Ashes to Ashes

“I'm not mad at you.”

He laughed. “The hell you're not. You won't return my phone calls. You don't want to have a conversation with me. Your back goes up every time you see me.”

“I've seen you what—twice since you got here? The first time you used me to get your way, and the second time you made fun of my job—”

“I did not make fun of your job,” he protested. “I made fun of your client.”

“Oh, that makes all the difference,” she said with sarcasm, conveniently forgetting that everyone made fun of David Willis, including her. She stood, not wanting him looking down on her any more than their height difference allowed. “What I do here is important, John. Maybe not in the same way as what you do, but it is important.”

“I'm not disagreeing with you, Kate.”

“No? As I recall, when I decided to leave the Bureau, you told me I was throwing my life away.”

The reminder struck a spark, and old frustration came alive in his dark eyes. “You threw away a solid career. You had what? Fourteen, fifteen years in? You were a tremendous asset to the BSU. You were a good agent, Kate, and—”

“And I'm a better advocate. I get to deal with people while they're still alive. I get to make a difference for them one-on-one, help them through a hard time, help them empower themselves, help them take steps to make a difference in their own lives. How is that not valuable?”

“I'm not against you being an advocate,” Quinn argued. “I was against you leaving the Bureau. Those are two separate issues. You let Steven push you out—”

“I did not!”

“The hell you didn't! He wanted to punish you—”

“And I didn't let him.”

“You cut and ran. You let him win.”

“He didn't win,” Kate returned. “His victory would have been in crushing the life out of my career one drop of blood at a time. I was supposed to stick around for that just to show him how tough I was? What was I supposed to do? Transfer and transfer until he ran out of cronies in his ol' boy network? Until I ended up at the resident agency in Gallup, New Mexico, with nothing to do but count the snakes and tarantulas crossing the road?”

“You could have fought him, Kate,” he insisted. “I would have helped you.”

She crossed her arms and arched a brow. “Oh, really? As I remember it, you didn't want much to do with me after your little run-in with the Office of Professional Responsibility.”

“That had nothing to do with it,” he said angrily. “The OPR never scared me. Steven and his petty little bureaucratic bullshit games didn't scare me. I was tied up. I was juggling maybe seventy-five cases including the Cleveland Cannibal—”

“Oh, I know all about it, John,” she said caustically. “The Mighty Quinn, bearing the weight of the criminal world on your shoulders.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” he demanded. “I've got a job and I do it.”

And to hell with the rest of the world, thought Kate, including me. But she didn't say it. What good would it do now? It wouldn't change history as she remembered it. And it wouldn't help to argue that he surely did give a damn what the OPR put in his file. There was no sense arguing that to Quinn the job was everything.

Long story short: She'd had an affair that had delivered the death blows to a marriage already battered beyond recognition. Her husband's retaliation had forced her out of her career. And Quinn had walked away from the wreck and lost himself in his first love—his work. When push had come to shove, he stepped back and let her fall. When she turned to go, he hadn't asked her not to.

In five years he hadn't called her once.

Not that she'd wanted him to.

The argument had drawn them closer together one step at a time. He was near enough now that she could smell the faint hint of a subtle aftershave. She could sense the tension in his body. And fragments of a thousand memories she'd locked away came rushing to the surface. The strength of his arms, the warmth of his body, the comfort he had offered that she had soaked up like a dry sponge.

Her mistake had been in needing. She didn't need him now.

She turned away from him and sat back on the desk, trying to convince herself that it wasn't a sign of anything that they'd fallen so readily into this argument.

“I've got a job to do too,” she said, looking pointedly at her watch. “I suppose that's why you showed up. Sabin called you?”

Quinn let out the air he'd held in his lungs. His shoulders dropped three inches. He hadn't expected the emotions to erupt so easily. It wasn't like him to let that happen. Nor was it like him to abandon a fight until he won. The relief he felt in doing so was strong enough to induce embarrassment.

He retreated a step. “He wants me to sit in with you and your witness when she comes back to work on the sketch.”

“I don't care what he wants,” Kate said stubbornly. “I won't have you there. This girl is hanging with me by a thread. Somebody whispers the letters FBI and she'll bolt.”

“Then we won't mention those letters.”

“She can smell a lie a mile off.”

“She'll never have to know I'm there. I'll be a mouse in the corner.”

Kate almost laughed. Yeah, who would notice Quinn? Six feet of dark, handsome masculinity in an Italian suit. Naw, a girl like Angie wouldn't notice him at all.

“I'd like to get a sense of this girl,” he said. “What's your take on her? Is she a credible witness?”

“She's a foul-mouthed, lying, scheming little bitch,” Kate said bluntly. “She's probably a runaway. She's maybe sixteen going on forty-two. She's had some hard knocks, she's alone, and she's scared spitless.”

“The well-rounded American child,” Quinn said dryly. “So, did she see Smokey Joe?”

Kate considered for a moment, weighing all that Angie was and was not. Whatever the girl hoped to gain in terms of a reward, whatever lies she may have told, seeing the face of evil was for real. Kate could feel the truth in that. The tension in the girl every time she had to retell the story was something virtually impossible to fake convincingly. “Yes. I believe she did.”

Quinn nodded. “But she's holding back?”

“She's afraid of retaliation by the killer—and maybe by the cops too. She won't tell us what she was doing in that park at midnight.”

“Guesses?”

“Maybe scoring drugs. Or she might have turned a trick somewhere nearby and was cutting across the park to get back to whatever alley she'd been sleeping in.”

“But she doesn't have a record?”

“None that anyone's been able to find. We're flashing her picture around sex crimes, narcotics, and the juvie division. No bites yet.”

“A woman of mystery.”

“Pollyanna she ain't.”

“Too bad you can't get her prints.”

Kate made a face. “We'd have them now if I'd let Sabin get his way. He wanted Kovac to arrest her Monday and let her sit in jail overnight to put the fear of God in her.”

“Might have worked.”

“Over my dead body.”

Quinn couldn't help but smile at the steel in her voice, the fire in her eyes. Clearly, she felt protective of her client, lying, scheming little bitch or not. Kovac had commented to him that while Kate was the consummate professional, she protected her victims and witnesses as if they were family. An interesting choice of words.

In five years she hadn't remarried. There was no snapshot of a boyfriend on the shelves above her desk. But inside a delicate silver filigree frame was a tiny photo of the daughter she had lost. Tucked back in the corner, away from the paperwork, away from the casual glance of visitors, almost hidden even from her own gaze, the cherubic face of the child whose death she carried on her conscience like a stone.