Ashes to Ashes

3

CHAPTER

“THIS HAPPENED IN the night. It was dark. How much could she have seen?” Kate asked.

The three of them walked together through the underground concourse that ran beneath Fifth Street and connected the government center to the depressing Gothic stone monstrosity that housed the Minneapolis city government offices and the Minneapolis police department. The underground corridor was busy. No one was going out onto the street voluntarily. The gloomy morning had turned dour as a leaden sky sank low above the city and let loose with a cold, steady rain. November: a lovely month in Minnesota.

“She told the police she saw him,” Rob said, trundling along beside her. His legs were short for his body, and hurrying gave him the toddling gait of a midget, even though he was of average height. “We have to hope she saw him well enough to identify him.”

“I'd like a composite sketch in time for the press conference,” Sabin announced.

Kate ground her molars. Oh, yeah, this was going to be a peach of a case. “A good sketch takes time, Ted. It pays to get it right.”

“Yes, well, the sooner we get a description out there, a picture out there, the better.”

In her mind's eye she could envision Sabin wringing information out of the witness, then tossing her aside like a rag.

“We'll do everything we can to expedite the situation, Mr. Sabin,” Rob promised. Kate shot him a dirty look.

The city hall building had at one time in its history been the Hennepin County courthouse, and had been constructed with a sense of sober grandiosity to impress visitors. The Fourth Street entrance, which Kate seldom had cause to pass through, was as stunning as a palace, with a marble double grand staircase, incredible stained glass, and the enormous Father of the Waters sculpture. The main body of the building had always reminded her of an old hospital with its tiled floor and white marble wainscoting. There was forever a vacant feeling about the place, although Kate knew it was all but bursting at the seams with cops and crooks, city officials and reporters and citizens looking for justice or a favor.

The criminal investigative division of the PD had been crammed into a gloomy warren of rooms at the end of a cavernous hall while remodeling went on in their usual digs. The reception area was cut up with temporary partitions. There were files and boxes stacked everywhere, beat-up dingy gray metal file cabinets had been pushed into every available corner. Tacked to the wall beside the door into the converted broom closet that now housed sex crimes investigators was a sign that proclaimed:

TURKEY WAKE!

NOVEMBER 27

PATRICK'S

1600HRS

Sabin gave the receptionist a dismissive wave and took a right into the homicide offices. The room was a maze of ugly steel desks the color of dirty putty. Some desks were occupied, most were not. Some were neat, most were awash in paperwork. Notes and photographs and cartoons were tacked and taped to walls and cabinets. A notice on one side of the door ordered: HOMICIDE—LOCK UP YOUR GUNS!

Telephone receiver pressed to his ear, Sam Kovac spotted them, scowled, and waved them over. A twenty-two-year veteran, Kovac had that universal cop look about him with the requisite mustache and cheap haircut, both sandy brown and liberally threaded with silver.

“Yeah, I realize you're dating my second wife's sister, Sid.” He pulled a fresh pack of Salems from a carton on his desk and fumbled with the cellophane wrapper. He had shed the jacket of his rumpled brown suit and jerked his tie loose. “That doesn't entitle you to inside information on this murder. All that'll get you is my sympathy. Yeah? Yeah? She said that? Well, why do you think I left her? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Is that right?”

He bit at the tab on the cigarette wrapper and ripped the pack open with his teeth. “You hear that, Sid? That's the sound of me tearing you a new one if you print a word of that. You understand me? You want information? Come to the press conference with everybody else. Yeah? Well, same to you.”

He slammed the receiver down and turned his scowl on the county attorney. His eyes were the green-brown of damp bark, bloodshot, and hard and bright with intelligence. “Damn newsies. This is gonna get uglier than my aunt Selma, and she has a face that could make a bulldog puke.”

“Do they have Bondurant's name?” Sabin asked.

“Of course they do.” He pulled a cigarette from the pack and let it dangle from his lip as he rummaged through the junk on his desk. “They're all over this like flies on dog crap,” he said, glancing back at them over his shoulder. “Hi, Kate—Jesus, what happened to you?”

“Long story. I'm sure you'll hear it at Patrick's tonight. Where's our witness?”

“Down the hall.”

“Is she working with the sketch artist yet?” Sabin asked.

Kovac blew air between his lips and made a sound like a disgusted horse. “She's not even working with us yet. Our citizen isn't exactly overjoyed to be the center of attention here.”

Rob Marshall looked alarmed. “She's not a problem, is she?” He flashed the bootlicker's smile at Sabin. “I suppose she's just shaken up, Mr. Sabin. Kate will settle her down.”

“What's your take on the witness, Detective?” Sabin asked.

Kovac snatched up a Bic lighter and a messy file and started for the door. World-weary and nicked up, his build was at once solid and rangy, utilitarian rather than ornamental. His brown pants were a little baggy and a little too long, the cuffs puddling over the tops of his heel-worn oxfords.

“Oh, she's a daisy,” he said with sarcasm. “She gives us what's gotta be a stolen out-of-state driver's license. Tells us she's living at an apartment in the Phillips neighborhood but she's got no keys for it and can't tell us who has. If she hasn't got a sheet, I'll shave my ass and paint it blue.”

“So, you ran her and what?” Kate asked, forcing herself to keep pace with him, so that Sabin and Rob had to fall in behind. She had learned long ago to cultivate friendships with the cops who worked her cases. It was to her advantage to have them as allies rather than adversaries. Besides, she liked the good ones, like Kovac. They did a hard job for little credit and not enough pay for the plain old-fashioned reason that they believed in the necessity of it. She and Kovac had built a nice rapport in five years.

“I tried to run the name she's using today,” he qualified. “The fucking computer's down. Swell day this is gonna be. I'm on nights this rotation, you know. I oughta be home in bed. My team is on nights. I hate this team-concept crap. Give me a partner and leave me the hell alone. You know what I mean? I got half a mind to transfer out to sex crimes.”

“And turn your back on all this fame and glamour?” Kate teased, bumping him with a subtle elbow.

He gave her a look, tilting his head down in conspiracy. A spark of wry humor lit his eyes. “Shit, Red. I like my stiffs uncomplicated, you know.”

“I've heard that about you, Sam,” she joked, knowing he was the best investigator in the PD, a straight-up good guy who lived the job and hated the politics of it.

He huffed a laugh and pulled open the door to a small room that looked into another through the murky glass of a one-way mirror. On the other side of the glass, Nikki Liska, another detective, stood leaning against one wall, eyes locked in a staredown with the girl who sat on the far side of the fake-woodgrain table. A bad sign. The situation had already become adversarial. The table was littered with soda cans and paper coffee cups and doughnut chunks and fragments.

The sense of dread in Kate's belly gained a pound as she stared through the glass. She put the girl at maybe fifteen or sixteen. Pale and thin, she had a button nose and the lush, ripe mouth of a high-priced call girl. Her face was a narrow oval, the chin a little too long, so that she would probably look defiant without trying. Her eyes tilted at an exotic Slavic angle, and looked twenty years too old.

“She's a kid,” Kate declared flatly, looking to Rob with confusion and accusation. “I don't do kids. You know that.”

“We need you to do this one, Kate.”

“Why?” she demanded. “You've got a whole juvenile division at your disposal. God knows they deal with murder on a regular basis.”

“This is different. This isn't some gang shoot-'em-up we're dealing with,” Rob said, seemingly relegating some of the most violent crime in the city to the same category as shoplifting and traffic mishaps. “We're dealing with a serial killer.”

Even in a profession that dealt with murder as a matter of routine, the words serial killer struck a chord. Kate wondered if their bad guy was aware of that, if he reveled in the idea, or if he was too completely bound up in his own small world of hunting and killing. She had seen both types. All their victims ended up equally dead.

She turned from her director and looked again at the girl who had crossed paths with this latest predator. Angie DiMarco glared at the mirror, resentment pulsing from her in invisible waves. She picked up a fat black pen from the table and very deliberately drew the cap end slowly back and forth along her full lower lip in a gesture that was both impatient and sensuous.

Sabin gave Kate his profile as if he were posing for a currency engraver. “You've dealt with this kind of case before, Kate. With the Bureau. You have a frame of reference. You know what to expect with the investigation and with the media. You may well know the agent they send from the Investigative Support Unit. That could be helpful. We need every edge we can get.”

“I studied victims. I dealt with dead people.” She didn't like the anxiety coming to life inside her. Didn't like having it, didn't want to examine its source. “There's a big difference between working with a dead person and working with a kid. Last I heard, dead people were more cooperative than teenagers.”

“You're a witness advocate,” Rob said, his voice taking on a slight whine. “She's a witness.”

Kovac, who had propped himself up against the wall to watch the exchange, gave her a wan smile. “Can't pick your relatives or your witnesses, Red. I would have liked Mother Teresa to come running out of that park last night.”

“No, you wouldn't,” Kate returned. “The defense would claim she had cataracts and Alzheimer's, and say anyone who believes a man can rise from the dead three days after the fact is a less than credible witness.”

Kovac's mustache twitched. “Scum lawyers.”

Rob looked bemused. “Mother Teresa's dead.”

Kate and Kovac rolled their eyes in unison.

Sabin cleared his throat and looked pointedly at his watch. “We need to get going with this. I want to hear what she has to say.”

Kate arched a brow. “And you think she'll just tell you? You don't get out of the office enough, Ted.”

“She'd damn well better tell us,” he said ominously, and started for the door.

Kate stared through the glass for one last moment, her eyes meeting those of her witness, even though she knew the girl couldn't see her. A teenager. Christ, they could just as well have assigned her a Martian. She was nobody's mother. And there was a reminder she didn't need or want.

She looked into the girl's pale face and saw anger and defiance and experience no kid that age should have. And she saw fear. Buried beneath everything else, held as tight inside her as a secret, there was fear. Kate didn't let herself acknowledge what it was inside her own soul that let her recognize that fear.

In the interview room, Angie DiMarco flicked a glance at Liska, who was looking at her watch. She turned her eyes back to the one-way glass and slipped the pilfered pen inside the neckline of her sweater.

“A kid,” Kate muttered as Sabin and Rob Marshall stepped out into the hall ahead of her. “I wasn't even good at being one.”

“That's perfect,” Kovac said, holding the door open for her. “Neither is she.”

LISKA, SHORT, BLOND, and athletic with a boy's haircut, rolled away from the wall and gave them all a weary smile as they entered the interview room. She looked like Tinker Bell on steroids—or so Kovac had declared when he christened her with the nickname Tinks.

“Welcome to the fun house,” she said. “Coffee, anybody?”

“Decaf for me and one for our friend at the table, please, Nikki,” Kate said softly, never taking her eyes off the girl, trying to formulate a strategy.

Kovac spilled himself into a chair and leaned against the table with one arm, his blunt-tipped fingers scratching at chocolate sprinkles that lay scattered like mouse turds on the tabletop.

“Kate, this is Angie DiMarco,” he said casually. “Angie, this is Kate Conlan from the victim/witness program. She's being assigned to your case.”

“I'm not a case,” the girl snapped. “Who are they?”

“County Attorney Ted Sabin and Rob Marshall from victim/witness.” Kovac pointed to one and then the other as the men took seats across the table from their prized witness.

Sabin gave her his best Ward Cleaver expression. “We're very interested in what you have to say, Angie. This killer we're after is a dangerous man.”

“No shit.” The girl turned back to Kovac. Her glare homed in on his mouth. “Can I have a smoke?”

He pulled the cigarette from his lips and looked at it. “Hell, I can't even have one,” he confessed. “It's a smoke-free building. I was going outside with this.”

“That sucks. I'm stuck in this fucking room half the fucking night and I can't even have a fucking cigarette!”

She sat back and crossed her arms over her chest. Her brown hair was oily and parted down the middle, falling loose around her shoulders. She wore too much mascara, which had smudged beneath her eyes, and a faded Calvin Klein denim jacket that had once belonged to someone named Rick. The name was printed in indelible ink above the left breast pocket. She kept the jacket on despite the fact that the room was warm. Security or hiding needle tracks, Kate figured.

“Oh, for godsake, Sam, give her a cigarette,” Kate said, shoving up the sleeves of her sweater. She took the vacant chair on the girl's side of the table. “And give me one too, while you're at it. If the PC Nazis catch us, we'll all go down together. What're they gonna do? Ask us to leave this rat hole?”

She watched the girl out of the corner of her eye as Kovac shook two more cigarettes out of the pack. Angie's fingernails were bitten to the quick and painted metallic ice blue. Her hand trembled as she took the gift. She wore an assortment of cheap silver rings, and two small, crude ballpoint tattoos marred her pale skin—a cross near her thumb, and the letter A with a horizontal line across the top. A professional job circled her wrist, a delicate blue ink bracelet of thorns.

“You've been here all night, Angie?” Kate asked, drawing on the cigarette. It tasted like dried shit. She couldn't imagine why she had ever taken up the habit in her college days. The price of cool, she supposed. And now it was the price of bonding.

“Yes.” Angie fired a stream of smoke up at the ceiling. “And they wouldn't get me a lawyer either.”

“You don't need a lawyer, Angie,” Kovac said congenially. “You're not being charged with anything.”

“Then why can't I blow this shithole?”

“We got a lot of complications to sort out. For instance, the matter of your identification.”

“I gave you my ID.”

He pulled it from the file and handed it to Kate with a meaningful lift of his eyebrows.

“You're twenty-one,” Kate read deadpan, flicking ashes into an abandoned cup of oily coffee.

“That's what it says.”

“It says you're from Milwaukee—”

“Was. I left.”

“Any family there?”

“They're dead.”

“I'm sorry.”

“I doubt it.”

“Any family here? Aunts, uncles, cousins, half-related circus freaks? Anyone at all we could call for you—to help you through this?”

“No. I'm an orphan. Poor me.” She bluffed a sarcastic laugh. “Trust me, I don't need any family.”

“You've got no permanent address, Angie,” Kovac said. “You have to realize what's happened here. You're the only one who can identify a killer. We need to know where you're at.”

She rolled her eyes in the way only teenage girls can, imparting both incredulity and impatience. “I gave you my address.”

“You gave me the address for an apartment you don't have keys for and you can't tell me the name of who it is you're staying with.”

“I told you!”

She pushed up out of her chair and turned away from Kovac, the cigarette in her hand raining ashes on the floor. The blue sweater she wore beneath her jacket was either cropped short or shrunken, revealing a pierced navel and another tattoo—three drops of blood falling into the waistband of her dirty jeans.

“Her name is Molly,” she said. “I met her at a party and she said that I could crash at her place until I get my own.”

Kate caught the hint of a tremor in the girl's voice, the defensive body language as she pulled in on herself and turned away from them. Across the room, the door opened and Liska came in with the coffee.

“Angie, no one's trying to jam you up here,” Kate said. “Our first concern is that you're safe.”

The girl wheeled on her, her eyes dark blue and glittering with anger. “Your concern is that I testify against this psycho Cremator creep. You think I'm nuts? He'll track me down and kill me too!”

“Your cooperation is imperative, Angie,” Sabin said with authority. The man in command. “You're our only witness. This man has killed three women that we know of.”

Kate shot a dagger look at the county attorney.

“Part of my job is to see to it that you're safe, Angie,” she explained, keeping her voice even and calm. “If you need a place to stay, we can make that happen. Do you have a job?”

“No.” She turned away again. “I been looking,” she added almost defensively. She gravitated toward the corner of the room, where a dirty backpack had been discarded. Kate was willing to bet everything the kid owned was in that bag.

“It's tough coming into a new town,” Kate said quietly. “Don't know your way around. Don't have any connections. Hard to get set up, get your life going.”

The girl bowed her head and chewed at a thumbnail, her hair swinging down to obscure her face.

“It takes money to set yourself up,” Kate went on. “Money to eat. Money for a place. Money for clothes. Money for everything.”

“I get by.”

Kate could imagine just how. She knew how it worked with kids on the street. They did what they had to do to survive. Beg. Steal. Sell a little dope. Turn a trick or two or ten. There was no shortage of depraved human scum in the world more than willing to prey on kids with no homes and no prospects.

Liska set the steaming coffee cups on the table and leaned down to murmur in Kovac's ear. “Elwood tracked down the building manager. The guy says the apartment's vacant and if this kid is living there, then he wants a five-hundred-dollar deposit or he'll press charges for criminal trespass.”

“What a humanitarian.”

“Elwood says to him: ‘Five hundred? What's that? A buck a cockroach?'”

Kate absorbed the whispered remarks, her eyes still on Angie. “Your life's tough enough right now without having to become a witness to a murder.”

Head still down, the girl sniffed and brought the cigarette to her lips. “I didn't see him kill her.”

“What did you see?” Sabin demanded. “We need to know, Miss DiMarco. Every minute that passes is crucial to the investigation. This man is a serial killer.”

“I think we're all aware of that, Ted,” Kate conceded with a razor's edge in her voice. “You really don't have to remind us every two minutes.”

Rob Marshall twitched hard. Sabin met her gaze, his own impatience showing. He wanted a revelation before he bolted for his meeting with the mayor. He wanted to be able to step in front of the cameras at the press conference and give the monster loose among them a name and a face and announce that an arrest was imminent.

“Angie seems to be having some difficulty deciding whether to cooperate or not,” he said. “I think it's important she realize the gravity of the situation.”

“She watched someone set a human body on fire. I think she understands the gravity of the situation perfectly.”

In the corner of her eye, Kate could see she had caught the girl's attention. Maybe they could be friends living on the street together after Sabin fired her for challenging him in front of an audience. What was she thinking? She didn't even want this mess in her lap.

“What were you doing in that park at that hour of night, Angie?” Rob asked, mopping at his forehead with a handkerchief.

The girl looked him square in the face. “Minding my own fucking business.”

“You can take your coat off if you want,” he said with a brittle smile.

“I don't want.”

His jaw clenched and the grin became more of a grimace. “That's fine. If you want to keep it on, that's fine. It just seems hot in here. Why don't you tell us in your own way how you came to be in that park last night, Angie.”

She stared at him with venom in her eyes. “I'd tell you to kiss my ass, but you're so fucking ugly, I'd make you pay in advance.”

His face flushed as red as a bad rash.

A beeper went off and everyone in the room except the witness reached for theirs. Sabin scowled darkly as he read the message in the display window of his. He checked his watch again.

“Did you get a good look at the man, Angie?” Rob asked in a tight voice. “You could be such a help here. I know you've gone through something terrible—”

“You don't know shit,” the girl snapped.

A vein popped out in Rob's left temple and sweat beaded on his shiny forehead.

“That's why we're asking you, kiddo,” Kate said calmly. She blew a lazy stream of smoke. All the time in the world. “Did you get a good look at the guy?”

Angie studied her for a moment, the time and the silence stretching, then looked to Sabin to Liska to Kovac, and back to Rob Marshall. Gauging. Assessing.

“I saw him in the flames,” she said at last, dropping her gaze to the floor. “He lit the body on fire and he said, ‘Ashes to ashes.'”

“Would you know him if you saw him again?” Sabin demanded.

“Sure,” she murmured, bringing the cigarette to her lips for one final drag. The tip of it glowed like an ember from hell against the pale white of her face. When she spoke again, it was on a breath of smoke. “He's the devil.”

“WHAT WAS THAT about?” Kate went on the offensive the second they stepped from the interview room into the hall.

Sabin turned on her, his expression furious. “I was about to ask you the same thing, Kate. We need this girl's cooperation.”

“And you think you're going to get it by coming down on her like a ton of bricks? In case you didn't notice, she wasn't responding.”

“How could she respond with you butting in every time I started making some headway?”

“Force meets resistance, Ted. And it's my job to butt in—I'm an advocate,” she said, realizing she was inviting the wrath of a very powerful man. He had the power to take her off this case.

I should be so lucky, she thought. Already this investigation had the makings of a world-class cluster fuck. She couldn't possibly want to be stuck in the middle of it.

“You're the one who dragged me into this,” she said. “You want me to be this girl's friend, remember? That's going to be a tough enough job without you setting us up as a group force against her.

“She has to want to tell us what she saw. She has to believe we'll take care of her. Do you honestly think she trusts you not to take what she has to give and cut her loose? How do you think a kid like Angie ends up in a mess like this in the first place?”

“You didn't want this case because she's a kid,” Sabin said irritably. “Now suddenly you're an authority.”

“You wanted me on this because of my expertise, my frame of reference,” she reminded him. “Then you have to trust me to do the job. I know how to interview a witness.”

Sabin dismissed her by turning to Kovac. “You said the girl was apprehended fleeing the scene?”

“Not exactly.”

“She ran out of the park as the first unit arrived,” he said impatiently. “She was running away from a burning body. That makes her a suspect. Shake her down. Rattle her. Threaten her. Scare the truth out of her. I don't care how you do it. I've got a meeting in two minutes with the chief and the mayor. The press conference is set for five. I want a description of a killer by then.”

He walked away from them, straightening his jacket, moving his shoulders like a boxer who'd just gone five rounds. Kate looked to Kovac, who made a sour face.

“See the kind of shit I have to put up with?” he said.

“You?” Kate sniffed. “He could fire my ass. And still I don't care if he's on his way to a tryst with Janet Reno. Power doesn't give him license to harass a witness—or for you to do it for him. If you run over this kid with hobnail boots, I'll make your life a misery, Sam.”

Kovac grimaced. “Jesus, Kate, the big dog says toss her in the can. What am I gonna do? Thumb my nose at him? He'll have my cojones in his nutcracker for Christmas.”

“I'll use 'em for tennis.”

“Sorry, Kate. You're overruled. Sabin can castrate me and my pension. Look on the bright side: The tank'll be like Club Med to this chick.”

Kate turned to her boss for support. Rob shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “These circumstances are extraordinary, Kate.”

“I realize that. I also realize that if this kid had watched our psycho light up one of those hookers, there wouldn't be a press conference pending and Ted Sabin wouldn't even know her name. But that doesn't change what she saw, Rob. It doesn't change who she is or how she needs to be handled. She expects to be treated badly. It gives her an excuse to be uncooperative.”

His expression was a cross between wry and wrenched. “I thought you didn't want this case.”

“I don't,” Kate said flatly. “I have no personal desire to be ass-deep in alligators, but if I'm in this thing, then I'm in it all the way. Let me do my job with her or assign me elsewhere. I won't be a puppet and I won't have my hands tied. Not even by his high and mightiness.”

It was a bluff of sorts. She may not have wanted the job, but she was the best advocate for the job—or so Ted Sabin thought. Sabin with his hard-on for the idea of her as an FBI agent. As much as the obsession disgusted her, Kate knew it gave her a certain amount of leverage with him and therefore with Rob.

The real question was: What would it cost her? And why should she care enough to pay the price? She could smell the stench of this case a block away, could feel the potential entanglements touching her like the tentacles of an octopus. She should have cut and run. If she'd had any sense. If she hadn't looked past Angie DiMarco's defenses and glimpsed the fear.

“What's Sabin gonna do, Rob?” she questioned. “Cut off our heads and set us on fire?”

“That's not even remotely funny.”

“I didn't mean for it to be. Have some backbone and stand up to him, for Christ's sake.”

Rob sighed and discreetly pried a thumb inside the waistband of his slacks. “I'll talk to him and see what I can do. Maybe the girl will come up with an ID from the mug books by five,” he said without hope.

“You must still have connections in Wisconsin,” Kate said. “Maybe you can get a line on her, find out who she really is.”

“I'll make some calls. Is that all?” he asked pointedly.

Kate pretended innocence. She was well aware of her tendency to lead the dance, and perfectly unapologetic about it where her boss was concerned. He never inspired her to follow.

Rob walked away looking defeated.

“Ever the man of action, your boss,” Kovac said dryly.

“I think Sabin keeps his cojones in a jar in his medicine cabinet.”

“Yeah, well, I don't want mine added to the collection. See if you can get something out of this kid besides lies and sarcasm before five.” He clamped a hand on Kate's shoulder in congratulations and consolation. “Way to go, Red. The job's all yours.”

Kate frowned as she watched him retreat to the men's room. “And I ask yet again: Why do I always have to be the one in the wrong place at the wrong time?”