Ashes to Ashes

“Angie, who came to take you?”

“No. You can't make me.”

She had been coached to say “Evil's Angel.” No matter that he hadn't taken her, that Michele had been the one who'd saved the stupid little slut from slicing herself to ribbons in the shower, who'd cleaned up the mess and slipped the two of them out the back door of the house. The girl had her instructions and she defied them openly.

He decides he will kill her after all, despite her cooperation in the kitchen. She is too unpredictable.

He will kill her here. After the Bitch is dead. He pictures himself in a frenzy, wild with the euphoria of killing the Bitch. He sees himself throwing the girl onto the table, on top of the bloody, mutilated body, tying her there, fucking her, choking her, stabbing her in the face over and over and over and over. Punishing her exactly as he plans to punish the Bitch.

He will kill them both, then burn them together, here, and burn the house as well. He has already set the stage for the fire, pouring the accelerant—gas from a can he put in the Bitch's garage himself the night he shit on the floor.

The fantasy of the murders he is about to commit excites him as fantasies always have—intellectually, sexually, fundamentally. The pattern of the mind of his breed: fantasy, violent fantasy; then facilitators that trigger action: murder. The natural cycle of his life—and his victims' death.

Decision made, he turns his thoughts to the matter at hand: Kate Conlan.

CONSCIOUSNESS RETURNED FOR Kate in fits and starts, like a television with bad reception. She could hear but not see. Then she had some blurred vision, but nothing more than a horrific ringing in her ears. The only clear, constant signal was pain hammering at the back of her skull. She felt sick with it. She couldn't seem to move her arms or legs and wondered if Rob had broken her neck or severed her spinal cord. Then she realized she could still feel her hands, and that they hurt like hell.

Tied.

The ceiling tile, the smell of dust, the vague sense of dampness. The basement. She was tied spread-eagle on the old Ping-Pong table in her own basement.

Another scent—out of place—came to her, thick, oily, and bitter. Lighter fluid.

Oh, sweet Jesus.

She looked at Rob Marshall standing at the foot of the table, staring at her. Rob Marshall, a serial killer. The incongruity made her want to believe she was just having a nightmare, but she knew better. She'd seen too much when she was an agent. The stories were stacked up in her memory like files in a cabinet. The NASA engineer who had kidnapped hitchhikers and drained their blood to drink it. The electronics technician, a married father of two, who kept chosen body parts of his victims in his meat freezer in his garage. The young Republican law student who volunteered at a suicide hotline and turned out to be Ted Bundy.

Add to the stack the victim advocate who chose his own victims from the department's client list. She felt like a fool for not having seen it, even though she knew a killer as sophisticated as Smokey Joe was one of nature's perfect chameleons. Even now she didn't want to think of Rob Marshall as being that clever.

He had taken his coat off, revealing a gray sweater soaked at the throat with blood from where she'd stabbed him with the nail file. An inch in the right direction and she would have hit his jugular.

“Did I miss anything?” she asked, her voice rusty from the choking he'd given her.

She could see the surprise in his face, the confusion. Score one for the victim.

“Still with the smart mouth,” he said. “You don't learn, bitch.”

“Why should I? What will you do, Rob? Torture and kill me?” She tried desperately to keep the fear out of her voice. She felt as if it had her by the throat, then remembered with another jolt of adrenaline the ligature marks on the throats of his victims. “You'll do that either way. I might as well have the satisfaction of calling you a dickless loser to your face.”

Standing to one side of the table, backlit by candles, butcher knife in hand, Angie sucked in a breath and made a pitious sound in her throat. She clutched the knife to her as if it were a treasured toy to comfort herself.

Rob's face hardened. He pulled a penknife from his pocket and jabbed it, all the way to the handle, into the bottom of Kate's right foot, and she learned very quickly and painfully the price he was going to make her pay for the strategy she'd chosen.

Kate cried out and her whole body convulsed against the restraints that bit deep into the skin of her wrists and ankles. When she fell back, the bindings seemed to have stretched to give her slightly more mobility.

She pulled her mind back together by focusing on Angie, thinking of the look she'd seen in the girl's eyes earlier, when she'd been struck by the thought that Angie's eyes weren't empty, that as long as there was some light in the darkness, there was still hope. She thought of the way the girl had started to go after Rob with the utility knife.

“Angie, get out!” she rasped. “Save yourself!”

The girl flinched and glanced nervously at Rob.

“She'll stay,” he snapped, stabbing the knife into her foot again, winning another cry from Kate. “She's mine,” he said, eyes glowing with the intoxication he achieved from inflicting pain.

“I don't think so.” Kate sucked in a sharp breath. “She's not stupid.”

“No, you're the stupid one,” he said, backing away a step. He pulled a long taper from the candelabrum he'd taken from her dining room and set on the clothes drier.

“Because I know the kind of pathetic, warped excuse for a human being you are?”

“How pathetic am I now, bitch?” he demanded, dragging the flame of the candle from toe to toe on her right foot.

Instinctively, Kate kicked at the source of her torment, knocking the candle from his hand. Rob pounced on it, swearing, disappearing from view at the end of the table.

“Stupid bitch!” he cursed frantically. “Stupid fucking bitch!”

The scent of the gasoline pressed over Kate's nose and mouth, and she shuddered at the notion of burning alive. The terror was like a fist in the base of her throat. The pain where Rob had already burned her was like a live thing, as if her foot had ignited and now the flames would shoot up her leg.

“What's the matter, Rob?” she asked, fighting the need to cry. “I thought you liked fire. Are you afraid of it?”

He scrambled to his feet, glaring at her. “I am the Cremator!” he shouted, the candle clutched in his fist. She could see his increasing agitation in his respiration rate, in the quick jerkiness of his movements. This wasn't going the way it had in his fantasies.

“I am superior!” he shouted, wild-eyed. “I am Evil's Angel! I hold your life in my hands! I am your god!”

Kate channeled her pain into her anger. “You're a leech. You're a parasite. You're nothing.”

She was probably goading him into stabbing her forty-seven times, cutting her larynx out and running it down the garbage disposal. Then she thought of the photographs of his other victims, of the tape of Melanie Hessler, of the hours of torture, rape, repeated strangulation.

She'd take her chances. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

“You make me sick, you spineless little shit.”

That was the truth. It made her want to vomit to think she'd worked beside him day in and day out, and every time his mind wandered it wandered to fantasies of abuse and brutality and murder—the very things they tried to help their clients live through and get past.

He paced at the foot of the table, muttering under his breath, as if he might be speaking to voices in his head, though Kate thought it unlikely he heard any. Rob Marshall wasn't psychotic. He was perfectly aware of everything he did. His actions were a conscious choice—though, if he were caught, he would probably try to convince the authorities otherwise.

“You can't get it up without the domination, can you?” Kate pressed on. “What woman would have you if you didn't tie her down?”

“Shut up!” he screamed. “Shut the fuck up!”