The Last Victim by Karen Robards Page A

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 hewas 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