Ashes to Ashes

18

CHAPTER

KATE PILOTED THE 4Runner carefully into the narrow, ancient garage that sat just off the alley behind her house. During the winter months she regularly dreamed of an attached garage, but then spring would come and the backyard perennial beds would bloom and she would forget about the hassle of tromping through the snow, and the danger of walking in a dark alley in a city with a disturbing number of sex crimes.

The wind scrambled and scattered the dead leaves that lay in a drift along the side of the neighbor's garage. A little shiver snaked down Kate's back, and she paused to turn and stare back into the darkness behind her—just in case. But it was only her natural paranoia compounded by the knowledge that the meeting she had just attended had been staged for the sole purpose of baiting a serial killer.

Old feelings from her days in the BSU came rushing back. Memories of unspeakable crimes that were the topics of casual conversation around the water cooler. Serial murder had been such an ingrained part of her world, that kind of idle talk hadn't seemed strange to her until toward the end of her career—after Emily died. Death had then suddenly taken on a more personal quality, and she had lost the veneer of detachment that was necessary for people in law enforcement. Finally, she hadn't been able to stand it anymore.

She wondered how John still did . . . if he did. He'd looked pale tonight, gaunt and gray in the harsh lights. Back in the old days, his coping strategy had been overwork. He didn't have to deal with feelings if he was too busy to face them. That probably hadn't changed. And what did she care if it had or not?

She slid the key into the back-door dead bolt and paused again before turning it, the hair rising up on the back of her neck. Slowly, she turned, straining to see past the reach of the motion-detector light into the shadowed corners of the yard. It struck her then that she'd left her cell phone in the truck. In the truck, across the yard in the creepy garage.

Screw it. She could pick up any messages from the house phone. If there was a God, none of her clients would have a crisis tonight. And she could settle into a hot tub with a glass of her favorite coping method. This case might kill her, but at least she'd die clean and pleasantly numb.

No maniac rushed to push his way in the door behind her, and no maniac waited in the kitchen with a butcher knife. Thor ran in to complain loudly at the late dinner hour. Kate tossed her purse on the counter and clicked on the small television to catch the news. With one hand she unbuttoned her coat, with the other she reached into the fridge for the cat food and then the bottle of Sapphire.

The lead story on the ten o'clock news was the meeting. There was a clip of the crowd—Toni Urskine and her Phoenix women prominent in the shot—Chief Greer thumping the podium, and John looking grave as he spoke about the Bureau's role in the investigation.

Grave and handsome. The camera had always loved his face. He had aged hard, and even that looked good on him—the lines fanning out beside his eyes, the gray in his close-cropped hair. His physical, sexual appeal hit her on a basic level she couldn't block, and could only pretend to ignore.

Then it was back to the anchor, who rehashed the facts of the cases while photographs of Peter and Jillian Bondurant filled one corner of the screen. Reward and hotline information followed, and they were on to the next hot topic: beat cops warming themselves these chilly nights in the strip clubs downtown.

Kate left the news to Thor and wandered into the dining room, flipping on the old mission-style chandelier she had salvaged and rewired herself, thinking about the Bondurant connection and how Jillian did or didn't fit the victim profile.

“Damn you, John,” she muttered.

“We'll talk about the case. I've got some ideas I'd like to bounce off you.”

“It's not my job. I'm not with BSU anymore.”

“You were an expert in the field . . .”

And he had access to every expert in the field. He didn't need her.

She hung her coat on the back of a chair and sat down at the oak table she'd refinished that first summer after she'd left the Bureau. She had been wound, wired, still reeling from Emily's death and the wreck of both her marriage and her relationship with Quinn. Life as she knew it had ended, and she had to start over again. Alone, except for the ghosts.

She'd never told anyone close to her about Quinn, not her sister or her parents. They didn't know her resignation from the Bureau had come under a cloud of scandal. She couldn't have adequately explained the connection she'd felt to Quinn as Steven had drifted away from her on a tide of grief and anger. Even severed, that connection had been too precious to share with people who wouldn't understand. And her parents wouldn't have understood any more than any of her colleagues back in Quantico had.

She'd had an affair, cheated on her husband. She was a villain. That was what people wanted to believe—the worst and most sordid. No one wanted to know how alone she'd felt, how in need of comfort and support she'd been. They didn't want to hear about the powerful pull of something far beyond physical attraction that had drawn her to John Quinn—and he to her. People preferred to believe the worst because it seemed less apt to touch their own lives.

And so Kate had kept her secret to herself—and the guilt and regret and heartache that were part and parcel of the deal. And she'd built that new life a block at a time, careful to give it a good foundation and balance. The job was eight-to-five most days. Clients came and went. She got to help them in specific ways, and then their lives moved on and out of hers. Her involvement was finite and manageable.

Even as she thought that, she saw Angie in her mind's eye, and took a long pull on the Sapphire. She remembered the girl's tears, the tough kid, the street kid, curled in on herself and crying like the child she would never admit she was. Scared and embarrassed and ashamed—and she would never admit that either.

Kate had kneeled at Angie's feet, maintaining contact with one hand—touching the girl's hand or her knee or stroking her head as she doubled over and tried to hide her face. And the whole time, the same loop of emotions, the same chain of thoughts, played through Kate's mind—that she was nobody's mother, that this connection she was making to this girl was more than Kate wanted and less than Angie needed.

But the stark truth was that Kate was all she had. The ball was in her court and there was no one else to dump it to. There wasn't another advocate in the office who would stand up to Ted Sabin. There weren't that many who would stand up to Angie.

The story the girl told was short and sad and sordid. She had got picked up on Lake Street and dumped out in the park, a disposable sex toy for a man who never even asked her name. He paid her twenty when the going rate was thirty-five, told her to call a cop when she complained, shoved her out of his vehicle, and drove away. He left her there in the middle of the night like an unwanted kitten.

The image of her standing there alone, disheveled, smelling of sex, with a crumpled twenty in her pocket stuck in Kate's mind. Abandoned. Alone. Her life stretching out in front of her like forty miles of bad road. She couldn't have been more than fifteen or sixteen. Not that much older than Emily would have been if she had lived.

The tears rose up in a sneak attack. Kate took another sip of the gin and tried to swallow the knot down with it. There was no time for crying and no point in it. Emily was gone and Angie was no substitute. She didn't even want a substitute. The sudden sense of emptiness could be dodged or numbed. She was an old hand at it. Put the pain back in its box. Keep those walls up high. God forbid anyone see over them . . . herself included.

The fatigue and the alcohol pulled at her as she got up and headed for the den. She had to check her messages. And she wanted to call the Phoenix to make one last connection with Angie for the night—to strengthen the connection that had been made that afternoon.

She refused to let herself think of the girl sitting alone in her room at the Phoenix, feeling vulnerable and afraid and disappointed in herself for reaching out. She refused to think that she should have tried harder to make that connection go deeper.

The entry hall was lit by a streetlight half a block away, the illumination coming soft and silver through a pair of sidelights Kate kept meaning to get rid of. It was a simple matter to break a sidelight and get into a house. That reminder unfailingly came at night just before she went upstairs to bed.

A lamp burned low in the library-cum-office, a room she had left much the way she remembered it from childhood, when her father had been a midlevel executive for Honeywell. Cluttered and masculine with a sturdy oak desk and a couple of hundred books lining the walls, it smelled of leather upholstery and the faintest memory of good cigars. The message light on the answering machine flickered like a flame, but the phone rang before she could hit the playback button.

“Kate Conlan.”

“Kovac. Get your fanny to the Phoenix, Red. Our witness is missing. We'll meet you there.”

“I SHOULD HAVE stayed,” Kate said, pacing the ratty den of the Phoenix with her hands on her hips. “Goddammit, I should have stayed.”

“You can't be with 'em twenty-four/seven, Red,” Kovac said, lighting a cigarette.

“No,” she muttered, turning a furious glare on the narcotics dick Kovac had borrowed to keep an eye on Angie while she was at the Phoenix—a grubby-looking skinny guy in an army jacket with the name Iverson stenciled over the pocket. “That was your job.”

“Hey.” He held up his hands to ward her off. “I was here, but I was told you didn't want me too close. She must have slipped out the back.”

“Well, duh. Where did you think she would ‘slip out'? By definition, that sorta rules out the front door, doesn't it?”

The narc tipped his head back and swaggered toward Kate, cocky and mean, an attitude that played well with dealers and hypes. “I didn't ask for this lame fucking job, and I don't have to take a bunch of shit from a fucking social worker.”

“Hey!” Quinn barked.

Kate stopped Iverson in his tracks with a look and closed the distance between them herself. “You lost the only witness we had, asshole. You don't want to answer to me? Fine. How about the chief? How about the county attorney? Why don't you tell the mayor how you lost the only witness to the burning of Peter Bondurant's daughter's body because you're a hot-shit narc and you think baby-sitting is beneath you?”

Iverson's face went purple to the rims of his ears. “Fuck this,” he said, backing off. “I'm out of here.”

Kovac let him walk out. The front door squeaked open and slammed shut, the sound reverberating in the cavernous hall.

“Every superior in the chain is gonna ream his ass,” he said with a sigh. “He won't be able to sit down on the street sweeper they assign him to tomorrow.”

Kate began to pace again. “Did she leave or was she taken?”

“Iverson said her stuff is gone from her room and there's no sign of forced entry at the back. There was another resident here the whole time. She told him she didn't see or hear anything. Quinn and I got here just ahead of you. We haven't looked for ourselves yet.”

Kate shook her head at her own stupidity. “I'd actually made some progress with her. I should have stayed.”

“What time did you drop her off?”

“I don't know. It must have been after eight. She told me about the john in the park late this afternoon, but then she was embarrassed and upset, and I didn't want to push it. I took her to City Center for something to eat, and let her do a little shopping.”

“Lieutenant Fowler came up with some dough for her?”

Kate made a face and waved the question off. The money had come out of her own pocket, but it didn't matter. “Then I brought her back here.”

Angie growing quieter and quieter the closer they got to the Phoenix. Slipping back inside the tough shell. And I let her, Kate thought.

“I dropped her off and went on to the meeting to tell you—oh, shit. I should have stayed.”

“Who else was here when you let her off?”

“Gregg Urskine—but he was going to the meeting—and one other woman. I don't know who. I didn't see her. Gregg told me she was here. I didn't want Angie alone.”

It was too easy to imagine Angie in this big old house, all but alone. If Smokey Joe had any way of knowing where she was . . . His three victims had vanished with no sign of a struggle. There and gone, simply, easily. And Angie DiMarco claimed she could identify him.

That fast, that easily, the girl was gone. One careless decision . . .

“I blew it, and now we've lost her.”

Kate knew the emotions suddenly threatening to swamp her were out of proportion, but she didn't seem able to pull them back. She felt vaguely ill, slightly dizzy. The aftertaste of gin was like metal in her mouth.

She felt Quinn come up behind her, knew it was he without looking. Her body was still attuned to his. There was a disconcerting thought: that the physical magnetism hadn't faded in all this time.

“It isn't your fault, Kate,” he said softly.

He put a hand on her shoulder, his thumb unerringly finding the knot of tension in her trapezius and rubbing at it in an old, familiar way. Too familiar. Too comforting.

“It doesn't matter now,” she said, turning away stiffly. “What matters is finding her. So let's start looking.”

They went upstairs to the room Angie had been sharing with another Phoenix resident. The walls of the room were a nasty shade of yellow, the old woodwork dark with age and varnish. As it was all through the house, the furniture was mismatched and ill proportioned.

Angie's bed was a wad of unmade sheets. The shopping bag from their excursion to City Center lay in the midst of the mess, tissue tumbling out of it, the jeans and sweater she'd bought nowhere in sight. The dirty backpack was conspicuously absent, suggesting the girl had flown the coop of her own accord.

Sitting on the nightstand beside the cheap glass lamp was a tiny statue of an angel.

Kate picked it up and looked at it: an inch-high piece of pottery she'd bought for five bucks from a Navajo woman on the plaza in Santa Fe. She had slipped the old woman's five-year-old granddaughter an extra dollar for carefully wrapping the doll in tissue, her little brow furrowed as she concentrated on the importance of her task. Watching the little girl, she'd thought of Emily and, to her extreme embarrassment, had nearly started to cry.

“You know something about that?” Quinn asked softly, standing too close again.

“Sure. She stole it off my desk today.” She touched the gold-painted halo on the angel's dark head. “I have a collection of guardian angels. Ironic, huh? I don't really believe in them. If there were such things as guardian angels, then you and I wouldn't have jobs, and I wouldn't have lost my daughter, and we wouldn't have kids living lives like Angie's.

“Stupid,” she said, rubbing the angel's wings gently between her fingers. “I wish she'd taken this with her.”

The statue slipped from her grasp and fell to the old rug beside the bed. Kate knelt down to get it, putting her left hand down on the floor for balance. Her heart thumped hard in her chest, and she sat back against her heels as she raised the same hand, turning it palm up.

“Oh, Jesus,” she breathed, staring at the smear of blood.

Quinn swore, grabbing her hand, pulling it closer to the light.

Kate pulled away from him, twisting around, crouching low and straining to see against the dark wood of the old floor. The angle had to be perfect. The light had to hit it just right . . . Iverson hadn't seen it because he hadn't been looking hard enough.

“No,” she muttered, finding another droplet, then a smear where someone had tried to hastily clean up. I should have stayed with her.

The trail led to the hall. The hall led to the bathroom.

Panic fell like stone in Kate's stomach. “Oh, God, no.”

I should have stayed with her.

She stumbled to her feet and down the hall, all senses magnified, the pounding of her heart like a jack-hammer in her ears.

“Don't touch anything!” Kovac yelled, coming behind her.

Kate pulled up short of the bathroom door, which stood ajar, and allowed Kovac to bump it open with his shoulder. He pulled a ballpoint pen from his coat pocket and flipped on the light.

The room was awash in brain-bending hot pink, orange, and silver foil wallpaper from the seventies. The fixtures were older, the two-inch floor tiles long past being white. Dotted with blood. A fleck here. A smeared stain there.

Why didn't I stay with her?

“Come out in the hall, honey,” Quinn said, setting his hands on Kate's shoulders as Kovac moved to pull back the shower curtain.

“No.”

She held her ground, trembling, the breath held tight in her lungs. Quinn slipped an arm around her, ready to pull her out as Kovac drew the shower curtain back.

There was no body. Angie wasn't lying dead in the tub. Still Kate's stomach turned and a wave of cold washed over her. Quinn's arm tightened around her and she sagged back against him.

Blood streaked the tiled wall in pale smudges, like a faded fingerpainting. A thin line of water tinted rusty with diluted blood led from the center of the tub to the drain.

Kate pressed a hand across her mouth, smearing the blood on her palm across her chin.

“Shit,” Kovac breathed, backing away from the tub.

He went to the plastic hamper beside the sink and opened it gingerly with the same pen he had used to turn on the light.

“Hey, Kojak,” Elwood said, sticking his big head in the door. “What's up?”

“Call the crime scene guys.” He pulled one towel and then another from the hamper, both of them wet and bloody. “Looks like we've got us a crime scene.”