Ashes to Ashes

37

CHAPTER

ROB CAUGHT KATE by the hair and began to pull her up. Kate's fingers closed around the metal nail file in her pocket. She waited. This might be the best weapon she would get her hands on. But she had to use it accurately, and she had to use it at the perfect moment. Strategies ran through her head like rats in a maze, each desperate for a way out.

Rob slapped her face, and the taste of blood bloomed in her mouth like a rose.

“I know you're not dead. You keep underestimating me, Kate,” he said. “Even now you taunt me. That's very stupid.”

Kate hung her head, curling her legs beneath her. He wanted her frightened. He wanted to see it in her eyes. He wanted to smell it on her skin. He wanted to hear it in her voice. That was his thing. That was what he soaked up listening to the tapes of victims—his own victims and the victims of others. It sickened her to think how many victims had poured their hearts out to him, him feeding his sick compulsions on their suffering and their fear.

Now he wanted her afraid, and he wanted her submissive. He wanted her sorry for every time she'd ever mouthed off to him, for every time she'd defied him. And if she gave him what he wanted, his sense of victory would only further fuel his cruelty.

“I will be your master today, Kate,” he said dramatically.

Kate raised her head and gave him a long, level, venomous stare, screwing up her courage as she sucked at the cut in her mouth. He would make her pay for this, but it seemed the way to go.

Very deliberately, she spit the blood in his face. “The hell you will, you miserable little shit.”

Instantly furious, he swung at her with the sap. Kate ducked the punch and launched herself upward, bringing her right elbow up under his chin, knocking his teeth together. She pulled the nail file and stabbed it into his neck to the hilt just above his collarbone.

Rob screamed and grabbed at the file, falling back, crashing into the hall table. Kate ran for the kitchen.

If she could just get out of the house, get to the street. Surely he would have disabled her car somehow, or blocked it in. To get help, she had to get to the street.

She dashed through the dining room, knocking chairs over as she ran past. Rob came behind her, grunting as he hit something, swearing, spitting the words out between his teeth like bullets.

He couldn't outrun her on his stubby legs. He seemed not to have a gun. Through the kitchen and she was home free. She'd run to the neighbor across the street. The graphic designer who had his office in his attic. He was always home.

She burst into the kitchen, faltered, then pulled up, her heart plummeting.

Angie stood just inside the back door, tears streaming down her face, a butcher's knife in her hand—pointed directly at Kate's chest.

“I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry,” she sobbed, shaking badly.

Suddenly, the conversation that had taken place between Angie and Rob in the den took on a whole new dimension. Pieces of the truth began to click into place. The picture they made was distorted and surreal.

If Rob was the Cremator, then it was Rob Angie had seen in the park. Yet the man in the sketch Oscar had drawn at her instruction looked no more like Rob Marshall than he looked like Ted Sabin. She had sat across from him in the interview room, giving no indication . . .

In the next second Rob Marshall was through the door behind her and six ounces of steel packed in sand and bound in leather connected with the back of her skull. Her legs folded beneath her and she dropped to her knees on the kitchen floor, her last sight: Angie DiMarco.

This is why I don't do kids. You never know what they're thinking.

Then everything went dark.

THE TRAVEL MAGAZINES were still scattered on Michele Fine's coffee table with pages folded and destinations circled with notations in the margins. Get a tan! Too $$$. Nightlife!

The murderer as a tourist, Quinn thought, turning the pages.

When the police checked with the airlines, they might find she had booked flights to one or more of those locations. If they were very lucky, they would also find matching flights booked in the name of her partner. Whoever he was.

With the amount of blood at the scene in the sculpture garden, it seemed highly unlikely Fine had taken herself out of the park. Gil Vanlees had been in custody. Both Fine and the money Peter Bondurant had brought to the scene and subsequently walked away from were gone.

The cops swarmed over the apartment like ants, invading every cupboard, crack, and crevice, looking for anything that might give them a clue as to who Fine's partner in murder was. A scribbled note, a doodled phone number, an envelope, a photograph, something, anything. Adler and Yurek were canvassing the neighbors for information. Did they know her? Had they seen her? What about a boyfriend?

The main living areas of the apartment looked exactly as they had the day before. Same dust, same filthy ashtray. Tippen found a crack pipe in an end table drawer.

Quinn went down the hall, glancing into a bathroom worthy of a speedtrap gas station, and on to Michele Fine's bedroom. The bed was unmade. Clothes lay strewn around the room like outlines where dead bodies had fallen. Just as in the rest of the apartment, there were no personal touches, nothing decorative—except in the window that faced south and the back side of another building.

“Look at the sun catchers,” Liska said, moving across the room.

They hung from hooks on little suction cups stuck to the window. Hoops about three inches in diameter, each holding its own miniature work of art. The light coming through them gave the colors a sense of life. The air from a register above the window made them quiver against the glass like butterfly wings, and fluttered the decorations that were attached to each—a piece of ribbon, a pearl button on a string, a dangling earring, a finely braided lock of hair . . .

Liska's face dropped as she stopped beside Quinn, the realization hitting her.

Lila White's calla lily. Fawn Pierce's shamrock. A mouth with a tongue sticking out. A heart with the word “Daddy.” There were half a dozen.

Tattoos.

The tattoos that had been cut from the bodies of the Cremator's victims. Stretched tight in little craft hoops, drying in the sun. Decorated with mementos of the women they had been cut from. Souvenirs of torture and murder.