Ashes to Ashes

8

CHAPTER

KATE EASED HER aching body down into the old claw-foot tub and tried to exhale the tension she had stored up during the day. It worked its way from the core of her through her muscles in the form of pain. She envisioned it rising from the water with steam and the scent of lavender. The brass wire tray that spanned the tub before her held a Bad Monday–size glass of Bombay Sapphire and tonic. She took a deep drink, lay back, and closed her eyes.

The stress management people frowned on alcohol as an answer to tension and preached that it would set a person on the road to alcoholism and doom. Kate had been up and down the road to doom. She figured if she was ever to become an alcoholic, it would have happened years before. Five years before. It hadn't, and so tonight she drank gin and waited for the pleasant numbness it would bring.

For just the briefest of moments the montage of faces from that bleak period of her life flashed through her mind's eye: Steven's changing face over the passing of that terrible year—distant, cold, angry, bitter; the doctor's regret, worn tired and bland by too many tragedies; her daughter's sweet face, there and gone in a single painful heartbeat. Quinn's face—intense, compassionate, passionate . . . angry, dispassionate, indifferent, a memory.

It never failed to amaze her, the sudden sharpness of that pain as it stabbed through the cotton batting of time. A part of her wished fervently it would dull, and another part of her hoped that it never would. The endless cycle of guilt: the need to escape it and the equally desperate need to cling to it.

She opened her eyes and stared at the window beyond the foot of the tub. A rectangle of night peered in above the half-curtain, blackness beyond the steamed glass.

She had at least healed over the surface of the old wounds and moved on with her life, which was as much as anyone could ever honestly hope to do. But how easily torn, that old scar tissue. How humbling the reality that she hadn't really grown past that pain attached to the memory of John Quinn. She felt like a fool and a child, and blamed the element of surprise.

She would do better tomorrow. She would have a clear head and keep her focus. She would allow no surprises. There was no sense in dredging up the past when the present demanded all her attention. And Kate Conlan had never been anything if not sensible . . . with the exception of a few brief months during the worst year of her life.

She and Steven had grown apart. A tolerable situation, had all things remained equal. Then Emily had contracted a virulent strain of influenza, and in a matter of days their sweet, sunny child was gone. Steven had blamed Kate, feeling she should have recognized the seriousness of the illness sooner. Kate had blamed herself despite the doctors' assurances that it wasn't her fault, that she couldn't have known. She had been so in need of someone to hold her, someone to offer comfort and support and absolution. . . .

Pulling the end of the towel over her shoulder from the towel bar behind her, she dabbed at her eyes, wiped her nose, then took another drink. The past was out of her control. She could at least delude herself into believing she had some control of the present.

She steered her thoughts to her client. Idiotic word—client. It implied the person had chosen her, hired her. Angie DiMarco would have done neither. What a piece of work that kid was. And Kate was far too experienced in the ways of the real world to believe there was a heart of gold under all that. There was more likely something warped and mutated by a life less kind than that of the average stray cat. How people could bring a child into the world and let her come to this . . . The notion brought indignation and an unwelcome stab of jealousy.

It wasn't her job, really, finding out who Angie DiMarco was or why she was that sadly screwed-up person. But the more she knew about a client, the better able she was to understand that client, to act and react accordingly. To manipulate. To get what Sabin wanted out of the witness.

Draining the tub, she dried off, wrapped herself in a fat terry robe, and took the last of her drink to the small antique writing desk in her bedroom. Her feminine sanctuary. Peach tones and rich deep green gave the room a sense of warmth and welcome. Nanci Griffith's quirky sweet voice drifted from the speakers of the small stereo system on the bookshelf. Thor, the Norwegian forest cat who held dominion over the house, had claimed Kate's bed as his rightful throne and lay in all his regal, hairy splendor dead center on the down comforter. He gazed at her with the bored supremacy of a crown prince.

Kate curled a leg beneath her on the chair, pulled a sheet of paper from a cubbyhole in the desk, and began to write.

Angie DiMarco

Name? Probably phony. Belongs to some woman in Wisconsin. Get someone to run it through Wisconsin DMV.

Family dead—figuratively or literally?

Abuse? Likely. Sexual? Strong probability.

Tattoos: multiple—professional and amateur.

Significance?

Significance of individual designs?

Body piercing: fashion or something more?

Compulsive behaviors: Nail biting. Smokes.

Drinks: How much? How often?

Drugs? Possibly. Thin, pale, unkempt. But seems too

focused in behavior.

She could make only a thumbnail sketch of Angie's personality. Their time together had been too brief and too strongly influenced by the stress of the situation. Kate hated to think what conclusions some stranger would draw of her if she were thrust in a similar position. Stress triggered those old fight-or-flight instincts in everyone. But understanding didn't make the kid any more pleasant to deal with.

Luckily, the woman who ran the Phoenix House was accustomed to a wide range of bad attitudes. Residents at the house were women who had chosen or been forced down some of life's rougher roads and now wanted out.

Angie had been less than appreciative for the roof over her head. She had lashed out at Kate in a way that struck Kate as being way out of proportion.

“So what if I don't want to stay here?”

“Angie, you've got no place else to go.”

“You don't know that.”

“Don't make me go through this again,” Kate said with an impatient sigh.

Toni Urskine, director of the Phoenix, lingered in the doorway for that much of the exchange, watching with a frown. Then she left them to have it out in the otherwise deserted den, a small room with cheap paneling and cast-off furnishings. Mismatched rummage sale “art” on the walls gave the place the ambiance of a fleabag hotel.

“You have no permanent address,” Kate said. “You tell me your family is dead. You haven't managed to come up with a single real-live person who would take you in. You need a place to stay. This is a place to stay. Three squares, bed, and bath. What's the problem?”

Angie swatted at a stained throw pillow on a worn plaid love seat. “It's a fucking sty, that's the problem.”

“Oh, excuse me, you've been living at the Hilton? Your fake address wasn't in this good a house?”

“You like it so much, then you stay here.”

“I don't have to stay here. I'm not the homeless witness to a murder.”

“Well, I don't fucking want to be!” the girl cried, her eyes shining like crystal, sudden tears poised to spill down her cheeks. She turned away from Kate and jammed the heels of her hands against her eyes. Her thin body curled in on itself like a comma.

“No, no, no,” she mewed softly to herself. “Not now . . .”

The swift break in emotions caught Kate flat-footed. This was what she had wanted, wasn't it? To have the hard shell crack. Now that it had, she wasn't quite sure what to do about it. She hadn't been expecting the break to come now, over this.

Hesitantly, she stepped toward the girl, feeling awkward and guilty. “Angie . . .”

“No,” the girl whispered more to herself than to Kate. “Not now. Please, please . . .”

“You don't have to be embarrassed, Angie,” Kate said softly, standing close, though she made no attempt to touch the girl. “You've had a hell of a day. I'd cry too. I'll cry later. I'm no good at it—my nose runs, it's gross.”

“Why c-c-can't I j-j-just stay with you?”

The question came from way out in left field, hit Kate square in the temple, and stunned her to her toes. As if this girl had never been away from home. As if she had never stayed among strangers. She'd likely been living on the street for God only knew how long, doing God only knew what to survive, and suddenly this dependence. It didn't make sense.

Before Kate could respond, Angie shook her head a little, rubbed the tears from her face with the sleeve of her jacket, and sucked in a ragged breath. That fast the window of opportunity shut and the steel mask was back in place.

“Never mind. Like you fucking care what happens to me.”

“Angie, I care what happens to you or I wouldn't have this job.”

“Yeah, right. Your job.”

“Look,” Kate said, out of energy for the argument, “it beats sleeping in a box. Give it a couple of days. If you hate it here, I'll see about making some other arrangements. You've got my cell phone number: Call me if you need me or if you just need to talk. Anytime. I meant what I said—I'm on your side. I'll pick you up in the morning.”

Angie said nothing, just stood there looking sullen and small inside her too-big denim jacket that belonged to someone else.

“Try to get some sleep, kiddo,” Kate said softly.

She had left the girl standing in the den, staring out a window at the lights of the house next door. The poignant picture brought a sense of sympathy to Kate. The symbolism of a kid on the outside of a family looking in. A child with no one.

“This is why I don't work with kids,” she said now to the cat. “They'd just ruin my reputation as a hard-ass.”

Thor trilled deep in his throat and rolled onto his back, offering his hairy belly for rubbing. She complied, enjoying the contact with another living being who appreciated and loved her in his own way. And she thought of Angie DiMarco lying awake in the night, in a house filled with strangers, the one connection in her life that meant anything to anyone being her connection to a killer.

A BLINKING MESSAGE light greeted Quinn as he let himself into his room at the Radisson Plaza Hotel. He tossed the sack of Mexican takeout in the wastebasket beneath the writing table, called room service, and ordered wild rice soup and a turkey sandwich he probably wouldn't eat. His stomach couldn't deal with Mexican anymore.

He stripped out of his clothes, crammed everything but his shoes into a plastic laundry bag, tied the bag shut, and set it by the door. Someone down in laundry was in for an unpleasant surprise.

The water pounded out of the showerhead like a hail of bullets, as hot as he could stand it. He scrubbed his hair and body and let the water work on the knots in his shoulders, then he turned and let it pelt him in the face and chest. Images from the day tumbled through his head, out of order: the meeting, Bondurant's lawyer, the rush to the airport, the crime scene tape fluttering around the trunks of sturdy maple trees, Kate.

Kate. Five years was a long time. In five years she had established herself in a new career, she had a new life—which she deserved after all that had gone wrong in Virginia.

And what had he built in five years besides his reputation and a lot of unused vacation time?

Nothing. He owned a town house and a Porsche and a closet full of designer suits. He socked the rest of his money away for a retirement that would probably end in a massive coronary two months after he left the Bureau because he had nothing else in his life. If the job didn't kill him first.

He turned the water off; climbed out of the shower, and toweled himself dry. He had an athlete's body, solid, roped with muscle, leaner than it used to be—the reverse of most men in their mid-forties. He couldn't remember when his enjoyment of food had become indifference. Once upon a time he had considered himself a gourmet cook. Now he ate because he had to. The exercise he used to burn off tension burned off all the calories as well.

The greasy, spicy smell of the discarded Mexican food was permeating the bedroom. A smell preferable to a burned corpse, though he knew from experience it wouldn't be so welcome when it turned stale and he woke up to it at three in the morning.

The thought brought on a tumble of unpleasant memories of other hotel rooms in other cities and other dinners bought to fight off the aftertaste and smell of death. Of lying awake, alone in a strange bed in the middle of the night, sweating like a horse from nightmares, his heart racing.

The panic hit him in the gut like a sledgehammer, and he sat down on the edge of the bed in sweat pants and a gray FBI Academy T-shirt. He put his head in his hands for a moment, dreading the attack—the hollowness, the dizziness; the tremors that started in the core of him and rattled outward, down his arms and legs; the sense that there was nothing left of who he really was, the fear that he wouldn't know the difference.

He cursed himself and reached down deep for the strength to fight it off as he had done again and again in the last year. Or was it two now? He measured time by cases, measured cases by bodies. He had a recurring dream that he was locked away in a white room, pulling the hair out of his head one by one and naming each after the victims, pasting the hairs to the wall with his saliva.

He clicked the television on for noise to drown out the voice of fear in his head, then dialed the phone for his voice mail messages. Seven calls regarding other cases he had dragged here with him: a string of robberies and torture murders of gay men in Miami; the poisoning deaths of five elderly women in Charlotte, North Carolina; a child abduction case in Blacksburg, Virginia, that had, as of 8:19 P.M. eastern standard time, become a homicide with the discovery of the little girl's body in a wooded ravine.

Goddamn, he should have been there. Or maybe he should have been in rural Georgia, where a mother of four had been beaten to death with a ball peen hammer in a fashion reminiscent of three other murders in the last five years. Or maybe he should have been in England, consulting with Scotland Yard on the case that had turned up nine mutilated bodies in the yard of an abandoned slaughterhouse, the eyes gouged out of each and the mouths sewn shut with waxed thread.

“Special Agent Quinn, this is Edwyn Noble—”

“And you got this number how?” Quinn asked aloud as the message played.

He wasn't thrilled with Noble's in with this investigation. Being married to the mayor gave him a foot in the door no other lawyer in the city would have had. Being Peter Bondurant's attorney forced the door open wider.

“I'm calling on behalf of Mr. Bondurant. Peter would very much like to meet with you tomorrow morning if possible. Please give me a call back tonight.”

He left the number, then a seductive taped voice informed Quinn he had no further messages. He recradled the receiver with no intention of picking it up again to call Noble. Let him stew. If he had something pertinent to the case, he could call Kovac or Fowler, the homicide lieutenant. Quinn called no one back, preferring to wait until after he didn't eat his dinner.

The ten o'clock news led with the latest murder, flashing taped footage of the crime scene unit combing over the dumping site in the park, then going to the tape of the press conference. A photo of Jillian Bondurant came up with another of her red Saab. A good three and a half minutes of coverage, total. The average news story ran less than half that.

Quinn dug the files for the first two murders out of his briefcase and stacked them on the writing desk. Copies of investigative reports and crime scene photos. Autopsy reports, lab reports, initial and follow-up investigative reports. News clippings from both the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Descriptions and photos of the crime scenes.

He had stated very clearly he wanted no information on possible suspects if there were any, and none had been included. He couldn't let anyone's speculation about a possible suspect cloud his judgment or steer his analysis in one direction or another. This was yet another reason he would have preferred to put the profile together from his office in Quantico. Here he was too close; the case was all around him. The personalities involved in the cases could spur reactions he would not have looking at a collection of adjectives and facts. There was too much worthless input, too many distractions.

Too many distractions—like Kate. Who hadn't called and had no reason to, really. Except that they had once shared something special . . . and walked away from it . . . and let it die. . . .

Nothing in a Quinn life had the power to be quite so distracting as the irreparable past. The only cure Quinn had found for the past was to try to control the present, which meant pouring himself into the case at hand. Focus with intensity on maintaining control of the present. And on maintaining control of his sanity. And when the nights stretched long—as they all did—and his mind raced with the details of a hundred murders, he could feel his grip slipping on both.

ANGIE SAT AT the head of the small, hard twin bed, her back pressed into the corner so that she could feel the nubby plaster wall biting through the baggy flannel shirt she had chosen to sleep in. She sat with her knees pulled up beneath her chin, her arms wrapped tight around her legs. The door was closed; she was alone. The only light coming in through the window came from a distant streetlamp.

The Phoenix was a house for women “rising to a new beginning.” So said the sign on the front lawn. It was a big, rambling old house with squeaky floors and no frills. Kate had brought her there and dumped her among the ex-hookers and ex-dopers and women trying to escape boyfriends who beat the shit out of them.

Angie had looked in at some of them watching TV in a big living room full of ratty furniture, and thought how stupid they must be. If there was one thing she had learned in life, it was that you could escape circumstance, but you could never escape who you were. Your personal truth was a shadow: There was no denying it, no changing it, and no getting rid of it.

She felt the shadow sweep over her now, cold and black. Her body trembled and tears rose in her eyes. She had been fighting it off all day, all night. She had thought it was going to swallow her whole right in front of Kate—an idea that only added to the panic. She couldn't lose control in front of anyone. Then they'd know that she was crazy, that she was defective. They'd ship her off to the nuthouse. She'd be alone then.

She was alone now.

The tremor began at the very core of her, then opened up wider and wider into a weird, hollow feeling. At the same time, she felt her consciousness shrinking and shrinking until she felt as if her body was just a shell and she was a tiny being locked inside it, in danger of falling off a ledge into some dark chasm inside and never being able to climb out.

She called this feeling the Zone. The Zone was an old enemy. But as well as she knew it, it never failed to terrify her. She knew if she didn't fight it off, she could lose control, and control was everything. If she didn't fight it off, she could lose whole blocks of time. She could lose herself, and what would happen then?

It shook her now, and she started to cry. Silently. Always silently. She couldn't let anyone hear her, she couldn't let them know how afraid she was. Her mouth tore open, but she strangled the sobs until her throat ached. She pressed her face against her knees, closing her eyes tight. The tears burned, fell, slid down her bare thigh.

In her mind, she could see the burning corpse. She ran from it. She ran and ran but didn't get anywhere. In her mind, the corpse became her, but she couldn't feel the flames. She would have welcomed the pain, but she couldn't conjure it up with just her mind. And all the while she felt herself growing smaller and smaller inside the shell of her body.

Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! She pinched her thigh hard, digging the ragged edge of her fingernails into the skin. And still she felt herself being sucked deeper and deeper into the Zone.

You know what you have to do. The voice unfurled in her mind like a black ribbon. She shivered in response to it. It twined itself through vital parts of her, a strange matrix of fear and need.

You know what you have to do.

Frantically, she pulled her backpack to her, fumbled with the zipper, and dug through an inner pocket for the thing she needed. Her fingers curled around the box cutter, which was disguised as a small plastic key.

Shaking, choking back the sobs, she crawled to a wedge of light on the bed and shoved up the left sleeve of the flannel shirt, exposing a thin white arm that was striped with narrow scars, one beside another and another, lining her arms like bars in an iron fence. The razor emerged from the end of the box cutter like a serpent's tongue and she drew it across a patch of tender skin near her elbow.

The pain was sharp and sweet, and seemed to short-circuit the panic that had electrified her brain. Blood blossomed from the cut, a shiny black bead in the moonlight. She stared at it, mesmerized as the calm flowed through her.

Control. Life was all about control. Pain and control. She had learned that lesson long ago.

“I'M THINKING OF changing my name,” he says. “What do you think of Elvis? Elvis Nagel.”

His companion says nothing. He picks up a pair of panties from the pile in the box and presses them to his face, burying his nose in the crotch and sniffing deep the scent of pussy. Nice. Smell is not as good a stimulant as sound for him, but still . . .

“Get it?” he says. “It's an anagram. Elvis Nagel—Evil's Angel.”

In the background, three televisions are running videotapes of the local six o'clock newscasts. The voices blend together in a discordant cacophony he finds stimulating. The common thread that runs through them all is urgency. Urgency breeds fear. Fear excites him. He especially enjoys the sound of it. The tight, quivering tension underlying a controlled voice. The erratic changes in pitch and tone in the voice of someone openly afraid.

The mayor appears on two screens. The ugly cow. He watches her speak, wondering what it might be like to cut her lips off while she is still alive. Maybe make her eat them. The fantasy excites, as his fantasies always have.

He turns up the volume on the televisions, then crosses to the stereo system set into the bookcase, selects a cassette from the rack, and slips it into the machine. He stands in the center of the basement room, staring at the televisions, at the furrowed brows of anchormen and the faces of the people at the press conference shot from three different angles, and lets the sounds wash over him—the voices of the reporters, the background echo in the cavernous hall, the urgency. At the same time from the stereo speakers comes the voice of raw, unvarnished fear. Pleading. Crying for God. Begging for death. His triumph.

He stands in the center of it. The conductor of this macabre opera. The excitement builds inside him, a huge, hot, swelling, sexual excitement that builds to a crescendo and demands release. He looks to his companion for the evening, considering, but he controls the need.

Control is all. Control is power. He is the action. They are the reaction. He wants to see the fear in all their faces, to hear it in their voices—the police, the task force, John Quinn. Especially Quinn, who hadn't even bothered to speak at the press conference, as if he wanted the Cremator to think he didn't warrant his personal attention.

He will have Quinn's attention. He will have their respect. He will have whatever he wants because he has control.

He turns the televisions down to a dull mumble but leaves them on so he won't return to silence. Silence is something he abhots. He turns off the stereo system but pockets a microcassette recorder loaded with a tape.

“I'm going out,” he says. “I've had enough of you. You're boring me.”

He goes to the mannequin he has been playing with, trying different combinations of the clothes of his victims.

“Not that I don't appreciate you,” he says quietly.

He leans forward and kisses her, putting his tongue in her open mouth. Then he lifts the head of his last victim off the shoulders of the mannequin, puts it back into its plastic bag, takes it to the refrigerator in the laundry room, and sets it carefully on a shelf.

The night is thick with fog and mist, the streets black and gleaming wet in the glow of the streetlights. A night reminiscent of the Ripper's London. A night for hunting.

He smiles at the thought as he drives toward the lake. He smiles wider as he presses the play button on the microcassette recorder and holds the machine against his ear, the screams a twisted metamorphosis of a lover's whispered words. Affection and desire warped into hatred and fear. Two sides of the same emotions. The difference is control.