Her Last Whisper (41 page)

He was right. Charlie was sure of it. There really wasn’t any other viable possibility. Her heart hammered as she repeated Michael’s observation to the others. Then a thought struck her and she added, “Tam mentioned an enclosed space and silver wheels. A room service cart fits.”

“Do we have the other victims’ hotel bills?” Tony asked. When Lena answered in the affirmative, he said, “Check them for room service charges on the night each victim was last known to be in her hotel.”

“Yes,” Lena cried a moment later. “There are room service charges for all of them.”

“Then we’ve got our guy.” Tony pointed at the man on the screen. “I need an identity.
Stat
.”

“Oh, God.” Lena sounded sick as she stared at the picture of the
waiter leaving the room with the cart piled high with dirty dishes and the white cloth billowing toward the floor. “Oh, God. Then Giselle’s inside there.”

“We need a name,” Tony repeated, and they all went to work on identifying the waiter.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t as easy as they’d first thought it was going to be. There was no clear shot of the waiter’s face. As if conscious of the camera’s location, he kept his face deliberately turned away.

“He’s about six feet, one-eighty, average build, short dark hair,” Buzz reported after a thorough search of all pertinent footage. “That’s all we’ve got, boss.”

“He almost certainly works for Acer Staffing Solutions. They provide waitstaff for the Conquistador and the other victims’ hotels,” Lena said. “Eleven of our top suspects work for Acer.”

“How many of them match the description?” Charlie asked, and Lena started pecking away at her computer keys again.

“Okay.” Tony was on the phone with his contact at the ME’s office. “Thanks.”

He disconnected and told them, “They’ve finished preliminary tox screens on two of the victims. Both had Zolpidem tartrate in their systems. I’m going to extrapolate that they all do.” He looked around at their frowning faces, and translated that to “Ambien.”

“Yo. Sleeping pills: the old school date rape drug. That would explain why the last thing those two girls remembered was falling asleep in their hotel room,” Michael said to Charlie, who barely remembered not to nod.

“This is how it has to be going down: the victims order room service, the unsub, who presumably has picked them out as possible victims earlier and knows their room numbers, puts Ambien in their food in the kitchen, the victims eat, fall asleep, and when he goes to their rooms, supposedly to pick up the dishes, he grabs the victims and takes them out in the cart. Then they end up starring in his death porn.” Buzz sounded savage. “Destiny Sherman must have been inside the cart when he took it in to pick up the unconscious victims. She stayed behind to come out later in their clothes to fool the security cameras.”

“We only have footage of that happening one time,” Charlie warned. “Although it’s a solid theory.”

“The reason we only have footage of that happening one time is because nobody started looking for the other victims in time to keep the footage from being recorded over,” Lena retorted.

“It doesn’t explain what happened to Ms. Green,” Tony said. “She didn’t order room service, and he didn’t come to her room. He appears to have been waiting for her in the elevator.”

“Tam went downstairs again.” Charlie went cold all over as she thought about it. “If she encountered this guy, she may have had some sort of psychic flash about him. You’ve seen how she knows things. Maybe he spotted it. Maybe she said something to him.”

“That fits with what we know,” Tony agreed.

“Which means he was working at the Conquistador yesterday,” Charlie told Lena with a quick upsurge of excitement. “Screen for that.”

A moment later Lena said, “I’m down to two names. They meet the physical description, they’re employed by Acer Staffing, they were working at the Conquistador the night Giselle disappeared, they’re locals, they have or have access to four-wheel-drive vehicles, and one’s an amateur improviser and the other is a clown. And, both were working at the Conquistador yesterday. On the negative side, neither lives in the grid and neither is named Joe.”

“Names and addresses,” Tony said.

“Robert Thomas Dobson, Jr. and Cory Bobbins Hill.” Lena picked up her phone. “I’ll text them to you, along with their addresses.”

Tony nodded. “Find out if they’re at work today.”

Lena made a call, then said, “Neither one of them is scheduled to work today.”

“Okay. Let’s go check ’em out.” Tony was moving toward the door. “Charlie, you’re with me. Kaminsky, you’re with Crane. We’ve got Dobson, you’ve got Hill.”

The small ranch house in the Las Vegas suburb of Henderson was shaded by a single bushy olive tree. The woman who answered the door was young, with short blond hair and a baby on her hip. She shook her head in response to Tony’s request to speak to Robert Dobson.

“He owns the house, but he doesn’t live here anymore. We’ve been renting here for over two years. I think he couldn’t afford the mortgage when the economy tanked, but he couldn’t sell it, so …” Her voice trailed off. She frowned, looking first Tony and then Charlie, both of whom were standing on the small concrete stoop, over curiously. “You’re part of that serial killer hunter team from the FBI, aren’t you? I saw you on TV.” Her eyes widened. “Is he involved in that?”

Tony shook his head. “We’re just doing a routine check to see if any of the people who work in the hotels saw anything that could help us,” he lied with perfect aplomb, while Charlie cringed inwardly at the thought of what being recognized might do to their ability to find their quarry and Michael, who’d been vocal about his opinion that Charlie should have stayed back in the safety of the FBI
office, said, “Think she’s going to run and call our boy the second she’s out of sight?”

“He and his wife moved in with his mother, and then they got a divorce so I think it’s just him and his mother now. I have her address, if that helps,” she volunteered breathlessly.

“It would,” Tony agreed, and smiled at her.

“I’ll be right back. I’m Kelly Sims, by the way.” She returned his smile. Charlie could see that she was impressed with Tony’s good looks.

“Special Agent Tony Bartoli, Dr. Charlotte Stone,” Tony made the introductions which, since Kelly had already recognized them, there seemed no reason not to do. “Nice to meet you, Kelly.”

“You too.” Kelly smiled at him again and disappeared inside. A minute later she was back, offering Tony a scrap of paper with an address scribbled down on it. “We have to forward his mail sometimes.”

Tony thanked her, and they left.

“Do you think she’ll call Dobson and tell him we’re looking for him?” Charlie punched the address into the GPS as he backed out of the driveway.

“I don’t know. We’re not going to get there faster than she can call, so let’s hope she doesn’t.” Tony sounded as calm as always.

“If he lost his house, got a divorce, and had to move in with his mother more than two years ago, any or all of those could be the trigger event we’re looking for.”

“Fits the time frame,” Tony agreed. Following the prompting of the GPS, they pulled onto the expressway.

“Babe, you remember that breakfast we had with the voodoo priestess?” Michael asked musingly from the backseat. “Wasn’t the waiter’s name—?”

“Bob!” Charlie gasped as the memory of the waiter who had stared at Tam’s cleavage exploded into her consciousness. Tony looked at her with surprise. Burningly conscious that he wouldn’t have heard Michael’s question, she added, “Bob was the name of the waiter who brought Tam and me our check at the hotel’s breakfast buffet. I just remembered it.”

“Way to recover,” Michael applauded drily.

“Robert Thomas Dobson. Cory Bobbins Hill. Either one of them could be a Bob.” Tony was quick on the uptake, as always.

“Yes.” Charlie got more excited as she thought about it. “Tam charged our breakfast to her room.
He would know her room number
. She told him she was a psychic, told him a bunch of stuff about himself. Nothing about his being a serial killer, but she’s always accurate, and maybe it was enough to spook him.”

“Or maybe she saw him again when she made that quickie trip downstairs and said something else to him then,” Michael suggested.

Charlie repeated that, and Tony nodded. He was already on the phone. “Kaminsky, did you get those pictures of Dobson and Hill yet?”

“The Conquistador doesn’t have their pictures because they aren’t employees of the hotel. Acer Staffing doesn’t keep the pictures they do have of them on file: the only copies are on the employees’ badges, which the employees keep. So I requested a download from the DMV and I’m waiting for it to come through,” Lena replied. “You find Dobson?”

“Dobson’s moved. We’re heading for his new address now,” Tony replied. “What about you?”

“We just got here. It doesn’t seem like anybody’s home. But we looked in all the windows, the house doesn’t have a basement, and the detached garage was open. There’s nothing out of the ordinary anywhere in sight, and if he’s murdering women or holding them prisoner he’s not doing it here.”

“Tony.” Charlie fought to stay calm as the GPS warned that they would be exiting left in two miles and she took a good look at the device’s map.
“Dobson’s new address is in the grid.”

An excited sound from the other end of the phone let them know that Lena had heard.

“Yeah,” Tony acknowledged. “Meet us there.” He gave Lena the address. “Better get a search warrant. And get some backup on the scene, too. Tell them to get there, but hang back until we give the word.”

Lena acknowledged that, and Tony disconnected.

“This has got to be him.” Charlie’s palms felt damp. She’d done
a good job of keeping her anxiety tamped down until now, when the denouement was at hand. But she was afraid, terribly afraid, of catching the killer only to find that they were too late, and Tam and Giselle were dead. At the thought of them suffering the fate Carmela Lynch and the others had suffered, she felt sick.
Please God, not Tam
. And not Giselle, either. “He meets all the criteria.”

“Serial killer hunting as a science.” Tony glanced at her. “We wouldn’t be anywhere close to finding this guy without you.”

“Sounds like Dudley’s about to start kissing your hand again,” Michael said sardonically. “If he does, pardon me while I throw up.” Aggravation was a pretty good antidote to fear, Charlie discovered. She barely managed not to glare at the phantom menace. Instead she told Tony, “We haven’t caught him yet.”

It was only as she finished speaking that she discovered she’d primly clasped her hands in her lap.

The good news was, they’d found their killer: Robert Thomas Dobson, Jr., Bob the waiter from the hotel buffet. The bad news was, he wasn’t home.

There was ample incriminating evidence in the house, such as a tangle of jewelry (trophies, Charlie identified them as) that included a necklace identical to one in the picture of a victim, various implements of restraint and torture, and a prescription bottle full of Ambian.

The most damning thing they found was the body of his mother, stored in a basement freezer. Whether she’d been murdered or died of natural causes was impossible to determine, but it appeared that she’d been in there for some time. The neighbors said they thought she’d moved to Florida. Her latest Social Security check, unopened, lay in a pile of mail on the kitchen table.

“Where is
Giselle
?” Lena practically quivered with tension as she, Tony, and Charlie came together again in the small, perfectly ordinary-looking living room after having been all through the house and outbuildings.

Tony’s eyes, red-rimmed from lack of sleep, were the only giveaway to the direness of the situation. His voice was as deliberate as
always, and his lack of emotion was calming. “There’s a BOLO out for Dobson and his car. The neighborhood is being staked out, so if he comes home we’ll get him. We’ve got a list of his friends, known associates, and the places he frequents. We’ll find him.”

“If he hasn’t killed Giselle—and Tam—already, he’ll do it just as soon as he finds out that we’ve identified him.” Lena cast a haunted look out the front window of the modest split level. It was after six, and the setting sun threw the shadow of the house over the small front yard with its sun-crisped grass. “All it’s going to take is for CNN or somebody to find out that we’re here at his house, and it’s game over.”

It was probably game over anyway, was Charlie’s worst fear. The logical place for Bob Dobson to be at that moment was his kill site. She thought of Tam, and her insides twisted. Tam might be a formidable psychic, but she was as human as anyone else. She could be frightened, and hurt, and killed just like Giselle, just like the other victims. Just like Holly, all those years ago.

Charlie took a steadying breath.

Please let us figure this out in time
.

“You okay, babe?” Her expression must have changed, because Michael was looking at her with concern. The funny thing was, she’d been looking at him with concern all day, monitoring his ongoing flickering. That synchronicity struck her as funny, and she smiled.

“Goddamn it.” Michael’s swearing struck her as funny, too, and her smile widened. “You’re getting punch drunk. You need food, and you need rest.”

“We
need
to find the kill site.” Charlie’s reply was acerbic. She was talking to Michael, but as soon as she said it she realized what she had done and shifted her gaze to Lena.

Who visibly winced.

“His mother owned three other properties in addition to this one.” Buzz came up to them in time to hear that last. “I’ve got the addresses. They’re all in the grid.” He looked at Tony. “I texted them to you.”

Like Lena, he was giving off desperate vibes. Charlie supposed she was, too. Tony—and Michael—were the only ones who were
not, but they all knew the truth: with every minute that passed, the chances grew slimmer that Tam and Giselle were alive.

“Let’s go check these places out.” Tony was looking at his phone. “Crane, you and Kaminsky take the two to the west. They’re fairly close together. Charlie and I will take the other one.”