat sausage curls that hung down her back. As Charlie lay terrified in her bed, Holly had rushed across the room toward her, crying, “I want to go home. Please let me go home,” before vanishing, only to return again the next night, and the next, always the same thing, for five nights in a row, until Holly’s body was found. Then the visitations, as Charlie had finally figured out they were, although she’d been offered counseling and pharmaceuticals
when she had tried to convince anyone else of it, had stopped, swallowed up by the horror of reality.

After that, something in her had apparently been sensitized, because she had started seeing spirits on a regular basis. Every single time it was harrowing, heart-wrenching, and left her feeling physically sick. One of the reasons she had decided to become a psychiatrist rather than pursue another medical specialty was because psychiatrists almost never came into contact with the recently, violently dead in the course of their work. The other reason, of course, was that she wanted to see if she could find a way to identify and stop the human sharks that are serial killers. She felt she owed Holly that.

And now there was another of those sharks loose in the world, and he was about to slaughter another terrified seventeen-year-old girl unless he could somehow be stopped in time. Charlie’s heart turned over just from thinking about it. Dear God, how was it possible that such evil could exist in the world?

I can help the FBI just as much from here
.…

“Your hands,” Bartoli prompted. Jolted back to the present, Charlie nodded.

There was a staff restroom nearby. Summoning every bit of willpower she possessed in an effort to mask how bad she really felt, Charlie started walking toward it, carefully averting her eyes from Garland’s body and the uproar that continued to surrounded it. Still, she couldn’t help glancing down the hall in the direction that Garland had looked right before he had vanished. Despite her effort not to think about it, the fear on his face lingered in her mind. What had he seen, in those first moments after his spirit had separated from his body? He had been a bad man who had done terrible things. At the moment of death, had he found himself facing divine retribution?

She didn’t know. She never knew.

Evil man or not, he was still deserving of pity: she said a silent, heartfelt prayer for his soul.

“Were you talking to somebody back there?” Crane lobbed the question at her in an offhand way that was belied by the look he gave her. He and Bartoli were walking with her, like some kind of Praetorian guard. “You know, at the end, just after you had lifted your
hands up away from the wound but were still kneeling down beside the convict? Because it kind of seemed like you were talking to somebody, but nobody was there.”

Bartoli gave him a sharp look that said
shut up
as plainly as words could have done.

“I was saying a prayer,” Charlie answered with dignity, inspired by the one she’d just sent winging skyward for Garland. Crane frowned, but with Bartoli’s eyes on him, he let it drop.

“Do you want one of us to come in with you?” Bartoli asked as they reached the restroom.

Clearly, Charlie realized, she was not giving off the kind of I-got-it-together vibe she wanted to.

“No, of course not. I’m fine.” This time it was almost true. She was feeling stronger, almost herself, almost normal, as she pushed through the restroom door. That is, until out of the corner of her eye she glimpsed the guards heaving Garland’s body onto the stretcher. It took four of them, one latched onto each limb. His head dangled limply back in a way that simply wasn’t possible in life. Blood streamed from his chest, splattering as it hit the floor.

As the door swung shut behind her, Charlie felt sick all over again. Barely making it to the toilet in time, she promptly vomited.

After flushing, the first thing she did was wash her hands, carefully averting her eyes from the dyed-red water as it swirled down the drain. Then she rinsed her mouth, and her face. Finally, she sank down fully clothed on the toilet because it was the only place in the single-user restroom to sit, closed her eyes, and dropped her head to rest between her knees.

In an effort to make the restroom stop swirling around her, she started on a series of slow, deep breaths.

You wimp, you
cannot
faint in a bathroom with the FBI waiting outside. Get a grip
.

But almost as soon as she had the thought she realized that the strong smell of fresh blood she couldn’t seem to escape was real, and from a still-present source, and her eyes popped open again. Seconds later she catapulted to her feet.

From her knees down, her pants were soaked with Garland’s blood.

“Oh, God.” Quivering with horror, she kicked off her sneakers, then stripped off her pants. Her legs, which were toned and tanned and shapely from her running regime, were smeared with blood, too. Stomach once again churning, she instantly attacked them with wet paper towels. Her sleeveless blouse was okay, she concluded as, having finished with her legs, she checked herself out front and back in the mirror, but her white ankle socks had to go: blood had leached onto them. The socks she discarded by dropping them into the wastebasket. She would have done the same with her slacks except, oh, wait, she couldn’t walk out of the restroom wearing nothing but her shirt and a pair of silky pink bikini panties. So she did the only thing she could think of: she plopped her pants in the sink and rinsed the blood out of them, careful to sluice them only from the knees down. Probably there were drops of blood elsewhere on her pants, but if so they were impossible to see—and in any case, she didn’t want to know. All she wanted was to get them blood-free enough so she could wear them for a brief period without having her skin crawl. As soon as she got home she would throw the pants away, never to be worn again, but for now she was stuck with them.

“Dr. Stone? You okay in there?” Bartoli called through the door.

Charlie realized she had been in the restroom for a good deal longer than just washing her hands required. She hated knowing that Bartoli and Crane were waiting right outside the door for her, wouldn’t even allow herself to consider that maybe they’d heard her losing her lunch, and tried not to think about why they were waiting, and what they wanted her to do.

“I’m fine,” she called back, glad that it was actually starting to be true. As long as she didn’t let herself think about the corpse—or the spirit that had been so violently separated from it—that would continue to be the case, she hoped. Thank God the water in the sink was running clear. Turning off the tap, she started to wring out the legs of her pants. Forget trying to dry them with the hot air from the hand dryer: she would wear them wet until she could get rid of them.

“Doc, you gotta help me,” said Garland’s voice behind her.

Charlie practically jumped out of her skin. Whirling, clutching the sink for support, she found him standing in front of the toilet, looking every bit as tall and muscular and solid as he had when he
was alive. The shackles were gone; so was the blood. His prison jumpsuit was zipped to about halfway up his chest, and he balanced on the balls of his feet like a man poised to run. There was something dark and hunted in his eyes as they fastened on her.

“You got to fix me. Put me back together. Quick.”

Charlie took a deep breath. God, she hated this. He was
dead
, and yet here he stood crammed with her in a tiny, should-be-private bathroom, minus his restraints, which made him scary as hell, still possessing enough physicality to trap her against the sink, pinning her with his eyes, talking to her in that honeyed southern drawl, which fortunately she knew better than to trust one inch. A ruthless killer in life, she doubted he’d changed any in death. And because she was the victim of some hideous cosmic trick, she had no way to get away from him.

This whole I-see-dead-people thing totally sucks
.

“I can’t put you back together,” she spoke as calmly and reasonably as she could. “I can’t fix you. You’re
dead
. You should be able to see a white light. Go toward the light.”

His brows snapped together. He looked at her with disbelief. “What are you, the fucking ghost whisperer? ‘Go toward the light’ is the best you can do?”

Actually, never having died herself, she had no idea if there really was a white light, but she’d said it before and spirits had never taken issue with it. She’d done a lot of research into the afterlife, too, and according to it—and, yes, TV—there should absolutely be a white light.

“The light should take you to where you’re supposed to go. To—to heaven.” Okay, she faltered on that last bit. Heaven for Garland might be a stretch.

He snorted. “Yeah, right. I’m gonna get beamed right up to those Pearly Gates and get my angel wings and halo on. I don’t think so. Look, I’m thirty-six years old. I got things to do, places to be. I fucking can’t be dead. Fix me.”

“I can’t fix you. You’re dead. Really. Go toward the light.”

Looking pissed, he crossed his arms over his chest. “News flash, Doc: there’s no damned light. There’s like this purple fog with
things
in it.” With a quick glance around, he seemed to become aware of
exactly where he was. She got a glimpse of what she thought was panic in his eyes, and just thinking about what it must take to panic somebody as big and bad as Garland gave her goose bumps. “What are you doing in a bathroom in your underpants? Why aren’t you out there giving me CPR or something?”