Ashes to Ashes

blink. Her eyes had the flat look of a corpse's. Her mouth hung open, drool crusted white in a trail down her chin. Her lips moved ever so slightly.

Liska bent close, laying two fingers on the side of Fine's neck to feel for a pulse, unable to detect one.

“. . . elp . . . me . . . elp . . . me . . .” Fragments of words on the thinnest of breaths.

Tippen jogged in and stopped cold. “Shit.”

“Get an ambulance,” Liska ordered. “She may just live to tell the tale.”

40

CHAPTER

“I DIDN'T WANT to help,” Angie said softly.

It didn't sound like her voice. The thought drifted through her drug-fogged brain on a cloud. It sounded like the voice of the little girl inside her, the one she always tried to hide, to protect. She stared at the bandage on her left arm, the desire to pull it off and make the wound bleed lurking at the dark edge of her mind.

“I didn't want to do what he said.”

She waited for the Voice to sneer at her, but it was strangely silent. She waited for the Zone to zoom up on her, but the drugs held it off.

She sat at a table in a room that wasn't supposed to look like part of a hospital. The blue print gown she wore had short sleeves and exposed her thin, scarred arms for all to see. She looked at the scars, one beside another and another, like bars in a prison cell door. Marks she had carved into her own flesh. Marks life had carved into her soul. A constant reminder so she could never forget exactly who and what she was.

“Was Rob Marshall the one who took you to the park that night, Angie?” Kate asked quietly. She sat at the table too, beside Angie with her chair turned so that she was facing the girl. “Was he the john you told me about?”

Angie nodded, still looking down at the scars. “His Great Plan,” she murmured.

She wished the drugs would fog the memories, but the pictures were clear in her head, like watching them on television. Sitting in the truck, knowing the dead woman's body was in the back, knowing that the man at the wheel had killed her, knowing Michele had been a part of that too. She could see them stabbing her over and over, could see the sexual excitement in them growing with every thrust of the knives. Michele had given her to him afterward, and he had taken her again that night in the park, excited because of the dead woman in the back and because of his Great Plan.

“I was supposed to describe someone else.”

“As the killer?” Kate asked.

“Someone he made up. All these details. He made me repeat them over and over and over.”

Angie picked at a loose thread on the edge of her bandage, wishing blood would seep up through the layers of white gauze. The sight would comfort her, make her feel less terrible about sitting beside Kate. She couldn't look her in the face after all that had happened.

“I hate him.”

Present tense, Kate thought. As if she didn't know he was dead, that she had killed him. Maybe she didn't. Maybe her mind would allow her that one consolation.

“I hate him too,” Kate said softly.

Facts about Rob and the Finlow sisters were coming out of Wisconsin and piecing together into a terrible, sordid story America received new episodes of every night on the news. The lurid quality of lover-killers and the fall of a billionaire made for juicy ratings bait. Michele Finlow, who had lingered for ten hours after being found in Rob's basement, had filled in some of the blanks herself. And Angie would supply what fragments her mind would allow.

Daughters of two different men and a mother with a history of drug abuse and assorted domestic misery, Michele and Angie had been in and out of the child welfare system, never finding the care they needed. Children falling through the cracks of a system that was poor at best. Both girls had juvenile records, Michele's being longer and more inclined to violent behavior.

Kate had read the news accounts of the fire that had killed the mother and stepfather. The general consensus of the investigators on the case was that one or both of the girls had started it, but there hadn't been enough evidence to take to court. One witness had recalled seeing Michele calmly standing in the yard while the house burned, listening to the screams of the two people trapped inside. She had, in fact, been standing too near a window, and was burned when the window exploded and the fire rolled outside to consume fresh oxygen. The case had brought Rob Marshall into their lives via the court system. And Rob had brought the girls to Minneapolis.

Love. Or so Michele had called it, though it was doubtful she had any real grasp of the meaning of the word. A man in love didn't leave his partner to die a horrible death alone in a basement while he skipped the country, which was exactly what Rob would have done.

Peter Bondurant's bullet had struck Michele in the back, severing her spinal cord. Rob, who had been watching from a distance, had waited for Bondurant to leave, then picked her up and took her back to his home. Any gunshot wound brought into an ER had to be reported to the police. He hadn't been willing to risk that not even to save the life of this woman who allegedly loved him.

He'd left her there on the table, where they had played out their sick, sadistic fantasies; where they had killed four women. Left her paralyzed, bleeding, in shock, dying. He hadn't even bothered to cover her with a blanket. The payoff money had been recovered from Rob's car.

According to Michele, Rob had fixated on Jillian out of jealousy, but Michele had put him off. Then on that fateful Friday night Jillian had called from a pay phone after the battery in her cell phone had gone dead. She wanted to talk about the fight she'd had with her father. She needed the support of a friend. Her friend had delivered her to Rob Marshall.

“Michele loves him,” Angie said, picking at the bandage. A frown curved her mouth and she added, “More than me.”

But Michele was all she had, her only family, her surrogate mother, and so she had done whatever Michele had asked. Kate wondered what would happen in Angie's mind when she was finally told Michele was dead, that she was alone—the one thing she feared the most.

There was a soft rap at the door, signifying Kate's allotted time as a visitor was up. When she left she would be grilled by the people sitting on the other side of the observation window—Sabin, Lieutenant Fowler, Gary Yurek, and Kovac—back in good graces after scoring news time as a hero at Kate's fire—a photo of him and Quinn carrying her out the back door of her house had graced the cover of both papers in the Cities and made Newsweek. They believed she was here at their request. But she hadn't asked their questions or pressed for the answers. She hadn't come to this locked psychiatric ward to exploit Angie Finlow. She hadn't come as an advocate to see a client. She had come to see someone she had shared an ordeal with. Someone whose life would be forever tied to hers in a way no one else's ever would be.

She reached along the tabletop and touched Angie's hand, trying to keep her in the present, in the moment. Her own hands were still discolored and puffy, the ligature marks on her wrists covered by her own pristine white bandages. Three days had passed since the incident in her house.

“You're not alone, kiddo,” Kate whispered softly. “You can't just save my life and breeze out of it again. I'll be keeping my eye on you. Here's a little reminder of that.”

With the skill of a magician, she slipped the thing from her hand to Angie's. The tiny pottery angel Angie had stolen from her desk, then left behind at the Phoenix.

Angie stared at the statue, a guardian angel in a world where such things did not truly exist—or so she had always believed. The need to believe now was so strong, it terrified her, and she retreated to the shadowed side of her mind to escape the fear. Better to believe in nothing than wait for the inevitable disappointment to drop like an ax.

She closed her hand around the statue and held it like a secret. She closed her eyes and shut her mind down, not even aware of the tears that slipped down her cheeks.

Kate blinked back tears of her own as she rose slowly and carefully. She stroked a hand over Angie's hair, bent, and pressed the softest of kisses to the top of her head.