Ashes to Ashes (12 page)

She had left the girl standing in the den, staring out a window at the lights of the house next door. The poignant picture brought a sense of sympathy to Kate. The symbolism of a kid on the outside of a family looking in. A child with no one.

“This is why I don’t work with kids,” she said now to the cat. “They’d just ruin my reputation as a hard-ass.”

Thor trilled deep in his throat and rolled onto his back, offering his hairy belly for rubbing. She complied, enjoying the contact with another living being who appreciated and loved her in his own way. And she thought of Angie DiMarco lying awake in the night, in a house filled with strangers, the one connection in her life that meant anything to anyone being her connection to a killer.

A BLINKING MESSAGE light greeted Quinn as he let himself into his room at the Radisson Plaza Hotel. He tossed the sack of Mexican takeout in the wastebasket beneath the writing table, called room service, and ordered wild rice soup and a turkey sandwich he probably wouldn’t eat. His stomach couldn’t deal with Mexican anymore.

He stripped out of his clothes, crammed everything but his shoes into a plastic laundry bag, tied the bag shut, and set it by the door. Someone down in laundry was in for an unpleasant surprise.

The water pounded out of the showerhead like a hail of bullets, as hot as he could stand it. He scrubbed his hair and body and let the water work on the knots in his shoulders, then he turned and let it pelt him in the face and chest. Images from the day tumbled through his head, out of order: the meeting, Bondurant’s lawyer, the rush to the airport, the crime scene tape fluttering around the trunks of sturdy maple trees, Kate.

Kate. Five years was a long time. In five years she had established herself in a new career, she had a new life—which she deserved after all that had gone wrong in Virginia.

And what had he built in five years besides his reputation and a lot of unused vacation time?

Nothing. He owned a town house and a Porsche and a closet full of designer suits. He socked the rest of his money away for a retirement that would probably end in a massive coronary two months after he left the Bureau because he had nothing else in his life. If the job didn’t kill him first.

He turned the water off; climbed out of the shower, and toweled himself dry. He had an athlete’s body, solid, roped with muscle, leaner than it used to be—the reverse of most men in their mid-forties. He couldn’t remember when his enjoyment of food had become indifference. Once upon a time he had considered himself a gourmet cook. Now he ate because he had to. The exercise he used to burn off tension burned off all the calories as well.

The greasy, spicy smell of the discarded Mexican food was permeating the bedroom. A smell preferable to a burned corpse, though he knew from experience it wouldn’t be so welcome when it turned stale and he woke up to it at three in the morning.

The thought brought on a tumble of unpleasant memories of other hotel rooms in other cities and other dinners bought to fight off the aftertaste and smell of death. Of lying awake, alone in a strange bed in the middle of the night, sweating like a horse from nightmares, his heart racing.

The panic hit him in the gut like a sledgehammer, and he sat down on the edge of the bed in sweat pants and a gray FBI Academy T-shirt. He put his head in his hands for a moment, dreading the attack—the hollowness, the dizziness; the tremors that started in the core of him and rattled outward, down his arms and legs; the sense that there was nothing left of who he really was, the fear that he wouldn’t know the difference.

He cursed himself and reached down deep for the strength to fight it off as he had done again and again in the last year. Or was it two now? He measured time by cases, measured cases by bodies. He had a recurring dream that he was locked away in a white room, pulling the hair out of his head one by one and naming each after the victims, pasting the hairs to the wall with his saliva.

He clicked the television on for noise to drown out the voice of fear in his head, then dialed the phone for his voice mail messages. Seven calls regarding other cases he had dragged here with him: a string of robberies and torture murders of gay men in Miami; the poisoning deaths of five elderly women in Charlotte, North Carolina; a child abduction case in Blacksburg, Virginia, that had, as of 8:19 P.M. eastern standard time, become a homicide with the discovery of the little girl’s body in a wooded ravine.

Goddamn, he should have been there. Or maybe he should have been in rural Georgia, where a mother of four had been beaten to death with a ball peen hammer in a fashion reminiscent of three other murders in the last five years. Or maybe he should have been in England, consulting with Scotland Yard on the case that had turned up nine mutilated bodies in the yard of an abandoned slaughterhouse, the eyes gouged out of each and the mouths sewn shut with waxed thread.

“Special Agent Quinn, this is Edwyn Noble—”

“And you got this number how?” Quinn asked aloud as the message played.

He wasn’t thrilled with Noble’s in with this investigation. Being married to the mayor gave him a foot in the door no other lawyer in the city would have had. Being Peter Bondurant’s attorney forced the door open wider.

“I’m calling on behalf of Mr. Bondurant. Peter would very much like to meet with you tomorrow morning if possible. Please give me a call back tonight.”

He left the number, then a seductive taped voice informed Quinn he had no further messages. He recradled the receiver with no intention of picking it up again to call Noble. Let him stew. If he had something pertinent to the case, he could call Kovac or Fowler, the homicide lieutenant. Quinn called no one back, preferring to wait until after he didn’t eat his dinner.

The ten o’clock news led with the latest murder, flashing taped footage of the crime scene unit combing over the dumping site in the park, then going to the tape of the press conference. A photo of Jillian Bondurant came up with another of her red Saab. A good three and a half minutes of coverage, total. The average news story ran less than half that.

Quinn dug the files for the first two murders out of his briefcase and stacked them on the writing desk. Copies of investigative reports and crime scene photos. Autopsy reports, lab reports, initial and follow-up investigative reports. News clippings from both the
Minneapolis Star Tribune
and the
St. Paul Pioneer Press
. Descriptions and photos of the crime scenes.

He had stated very clearly he wanted no information on possible suspects if there were any, and none had been included. He couldn’t let anyone’s speculation about a possible suspect cloud his judgment or steer his analysis in one direction or another. This was yet another reason he would have preferred to put the profile together from his office in Quantico. Here he was too close; the case was all around him. The personalities involved in the cases could spur reactions he would not have looking at a collection of adjectives and facts. There was too much worthless input, too many distractions.

Too many distractions—like Kate. Who hadn’t called and had no reason to, really. Except that they had once shared something special … and walked away from it … and let it die… .

Nothing in a Quinn life had the power to be quite so distracting as the irreparable past. The only cure Quinn had found for the past was to try to control the present, which meant pouring himself into the case at hand. Focus with intensity on maintaining control of the present. And on maintaining control of his sanity. And when the nights stretched long—as they all did—and his mind raced with the details of a hundred murders, he could feel his grip slipping on both.

ANGIE SAT AT the head of the small, hard twin bed, her back pressed into the corner so that she could feel the nubby plaster wall biting through the baggy flannel shirt she had chosen to sleep in. She sat with her knees pulled up beneath her chin, her arms wrapped tight around her legs. The door was closed; she was alone. The only light coming in through the window came from a distant streetlamp.

The Phoenix was a house for women “rising to a new beginning.” So said the sign on the front lawn. It was a big, rambling old house with squeaky floors and no frills. Kate had brought her there and dumped her among the ex-hookers and ex-dopers and women trying to escape boyfriends who beat the shit out of them.

Angie had looked in at some of them watching TV in a big living room full of ratty furniture, and thought how stupid they must be. If there was one thing she had learned in life, it was that you could escape circumstance, but you could never escape who you were. Your personal truth was a shadow: There was no denying it, no changing it, and no getting rid of it.

She felt the shadow sweep over her now, cold and black. Her body trembled and tears rose in her eyes. She had been fighting it off all day, all night. She had thought it was going to swallow her whole right in front of Kate—an idea that only added to the panic. She couldn’t lose control in front of anyone. Then they’d know that she was crazy, that she was defective. They’d ship her off to the nuthouse. She’d be alone then.

She was alone now.

The tremor began at the very core of her, then opened up wider and wider into a weird, hollow feeling. At the same time, she felt her consciousness shrinking and shrinking until she felt as if her body was just a shell and she was a tiny being locked inside it, in danger of falling off a ledge into some dark chasm inside and never being able to climb out.

She called this feeling the Zone. The Zone was an old enemy. But as well as she knew it, it never failed to terrify her. She knew if she didn’t fight it off, she could lose control, and control was everything. If she didn’t fight it off, she could lose whole blocks of time. She could lose herself, and what would happen then?

It shook her now, and she started to cry. Silently. Always silently. She couldn’t let anyone hear her, she couldn’t let them know how afraid she was. Her mouth tore open, but she strangled the sobs until her throat ached. She pressed her face against her knees, closing her eyes tight. The tears burned, fell, slid down her bare thigh.

In her mind, she could see the burning corpse. She ran from it. She ran and ran but didn’t get anywhere. In her mind, the corpse became her, but she couldn’t feel the flames. She would have welcomed the pain, but she couldn’t conjure it up with just her mind. And all the while she felt herself growing smaller and smaller inside the shell of her body.

Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!
She pinched her thigh hard, digging the ragged edge of her fingernails into the skin. And still she felt herself being sucked deeper and deeper into the Zone.

You know what you have to do
. The voice unfurled in her mind like a black ribbon. She shivered in response to it. It twined itself through vital parts of her, a strange matrix of fear and need.

You know what you have to do.

Frantically, she pulled her backpack to her, fumbled with the zipper, and dug through an inner pocket for the thing she needed. Her fingers curled around the box cutter, which was disguised as a small plastic key.

Shaking, choking back the sobs, she crawled to a wedge of light on the bed and shoved up the left sleeve of the flannel shirt, exposing a thin white arm that was striped with narrow scars, one beside another and another, lining her arms like bars in an iron fence. The razor emerged from the end of the box cutter like a serpent’s tongue and she drew it across a patch of tender skin near her elbow.

The pain was sharp and sweet, and seemed to short-circuit the panic that had electrified her brain. Blood blossomed from the cut, a shiny black bead in the moonlight. She stared at it, mesmerized as the calm flowed through her.

Control. Life was all about control. Pain and control. She had learned that lesson long ago.

“I’M THINKING OF changing my name,” he says. “What do you think of Elvis? Elvis Nagel.”

His companion says nothing. He picks up a pair of panties from the pile in the box and presses them to his face, burying his nose in the crotch and sniffing deep the scent of pussy. Nice. Smell is not as good a stimulant as sound for him, but still …

“Get it?” he says. “It’s an anagram. Elvis Nagel—Evil’s Angel.”

In the background, three televisions are running videotapes of the local six o’clock newscasts. The voices blend together in a discordant cacophony he finds stimulating. The common thread that runs through them all is urgency. Urgency breeds fear. Fear excites him. He especially enjoys the sound of it. The tight, quivering tension underlying a controlled voice. The erratic changes in pitch and tone in the voice of someone openly afraid.

The mayor appears on two screens. The ugly cow. He watches her speak, wondering what it might be like to cut her lips off while she is still alive. Maybe make her eat them. The fantasy excites, as his fantasies always have.

He turns up the volume on the televisions, then crosses to the stereo system set into the bookcase, selects a cassette from the rack, and slips it into the machine. He stands in the center of the basement room, staring at the televisions, at the furrowed brows of anchormen and the faces of the people at the press conference shot from three different angles, and lets the sounds wash over him—the voices of the reporters, the background echo in the cavernous hall, the urgency. At the same time from the stereo speakers comes the voice of raw, unvarnished fear. Pleading. Crying for God. Begging for death. His triumph.

He stands in the center of it. The conductor of this macabre opera. The excitement builds inside him, a huge, hot, swelling, sexual excitement that builds to a crescendo and demands release. He looks to his companion for the evening, considering, but he controls the need.

Control is all. Control is power.
He
is the action.
They
are the reaction. He wants to see the fear in all their faces, to hear it in their voices—the police, the task force, John Quinn. Especially Quinn, who hadn’t even bothered to speak at the press conference, as if he wanted the Cremator to think he didn’t warrant his personal attention.