Ashes to Ashes

in his gut. Jillian was the key. Something in her life had put her in the crosshairs of this killer. And if they could find out what that something was, then they might have a hope in hell of catching the son of a bitch.

He went back to the desk and flipped through the binder pages to the section of photographs: eight-by-ten color prints, neatly labeled as to subject matter. The crime scenes: general shots, lay-of-the-land shots, body position from various angles, close-ups of the burned, defiled women. And from the ME's office: general and close- up shots of the victims before and after clean-up at the morgue, autopsy photographs, close-up shots of wounds. Wounds inflicted before death—indicative of a sexual sadist. Wounds inflicted after death—which were more fetishistic than sadistic, intrinsic to the killer's fantasies.

Sophisticated fantasies. Fantasies he'd been developing for a long, long time.

He paged slowly through the close-ups of the wounds, examining every mark the killer had left, lingering on the stab wounds to the victims' chests. Eight stab wounds clustered in a group, longer wounds alternating with shorter in a specific pattern.

Of all the gruesome aspects of the murders, this bothered him most. More than the burning. The burning seemed more for show, making a public statement. Ashes to ashes. A symbolic funeral, the end of his connection to the victim. These stab wounds meant something more personal, intimate. What?

A cacophony of voices filled Quinn's head: Bondurant's, Brandt's, the medical examiner's, Kovac's; cops and coroners and experts and agents from hundreds of past cases. All of them with an opinion or a question or an ax to grind. All of them so loud he couldn't hear himself think anymore. And the fatigue only seemed to magnify the noise until he wanted to beg someone to turn it off.

The Mighty Quinn. That was what they called him back in Quantico. If they could see him now . . . Feeling as if he might choke on the fear of missing something or turning the investigation in the wrong way.

The system was on overload, and he was the one at the switch—and there was the most frightening thought: that only he could make things change, and he wouldn't make things change because as awful as this was, the alternative scared him even more. Without the job, there was no John Quinn.

A fine trembling started deep within him and subtly worked its way out into his arms. He fought against it, hating it, tightening his biceps and triceps, trying to force the weakness back down inside him. Eyes squeezed shut, he dropped to the floor and began push-ups. Ten, twenty, thirty, more, until his arms felt as if the skin would burst open, unable to contain the straining muscle mass, until the pain burned the noise out of his mind and all he could hear was the pounding of his own pulse. And then he forced himself to his feet, breathing hard, warm and damp with sweat.

He focused on the photograph before him, seeing not the torn flesh or the blood or the corpse; seeing only the pattern of the wound. X over X.

“Cross my heart,” he murmured, tracing a fingertip over the lines. “Hope to die.”

“A SERIAL KILLER stalks the streets of Minneapolis. Today, Minneapolis police released a composite sketch of the man who may have brutally slain three women, and that is our top story tonight . . .”

The women of the Phoenix House sat in, on, and around the mismatched assortment of chairs and couches in the living room, their attention on the broad-shouldered, square-jawed anchor of the Channel Eleven news. The camera cut to film footage of the afternoon press briefing, the chief of police holding up the sketch of the Cremator, then the screen was filled with the sketch itself.

Angie watched from the doorway, her attention on the women. A couple of them weren't much older than she was. Four were in their twenties. One was older, fat, and ugly. The fat one wore a sleeveless top because the furnace had gone haywire and the house was as hot and dry as a desert. Her upper arms were flabby and fish-belly white. Her stomach rested on her thighs when she sat down.

Angie knew the woman had been a hooker, but she couldn't imagine a man ever being hard up enough to pay to have sex with her. Men liked pretty girls, young girls. Didn't matter how old or ugly the man was, they all wanted pretty girls. That was Angie's experience. Maybe that was why Fat Arlene was there. Maybe she couldn't get a man to pay her, and the Phoenix was her retirement home.

A redhead who had the thin, pale, bruised look of an addict started to cry when photographs of the three murder victims came onscreen. The other women pretended not to notice. Toni Urskine, who ran the Phoenix, perched on the arm of the redhead's chair, leaned down, and touched her shoulder.

“It's okay,” she said softly. “It's okay to cry. Fawn was your friend, Rita.”

The redhead pulled her bony bare feet up onto the seat of her chair and buried her head against her knees, sobbing. “Why'd he have to kill her that way? She didn't hurt nobody!”

“There's no making sense of it,” another one said. “It could have been any of us.”

A fact that was clear to all of them, even the ones who tried to deny it.

Fat Arlene said, “You gotta be smart about who you go with. You gotta have a sense about it.”

A black woman with ratty dreadlocks shot her a mean glare. “Like you got to pick and choose. Who wanna tie your fat ass down? See all that fat jiggling like Jell-O while he cut you up.”

Arlene's face went red and squeezed tight, eyes disappearing in the round mounds of cheeks and puffy brows. She looked like a chow chow Angie had seen once. “You can just shut your hole, you bony bitch!”

Looking angry, Toni Urskine left the crying redhead and moved toward the middle of the room, holding her hands up like a referee. “Hey! None of that! We've got to learn to respect and care for one another. Remember: group esteem, gender esteem, self-esteem.”

Easy for her to say, Angie thought, slipping back from the door. Toni Urskine had never had to go down on some old pervert to get enough money for a meal. She was little miss do-gooder, in her casual-chic outfits from Dayton's and a hundred-dollar hairdo by Horst. She drove up to this crappy house in her Ford Explorer from some beautiful home out in Edina or Minnetonka. She didn't know what it did to a person inside to find out she was worth only twenty-five bucks.

“We all care about these murder victims,” Urskine said passionately, dark eyes shining, her sharp-featured face aglow. “We all are angry that the police have done virtually nothing until now. It's an outrage. It's a slap in the face. It's the city of Minneapolis telling us the lives of women in desperate circumstances mean nothing. We need to be angry about that, not angry with each other.”

The women listened, some intent, some halfheartedly, some pretending not to.

“I think what we need here is involvement. We need to be proactive,” Urskine said. “We'll go down to city hall tomorrow. The press can hear our side of it. We'll get copies of the composite sketch and canvass . . .”

Angie backed away from the door and moved silently down the hall. She didn't like it when people started talking about the Cremator cases. The Phoenix women weren't supposed to know who she was or that she was involved in the case, but Angie always got the tense feeling that the other women would look at her and somehow figure out she was the mystery witness. She didn't want anyone to know.

She didn't want it to be true.

Sudden tears filled her eyes and she rubbed her hands against them. No show of emotion. If she showed what she felt, then someone would see a weakness in her, or a need, or the madness that sucked her into the Zone and made her cut herself. No one would understand that the blade severed the connection to insanity.

“Is everything all right?”

Startled, Angie jerked around and stared at the man standing in the open doorway to the basement. Late thirties, good-looking, dressed in tan chinos and a Ralph Lauren Polo shirt to work on the furnace: He had to be some relation to Toni Urskine. Sweat and dirt streaked his face. He worked a gray rag between hands dark with grime and something the color of blood.

He glanced down as Angie did and looked back up with a crooked smile. “The old furnace in this place,” he said by way of explanation. “I keep it running with willpower and rubber bands.

“Greggory Urskine,” he said, sticking out his hand.

“You cut yourself,” Angie said, not accepting the gesture, her gaze still on the smear of blood that crossed his palm.

Urskine looked at it and rubbed the rag over it, chuckling in that nervous way people sometimes have when they are trying to make a good impression. Angie just stared at him. He looked a little like Kurt Russell, she thought: a wide jaw and small nose, tousled sandy hair. He wore glasses with silver wire rims. He had cut himself