Ashes to Ashes

“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