“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 eyes 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.