The Last Time I Saw Her

by Karen Robards

  “Virginia State Police SWAT,” Brown said, in reply to Charlie’s question. “They’re heading up to Bob Prager’s barn. Word is the bus is holed up in there.”

  Charlie’s heart beat faster.

  “Abell and Torres—two of the escapees—will die rather than surrender, and will kill every hostage rather than surrender,” she said. “Ware might be persuaded to give himself up, but he’s heavily influenced by Abell and Torres. I don’t know the other three men.” Charlie took a breath and looked at Brown. “I know you’re not the person who should be given that information. I need to talk to whoever is in charge of what’s getting ready to happen at the barn.”

  Brown said, “I’m not sure who that is. I can take you to the operations center when we get down to where they’re set up. Somebody there’ll be able to put you in touch with the right person.”

  “You need to get checked out by an EMT,” Michael told her quietly. “Remember getting thrown out of a moving bus?”

  “I will,” Charlie promised, slanting a look up at him. His face was close: taking advantage of the darkness, she’d been leaning against him for most of the way down, and at some point her hand had crept into his. Now their fingers were entwined, and the feel of his warm, strong hand holding hers made her both happy and sad. Happy because, miracle of miracles, he was there; sad because having him with her in a physical incarnation couldn’t last. “As soon as I talk to whoever’s in charge. And I’m really not hurt.”

  Brown’s words had prepared Charlie for a base of operations having been set up, but when they passed through a National Guard–manned roadblock and reached the foot of the mountain, the scope of what they encountered was astounding. The four-lane highway that skirted the mountain had been blocked off, and a large and motley collection of vehicles ranging from patrol cars to ambulances to firetrucks to big green army trucks were parked in and alongside the road for as far as she could see in either direction. There were a number of people moving around inside the cordoned-off area, but it was too dark for her to see much detail. Low-level lanterns had been strung up on ropes stretched between tree trunks along the area’s perimeter. Two large military-style tents had been erected in the middle of the road, and these were lit by electricity powered by portable generators. Charlie knew the squat black boxes were generators because she could hear them rumbling as the truck stopped and Michael opened the door and got out. With their flaps closed, the tents glowed as brightly as paper lanterns in the dark.

  With a thank-you to Brown, Charlie got out, too, and looked at the closest tent, which he had pointed out as the operations center. It was busy, with uniformed law enforcement personnel, the National Guard, and others in civilian clothes flitting in and out. She could see tables set up inside through the opening created by one tent flap that had been pulled back and secured in place. A group of uniformed cops were clustered around a large chalkboard near the entrance. While Michael closed the door of the Jeep and Brown drove off, Charlie shook off her exhaustion one more time and headed purposefully toward that tent. She’d gone only a few steps when her eye was caught by a short, stocky man with buzzed blond hair who’d just emerged from the second tent, which was maybe some fifty feet away. He was wearing the blue uniform of a prison guard, and what had attracted her attention in the first place was that he had walked out right through the canvas covering the closed side of the tent.

  Charlie recognized him with a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach.

  “Oh,” she said, and only realized that she’d stopped walking when Michael, who’d been behind her, caught up and stopped, too. It didn’t take more than a glance at her for him to follow the direction of her gaze.

  “Shit,” Michael said. From that, Charlie knew that despite being in Hughes’s body Michael was still able to see the same spirits she did, and that he’d also recognized the second of the two prison guards who’d been shot on the bus. The guard was in spirit form now.

  “…need a ride home,” the guard called plaintively. “Can anybody give me a ride home?”

  He looked around without appearing to see anyone, then turned and walked back through the closed canvas wall of the tent.

  The back of his head was missing. From the neck up there was nothing but a mass of bloody red pulp.

  Charlie’s stomach churned. Her fists clenched as she fought the rush of sorrow that hit her as she remembered the man pleading that he had a wife, children. He would never see them again, never go home. The instant nausea, the deep pity for the victim—they were what happened to her in the close presence of spirits, her crappy life as usual. Her face must have given away some of what she was experiencing, because Michael muttered “Shit” again and pulled her into his arms. Clutching at his shirtfront, she rested her forehead against his chest, shut her eyes, and breathed.

  For a moment, just a moment, she let herself be weak.

  A sharp sound popped her eyes open again, and she looked up to see the tent flap being thrown back and a man in a white coat stepping out. From his attire, Charlie guessed that he was either the medical examiner or the county coroner or an assistant to one or the other. Beyond him, through the now open flap, she saw gurneys with sheet-covered corpses on them neatly lined up in a row. Grimacing, she realized she was looking at a makeshift morgue. Probably one of the generators was providing refrigeration.

  “That must be where they’re keeping the bodies until they’re taken away to wherever they’ll be autopsied,” she said, careful to keep her voice even. Inside the tent, as she watched, another spirit sat upright, rising through the sheet covering his gurney as if it wasn’t there. Charlie recognized the police officer Abell had shot.

  “Come on, babe, you don’t need to see this.” Michael’s arms tightened around her, and he half turned with her as though he would walk her away from the scene. Charlie didn’t resist: there was nothing she could do for the dead. Before they could move away, another of the small trucks purred past them and stopped in front of the tent. It was parked so close that Charlie could smell the exhaust wafting toward them.

  Two National Guard officers got out of the truck, said something to the man in the white coat, and walked toward the rear of the vehicle. Even before they opened the closed bed and started to remove the blue-tarp-wrapped bundle in the back, Charlie’s stomach turned inside out.

  “…shot me in the back!” the kid who sprang out of the truck bed screamed. It was the tall, skinny boy with the stringy brown hair and black hoodie who’d gotten hit in the face for talking to Bree, Charlie saw with a burst of horror. And the horror was because what was screaming at her was the kid’s spirit. His body was wrapped in the tarp: he was no longer alive. Usually the dead couldn’t see the living, but this boy could. Charlie realized that he saw her even before he came rushing toward her, his eyes wild. “I went out the window just like you said, but they shot me! I was running away and I got hit! It hurts! It hurts!”

  He started to scream.

  “Holy hell,” Michael growled, taking in the hair-raising scene. He whirled with Charlie so that his back was between her and the spirit as the kid reached them, but the spirit, shrieking, ran right through both of them before vanishing.

  Charlie was instantly drenched in cold sweat. Her stomach went into full revolt. Shoving away from Michael with both hands, she barely made it to the edge of the pavement before dropping to her knees and vomiting in the scruffy grass.

  “Goddamn it.” Michael leaned over her, pulling her hair back away from her face, holding it for her and adding a string of choice curse words as she vomited again.

  “You know that—spirits affect me like this sometimes,” she managed when she was done.

  Michael was still leaning over her, keeping her hair back out of her face. “Yeah, I do fucking know. Take a couple of deep breaths.”

  Charlie did.

  “Here.” Michael thrust something at her. “Dude had some napkins in his pocket.”

  Charlie accepted what she discov
ered was a wad of paper napkins and wiped her mouth.

  “I don’t suppose you have any water?” she asked over her shoulder. To her consternation, her voice sounded shaky.

  “Sorry, babe. We can probably get some around here somewhere.”

  Charlie nodded. A moment later, she felt recovered enough to let Michael pull her to her feet.

  “He was just a kid.” Charlie leaned tiredly against him. It felt good to rest her cheek against the solid warmth of his chest.

  “I know.” Supporting her with an arm around her waist, Michael tucked her hair behind her ears as she tilted her face so she could look up at him.

  The dead cop walked out through the tent again. With a muttered “Oh, God,” Charlie turned her face away—and found herself looking right at a tall man in a dark suit who emerged from the operations center. He hesitated for a moment, as if he was surprised by what he was seeing, and then came striding toward them. The light was behind him, but—

  “Charlie?” His voice was sharp.

  She’d known who he was even before he spoke. The lean build, the black hair—“Tony!”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Charlie didn’t know why she was even surprised. Of course Tony had heard about what had happened. Of course he had come. First of all, he was her friend, and he was that kind of guy. Second, he was as serious about his work as she was, and catching serial killers was his job. For this, he would have reactivated himself from sick leave without a second thought. At this moment, there were three of the most notorious serial killers in the country loose on the mountain behind them. When he’d set out, there would have been five of the human predators at large. With hostages, including eight teens and—her.

  “Is everything all right?” Tony’s voice was still sharp. Charlie realized that she was leaning against Michael with her arms wrapped around his waist and his arm tight around hers. His hand that had just finished tucking her hair behind her ears now rested on her shoulder. He’d stiffened when Tony had called her name, and was now looking at Tony just as she was, although she imagined his expression was very different. The two of them presented an unmistakably intimate picture, she was sure. If her world had been as normal as everyone else’s, this wouldn’t have been a problem. Michael would have been Michael, the man she was in love with, her guy, and she would have introduced him to Tony as such and that would have been that. Unfortunately, Michael was dead and inhabiting Hughes’s body. More unfortunately, Tony was well aware that she had met Hughes only the day before and that she suspected him of being a serial killer. The reason he was aware of all that was that she had told him so herself, which if she had foreseen the turn events would take she might not have done, but what was it they said about hindsight? She was also almost certain Tony knew what Hughes looked like and was thus able to identify him now. A photo would have been part of the investigative file she’d asked him to put together for her.

  Which made the fact that she was clinging like a barnacle to a boat to the man who Tony thought was Hughes a little hard to explain.

  “She’s sick,” Michael said, exhibiting more presence of mind than she possessed at the moment in coming up with such a semi-reasonable explanation for their embrace. Charlie could feel the increased tension in his body—he had some issues concerning her relationship with Tony—but his voice was even. “She’s had a hell of a day. For starters, she was pushed out of a moving bus and hit the pavement hard. She needs to be checked by a doctor.”

  “You’re Rick Hughes,” Tony said, approaching. His left arm was in a sling, Charlie saw, a reminder of the bullet wounds that had nearly killed him. The darkness made his expression—and Michael’s—impossible to read. There was no inflection at all in Tony’s voice. Which told her a great deal: he didn’t like seeing her in the supposed Rick Hughes’s arms.

  Why was nothing in her life ever simple?

  “Yeah,” Michael replied as Charlie pushed away from him. He made no attempt to keep her.

  “Tony Bartoli, FBI,” Tony introduced himself, and the two men exchanged a perfunctory handshake. Michael knew exactly who Tony was, of course, and also knew way more about Tony than Tony probably would be comfortable with if he was aware of it. As the handshake ended, Tony slid a hand around her elbow, deliberately drawing her away from Michael.

  “Are you okay? You shouldn’t have come.” Charlie looked up at Tony reproachfully. He was six-one, one-ninety, and handsome, with a lean, expressive face, even features, and coffee brown eyes. It was hard to tell through the darkness, but she thought he looked tired and kind of drawn around the eyes and mouth. No surprise, given the wounds he had suffered, but still she hated this evidence that he hadn’t yet recovered. She and Tony had been through a lot together, and she was immensely fond of him. She hugged him. “How are you feeling?”

  He returned her hug with his one good arm. “A lot better as of about twenty minutes ago, when we got the call that you’d been found alive. You got pushed out of a moving bus? Are you hurt?”

  “I’m fine. I’ll tell you all about it later.”

  Charlie wasn’t looking at Michael, but she could feel him watching the two of them. Because he’d been there throughout the whole thing, he knew every detail of her relationship with Tony, and she was pretty sure he also knew that as much as she might wish it were otherwise, he had nothing to worry about: Tony was not the man who could make her heart go pitter-pat on sight. Still, she was picking up a vibe from Michael as he watched her with Tony that she couldn’t quite interpret. Not anger, not jealousy, but—something. What?

  “I’m actually really glad you’re here,” Charlie said to Tony, choosing to ignore the crosscurrents in the air in the interest of passing on the information she possessed as quickly as possible. “You can cut through the red tape for me.”

  “Red tape?”

  “Red tape,” she confirmed. “There’s no time for me to go through half-a-dozen different people.” The exhausted heaviness in her legs made moving an effort, she discovered, as she pulled away from him to head for the tent, but she moved anyway. She threw a quick “Come on” over her shoulder at Tony as she went.

  He caught up with her. “Where are we going?”

  “The tent,” she replied, adding, “I have information for whoever’s in charge of trying to rescue the hostages. Three of the men being hunted are my research subjects: I know them well. Two of them—Abell and Torres—will die and kill any hostages they’re holding before surrendering. The third, Ware, will do whatever they tell him. A full-out assault on the barn where they may be holed up will almost certainly result in everyone inside being killed. They need to try something else first. Negotiations, snipers, I don’t know, but something else.”

  She was still slightly nauseated and her knees were wobbly and her mouth felt like it was stuffed with sour-tasting cotton balls, to name only the most immediate of her physical concerns, but this information couldn’t wait any longer, because if it did it might be too late to do any good.

  It might already be too late to do any good. But she had to hope that if the hostages were in the barn, they were still alive, and that it would take a little time for the rescue force to get set up.

  “Are you sure you’re okay? Because you don’t look okay.” Tony’s hand slid around her elbow again as he looked at her in concern. They were just walking into the rectangle of light that was spilling out through the open tent flap, and he was getting his first good look at her. This close to the tent, the jumble of voices emanating from it was audible. There was a lot of activity in the parking area around them, and she could hear that, too.

  “She needs to see a doctor,” Michael said for the second time from a few paces behind them. “She was puking her guts out back there in the grass.”

  Charlie’s lips tightened. Of course, Michael knew that the reason she’d just vomited wasn’t anything a doctor could do anything about, but he thought she needed to see one and was using that as an excuse to get Tony to pile on with him.
Not that she would explain any of this to Tony.

  “I’ll see a doctor as soon as I make sure this information is given to the right people,” she said. It occurred to her that she wouldn’t be quite that impatient with Hughes, whom she barely knew, but it was too late. She moderated her tone. “It might not make a difference, but…it might.”

  The thought of what could be happening to the remaining hostages at that very moment was enough to make her want to jump out of her skin. Any slight help she could give them, she meant to provide.

  “Lee Hintz with the Virginia State Police is in charge here. I’ll take you to him.” Tony’s hand tightened on her arm, and he swept her into the tent and over to the chalkboard surrounded by cops she’d spotted when she’d first looked through the flap. It was still surrounded by cops, but it wasn’t a chalkboard, she discovered as they reached it. The angle and the uncertain lighting had misled her. It was a dry-erase board with the pictures of everyone who’d been on that bus affixed to it. Her picture, labeled DR. CHARLOTTE STONE and captured from her driver’s license, wasn’t particularly flattering. Hughes’s picture was beside hers. It, too, appeared to have been taken from his driver’s license, but because he looked exactly like Michael except in a jacket and tie, the picture was hot. The next picture was of Paris, whose last name, Charlie learned from its label, was Troyan. The three of them made up the first vertical row to the left. In the center, a larger group started with the chaperone. Her name was Tabitha Grunwald. The bus driver’s picture was beside hers: Larry Carter. After that came Bree Hoyt. Then the boys, one after the other: Trevor Frost (the small, scared-looking kid), Blake Armour (he was the one who’d looked under the bus seat and told Paris she was too big to get out a window), Josh Watkins (the kid with the carroty hair), Kyle Miller (the heavyset kid), and Chris Thomson. Charlie frowned as she saw that the picture of the sixth boy, Ben Snider, had been moved to the other side of the board. Dead now, his picture had been grouped with those of Frank Macy, the buzzed blond prison guard, and Rob Weise, the other prison guard.