Ashes to Ashes

Kate raised her head and gave him a long, level, venomous stare, screwing up her courage as she sucked at the cut in her mouth. He would make her pay for this, but it seemed the way to go.

Very deliberately, she spit the blood in his face. “The hell you will, you miserable little shit.”

Instantly furious, he swung at her with the sap. Kate ducked the punch and launched herself upward, bringing her right elbow up under his chin, knocking his teeth together. She pulled the nail file and stabbed it into his neck to the hilt just above his collarbone.

Rob screamed and grabbed at the file, falling back, crashing into the hall table. Kate ran for the kitchen.

If she could just get out of the house, get to the street. Surely he would have disabled her car somehow, or blocked it in. To get help, she had to get to the street.

She dashed through the dining room, knocking chairs over as she ran past. Rob came behind her, grunting as he hit something, swearing, spitting the words out between his teeth like bullets.

He couldn't outrun her on his stubby legs. He seemed not to have a gun. Through the kitchen and she was home free. She'd run to the neighbor across the street. The graphic designer who had his office in his attic. He was always home.

She burst into the kitchen, faltered, then pulled up, her heart plummeting.

Angie stood just inside the back door, tears streaming down her face, a butcher's knife in her hand—pointed directly at Kate's chest.

“I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry,” she sobbed, shaking badly.

Suddenly, the conversation that had taken place between Angie and Rob in the den took on a whole new dimension. Pieces of the truth began to click into place. The picture they made was distorted and surreal.

If Rob was the Cremator, then it was Rob Angie had seen in the park. Yet the man in the sketch Oscar had drawn at her instruction looked no more like Rob Marshall than he looked like Ted Sabin. She had sat across from him in the interview room, giving no indication . . .

In the next second Rob Marshall was through the door behind her and six ounces of steel packed in sand and bound in leather connected with the back of her skull. Her legs folded beneath her and she dropped to her knees on the kitchen floor, her last sight: Angie DiMarco.

This is why I don't do kids. You never know what they're thinking.

Then everything went dark.

THE TRAVEL MAGAZINES were still scattered on Michele Fine's coffee table with pages folded and destinations circled with notations in the margins. Get a tan! Too $$$. Nightlife!

The murderer as a tourist, Quinn thought, turning the pages.

When the police checked with the airlines, they might find she had booked flights to one or more of those locations. If they were very lucky, they would also find matching flights booked in the name of her partner. Whoever he was.

With the amount of blood at the scene in the sculpture garden, it seemed highly unlikely Fine had taken herself out of the park. Gil Vanlees had been in custody. Both Fine and the money Peter Bondurant had brought to the scene and subsequently walked away from were gone.

The cops swarmed over the apartment like ants, invading every cupboard, crack, and crevice, looking for anything that might give them a clue as to who Fine's partner in murder was. A scribbled note, a doodled phone number, an envelope, a photograph, something, anything. Adler and Yurek were canvassing the neighbors for information. Did they know her? Had they seen her? What about a boyfriend?

The main living areas of the apartment looked exactly as they had the day before. Same dust, same filthy ashtray. Tippen found a crack pipe in an end table drawer.

Quinn went down the hall, glancing into a bathroom worthy of a speedtrap gas station, and on to Michele Fine's bedroom. The bed was unmade. Clothes lay strewn around the room like outlines where dead bodies had fallen. Just as in the rest of the apartment, there were no personal touches, nothing decorative—except in the window that faced south and the back side of another building.

“Look at the sun catchers,” Liska said, moving across the room.

They hung from hooks on little suction cups stuck to the window. Hoops about three inches in diameter, each holding its own miniature work of art. The light coming through them gave the colors a sense of life. The air from a register above the window made them quiver against the glass like butterfly wings, and fluttered the decorations that were attached to each—a piece of ribbon, a pearl button on a string, a dangling earring, a finely braided lock of hair . . .

Liska's face dropped as she stopped beside Quinn, the realization hitting her.

Lila White's calla lily. Fawn Pierce's shamrock. A mouth with a tongue sticking out. A heart with the word “Daddy.” There were half a dozen.

Tattoos.

The tattoos that had been cut from the bodies of the Cremator's victims. Stretched tight in little craft hoops, drying in the sun. Decorated with mementos of the women they had been cut from. Souvenirs of torture and murder.

38

CHAPTER

HIS TRIUMPH IS at hand. His crowning glory. His finale—for now, for this place. He has arranged the Bitch on the table to his satisfaction and bound her hands and feet to the table legs with plastic twine he has pilfered from the mailroom at the office. A length of it is wrapped around the Bitch's throat with long free ends trailing for him to wrap around his fists. For mood lighting he has brought candles down to the basement from other parts of the house. He finds the flames very sensual, exciting, erotic. That excitement is heightened by the smell of gasoline heavy in the air.

He stands back and surveys the tableau. The Bitch under his absolute control. She is still clothed because he wants her conscious for her degradation. He wants her to feel every second of her humiliation. He wants to capture it all on tape.

He loads the microcassette recorder with a fresh tape and sets it on a black vinyl barstool with a ripped seat. He doesn't worry about fingerprints. The world will shortly discover the Cremator's “true” identity.

He sees no reason not to carry through with the plan. Michele might be out of the picture, but he still has Angie. If she passes her test, he might take her with him. If she fails, he will kill her. She isn't Michele—his perfect complement. Michele, who would do anything he asked if she thought compliance would make him love her. Michele, who had followed his lead in the torture games, who had encouraged him to burn the bodies, and reveled in her tattoo arts and crafts.

He misses her as much as he can miss anyone. With a vague detachment. Mrs. Vetter will miss her horrid little dog more.

Angie watches him as he unties the leather roll that holds all his favorite tools and spreads it out on the table. She looks like something from a teenage slasher movie. Her clothes are disheveled, the thighs of her jeans shredded and blood-soaked. She still holds the butcher knife from the kitchen and surreptitiously pricks the end of her thumb with the point of it and watches the blood bead. Crazy little bitch.

He looks at the choke marks on her throat, thinks about all the ways she has defied him during the execution of his Great Plan. Making him look stupid during her first interview, refusing to give the name of the bar where he'd picked her up that night to lend credibility to her story. Refusing to describe the Cremator to the sketch artist the way he had instructed her to. He had spent considerable time creating the image of a phantom killer in his mind. The girl had willfully given a description so vague it might fit half the men in the Twin Cities—including the hapless Vanlees. The idea of Vanlees getting credit as the Cremator makes him furious. And, even after the beatings he'd given her since Wednesday, she had refused him his perfect moment of revelation in Kate's living room.

“Who came to take you, Angie?”

“No.”

“Who came to take you?”

“No. I won't do it.”