Ashes to Ashes

40

CHAPTER

“I DIDN'T WANT to help,” Angie said softly.

It didn't sound like her voice. The thought drifted through her drug-fogged brain on a cloud. It sounded like the voice of the little girl inside her, the one she always tried to hide, to protect. She stared at the bandage on her left arm, the desire to pull it off and make the wound bleed lurking at the dark edge of her mind.

“I didn't want to do what he said.”

She waited for the Voice to sneer at her, but it was strangely silent. She waited for the Zone to zoom up on her, but the drugs held it off.

She sat at a table in a room that wasn't supposed to look like part of a hospital. The blue print gown she wore had short sleeves and exposed her thin, scarred arms for all to see. She looked at the scars, one beside another and another, like bars in a prison cell door. Marks she had carved into her own flesh. Marks life had carved into her soul. A constant reminder so she could never forget exactly who and what she was.

“Was Rob Marshall the one who took you to the park that night, Angie?” Kate asked quietly. She sat at the table too, beside Angie with her chair turned so that she was facing the girl. “Was he the john you told me about?”

Angie nodded, still looking down at the scars. “His Great Plan,” she murmured.

She wished the drugs would fog the memories, but the pictures were clear in her head, like watching them on television. Sitting in the truck, knowing the dead woman's body was in the back, knowing that the man at the wheel had killed her, knowing Michele had been a part of that too. She could see them stabbing her over and over, could see the sexual excitement in them growing with every thrust of the knives. Michele had given her to him afterward, and he had taken her again that night in the park, excited because of the dead woman in the back and because of his Great Plan.

“I was supposed to describe someone else.”

“As the killer?” Kate asked.

“Someone he made up. All these details. He made me repeat them over and over and over.”

Angie picked at a loose thread on the edge of her bandage, wishing blood would seep up through the layers of white gauze. The sight would comfort her, make her feel less terrible about sitting beside Kate. She couldn't look her in the face after all that had happened.

“I hate him.”

Present tense, Kate thought. As if she didn't know he was dead, that she had killed him. Maybe she didn't. Maybe her mind would allow her that one consolation.

“I hate him too,” Kate said softly.

Facts about Rob and the Finlow sisters were coming out of Wisconsin and piecing together into a terrible, sordid story America received new episodes of every night on the news. The lurid quality of lover-killers and the fall of a billionaire made for juicy ratings bait. Michele Finlow, who had lingered for ten hours after being found in Rob's basement, had filled in some of the blanks herself. And Angie would supply what fragments her mind would allow.

Daughters of two different men and a mother with a history of drug abuse and assorted domestic misery, Michele and Angie had been in and out of the child welfare system, never finding the care they needed. Children falling through the cracks of a system that was poor at best. Both girls had juvenile records, Michele's being longer and more inclined to violent behavior.

Kate had read the news accounts of the fire that had killed the mother and stepfather. The general consensus of the investigators on the case was that one or both of the girls had started it, but there hadn't been enough evidence to take to court. One witness had recalled seeing Michele calmly standing in the yard while the house burned, listening to the screams of the two people trapped inside. She had, in fact, been standing too near a window, and was burned when the window exploded and the fire rolled outside to consume fresh oxygen. The case had brought Rob Marshall into their lives via the court system. And Rob had brought the girls to Minneapolis.

Love. Or so Michele had called it, though it was doubtful she had any real grasp of the meaning of the word. A man in love didn't leave his partner to die a horrible death alone in a basement while he skipped the country, which was exactly what Rob would have done.

Peter Bondurant's bullet had struck Michele in the back, severing her spinal cord. Rob, who had been watching from a distance, had waited for Bondurant to leave, then picked her up and took her back to his home. Any gunshot wound brought into an ER had to be reported to the police. He hadn't been willing to risk that not even to save the life of this woman who allegedly loved him.

He'd left her there on the table, where they had played out their sick, sadistic fantasies; where they had killed four women. Left her paralyzed, bleeding, in shock, dying. He hadn't even bothered to cover her with a blanket. The payoff money had been recovered from Rob's car.

According to Michele, Rob had fixated on Jillian out of jealousy, but Michele had put him off. Then on that fateful Friday night Jillian had called from a pay phone after the battery in her cell phone had gone dead. She wanted to talk about the fight she'd had with her father. She needed the support of a friend. Her friend had delivered her to Rob Marshall.

“Michele loves him,” Angie said, picking at the bandage. A frown curved her mouth and she added, “More than me.”

But Michele was all she had, her only family, her surrogate mother, and so she had done whatever Michele had asked. Kate wondered what would happen in Angie's mind when she was finally told Michele was dead, that she was alone—the one thing she feared the most.

There was a soft rap at the door, signifying Kate's allotted time as a visitor was up. When she left she would be grilled by the people sitting on the other side of the observation window—Sabin, Lieutenant Fowler, Gary Yurek, and Kovac—back in good graces after scoring news time as a hero at Kate's fire—a photo of him and Quinn carrying her out the back door of her house had graced the cover of both papers in the Cities and made Newsweek. They believed she was here at their request. But she hadn't asked their questions or pressed for the answers. She hadn't come to this locked psychiatric ward to exploit Angie Finlow. She hadn't come as an advocate to see a client. She had come to see someone she had shared an ordeal with. Someone whose life would be forever tied to hers in a way no one else's ever would be.

She reached along the tabletop and touched Angie's hand, trying to keep her in the present, in the moment. Her own hands were still discolored and puffy, the ligature marks on her wrists covered by her own pristine white bandages. Three days had passed since the incident in her house.

“You're not alone, kiddo,” Kate whispered softly. “You can't just save my life and breeze out of it again. I'll be keeping my eye on you. Here's a little reminder of that.”

With the skill of a magician, she slipped the thing from her hand to Angie's. The tiny pottery angel Angie had stolen from her desk, then left behind at the Phoenix.

Angie stared at the statue, a guardian angel in a world where such things did not truly exist—or so she had always believed. The need to believe now was so strong, it terrified her, and she retreated to the shadowed side of her mind to escape the fear. Better to believe in nothing than wait for the inevitable disappointment to drop like an ax.

She closed her hand around the statue and held it like a secret. She closed her eyes and shut her mind down, not even aware of the tears that slipped down her cheeks.

Kate blinked back tears of her own as she rose slowly and carefully. She stroked a hand over Angie's hair, bent, and pressed the softest of kisses to the top of her head.

“I'll be back,” she whispered, then gathered her crutches and hobbled toward the door, muttering to herself. “Guess maybe I'll have to stop saying I don't do kids, after all.”

The idea came with a wave of emotions she simply didn't have the strength to deal with today. Luckily, she would have a lot of tomorrows to work on them.

As she went into the hall, the door to the observation room opened and Sabin, Fowler, and Yurek spilled out, looking frustrated. Kovac followed with a look-at-these-clowns smirk. At the same time, a short, handsome Italian-looking man in a thirty-five-hundred-dollar charcoal suit steamed down the hall toward them with Lucas Brandt and a scowl.

“Have you been speaking with the girl without her counsel present?” he demanded.

Kate gave him the deep-freeze stare.

“You can't proceed with this until her competency has been determined,” Brandt said to Sabin.

“Don't tell me my job.” Sabin's shoulders hunched as if he might bring his fists up. “What are you doing here, Costello?”

“I'm here to represent Angie Finlow at the request of Peter Bondurant.”

Anthony Costello, sleazeball to the rich and famous. Kate almost laughed. Just when she thought nothing could amaze her . . . Peter Bondurant paying for Angie's legal counsel. Retribution for shooting her sister in the back? Good PR for a man who would stand to face charges of his own? Or maybe he simply wanted to make up for the mess his daughter's life had become by helping Angie out of the mess her life had always been. Karma.

“Anything she told you is privileged,” Costello barked at her.

“I'm just here to see a friend,” Kate said, hobbling away to let the men duke it out.

A new act for the media circus.

“Hey, Red!”

She turned and stopped as Kovac came toward her. He looked as if he'd fallen asleep at the beach. His face was the bright red of a bad sunburn. His eyebrows were a pair of pale hyphens, singed short. The requisite cop mustache was gone, leaving him looking naked and younger.

“How do you like them apples?” he croaked, fighting off a coughing fit. The aftereffects of smoke inhalation.

“Curiouser and curiouser.”

“Quinn back yet?”

“Tomorrow.”

He had gone back to Quantico for the wrap-up and to put in for his first holiday in five years—Thanksgiving.

“So you're coming tonight?”

Kate made a face. “I don't think so, Sam. I'm not feeling very social.”

“Kate,” he said on a disapproving growl. “It's Turkey Wake! I'm the damn bishop, for Christ's sake! We've got a lot to celebrate.”

True, but a rousing, ribald roast of a rubber chicken with a mob of drunken cops and courthouse personnel didn't seem the way to go for her. After all that had happened, after the media she'd had to face in the last few days, interaction was the last thing she wanted.

“I'll catch it on the news,” she said.

He heaved a sigh, giving up, sobering for the real reason he had broken away from the pack. “It's been a hell of a case. You held your own, Red.” A hint of his usual wry grin canted his mouth. “You're okay for a civilian.”

Kate grinned at him. “Up yours, Kojak.” Then she hobbled closer, leaned forward, and kissed his cheek. “Thanks for saving my life.”

“Anytime.”

A WARM FRONT had moved into Minnesota the day before, bringing sun and temperatures in the high fifties. The snow was nearly gone, re-exposing dead yellow lawns and leafless bushes and dirt. Ever conscious of the length of winter once it settled in with serious intent, the citizens of Minneapolis had emerged from early hibernation on bicycles and Rollerblades. Small packs of power-walking old ladies trooped down Kate's block on the way to the lake, slowing to gawk at the blackened exterior of her home.

Most of the damage had been contained to the basement and first floor. The house would be salvaged, repaired, restored, and she would try not to think too much about what had happened there every time she had to go to the basement. She would try not to stand at the washing machine and think of Rob Marshall lying dead and burned to a charred black lump on her floor.

There were tougher jobs ahead than selecting new kitchen cabinets.

Kate picked her way through the charred mess that had been the first floor. A buddy of Kovac's who had done a lot of arson investigation had gone through the structure for her, telling her where she could and couldn't go, what she should and shouldn't do. She wore the yellow hardhat he'd given her to protect herself from falling chunks of plaster. On one foot she wore a thick-soled hiking boot. Over the bandages on the other foot was a thick wool sock and a heavy-duty plastic garbage bag.

She sorted through the debris with long-handled tongs, for things worth keeping. The job depressed her beyond tears. Even with the timely arrival of the fire department, the explosion of paint and solvents in the basement had damaged much of the first floor. And what the fire hadn't ruined, the fire hoses had.

The loss of ordinary possessions didn't bother her. She could buy another television. A sofa was a sofa. Her wardrobe was smoke-damaged, but insurance would buy her another. It was the loss of things richly steeped in memories that hurt. She'd grown up in this house. The thing that now looked like a pair of burned tree stumps had been her father's desk. She could remember crawling into the knee well during games of hide-and-seek with her sister. The rocking chair in the living room had belonged to her great-aunt. Photograph albums holding a lifetime's worth of memories had burned, melted, or been soaked, then frozen and thawed again.

She picked up what was left of an album with pictures of Emily and started to page through, tears coming as she realized the photographs were mostly ruined. It was like losing her child all over again.

She closed the book and held it to her chest, looking around through the blur at the devastation. Maybe this wasn't the day to do this job. Quinn had tried to talk her out of it on the phone. She had insisted she was strong enough, that she needed to do something positive.

But she wasn't strong enough. Not in the way that she needed to be. She felt too raw, too tired, emotions too close to the surface. She felt as if she'd lost more than what the fire had taken. Her faith in her judgment had been shaken. The order of her world had been upended. She felt very strongly that she should have been able to prevent what had happened.

The curse of the victim. Second-guessing herself. Hating her lack of control of the world around her. The test was whether a person could rise above it, push past it, grow beyond the experience.

She carried the photo album outside and set it in a box on the back steps. The backyard was awash in yellow-orange light as the sun began its early exit from the day. The grainy light fell like mist on her winter-dead garden in the far corner of the yard, and a statue she had forgotten to put away for the season—a fairy sitting on a pedestal, reading a book. With nothing but dead stems around it, it looked far too exposed and vulnerable. She had the strangest urge to pick it up and hold it like a child. Protect it.

Another wave of emotion pushed tears up in her eyes as she thought again of Angie looking so small and so young and so lost sitting in the too-big hospital gown, her gaze on the tiny guardian angel statue in her hand.

A car door slammed out front and she peered around the corner of the house to see Quinn walking away from a cab. Instantly her heart lifted at the sight of him, at the way he looked, the way he moved, the frown on his face as he looked up at the house without realizing she was watching him. And just as instantly her nerves tightened a notch.

They hadn't seen much of each other in the days since the fire. The wrap-up of the case had taken much of Quinn's time. He'd been in demand by the media as they had insisted on rehashing, analyzing and re-analyzing every aspect of it. And then the official summons back to Quantico, where he had several cases coming to a head at once. Even their phone conversations had been brief, and both of them had skated around the big issues of their relationship. The case had brought him to Minneapolis. The case had brought them together. The case was over. Now what?

“I'm out back!” Kate called.

Quinn fixed his gaze on her as he came up the walk beside the house. She looked ridiculous and beautiful in a hardhat and a green canvas coat that was a bit too big for her. Beautiful, even battered and bruised and shaken from the inside out.

He'd almost lost her. Again. Forever. The idea struck him with the force of a hammer to the solar plexus about every five minutes. He'd almost lost her in part because he hadn't been able to see right in front of him the monster he was supposed to know as well as any man on earth.

“Hey, pretty,” he said. He dropped his bags on the ground, took her into his arms, and kissed her—not in a sexual way, but in a way that gave them both comfort. The hardhat tipped back on her head and fell off, letting her hair cascade down her back. “How's it going?”

“It sucks. I hate it,” she said plainly, Kate-style. “I liked my house. I liked my stuff. I had to start over once. I don't want to have to do it again. But life says, ‘Tough bounce,' and what are my options? Take it on the chin and keep marching.”

She gave a shrug and broke eye contact. “Better than the deal Angie got. Or Melanie Hessler.”

Quinn took her stubborn chin in his hand and turned her face back to his. “Are you beating yourself up, Kathryn Elizabeth?”

She nodded and let him wipe the tears from her cheeks with his thumbs.

“So am I,” he confessed, and found a wry smile. “We're a pair. Think how great the world would be if you and I really did control it.”

“We'd do a better job of it than whoever has the job now,” she promised, then shivered. “Or I'd blow it, and people I cared about would get hurt.”

“Well, here's an ugly rumor I heard today: We're only human. Mistakes come with the territory.”

Kate knitted her brow. “Human?” She took his hand and led him to the old weathered cedar garden bench. “You and I? Who told you that? Let me go melt their brain with death rays.”

They sat, and his arm automatically went around her shoulders, just as her head automatically found his shoulder.

“Hey, you. You're early,” she said.

“Well, I didn't want to miss Turkey Wake,” he said, deadpan. “Happy to see me?”

“Not after that answer.”

He laughed and brushed a kiss against her temple. They sat in silence for another few minutes, staring at the blackened back door of the house where Quinn and Kovac had carried her out.

“I came back here and built this very specific life,” Kate said softly. “Thinking if I did it that way, I could have control of it, and bad things wouldn't happen. How's that for naive?”

Quinn shrugged. “I thought if I could grab my world by the balls, I could ride all the demons out of it. But it doesn't work that way. There's always another demon. I can't count them all anymore. I can't keep them straight. Hell, I can't even see them right in front of me.”

Kate could hear the hint of desperation underlying the toughness, and knew his faith in his abilities had been shaken too. The Mighty Quinn. Always right, always sure, moving forward like an arrow. She had always loved his unfailing strength, had always admired his bullheadedness. She loved him as much for his vulnerability.

“No one saw this coming, John. I hated the guy from the day he took the job, and not even I suspected this. We see what we expect to see. Scary, considering what can lie beneath the surface.”

She stared at the garden, dead and brown, surreal in the fading light. “Imagine the most horrific, repulsive cruelty one human being can commit against another. Someone's out there doing it right now. I don't know how you stand it anymore, John.”

“I don't,” he admitted. “You know how it is when you first come on the job? Everything gets to you. You have to toughen up. You have to get that emotional armor on. Then you reach a point when you've seen so much, nothing gets to you, and you start to wonder about your humanity. Stay at it long enough, the armor starts to corrode, the evil starts to eat through it, and you're back where you started, only you're older and tired, and you know you can't slay all the dragons no matter how hard you try.”

“And then what?” Kate asked quietly.

“And then you either step aside, or you eat your gun, or you drop in your tracks like Vince Walsh.”

“On the surface that choice would seem like a no-brainer.”

“Not when the job is all you've got. When you bury yourself in it because you're too afraid to go and get the life you really want. Portrait of me for the last five years,” he said. “No more. As of today, I am officially on leave. Time to drain the strain, get my head screwed on straight.”

“Decide what you want,” Kate offered to the list.

“I know what I want,” he said simply.

He turned to her on the bench and took her hands in his. “I need something good in my life, Kate. I need something beautiful and warm. I need you. I need us. What do you need?”

Kate looked at him, her destroyed home in her peripheral vision, and thought, of all things, of the phoenix rising from the ashes. The events that had brought them to this place in this time may have been devastating, but here was their chance for a new beginning. Together.

For the first time in five years she felt a sense of warm, sweet peace in place of the hard, aching emptiness she'd grown almost numb to. She had spent the years without him, merely existing. It was time to live. After all the death, literal and metaphorical, it was time for both of them to live.

“I need your arms around me, John Quinn,” she said, smiling softly. “Every day and every night of my life.”

Quinn let out a pent-up breath, a grin splitting his handsome face. “Took you long enough to answer.”

He took her into his arms carefully, mindful of her wounds, and held her close. He imagined he could feel her heart beat even through the heavy canvas of her coat.

“You've got my heart, Kate Conlan,” he said, burying his cold nose in the thick silk of her hair. “You've had it all this time. I lived too long without it.”

Kate smiled against his chest, knowing this was home—his embrace, his love.

“Well, tough, John Quinn,” she said, gazing up at him in the last light of sunset. “I'm not giving it back.”