Ashes to Ashes

39

CHAPTER

“I NEVER LIKED him,” Yvonne Vetter said to the uniformed officer who stood guard outside Rob Marshall's garage door. She was huddled into a lumpy wool coat that made her look misshapen. Her round, sour face squinted up at him from beneath an incongruously jaunty red beret. “I called your hotline several times. I believe he cannibalized my Bitsy.”

“Your what, ma'am?”

“My Bitsy. My sweet little dog!”

“Wouldn't that be animalized?” Tippen speculated.

Liska cuffed him one on the arm.

The task force would get the first look around Rob's chamber of horrors before the collection of evidence began. The videographer followed right behind them. Even as they entered the house, the news crews were pulling up to the curbs on both sides of the street.

It was a nice house on a quiet street in a quiet neighborhood. An extra-large tree-studded lot near one of the most popular lakes in the Cities. A beautifully finished basement. Realtors would have been drooling over the opportunity to sell it if not for the fact Rob Marshall had tortured and murdered at least four women there.

They started in the basement, wandering through a media room equipped with several televisions, VCRs, stereo equipment, a bookcase lined with video- and audiotapes.

Tippen turned to the videographer. “Don't shoot the stereo equipment yet. I really need a new tuner and tape deck.”

The videographer immediately turned the camera on the recording equipment.

Tippen rolled his eyes. “It was a joke. You technogeeks have no sense of humor.”

The camera guy turned his lens on Tippen's ass as he walked away.

A headless mannequin stood in one corner of the room decked out in a skimpy see-through black lace bra and a purple spandex miniskirt.

“Hey, Tinks, you could pick up some new outfits,” Tippen called, eyeballing a sticky-looking residue on the shoulders of the mannequin. Possibly blood mixed with some other, clearer fluid.

Liska continued down the hall, checking out a utility room, moving on. Her boys would have loved this house. They talked endlessly about getting a house like their friend Mark had, with a cool rec room in the basement—where they could escape Mom's scrutiny—with a pool table and a big-screen TV.

There was a pool table here in the room at the end of the hall. It was draped with bloodstained white plastic, and there was a body on it. The smell of blood, urine, and excrement hung thick in the air. The stench of violent death.

“Tippen!” Liska hollered, bolting for the table.

Michele Fine lay twisted at an odd angle on her back, staring up at the light glaring in her face. She didn't blink. Her eyes had the flat look of a corpse's. Her mouth hung open, drool crusted white in a trail down her chin. Her lips moved ever so slightly.

Liska bent close, laying two fingers on the side of Fine's neck to feel for a pulse, unable to detect one.

“. . . elp . . . me . . . elp . . . me . . .” Fragments of words on the thinnest of breaths.

Tippen jogged in and stopped cold. “Shit.”

“Get an ambulance,” Liska ordered. “She may just live to tell the tale.”