Ashes to Ashes

38

CHAPTER

HIS TRIUMPH IS at hand. His crowning glory. His finale—for now, for this place. He has arranged the Bitch on the table to his satisfaction and bound her hands and feet to the table legs with plastic twine he has pilfered from the mailroom at the office. A length of it is wrapped around the Bitch's throat with long free ends trailing for him to wrap around his fists. For mood lighting he has brought candles down to the basement from other parts of the house. He finds the flames very sensual, exciting, erotic. That excitement is heightened by the smell of gasoline heavy in the air.

He stands back and surveys the tableau. The Bitch under his absolute control. She is still clothed because he wants her conscious for her degradation. He wants her to feel every second of her humiliation. He wants to capture it all on tape.

He loads the microcassette recorder with a fresh tape and sets it on a black vinyl barstool with a ripped seat. He doesn't worry about fingerprints. The world will shortly discover the Cremator's “true” identity.

He sees no reason not to carry through with the plan. Michele might be out of the picture, but he still has Angie. If she passes her test, he might take her with him. If she fails, he will kill her. She isn't Michele—his perfect complement. Michele, who would do anything he asked if she thought compliance would make him love her. Michele, who had followed his lead in the torture games, who had encouraged him to burn the bodies, and reveled in her tattoo arts and crafts.

He misses her as much as he can miss anyone. With a vague detachment. Mrs. Vetter will miss her horrid little dog more.

Angie watches him as he unties the leather roll that holds all his favorite tools and spreads it out on the table. She looks like something from a teenage slasher movie. Her clothes are disheveled, the thighs of her jeans shredded and blood-soaked. She still holds the butcher knife from the kitchen and surreptitiously pricks the end of her thumb with the point of it and watches the blood bead. Crazy little bitch.

He looks at the choke marks on her throat, thinks about all the ways she has defied him during the execution of his Great Plan. Making him look stupid during her first interview, refusing to give the name of the bar where he'd picked her up that night to lend credibility to her story. Refusing to describe the Cremator to the sketch artist the way he had instructed her to. He had spent considerable time creating the image of a phantom killer in his mind. The girl had willfully given a description so vague it might fit half the men in the Twin Cities—including the hapless Vanlees. The idea of Vanlees getting credit as the Cremator makes him furious. And, even after the beatings he'd given her since Wednesday, she had refused him his perfect moment of revelation in Kate's living room.

“Who came to take you, Angie?”

“No.”

“Who came to take you?”

“No. I won't do it.”

“Angie, who came to take you?”

“No. You can't make me.”

She had been coached to say “Evil's Angel.” No matter that he hadn't taken her, that Michele had been the one who'd saved the stupid little slut from slicing herself to ribbons in the shower, who'd cleaned up the mess and slipped the two of them out the back door of the house. The girl had her instructions and she defied them openly.

He decides he will kill her after all, despite her cooperation in the kitchen. She is too unpredictable.

He will kill her here. After the Bitch is dead. He pictures himself in a frenzy, wild with the euphoria of killing the Bitch. He sees himself throwing the girl onto the table, on top of the bloody, mutilated body, tying her there, fucking her, choking her, stabbing her in the face over and over and over and over. Punishing her exactly as he plans to punish the Bitch.

He will kill them both, then burn them together, here, and burn the house as well. He has already set the stage for the fire, pouring the accelerant—gas from a can he put in the Bitch's garage himself the night he shit on the floor.

The fantasy of the murders he is about to commit excites him as fantasies always have—intellectually, sexually, fundamentally. The pattern of the mind of his breed: fantasy, violent fantasy; then facilitators that trigger action: murder. The natural cycle of his life—and his victims' death.

Decision made, he turns his thoughts to the matter at hand: Kate Conlan.

CONSCIOUSNESS RETURNED FOR Kate in fits and starts, like a television with bad reception. She could hear but not see. Then she had some blurred vision, but nothing more than a horrific ringing in her ears. The only clear, constant signal was pain hammering at the back of her skull. She felt sick with it. She couldn't seem to move her arms or legs and wondered if Rob had broken her neck or severed her spinal cord. Then she realized she could still feel her hands, and that they hurt like hell.

Tied.

The ceiling tile, the smell of dust, the vague sense of dampness. The basement. She was tied spread-eagle on the old Ping-Pong table in her own basement.

Another scent—out of place—came to her, thick, oily, and bitter. Lighter fluid.

Oh, sweet Jesus.

She looked at Rob Marshall standing at the foot of the table, staring at her. Rob Marshall, a serial killer. The incongruity made her want to believe she was just having a nightmare, but she knew better. She'd seen too much when she was an agent. The stories were stacked up in her memory like files in a cabinet. The NASA engineer who had kidnapped hitchhikers and drained their blood to drink it. The electronics technician, a married father of two, who kept chosen body parts of his victims in his meat freezer in his garage. The young Republican law student who volunteered at a suicide hotline and turned out to be Ted Bundy.

Add to the stack the victim advocate who chose his own victims from the department's client list. She felt like a fool for not having seen it, even though she knew a killer as sophisticated as Smokey Joe was one of nature's perfect chameleons. Even now she didn't want to think of Rob Marshall as being that clever.

He had taken his coat off, revealing a gray sweater soaked at the throat with blood from where she'd stabbed him with the nail file. An inch in the right direction and she would have hit his jugular.

“Did I miss anything?” she asked, her voice rusty from the choking he'd given her.

She could see the surprise in his face, the confusion. Score one for the victim.

“Still with the smart mouth,” he said. “You don't learn, bitch.”

“Why should I? What will you do, Rob? Torture and kill me?” She tried desperately to keep the fear out of her voice. She felt as if it had her by the throat, then remembered with another jolt of adrenaline the ligature marks on the throats of his victims. “You'll do that either way. I might as well have the satisfaction of calling you a dickless loser to your face.”

Standing to one side of the table, backlit by candles, butcher knife in hand, Angie sucked in a breath and made a pitious sound in her throat. She clutched the knife to her as if it were a treasured toy to comfort herself.

Rob's face hardened. He pulled a penknife from his pocket and jabbed it, all the way to the handle, into the bottom of Kate's right foot, and she learned very quickly and painfully the price he was going to make her pay for the strategy she'd chosen.

Kate cried out and her whole body convulsed against the restraints that bit deep into the skin of her wrists and ankles. When she fell back, the bindings seemed to have stretched to give her slightly more mobility.

She pulled her mind back together by focusing on Angie, thinking of the look she'd seen in the girl's eyes earlier, when she'd been struck by the thought that Angie's eyes weren't empty, that as long as there was some light in the darkness, there was still hope. She thought of the way the girl had started to go after Rob with the utility knife.

“Angie, get out!” she rasped. “Save yourself!”

The girl flinched and glanced nervously at Rob.

“She'll stay,” he snapped, stabbing the knife into her foot again, winning another cry from Kate. “She's mine,” he said, eyes glowing with the intoxication he achieved from inflicting pain.

“I don't think so.” Kate sucked in a sharp breath. “She's not stupid.”

“No, you're the stupid one,” he said, backing away a step. He pulled a long taper from the candelabrum he'd taken from her dining room and set on the clothes drier.

“Because I know the kind of pathetic, warped excuse for a human being you are?”

“How pathetic am I now, bitch?” he demanded, dragging the flame of the candle from toe to toe on her right foot.

Instinctively, Kate kicked at the source of her torment, knocking the candle from his hand. Rob pounced on it, swearing, disappearing from view at the end of the table.

“Stupid bitch!” he cursed frantically. “Stupid fucking bitch!”

The scent of the gasoline pressed over Kate's nose and mouth, and she shuddered at the notion of burning alive. The terror was like a fist in the base of her throat. The pain where Rob had already burned her was like a live thing, as if her foot had ignited and now the flames would shoot up her leg.

“What's the matter, Rob?” she asked, fighting the need to cry. “I thought you liked fire. Are you afraid of it?”

He scrambled to his feet, glaring at her. “I am the Cremator!” he shouted, the candle clutched in his fist. She could see his increasing agitation in his respiration rate, in the quick jerkiness of his movements. This wasn't going the way it had in his fantasies.

“I am superior!” he shouted, wild-eyed. “I am Evil's Angel! I hold your life in my hands! I am your god!”

Kate channeled her pain into her anger. “You're a leech. You're a parasite. You're nothing.”

She was probably goading him into stabbing her forty-seven times, cutting her larynx out and running it down the garbage disposal. Then she thought of the photographs of his other victims, of the tape of Melanie Hessler, of the hours of torture, rape, repeated strangulation.

She'd take her chances. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

“You make me sick, you spineless little shit.”

That was the truth. It made her want to vomit to think she'd worked beside him day in and day out, and every time his mind wandered it wandered to fantasies of abuse and brutality and murder—the very things they tried to help their clients live through and get past.

He paced at the foot of the table, muttering under his breath, as if he might be speaking to voices in his head, though Kate thought it unlikely he heard any. Rob Marshall wasn't psychotic. He was perfectly aware of everything he did. His actions were a conscious choice—though, if he were caught, he would probably try to convince the authorities otherwise.

“You can't get it up without the domination, can you?” Kate pressed on. “What woman would have you if you didn't tie her down?”

“Shut up!” he screamed. “Shut the fuck up!”

He threw the candle at her, missing her head by three feet. He rushed up alongside her, grabbed a boning knife off the table beside her and jammed the point of it against her larynx. Kate swallowed reflexively, felt the tip of the steel bite into her skin.

“I'll cut it out!” he shouted in her face. “I'll fucking cut it out! I'm so sick of your bitching! I'm so sick of your voice!”

Kate closed her eyes and tried not to swallow again, holding herself rigid as he started to push the small, sharp blade into her throat. Terror tore through her. Instinct told her to jerk away. Logic told her not to move. And then the pressure stopped, eased away.

Rob stared at the tape recorder he'd left on the old barstool. He may not have wanted to hear her criticism of him, but he wanted to listen to her screams as he had listened to the screams and cries and pleading of all his victims. In fact, with her, he probably wanted it more. If he cut her voice out, he couldn't get that. If he couldn't get that, the act of killing her lost its meaning.

“You want to hear it, don't you, Rob?” she asked. “You want to be able to listen later and hear the exact moment I became frightened of you and gave you control. You don't want to give that up, do you?”

He picked up the tape recorder and held it close to her mouth. He put down the knife, picked up a pliers, and grabbed hold of the tip of her breast, squeezing brutally. Even through the buffer of her sweater and bra, the bite was sharp, then excruciating, making her scream. When he finally let go, he stepped back with a vicious smile and held up the cassette recorder.

“There,” he said. “I've got it.”

It seemed an eternity passed before the white noise faded from Kate's head. She was breathing as if she'd run the four-hundred-yard dash, sweating, shaking. The haze cleared from her vision and she was looking at Angie, the girl still standing in the same spot, clutching the knife to her. Kate wondered if she'd gone catatonic. Angie was her only hope, the weakest link in Rob's scenario. She needed the girl with her, lucid and able to act.

“Angie,” Kate croaked. “He doesn't own you. You can fight him. You've been fighting him, haven't you?” She thought of the scene that had played out upstairs—Rob wanting Angie to decribe what he'd done to her after taking her from the Phoenix House, Angie refusing, defying him, taunting him. She'd done it before—in the offices.

Rob's face reddened. “Quit talking to her!”

“Afraid she might turn on you, Rob?” Kate asked with not nearly the attitude she'd had five minutes earlier.

“Shut up. She's mine. And you're mine too, bitch!”

He lunged at her, grabbed hold of the neck of her sweater and tore at it with his hands, trying without success to rip it. Swearing, sputtering, flustered, embarrassed, he fumbled for another knife among the array of tools he had so carefully laid out on the table.

“You don't own her any more than you own me,” Kate said, glaring at him, straining against the bonds. “And you will never, ever own me, you toad.”

“Shut up!” he screamed again. He turned and slapped her across the mouth with the back of his hand. “Shut up! Shut up! You fucking bitch!”

The knives clattered together and he came away with a big one. Kate sucked in what she imagined might be her last breath and held it. Rob grabbed the neck of her sweater again and cut through it with the knife, violently rending the fabric with big, jagged tears. The tip of the knife bit into her breast, skipped along her belly, nicked the point of her hip.

“I'll show you! I'll show you! Angie!” he barked, swinging toward the girl. “Come here! Come here, now!”

He didn't wait. He rushed around the end of the table, grabbed the girl by the arm, and dragged her back to Kate.

“Do it!” he said in her ear. “For Michele. You want to do this for Michele. You want Michele to love you, don't you, Angie?”

Michele? Wild card, Kate thought, a fresh wave of terror flashing through her. Who the hell was Michele, and what did she mean to Angie? How could she fight an enemy she'd never seen?

Tears ran down Angie's face. Her lower lip was quivering. She clutched the butcher knife with both trembling hands.

“Don't do it, Angie,” Kate said, her voice vibrating with fear. “Don't let him use you this way.”

She couldn't know if the girl even heard her. She thought of what Angie had told her about the Zone, and wondered if she was going into that place now, to escape this nightmare. And what then? Would she act on autopilot? Was the Zone a dissociative state? Had it allowed her to participate in Rob's kills before?

She jerked again at the restraints, stretching the plastic another fraction of an inch.

“Do it!” Rob shouted against the side of Angie's face. “Do it, you stupid cunt! Do it for your sister. Do it for Michele. You want Michele to love you.”

Sister. The headline went through Kate's mind like a comet: Sisters Exonerated in Burning Death of Parents.

Pig eyes popping from his ugly round head, Rob screamed with frustration and raised the knife he held. “Do it!!”

Light hit a blinding starburst off the blade as it plunged through the air and into the hollow of Kate's shoulder just as she managed to twist her body a crucial few inches. The tip of the blade hit bone and glanced off, and the pain was like lightning striking her.

“Do it!” Rob screamed at Angie, striking her in the back of the head with the handle of the bloody knife. “You worthless whore!”

“No!” the girl cried.

“Do it!!”

Sobbing, Angie brought the knife up.

“WE GOT A hit on Fine's prints in Wisconsin,” Yurek said, stepping into the bedroom doorway.

The crime scene unit was removing the tattoo fetishes from the window, carefully folding tissue paper around each and sliding each into its own small paper sack.

“Her real name is Michele Finlow. She's got a handful of misdemeanors and a sealed juvenile record.”

Kovac arched a brow. “Is skinning people a misdemeanor in Wisconsin?”

“The state that brought us Ed Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer,” Tippen remarked.

“Hey, aren't you from Wisconsin, Tip?” one of the crime scene guys asked.

“Yeah. Menomonie. Wanna come to my house for Thanksgiving?”

Quinn stuck a finger in his free ear and listened to Kate's home number ring unanswered for the third time in twenty minutes. Her machine should have picked up. He disconnected and tried her cell phone. It rang four times, then passed him on to her message service. Her clients called her on the cell phone. Angie DiMarco had the number. Kate wouldn't let it go unanswered. Not as responsible as she felt for Angie.

He rubbed a hand against the fire in his belly.

Mary Moss joined the group. “One of the neighbors down the hall says she sometimes saw Michele with a stubby, balding guy with glasses. She didn't get a name, but she says he drives a black SUV that once rear-ended the car of the guy in 3F.”

“Yes!” Kovac said, pumping one arm. “Smokey Joe, you're toast.”

“Hamill is talking right now with Mr. 3F to get the insurance info.”

“We can bust the Cremator in time for the six o'clock news and still make Patrick's for happy hour,” Kovac said, grinning. “This is turning into my kind of day.”

Hamill hustled into the apartment, dodging crime scene people. “You won't believe this,” he said to the task force at large. “Michele Fine's boyfriend was Rob Marshall.”

“Holy shit.”

Quinn grabbed Kovac by the shoulder and shoved him toward the door. “I have to get to Kate. Give me the keys. I'm driving.”

“DO IT! DO IT!”

Angie let out a long, distorted scream that sounded very far away in her own ears, like a wail coming down a long, long tunnel. The Zone loomed up beside her, a yawning black mouth. And on the other side, the Voice had come to life.

You stupid little slut! Do what I tell you!

“I can't!” she cried.

“DO IT!”

The fear was like a softball in her throat, closing off her air, gagging her, choking her.

No one loves you, crazy little bitch.

“You love me, Michele,” she mewed, not sure if she had spoken the words aloud or if they existed only in her head.

“DO IT!”

DO IT!

She stared down at Kate.

The Zone moved over her. She could feel the hot breath of it. She could fall into it and never come out. She would be safe.

She would be alone. Forever.

“DO IT!”

You know what to do, Angel. Do what you're told, Angel.

Her whole body was shaking.

Coward.

“You can save Michele, Angie. Do this for Michele.”

She looked down at Kate, at the place on her chest where she was supposed to stick the knife. Just as Michele had. She'd seen her sister do it. He had made her watch as they stood on either side of the dead woman, one stabbing and then the other, making their pact, sealing their bond, pledging their love. It had frightened her and made her sick. Michele had laughed at her, then given her to him for sex.

He hurt her. She hated him. Michele loved him. She loved Michele.

Nobody loves you, crazy little bitch.

That was all she'd ever wanted, someone to care about her, someone to keep her from being alone. All she'd ever gotten was use and abuse. Even from Michele, who had kept her from being alone. But Michele loved her. Love and hate. Love and hate. Lovehate, lovehate, lovehate. There was no line between them for her. She loved Michele, wanted to save her. Michele was all she had.

“DO IT! KILL HER! KILL HER!”

She looked down at Kate, straining against the ties, terror in her face.

“Why do you care what happens to me?”

“Because no one else does.”

“I'm sorry,” she whimpered.

“Angie, don't!”

“Stab her. Now!”

The pressure inside her was tremendous. The pressure from outside was more. She felt as if her bones would collapse and the weight of it would crush her, and the Zone would suck up the mess and she would be gone forever.

Maybe that would be just as well. At least then she wouldn't hurt anymore.

“Do it or I let your fucking cunt sister die!” he shouted. “Do it or I'll finish Michele in front of you! DO IT!”

She loved her sister. She could save her sister. She raised the knife.

“NO!”

Kate sucked in a breath and braced herself, never taking her eyes off Angie.

The girl let out an unearthly shriek as she raised the butcher knife with both hands above her head, then twisted her body and plunged the knife into Rob Marshall's neck.

Blood sprayed in a geyser as she jerked the blade out. Blood on the wall, on the bed, on Kate, spraying like a loose fire hose. Rob jerked back, astonished, grabbing at the wound, blood gushing through his fingers.

Angie went on screaming, plunging the knife again, stabbing his hand, stabbing his chest. She followed him as he staggered backward, trying to escape. He tried to call out for help or for mercy and choked on his own blood, the sound gurgling in his throat. His knees buckled, and he fell against the clothes drier, knocking the candelabrum to the floor.

Angie stepped back then and stared at him for a moment, as if she had no idea who he was or how he had come to fall to the floor with the last of his life's blood pumping out of him as he gurgled and gagged. Then she looked at the knife, dripping blood, her hands covered and sticky with it, and slowly she turned toward Kate.

QUINN DROVE WITH no regard for the laws of the road or of physics, driven himself by a growing sense of panic in his gut. Kovac hung on, braced himself, screamed more than once as Quinn swept the Caprice around and between cars.

“If he's smart, he's already blown town,” Kovac said.

“Smart's got nothing to do with it,” Quinn said above the roar of the engine. “He brought Kate on the case as part of his game. He killed Melanie Hessler because she was Kate's client. He left a calling card in Kate's garage the other night. He won't leave town without finishing the thing between them.”

He could see the hall light on as the car skidded to a stop in front of Kate's house. The light glowed through the sheers at the goddamn sidelights she should have known better than to have. Quinn slammed the Caprice into park before it fully stopped, and the transmission made an ominous sound. He was out of the car before it could stop rocking, running for the house as a pair of radio cars screamed up the street. He thundered onto the porch and pounded on the door, tried the handle. Locked.

“Kate! Kate!”

He pressed his face to the glass of one sidelight. The hall table sat askew. Things had tumbled over on it and off it. The rug was cockeyed.

“Kate!”

The shout that came from somewhere in the house went through him like steel. “No!”

Quinn grabbed the mailbox, ripped it off the wall, and smashed out the sidelight just as Kovac ran up onto the porch. Another few seconds and they were in. His eyes went to a smear of blood on the wall near the den.

“Kate!”

Her cry came from somewhere deep in the house. “Angie! NO!”

ANGIE TURNED THE knife in her bloody hands, staring at the blade. She let the tip of it kiss the fragile skin of her wrist.

“Angie, no!” Kate shouted, straining against the ties. “Don't do it! Please don't do it! Come cut me loose. Then we'll get you some help.”

She couldn't see Rob, but knew he lay crumpled on the floor near the drier. She could hear gurgling sounds coming from his throat. He had knocked the candelabrum over as he crashed, and the flames had found some of the lighter fluid he must have poured around while Kate had been unconscious. It ignited with a whoosh.

The flames would follow the trail of fuel in search of more fuel. The basement was crammed with posibilities—boxes of junk her parents had saved and abandoned, stuff she'd been meaning to throw out but hadn't gotten to, the obligatory half-empty cans of paint and other hazardous chemicals.

“Angie. Angie!” Kate said, trying to pull the girl's focus to her. Angie, who stood looking into the face of her own death.

“Michele won't love me,” the girl murmured, looking at the man she had just killed. She sounded disappointed in herself, like a small child who had written on the wall in crayon, then realized there would be a bad consequence.

“Kate!” Quinn's bellow sounded above.

Angie seemed not to hear the shouts or the thunder of big male feet. She pressed the blade of the knife lengthwise against the shadow of a vein in her wrist.

“Kate!”

She tried to shout “In the basement!” but her voice seized up so she barely heard herself. The flames caught hold of a box of clothes destined, oddly enough, for the Phoenix, and leapt with enthusiasm—far too near the table. Kate jerked at her bindings, succeeding only in pulling them even tighter around her wrists and ankles. She was losing the feeling in her hands.

She tried to clear her throat to speak. Smoke rolled thick and black from the boxes.

“Angie, help me. Help me and I'll help you. How's that for a deal?”

The girl stared at the knife.

The smoke detector at the top of the stairs finally blew, and the thunder of feet homed in on it.

Angie pressed the blade a little harder against her wrist. Tiny beads of blood surfaced like little jewels in a bracelet.

“No, Angie, please,” Kate whispered, knowing the girl couldn't have heard her if she'd shouted.

Angie looked at her square in the face, and for the first time since Kate had met her she looked like exactly what she was: a child. A child no one had ever wanted, had ever loved.

“I hurt,” she said.

“Call the fire department!” Quinn shouted at the head of the stairs. “Kate!”

“Joh—” Her voice cracked and she began to cough. The smoke rolled along the ceiling toward the stairwell and the new source of fresh air.

“Kate!”

Quinn led the way down the stairs with a .38 Kovac had lent him, his fear obliterating all known rules of procedure. As he dropped below the cloud of smoke, his focus was instantly on Kate, bound hand and foot on a table, her sweater cut open, blood pooling on her skin. And then his attention went to the girl beside the table: Angie DiMarco with a butcher knife in her hands.

“Angie, drop the knife!” he shouted.

The girl looked up at him, the light in her eyes fading away. “Nobody loves me,” she said, and in one quick, violent motion slashed her wrist to the bone.

“NO!” Kate screamed.

“Jesus!” Quinn charged across the room, leading with the gun.

Angie dropped to her knees as the blood gushed from her arm. The knife fell to the floor. Quinn kicked it aside and dropped to his knees, grabbing the girl's arm with a grip like a C-clamp. Blood pumped between his fingers. Angie sagged against him.

Kate watched with horror, not even acknowledging Kovac as he cut her loose. She rolled off the table onto feet she could no longer feel, and fell in a heap. She had to scramble to Angie on her knees. Her hands were as useless as clubs, swollen and purple, and she couldn't make her fingers move. Still, she wrapped her arms around the girl.

“We have to get out of here!” Quinn shouted.

The fire had begun licking its way up the steps. A uniformed officer fought it down with an extinguisher. But even as he cleared the stairs, the flames were working their way across the basement, following the trail of lighter fluid, pouncing on everything edible in its path.

Quinn and a uniform took Angie up the basement steps and out the back door. Sirens were screaming out on the street, a couple of blocks away yet. He passed the girl off to the uniform and ran back to the house as Kovac came with Kate leaning heavily against him, both of them coughing as thick black smoke rolled up behind them, acrid with the smell of chemicals.

“Kate!”

She fell against him and he scooped her up in his arms.

“I'm going back for Marshall!” Kovac shouted above the roar. The fire had come up through the floor and found the river of gasoline Rob had poured through the house.

“He's dead!” Kate yelled, but Kovac was gone. “Sam!”

One of the uniforms charged in after him.

The sirens blasted out front, fire trucks bulling their way down the narrow street. Quinn negotiated the back steps with Kate in his arms and hustled down the side of the house to the front yard and the boulevard. He lowered her into the backseat of Kovac's car just as an explosion sounded from the bowels of the house and windows on the first floor shattered. Kovac and the uniform staggered away from the back corner of the house and fell to their hands and knees in the snow. Firemen and paramedics rushed toward them and toward the house.

“Are you all right?” Quinn asked, staring into Kate's eyes, his fingers digging into her shoulders.

Kate looked up at her house, flames visible now through the windows of the first floor. Behind Kovac's car, Angie was being loaded into an ambulance. The fear, the panic she had fought to keep at bay during the ordeal, hit her belatedly in a pounding wave.

She turned back to Quinn, shaking. “No,” she whispered as the flood of tears came. And he folded her into his arms and held her.