Ashes to Ashes

She tried to shout “In the basement!” but her voice seized up so she barely heard herself. The flames caught hold of a box of clothes destined, oddly enough, for the Phoenix, and leapt with enthusiasm—far too near the table. Kate jerked at her bindings, succeeding only in pulling them even tighter around her wrists and ankles. She was losing the feeling in her hands.

She tried to clear her throat to speak. Smoke rolled thick and black from the boxes.

“Angie, help me. Help me and I'll help you. How's that for a deal?”

The girl stared at the knife.

The smoke detector at the top of the stairs finally blew, and the thunder of feet homed in on it.

Angie pressed the blade a little harder against her wrist. Tiny beads of blood surfaced like little jewels in a bracelet.

“No, Angie, please,” Kate whispered, knowing the girl couldn't have heard her if she'd shouted.

Angie looked at her square in the face, and for the first time since Kate had met her she looked like exactly what she was: a child. A child no one had ever wanted, had ever loved.

“I hurt,” she said.

“Call the fire department!” Quinn shouted at the head of the stairs. “Kate!”

“Joh—” Her voice cracked and she began to cough. The smoke rolled along the ceiling toward the stairwell and the new source of fresh air.

“Kate!”

Quinn led the way down the stairs with a .38 Kovac had lent him, his fear obliterating all known rules of procedure. As he dropped below the cloud of smoke, his focus was instantly on Kate, bound hand and foot on a table, her sweater cut open, blood pooling on her skin. And then his attention went to the girl beside the table: Angie DiMarco with a butcher knife in her hands.

“Angie, drop the knife!” he shouted.

The girl looked up at him, the light in her eyes fading away. “Nobody loves me,” she said, and in one quick, violent motion slashed her wrist to the bone.

“NO!” Kate screamed.

“Jesus!” Quinn charged across the room, leading with the gun.

Angie dropped to her knees as the blood gushed from her arm. The knife fell to the floor. Quinn kicked it aside and dropped to his knees, grabbing the girl's arm with a grip like a C-clamp. Blood pumped between his fingers. Angie sagged against him.

Kate watched with horror, not even acknowledging Kovac as he cut her loose. She rolled off the table onto feet she could no longer feel, and fell in a heap. She had to scramble to Angie on her knees. Her hands were as useless as clubs, swollen and purple, and she couldn't make her fingers move. Still, she wrapped her arms around the girl.

“We have to get out of here!” Quinn shouted.

The fire had begun licking its way up the steps. A uniformed officer fought it down with an extinguisher. But even as he cleared the stairs, the flames were working their way across the basement, following the trail of lighter fluid, pouncing on everything edible in its path.

Quinn and a uniform took Angie up the basement steps and out the back door. Sirens were screaming out on the street, a couple of blocks away yet. He passed the girl off to the uniform and ran back to the house as Kovac came with Kate leaning heavily against him, both of them coughing as thick black smoke rolled up behind them, acrid with the smell of chemicals.

“Kate!”

She fell against him and he scooped her up in his arms.

“I'm going back for Marshall!” Kovac shouted above the roar. The fire had come up through the floor and found the river of gasoline Rob had poured through the house.

“He's dead!” Kate yelled, but Kovac was gone. “Sam!”

One of the uniforms charged in after him.

The sirens blasted out front, fire trucks bulling their way down the narrow street. Quinn negotiated the back steps with Kate in his arms and hustled down the side of the house to the front yard and the boulevard. He lowered her into the backseat of Kovac's car just as an explosion sounded from the bowels of the house and windows on the first floor shattered. Kovac and the uniform staggered away from the back corner of the house and fell to their hands and knees in the snow. Firemen and paramedics rushed toward them and toward the house.

“Are you all right?” Quinn asked, staring into Kate's eyes, his fingers digging into her shoulders.

Kate looked up at her house, flames visible now through the windows of the first floor. Behind Kovac's car, Angie was being loaded into an ambulance. The fear, the panic she had fought to keep at bay during the ordeal, hit her belatedly in a pounding wave.

She turned back to Quinn, shaking. “No,” she whispered as the flood of tears came. And he folded her into his arms and held her.

39

CHAPTER

“I NEVER LIKED him,” Yvonne Vetter said to the uniformed officer who stood guard outside Rob Marshall's garage door. She was huddled into a lumpy wool coat that made her look misshapen. Her round, sour face squinted up at him from beneath an incongruously jaunty red beret. “I called your hotline several times. I believe he cannibalized my Bitsy.”

“Your what, ma'am?”

“My Bitsy. My sweet little dog!”

“Wouldn't that be animalized?” Tippen speculated.

Liska cuffed him one on the arm.

The task force would get the first look around Rob's chamber of horrors before the collection of evidence began. The videographer followed right behind them. Even as they entered the house, the news crews were pulling up to the curbs on both sides of the street.

It was a nice house on a quiet street in a quiet neighborhood. An extra-large tree-studded lot near one of the most popular lakes in the Cities. A beautifully finished basement. Realtors would have been drooling over the opportunity to sell it if not for the fact Rob Marshall had tortured and murdered at least four women there.

They started in the basement, wandering through a media room equipped with several televisions, VCRs, stereo equipment, a bookcase lined with video- and audiotapes.

Tippen turned to the videographer. “Don't shoot the stereo equipment yet. I really need a new tuner and tape deck.”

The videographer immediately turned the camera on the recording equipment.

Tippen rolled his eyes. “It was a joke. You technogeeks have no sense of humor.”

The camera guy turned his lens on Tippen's ass as he walked away.

A headless mannequin stood in one corner of the room decked out in a skimpy see-through black lace bra and a purple spandex miniskirt.

“Hey, Tinks, you could pick up some new outfits,” Tippen called, eyeballing a sticky-looking residue on the shoulders of the mannequin. Possibly blood mixed with some other, clearer fluid.

Liska continued down the hall, checking out a utility room, moving on. Her boys would have loved this house. They talked endlessly about getting a house like their friend Mark had, with a cool rec room in the basement— where they could escape Mom's scrutiny—with a pool table and a big-screen TV.

There was a pool table here in the room at the end of the hall. It was draped with bloodstained white plastic, and there was a body on it. The smell of blood, urine, and excrement hung thick in the air. The stench of violent death.

“Tippen!” Liska hollered, bolting for the table.

Michele Fine lay twisted at an odd angle on her back, staring up at the light glaring in her face. She didn't