She could make only a thumbnail sketch of Angie's personality. Their time together had been too brief and too strongly influenced by the stress of the situation. Kate hated to think what conclusions some stranger would draw of
Luckily, the woman who ran the Phoenix House was accustomed to a wide range of bad attitudes. Residents at the house were women who had chosen or been forced down some of life's rougher roads and now wanted out.
Angie had been less than appreciative for the roof over her head. She had lashed out at Kate in a way that struck Kate as being way out of proportion.
“So what if I don't want to stay here?”
“Angie, you've got no place else to go.”
“You don't know that.”
“Don't make me go through this again,” Kate said with an impatient sigh.
Toni Urskine, director of the Phoenix, lingered in the doorway for that much of the exchange, watching with a frown. Then she left them to have it out in the otherwise deserted den, a small room with cheap paneling and cast-off furnishings. Mismatched rummage sale “art” on the walls gave the place the ambiance of a fleabag hotel.
“You have no permanent address,” Kate said. “You tell me your family is dead. You haven't managed to come up with a single real-live person who would take you in. You need a place to stay. This is a place to stay. Three squares, bed, and bath. What's the problem?”
Angie swatted at a stained throw pillow on a worn plaid love seat. “It's a fucking sty, that's the problem.”
“Oh, excuse me, you've been living at the Hilton? Your fake address wasn't in this good a house?”
“You like it so much, then you stay here.”
“I don't have to stay here. I'm not the homeless witness to a murder.”
“Well, I don't fucking want to be!” the girl cried, her eyes shining like crystal, sudden tears poised to spill down her cheeks. She turned away from Kate and jammed the heels of her hands against her eyes. Her thin body curled in on itself like a comma.
“No, no, no,” she mewed softly to herself. “Not now . . .”
The swift break in emotions caught Kate flat-footed. This was what she had wanted, wasn't it? To have the hard shell crack. Now that it had, she wasn't quite sure what to do about it. She hadn't been expecting the break to come now, over this.
Hesitantly, she stepped toward the girl, feeling awkward and guilty. “Angie . . .”
“No,” the girl whispered more to herself than to Kate. “Not now. Please, please . . .”
“You don't have to be embarrassed, Angie,” Kate said softly, standing close, though she made no attempt to touch the girl. “You've had a hell of a day. I'd cry too. I'll cry later. I'm no good at it—my nose runs, it's gross.”
“Why c-c-can't I j-j-just stay with you?”
The question came from way out in left field, hit Kate square in the temple, and stunned her to her toes. As if this girl had never been away from home. As if she had never stayed among strangers. She'd likely been living on the street for God only knew how long, doing God only knew what to survive, and suddenly this dependence. It didn't make sense.
Before Kate could respond, Angie shook her head a little, rubbed the tears from her face with the sleeve of her jacket, and sucked in a ragged breath. That fast the window of opportunity shut and the steel mask was back in place.
“Never mind. Like you fucking care what happens to me.”
“Angie, I care what happens to you or I wouldn't have this job.”
“Yeah, right. Your job.”
“Look,” Kate said, out of energy for the argument, “it beats sleeping in a box. Give it a couple of days. If you hate it here, I'll see about making some other arrangements. You've got my cell phone number: Call me if you need me or if you just need to talk. Anytime. I meant what I said—I'm on your side. I'll pick you up in the morning.”
Angie said nothing, just stood there looking sullen and small inside her too-big denim jacket that belonged to someone else.
“Try to get some sleep, kiddo,” Kate said softly.
She had left the girl standing in the den, staring out a window at the lights of the house next door. The poignant picture brought a sense of sympathy to Kate. The symbolism of a kid on the outside of a family looking in. A child with no one.
“This is why I don't work with kids,” she said now to the cat. “They'd just ruin my reputation as a hard- ass.”
Thor trilled deep in his throat and rolled onto his back, offering his hairy belly for rubbing. She complied, enjoying the contact with another living being who appreciated and loved her in his own way. And she thought of Angie DiMarco lying awake in the night, in a house filled with strangers, the one connection in her life that meant anything to anyone being her connection to a killer.
A BLINKING MESSAGE light greeted Quinn as he let himself into his room at the Radisson Plaza Hotel. He tossed the sack of Mexican takeout in the wastebasket beneath the writing table, called room service, and ordered wild rice soup and a turkey sandwich he probably wouldn't eat. His stomach couldn't deal with Mexican anymore.
He stripped out of his clothes, crammed everything but his shoes into a plastic laundry bag, tied the bag shut, and set it by the door. Someone down in laundry was in for an unpleasant surprise.
The water pounded out of the showerhead like a hail of bullets, as hot as he could stand it. He scrubbed his hair and body and let the water work on the knots in his shoulders, then he turned and let it pelt him in the face and chest. Images from the day tumbled through his head, out of order: the meeting, Bondurant's lawyer, the rush to the airport, the crime scene tape fluttering around the trunks of sturdy maple trees, Kate.
Kate. Five years was a long time. In five years she had established herself in a new career, she had a new life—which she deserved after all that had gone wrong in Virginia.
And what had he built in five years besides his reputation and a lot of unused vacation time?
Nothing. He owned a town house and a Porsche and a closet full of designer suits. He socked the rest of his money away for a retirement that would probably end in a massive coronary two months after he left the Bureau because he had nothing else in his life. If the job didn't kill him first.
He turned the water off; climbed out of the shower, and toweled himself dry. He had an athlete's body, solid, roped with muscle, leaner than it used to be—the reverse of most men in their mid-forties. He couldn't remember when his enjoyment of food had become indifference. Once upon a time he had considered himself a gourmet cook. Now he ate because he had to. The exercise he used to burn off tension burned off all the calories as well.
The greasy, spicy smell of the discarded Mexican food was permeating the bedroom. A smell preferable to a burned corpse, though he knew from experience it wouldn't be so welcome when it turned stale and he woke up to it at three in the morning.
The thought brought on a tumble of unpleasant memories of other hotel rooms in other cities and other dinners bought to fight off the aftertaste and smell of death. Of lying awake, alone in a strange bed in the middle of the night, sweating like a horse from nightmares, his heart racing.
The panic hit him in the gut like a sledgehammer, and he sat down on the edge of the bed in sweat pants and a gray FBI Academy T-shirt. He put his head in his hands for a moment, dreading the attack—the hollowness, the dizziness; the tremors that started in the core of him and rattled outward, down his arms and legs; the sense that there was nothing left of who he really was, the fear that he wouldn't know the difference.
He cursed himself and reached down deep for the strength to fight it off as he had done again and again in the last year. Or was it two now? He measured time by cases, measured cases by bodies. He had a recurring dream that he was locked away in a white room, pulling the hair out of his head one by one and naming each after the
