Ashes to Ashes

35

CHAPTER

KATE STEPPED BACK from Angie, not trying to decipher what the girl had said. She was breathing hard, and she'd cracked her elbow on the coffee table on the fall to the floor. She rubbed it now as she tried to get her thoughts clear. Angie sat on her knees, keening like a banshee, hitting herself in the head with her bloody hands over and over again. Blood soaked the thighs of her jeans and oozed out through the slits she had cut with the knife.

“My God,” Kate murmured, shaken by the sight. She backed into the desk, turned to the phone.

Rob stood three feet away, staring at the girl with a peculiar kind of interest, as if he were a scientist watching a specimen.

“Talk to us, Angie,” he said softly. “Tell us what you're feeling.”

“Jesus Christ, Rob,” Kate snapped as she picked up the receiver. “Leave her alone! Go in the kitchen and get some wet towels.”

He went instead to Angie, pulled a six-inch black leather sap from his coat pocket, and struck her across the back. The girl screamed and fell over sideways, arching her back as if to try to escape the pain.

Kate stood stunned, staring at her boss with her mouth hanging open. “W-what . . . ?” she began, then swallowed and started again, her pulse racing. “What the hell is wrong with you?” she asked, breathless with astonishment.

Rob Marshall turned his gaze on her with undisguised hate. His eyes nearly glowed with it. The stare ran through Kate like a sword. She could feel the contempt roll off him in hot waves, could smell it rising, sour and vile from his pores. She stood there, time elongating, instincts coming alive even as she realized her phone was dead.

“You have no respect for me, Kate, you fucking cunt,” he said in a low, growling voice.

The words and the hatred behind them hit her like a fist, stunning her for a moment, then shaking her as the pieces fell into place.

“Who choked you, Angie? Did you know this guy?”

“Sure . . . So do you . . .”

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

“You stupid bitch. Now you're dead.”

Rob Marshall? No. The idea seemed almost laughable. Almost. Except that the phone had been working before he showed up, and he was standing before her with a weapon in his hand.

She put the receiver down.

“I've had it with you,” he said bitterly. “Picking, picking, picking. Bitching, bitching, bitching. Belittling me. Looking down your nose at me.”

He stood on the victimology reports that had scattered on the floor. Everyone is a victim of something. She'd had that thought half a dozen times that morning when she'd been going over the reports, but she hadn't examined it closely enough.

Lila White had been a victim of an assault.

Fawn Pierce had been a victim of rape.

Melanie Hessler, another rape victim.

At some time or other they had all dealt with victim/witness services.

The only one who didn't fit was Jillian Bondurant.

“But you're an advocate for victims, for God's sake,” she murmured.

An advocate who, because of his position, listened to account after account of people—largely women—being victimized, brutalized, beaten, raped, degraded. . . .

How many times had he made her sit through the replaying of Melanie Hessler's interview tapes? Rob listening intently, running the tape back, replaying pieces over and over.

In her mind she was suddenly in Kovac's car at the Hessler crime scene, listening to the microcassette the killer had dropped. Melanie Hessler begging for her life, screaming in agony, begging for death.

She thought of Rob going to look at the charred body, coming back agitated, seemingly upset. But what she had mistaken for distress had in fact been excitement.

Oh, my God.

Bile rose up the back of her throat as every rotten thing she'd ever said to him scrolled through her memory.

Oh, God, I'm dead.

“I'm sorry,” she said, options racing through her mind. The front door was just ten feet down the hall.

Disgust crossed Rob's face in a spasm. He squeezed his eyes nearly shut, looking as if he'd just caught wind of an open sewer. “No, you're not. You're not sorry about the way you've treated me. You're sorry I'm going to kill you for it.”

“Angie, run!” Kate shouted. She grabbed the fax machine off the desk, jerking the power cord out the back, and flung the machine at Rob. It hit him in the chest and knocked him off balance.

She bolted for the door, slipping on one of the victimology reports—a mistake that cost her a precious fraction of a second. Rob grabbed at her, caught hold of a coat sleeve with one hand, and swung wildly with the sap.

Even through the thick wool of her coat collar, Kate felt the weight of it as it struck her shoulder. Heavy, deadly, serious. If he caught her in the head, she would go down like a rock.

She shied sideways, eluding his grasp, then used his own momentum to shove him into the hall. Grabbing his left arm and twisting it up behind him as he came past, she ran him into the hall table and bolted away before the crash was over, running for the front door that suddenly seemed a mile away.

Rob let out a roar and tackled her from behind. They hit the floor hard, Kate crying out as her right arm twisted unnaturally beneath her and she felt the sickening tear of muscles in her shoulder.

Pain swept through her like a fire. She ignored it as best she could as she tried to kick free and scramble to the door. Rob wrapped a fist in her hair and jerked her head back, hitting her with his fist on the right side of her head. Her vision blurred, her ear rang like a bell and burned like a son of a bitch. Knife-sharp pain shot out across her face and down her jaw.

“You bitch! You bitch!” he screamed over and over.

And then his hands were around her throat and he was choking her, and his screams faded from her head. She fought automatically, frantically, clawing at his hands, but his fingers were short and thick and strong.

She couldn't breathe, felt like her eyes were going to burst, felt like her brain was swelling.

With the last bit of sense she could grab, Kate forced herself to go limp. Rob continued to squeeze for seconds that seemed like an eternity, then slammed her head down on the floor. She knew he was ranting but couldn't make out the words as the blood roared back up to her brain. She tried not to suck in the great gulps of oxygen she wanted and needed so desperately. She tried not to let her mind stall out. She had to keep thinking—and not of the crime scene she had visited, not of the charred body of her client, not of the autopsy photos of four women this man had tortured and mutilated.

“You think I can't do anything right!” Rob raved, pushing himself up off her. “You think I'm an idiot! You think you're better than everyone and I'm just a nothing!”

Not able to see him, Kate inched her left hand toward her coat pocket.

“You're such a fucking bitch!” he screamed, and kicked her, too immersed in his ranting to hear her grunt of pain as his boot connected with her hip.

Kate ground her teeth together and concentrated on moving the hand, half an inch at a time, into her coat pocket.

“You don't know me,” Rob declared. He grabbed something from her hall table and threw it. Whatever it was, it crashed somewhere in the vicinity of the kitchen. “You don't know anything about me, about my True Self.”

And she would never have suspected. God in heaven, she'd worked beside this man for a year and a half. Never once would she have thought he was capable of this. Never once had she questioned his motives for choosing his profession. On the contrary, his being an advocate for victims—so ready to listen to them, so ready to spend time with them—had been his one redeeming quality. Or so she had believed.

“You think I'm nobody,” he yelled. “I AM SOMEBODY! I AM EVIL'S ANGEL! I AM THE FUCKING CREMATOR! Now what do you think of me, Ms. Bitch?”

He crouched down beside her and rolled her onto her back. Kate kept her eyes nearly shut, barely seeing more than a blur of colors between her lashes. Her hand was in her pocket, fingers sliding around the shaft of the metal nail file.

“I saved you for last,” he said. “You're going to beg me to kill you. And I'm going to love doing it.”