The Last Victim Page 4

  “Where the hell is that oxygen?” she bit out, glaring at Pugh, at the guards, even at the two FBI agents who hovered uselessly with the rest, galvanized with the need to try something else, anything.

  “Mmm,” Garland groaned, coughed up a bright red dribble of blood, and opened his eyes.

  Charlie found herself looking into them. Their normal sky blue had turned almost colorless. The pupils were dilating even as she met his gaze. Death, she knew from experience, was just a few heartbeats away. The baddest of bad men, black heart, merciless and evil: all those descriptions of him and more were written down in his file, and she had no doubt that they were true. Still, she worked feverishly to keep the life-giving blood in his veins.

  “Stay with me. Do you hear?” Her voice was fierce, her pressure on the wound relentless.

  “Doc,” he said. Or at least his lips moved to form the word: her pulse was beating so hard against her eardrums by then that she couldn’t be sure she actually heard it.

  “I’m here,” she said. “Don’t try to talk.”

  Reaching up, he wrapped his fingers around her wrist. They were still surprisingly strong. For a moment their gazes locked.

  Then he died.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Charlie knew the instant death occurred. Garland’s chest quit rising and falling, and the sound of his breathing ceased between one breath and the next. His grip on her wrist slackened, and then his hand dropped away. The blood stopped spurting from his wound. Instead what was left from the last pump of his heart oozed out in a warm gush that she could feel soaking through the cotton of her lab coat. His lips quivered once, and then remained motionless. His eyes, which had been focused on her face, fixed and began to glaze.

  “Mr. Garland.” Refusing to accept the truth, she leaned in, pressing harder on his chest, her voice urgent.

  Then it happened. The thing she dreaded, that she went to extraordinary lengths to avoid, that she had never come to terms with and never would.

  Garland’s soul left his body. Frozen in place, leaning over him, her hands, which were drenched in his blood, still pressed to his wound, Charlie saw it begin. Her heart started thumping as she watched what looked like tendrils of white mist gather above the whole long length of him. The mist engulfed her wrists in a surge of electric energy. The tingle of it was tangible. She snatched her hands away, out of the force field, sinking back on her heels as the shimmering miasma gathered and seemed to hang like fog in the air just inches above Garland’s body. In the next instant she felt a cold rush of wind that went past her with a whoosh. The fog blew away, swirling upward, seeming to rise and solidify until Garland himself stood there. Or, rather, until what Garland had now become stood there.

  Charlie sucked in air.

  Garland’s body lay limp and unmoving on the concrete floor beside her, framed in a growing pool of his own blood. His soul, his essence, his being, his ghost—Charlie was never sure how best to describe the apparitions she saw—stood near the body’s head, not quite solid, not quite as substantial as a living, breathing human being, but undeniably there. His feet appeared to be planted on the concrete floor. His ankles and wrists were shackled just as they had been at the moment of his death. His jumpsuit was unzipped to the waist. His bloody chest was exposed. But no blood pumped from the wound, which was visible as a small black slit, and he appeared as hale and hearty as it was possible for anyone to be, except for the fact that he was dead.

  Charlie’s gut clenched.

  Dear God, don’t let this be happening again, was the half thought, half prayer that sprang instantly to her mind.

  But it was happening, and she was the unwilling witness. Garland looked down at his dead body, the apparition taking in the corpse lying on the floor at its feet. Charlie saw a long shiver run through the shade. Then it—or he, rather, for the corpse was no more Garland now than discarded wrappings were the gift they had once adorned—raised his head and met her gaze.

  Charlie’s heart lurched. Her breath caught. His eyes were once again their normal sky blue, alight with awareness and consternation and a touch of disbelief. He looked as conscious in death as he ever had in life.

  “Fuck,” the apparition said. “Are you shitting me?”

  She could hear him as clearly as if he were still alive, she realized, rattled. Profanity and all, it sounded so exactly like something he would say, it didn’t seem possible that the words were coming from a phantom.

  “No,” she replied, forgetting the crowd around them, that they could see her talking to what to them looked like empty space, that they could hear her side of the conversation.

  His eyes widened. “I’m dead?”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  His lips parted, and she thought he would say something more. But then he glanced around sharply, as if he heard a sound behind him. Charlie didn’t know what was there—she could never see more than the apparition itself—but an emotion that looked very much like fear contorted his face.

  As if he saw something coming that would drag him to hell.

  The rattle of metal wheels on concrete broke the spell that kept her eyes fastened on him. Looking beyond Garland, she saw the stretcher careening around the corner at last, propelled by a pair of guards, its clatter echoing off the walls. Behind the stretcher ran Dr. Creason and a male nurse pulling a wheeled resuscitation cart. Only a split second or so passed before Charlie realized that she could see the newcomers clearly: her view was no longer obstructed by Garland.

  The apparition was gone. Only Garland’s corpse remained, sprawled just inches away from her bent knees. Her soaked-through coat was no impediment as the last of his blood oozed out beneath it. Charlie felt a surge of profound pity for the dead man, along with a strong sense of thankfulness that his spirit had moved on.

  “Dr. Stone, are you okay?”

  Large male hands dropped onto her shoulders from behind. Startled, Charlie glanced up. While the rest of the crowd focused on the oncoming stretcher, one of the FBI agents—Bartoli—leaned over her. He frowned down at her, looking concerned. It was he who clasped her shoulders, she realized with relief. And the reason she felt relief was that he was alive, and solid. A man, not a ghost.

  Thank God.

  All of a sudden the reality of what was happening around her, the noise, the confusion, the presence of so many people crowding into way too small a space, snapped back into sharp focus. Charlie looked over at Pugh, who was beckoning wildly at the medical team rushing toward them while yelling at them to hurry. Two of the guards were halfway up the hall as they ran to meet the would-be rescuers. As she watched, they grabbed the stretcher by the front bar and pulled. The smell of death, of blood, of sweat, of fear, assaulted her nostrils. Colors popped: the scarlet blood, Garland’s orange jumpsuit, the deep blue of the guards’ uniforms. Sounds were amplified. The white glow of the fluorescents overhead bathed the scene in ugly, flickering, merciless light that hid nothing. Bartoli was still staring down at her. Charlie felt suddenly self-conscious, wondering what he and any other onlookers had noticed, and, if they had noticed, what they’d made of her conversation with the dead man.

  “I’m fine,” she told Bartoli, who let go of her shoulders and straightened, although her answer was something less than the truth. Shaken and drained, she felt woozy, disoriented, nauseated. Garland’s death in and of itself filled her with sorrow. On its own, such a sudden, violent end was terrible enough. Add to it the fact that she was seeing ghosts again and she felt almost like she had endured a physical assault. It had been a long time, a year at least, since a spirit had manifested itself to her, but still the unpleasant feeling was disturbingly familiar. Even though she had been careful to arrange her life so the opportunity for such a thing happening was limited, when she didn’t see anything supernatural she had begun to hope that her unwanted ability to communicate with those who had recently, violently passed over had waned. Apparently not, but now was not the time to dwell on it, not with so many eye
s to see and ears to hear in her immediate vicinity, not with her professional reputation to consider. To a lot of people, maybe even most people, the idea that anyone could see the spirits of the dead was nonsense, and any person claiming to see them was nuts. Nuts are not respected doctors, nor do they qualify for research grants from the government. Therefore, the fact that she’d just had a brief but vivid encounter with Garland’s ghost was something she wasn’t planning to share anytime soon. Pulling herself together required effort, but she managed it. The first order of business was not to look at Garland’s body, because looking at it made her feel ill all over again. As the stretcher arrived with a noisy rattle of wheels she glanced at it instead.

  “You want we should get him on the stretcher?” cried one of the perspiring guards, letting go of it as he and two more of the new arrivals made a concerted move toward the corpse without waiting for an answer.

  “No! Shock him! Shock him!” Pugh shouted, waving them back, addressing the medical team as he pointed at the corpse.

  “Give me the paddles,” Dr. Creason yelled to the nurse, who had pushed the crash cart up beside him. He grabbed the paddles out of the nurse’s hand while barking at Charlie, “Airway clear?”

  “It’s too late,” she said in a reasonably strong voice, then repeated the words more loudly as Dr. Creason, paddles in hand, dropped to his knees beside her. To him, to them all, she announced, “He’s dead.”

  “Ah, hell.” Pugh groaned.

  A shimmer in the air on the other side of Garland’s body caught her eye. It was no more substantial than a heat mirage on a blistering summer’s day, just as quickly there and gone. What worried her more was the sensation that assailed her seconds later, which felt exactly like a cold breeze whispering along the nape of her neck.

  Whatever it was, she didn’t like it.

  As the warden let loose with a stream of curses and the medical team got busy verifying her words, Charlie stood up, helped at the last minute by Bartoli, who was there with a steadying grip on her elbow when she staggered a little. Ordinarily she would have shaken free of his hand, but her knees, as it turned out, were about as stable as Jell-O. Her legs shook, she felt cold all over, and her breathing was still not entirely normal. She was also, she realized as she glanced down at herself, covered with Garland’s blood.

  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 t
o 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.