Ashes to Ashes

33

CHAPTER

THE KID LOOKED like hell, Kate thought—pale as death, her eyes glassy and bloodshot, her hair greasy. But she was alive, and the relief Kate felt at that was enormous. She didn't have to bear the weight of Angie's death. The girl was alive, if not well.

And sitting in my kitchen.

“Angie, God, you scared the hell out of me!” Kate said. “How did you get in? The door was locked. How'd you even know where I live?”

The girl said nothing. Kate edged a little closer, trying to assess her condition. Bruises marred her face. Her full lower lip was split and crusted with blood.

“Hey, kiddo, where've you been?” she asked. “People were worried about you.”

“I saw your address on an envelope in your office,” the girl said, still staring, her voice a flat hoarse rasp.

“Very resourceful.” Kate moved closer. “Now if only we could get you to use your talents for the good of humankind. Where've you been, Angie? Who hurt you?”

Kate was at the doorway now. The girl hadn't moved on the chair. She wore the same ratty jeans she'd worn from day one, now with dark stains that looked like blood on the thighs, the same dirty jean jacket that couldn't have been warm enough in this weather, and a dingy blue sweater Kate had seen before. Around her throat she wore a set of choke marks—purple bruises where fingers had pressed hard enough to cut off her wind and the blood supply to her brain.

A ghost of a bitter smile twisted Angie's mouth. “I've had worse.”

“I know you have, sweetie,” Kate said softly. It wasn't until she started to crouch down to take a closer look that Kate saw the utility knife in the girl's lap—a razor-blade nose on a sleek, thick, gray metal handle.

She straightened away slowly and took a half step back. “Who did this to you? Where've you been, Angie?”

“In the Devil's basement,” she said, finding some kind of sour amusement in that.

“Angie, I'm going to call an ambulance for you, okay?” Kate said, taking another step back toward the phone.

Instantly, tears filled the girl's eyes. “No. I don't need an ambulance,” she said, nearly frantic at the prospect.

“Someone's done a number on you, kiddo.” Kate wondered where that someone might be. Had Angie escaped and come here on her own, or had she been brought here? Was her abductor in the next room, watching, waiting? If she could get on the phone, she could dial 911 and the cops would be here in a matter of minutes.

“No. Please,” Angie begged. “Can't I just stay here? Can't I just be here with you? Just for a while?”

“Honey, you need a doctor.”

“No. No. No.” The girl shook her head. Her fingers curled around the handle of the utility knife. She held the blade against the palm of her left hand.

Blood beaded where the tip of the blade bit her skin.

The phone rang, shattering the tense silence. Kate jumped.

“Don't get it!” Angie shouted, holding her hand up, dragging the knife down inch by inch, opening the top layer of flesh, drawing blood.

“I'll really cut myself,” she threatened. “I know how to do it.”

If she meant it, if she brought that blade down a few inches to her wrist, she could bleed out before Kate finished the call to 911.

The ringing stopped. The machine in the den was politely informing whoever to leave a message. Quinn? she wondered. Kovac with some news? Rob calling to fire her? She imagined him capable of leaving that message, just as Melanie Hessler's boss had.

“Why would you want to cut yourself, Angie?” she asked. “You're safe now. I'll help you. I'll help you get through this. I'll help you get a fresh start.”

“You didn't help me before.”

“You didn't give me much chance.”

“Sometimes I like to cut myself,” Angie admitted, face downcast in shame. “Sometimes I need to. I start to feel . . . It scares me. But if I cut myself, then it goes away. That's crazy, isn't it?” She looked up at Kate with such forlorn eyes, it nearly broke her heart.

Kate was slow to answer. She'd read about girls who did what Angie was describing, and, yes, her first thought was that it was crazy. How could people mutilate themselves and not be insane?

“I can get you help, Angie,” she said. “There are people who can teach you how to deal with those feelings without having to hurt yourself.”

“What do they know?” Angie sneered, her eyes shining with contempt. “What do they know about ‘dealing with' anything? They don't know shit.”

Neither do I, Kate thought. God, why hadn't she just called in sick Monday?

She considered and discarded the idea of trying to wrestle the knife away from the girl. The potential for disaster was too great. If she could keep her talking, she might eventually persuade her into putting it down. They had all the time in the world—provided they were alone.

“Angie, did you come here by yourself?”

Angie stared at the knife blade as she delicately traced it along the blue lines of the tattoo near her thumb, the letter A with a horizontal line crossing the top of it.

“Did someone bring you?”

“I'm always alone,” she murmured.

“What about the other night, after I took you back to the Phoenix? Were you alone then?”

“No.” She dug the point of the blade into the tattooed blood droplets on the bracelet of thorns that encircled her wrist. “I knew he wanted me. He sent for me.”

“Who wanted you? Gregg Urskine?”

“Evil's Angel.”

“Who is that?” Kate asked.

“I was in the shower,” she said, eyes glazed as she looked back on the memory. “I was cutting myself. Watching the blood and the water. Then he sent for me. Like he smelled my blood or something.”

“Who?” Kate tried again.

“He wasn't happy,” she said ominously. In eerie contrast, a sly smirk twisted her mouth. “He was mad 'cause I didn't follow orders.”

“I can see this is a long story,” Kate said, watching the blood drip from Angie's hand to her dining room rug. “Why don't we go in the other room and sit down? I can get a fire going in the fireplace. Warm you up. How's that sound?”

Distract her from her knife play. Get her out of sight of one telephone and near another, so that one way or another a call might get placed. The phone/fax in the den had 911 on the speed dial. If she could get Angie settled on the couch, she could sit on the desktop, work the phone off the hook, punch the button. It might work. It sure as hell beat standing there, watching the girl bleed.

“My feet are cold,” Angie said.

“Let's go in the other room. You can take those wet boots off.”

The girl looked at her with narrowed eyes, raised her bleeding hand to her mouth and dragged her tongue along one wound. “You go first.”

In front of a psychotic with a knife, possibly going toward some waiting lunatic serial killer. Great. Kate started for the den, walking almost sideways, trying to keep one eye on Angie, one scouting ahead, trying to keep the conversation going. Angie clutched the knife in her hand, ready to use it. She walked a little bent over, with her other arm braced across her stomach, obviously in some pain.

“Did Gregg Urskine hurt you, Angie? I saw the blood in the bathroom.”

She blinked confusion. “I was in the Zone.”

“I don't know what that means.”

“No, you wouldn't.”

Kate led the way into the den.

“Have a seat.” She motioned to the couch where she and Quinn had made love not that many hours before. “I'll get the fire going.”

She thought of using the poker as a weapon, but discarded that idea immediately. If she could get the knife away from Angie by trickery, it would be preferable to violence for many reasons, not the least of which would be Angie's state of mind.

Angie wedged herself into a corner of the couch and began tracing over the bloodstains on her jeans with the point of the knife.

“Who choked you, Angie?” Kate asked, going to the desk. A fax had come in. The call she hadn't answered.

“A friend of a friend.”

“You need a better class of friends.” She eased a hip onto the desktop, her eyes on the fax—a copy of a newspaper article from Milwaukee. “Did you know this guy?”

“Sure,” the girl murmured, staring at the fire. “So do you.”

Kate barely heard her. Her attention was riveted on the fax the legal services secretary had forwarded with a note saying Thought you'd want to see this right away. The article was dated January 21, 1996. The headline read: Sisters Exonerated in Burning Death of Parents. There were two poor, grainy photographs, made worse by the fax. But even so, Kate recognized the girl in the photo on the right. Angie DiMarco.

PETER SAT IN his bedroom, in a small chair by the window, the black duffel bag in his lap, his arms wrapped around it. He was wearing the same clothes he had worn in the night—black slacks and sweater. The slacks were dirty. He had vomited on the sweater. The sour smell of puke and sweat and fear hung around him like a noxious cloud, but he didn't care to change, didn't want to shower.

He imagined he was pale. He felt as if all the blood had been drained out of him. What flowed through his veins now was the acid of guilt, burning, burning, burning. He imagined it might burn him alive from the inside out, turn all his bones to ash.

Edwyn had come to tell him about the arrest of the caretaker, Vanlees, and had found him in the music room, smashing the baby grand piano with a tire iron. Edwyn had called Lucas. Lucas had come with a little black bag full of vials and needles.

Peter had refused the drugs. He didn't want to feel numb. He'd spent too much of his life feeling numb, ignoring the lives of the people around him. Maybe if he'd dared to feel something sooner, things wouldn't have come to this. Now all he could feel was the searing pain of remorse.

Looking out the window, he watched as Kovac nudged the nose of his car against the bumper of Edwyn's Lincoln, then backed up and turned around. A part of him felt relief that John Quinn was leaving. A part of him felt despair.

He had listened to the conversation on the other side of the door. Noble and Brandt making excuses for him, lying for him. Quinn asking the definitive question: Were they protecting him for his sake or for their own?

Time passed as he sat in the chair, thinking back, reliving all of it from Jillian's birth, on through his every devasting mistake, to this moment and beyond. He stared out the window, not seeing the news vans, the reporters waiting for an appearance by him, a sound bite from him. He hugged the duffel bag and rocked from side to side, coming to the only conclusion that made sense to him.

Then he checked his watch, and waited.

KATE STARED AT the fax, a chill running from the top of her head down her entire body. Her brain picked out key words: burning deaths, mother, stepfather, drinking, drugs, foster care, juvenile records, history of abuse.

“What's wrong with you?” Angie asked.

“Nothing,” Kate said automatically, tearing her gaze from the article. “I just felt a little dizzy for a minute there.”

“I thought maybe you were in the Zone.” She smiled like a pixie. “Wouldn't that be funny?”

“I don't know. What's the Zone like?”

The smile vanished. “It's dark and empty and it swallows you whole and you feel like you'll never get out, and no one will ever come to get you,” she said, her eyes bleak again. Not empty but bleak, afraid, full of pain—which meant there was still something in her to save. Whatever had happened to her in a childhood that culminated with the suspicious deaths of her parents, some scrap of humanity had survived. And it had survived the last days in “the Devil's basement,” wherever that was.

“But sometimes it's a safe place too,” she said softly, staring at the blood that ran in rivulets all over her left hand, back and front and around her wrist. “I can hide there . . . if I dare.”

“Angie? Will you let me get a cold cloth for your hand?” Kate asked.

“Don't you like to see my blood? I do.”

“I'd rather not see it dripping on my carpet,” Kate said with a hint of her usual wry tone, more to spark some fire in Angie than out of any real concern for the rug.

Angie stared at her palm for a moment, then raised it to her face and wiped the blood down her cheek in a loving caress.

Kate eased away from the desk and backed toward the door.

The girl looked up at her. “Are you going to leave me?”

“No, honey, I'm not going to leave you. I'm just going to get that wet cloth.” And call 911, Kate thought, moving another step toward the door, afraid now to leave the girl for fear of what she might do to herself.

The doorbell rang as she stepped into the hall, and she froze for a second. A face appeared at one of the sidelights, a round head above a puffed-up down jacket, trying to peer in through the sheer curtain. Rob.

“Kate, I know you're home,” he said, petulant, knocking, his face still pressed to the window. “I can see you standing there.”

“What are you doing here?” Kate asked in a harsh whisper, pulling the door open.

“I heard from the office you weren't going in. We need to talk about this—”

“You can't pick up a telephone?” she started, then caught herself and waved off the argument. “This isn't the time—”

Rob looked stubborn. He moved a little closer. “Kate, we need to talk.”

Kate clamped her teeth against a sigh of exasperation. “Could you lower your voice?”

“Why? Is it a neighborhood secret you're trying to avoid me?”

“Don't be an ass. I'm not avoiding you. I've got a situation here. Angie's shown up and she's in a very fragile mental state.”

His little pig eyes rounded. “She's here? What is she doing here? Have you called the police?”

“Not yet. I don't want to make things worse. She's got a knife and she's willing to use it—on herself.”

“My God. And you haven't taken it away from her, Ms. Superwoman?” he said sarcastically as he pushed past her into the hall.

“I'd rather keep all my appendages attached, thanks.”

“Has she hurt herself?”

“So far, it's just surface cuts, but one will need stitches.”

“Where is she?”

Kate motioned to the den. “Maybe you can distract her while I call 911.”

“Has she told you where she's been? Who took her?”

“Not exactly.”

“If she goes to a hospital, she'll clam up out of resentment. It could be hours or days before we get the information out of her,” he said in an urgent tone. “The police have made an arrest. The press conference is starting soon. If we can get her to tell us what happened, we can call Sabin before it's over.”

Kate crossed her arms and considered. She could see Angie still sitting on the couch, drawing patterns with her fingertip on the palm of her bloody hand. If paramedics came and hauled her away, she would react badly, that was a sure bet. On the other hand, what would they be doing to her? Trying to drag what they wanted out of her while she sat bleeding and vulnerable.

Trying to catch a killer.

She heaved a sigh. “All right. We try, but if she gets serious with that knife, I'm calling.”

Rob squinted at her. The toothache smile. “I know it pains you, Kate, but sometimes I am right. You'll see this is one of those times. I know exactly what I'm doing.”

“WHAT'S HE DOING here?” Angie blurted out the words as if they gave her a bad taste in her mouth.

Rob gave her the toothache smile too. “I'm just here to help, Angie,” he said, sitting back against the desk.

She gave him a long, hard stare. “I doubt it.”

“It looks like you've had a little trouble since we saw you last. Can you tell us about that?”

“You want to hear about it?” she asked, eyes narrowed, her hoarse voice sounding almost seductive. She raised her hand and slowly licked the blood from her palm again, her gaze locked on his. “You want to know who did this to me? Or do you just want to hear about the sex?”

“Whatever you want to tell us about, Angie,” he said evenly. “It's important for you to talk about it. We're here to listen.”

“I'm sure you are. You like to hear about other people's pain and suffering. You're a sick little fuck, aren't you?”

A muscle ticked in Rob's cheek. He held on to his excuse for a smile, but it looked more like he was biting a bullet.

“You're trying my patience, Angie,” he said tightly. “I'm sure that's not what you really want to do. Is it?”

The girl looked away toward the fire for so long that Kate thought she would never speak again. Maybe she'd gone to the Zone she'd talked about. She held the utility knife in her right hand, pressing the fingertips against the blade.

“Angie,” Kate said, moving behind the couch, casually picking up the chenille throw from the back of it as she went. “We're trying to help you.”

She sat on the arm of the unoccupied end, holding the blanket loosely in her lap.

Tears gleamed in Angie's eyes and she shook her head. “No, you're not. I wanted you to, but you're not. You just want what I can tell you.” Her swollen mouth twisted into a bitter smile. “The funny thing is, you think you're getting what you want, but you are so wrong.”

“Tell us what happened that night at the Phoenix,” Rob prompted, trying to draw her attention back to him. “Kate dropped you off. You went upstairs to take a shower . . . Did someone interrupt you?”

Angie stared at him, slowly scratching the tip of the blade along her thigh over and over.

“Who came to take you, Angie?” Rob pressed.

“No,” she said.

“Who came to take you?” he asked again, enunciating with emphasis.

“No,” she said, glaring at him. “I won't do it.”

The blade of the knife bit deeper. Sweat glistened on her pale face in the firelight. The denim shredded. Blood bloomed bright red in the tears.

Kate felt ill at the sight. “Rob, stop it.”

“She needs to do this, Kate,” he said. “Angie, who came to take you?”

“No.” Tears streaked down Angie's battered face. “You can't make me.”

“Let her alone.” Kate moved off her perch. Christ, she had to do something before the girl cut herself to ribbons.

Rob's stare was locked on Angie. “Tell us, Angie. No more games.”

Angie glared at him, shaking visibly now.

“Where did he take you? What did he do to you?”

“Fuck you!” she spat out. “I'm not playing your game.”

“Yes, you are, Angie,” he said, his voice growing darker. “You will. You don't have a choice.”

“Fuck you! I hate you!”

Shrieking, she came up off the couch, arm raised, knife blade flashing.

Kate moved fast, flinging the chenille throw to cover the knife and diving into Angie from the side almost simultaneously. The girl howled as they crashed to the floor, knocking into the coffee table and scattering the victimology reports.

Kate held her down as she struggled, the first wave of relief washing through her. Rob picked up the knife, closed the blade, and put it in his pocket.

Angie was sobbing. Kate moved onto her knees and pulled the girl into her arms to hold her.

“It's all right, Angie,” she whispered. “You're safe now.”

Angie pushed free, staring at her, incredulous and furious. “You stupid bitch,” she rasped. “Now you're dead.”