Ashes to Ashes

“Don't you think the fire is symbolic?” he asks. “I think maybe the guy has some kind of religious mania. You know: ashes to ashes and all that.”

“Maybe.”

“I'll bet when they catch him, the cops find out he had some kind of religious fanatic stepfather or something. A mortician, maybe,” he says, thinking of the man who had been involved with his mother during much of his youth. The man who had believed he had been charged by God to redeem her through sexual subjugation and beatings.

“Sick bastard. Going around torturing and killing women because of his own inadequacies. Should have been drowned in a sack at birth.”

“And these creeps always put everything off on their mothers. Like they have no minds of their own.”

He wants to grab the two women saying these things. Grab them by their throats, scream his name in their purpling faces, and crush their windpipes with his bare hands. The anger is now a living flame, blue-centered and hot.

“I've read about that Quinn. He's brilliant. He caught that child-killer out in Colorado.”

“He can interrogate me anytime he wants,” the other woman says. “George Clooney's got nothing on him.”

They laugh, and he wants to pull a claw hammer out of the air and smash their skulls in with it. He feels the heat of the fire in his chest. His head is throbbing. The need is a fever just beneath the surface of his skin.

Outside the community center, the parking lot is in a state of gridlock. He goes to the car and leans back against it, crossing his arms.

“No point trying!” he calls to one of the uniformed cops directing traffic.

“Might as well wait it out.”

The idiot. Who in this picture is inadequate? Not the Cremator, but those who look for him and look at him and see a common man.

He watches others exit the building and come out onto the sidewalk. The yellow-white floodlight washes over them. Some are citizens. Some are cops assigned to the task force. Some he recognizes.

Quinn emerges from a side door toward the back of the building—a spot the media had chosen to ignore. He rushes out with no overcoat and stands just out of cover of the shadows in the doorwell, hands on hips, shoulders square, his breath clouding the air as he looks around.

Looking for me, Agent Quinn? The inadequate loser with the mother complex? The mental monster. You're about to find out what a monster really is.

The Cremator has a plan. The Cremator will be a legend. The killer who broke John Quinn. The ultimate triumph for the ultimate killer over the ultimate hunter of his kind.

He slides behind the wheel of the car he had driven here, starts the motor, adjusts the heater, and curses the cold. He needs a warmer hunting ground. He backs the car out of the slot and follows a silver Toyota 4Runner out of the parking lot and into the street.

18

CHAPTER

KATE PILOTED THE 4Runner carefully into the narrow, ancient garage that sat just off the alley behind her house. During the winter months she regularly dreamed of an attached garage, but then spring would come and the backyard perennial beds would bloom and she would forget about the hassle of tromping through the snow, and the danger of walking in a dark alley in a city with a disturbing number of sex crimes.

The wind scrambled and scattered the dead leaves that lay in a drift along the side of the neighbor's garage. A little shiver snaked down Kate's back, and she paused to turn and stare back into the darkness behind her—just in case. But it was only her natural paranoia compounded by the knowledge that the meeting she had just attended had been staged for the sole purpose of baiting a serial killer.

Old feelings from her days in the BSU came rushing back. Memories of unspeakable crimes that were the topics of casual conversation around the water cooler. Serial murder had been such an ingrained part of her world, that kind of idle talk hadn't seemed strange to her until toward the end of her career—after Emily died. Death had then suddenly taken on a more personal quality, and she had lost the veneer of detachment that was necessary for people in law enforcement. Finally, she hadn't been able to stand it anymore.

She wondered how John still did . . . if he did. He'd looked pale tonight, gaunt and gray in the harsh lights. Back in the old days, his coping strategy had been overwork. He didn't have to deal with feelings if he was too busy to face them. That probably hadn't changed. And what did she care if it had or not?

She slid the key into the back-door dead bolt and paused again before turning it, the hair rising up on the back of her neck. Slowly, she turned, straining to see past the reach of the motion-detector light into the shadowed corners of the yard. It struck her then that she'd left her cell phone in the truck. In the truck, across the yard in the creepy garage.

Screw it. She could pick up any messages from the house phone. If there was a God, none of her clients would have a crisis tonight. And she could settle into a hot tub with a glass of her favorite coping method. This case might kill her, but at least she'd die clean and pleasantly numb.

No maniac rushed to push his way in the door behind her, and no maniac waited in the kitchen with a butcher knife. Thor ran in to complain loudly at the late dinner hour. Kate tossed her purse on the counter and clicked on the small television to catch the news. With one hand she unbuttoned her coat, with the other she reached into the fridge for the cat food and then the bottle of Sapphire.

The lead story on the ten o'clock news was the meeting. There was a clip of the crowd—Toni Urskine and her Phoenix women prominent in the shot—Chief Greer thumping the podium, and John looking grave as he spoke about the Bureau's role in the investigation.

Grave and handsome. The camera had always loved his face. He had aged hard, and even that looked good on him—the lines fanning out beside his eyes, the gray in his close-cropped hair. His physical, sexual appeal hit her on a basic level she couldn't block, and could only pretend to ignore.

Then it was back to the anchor, who rehashed the facts of the cases while photographs of Peter and Jillian Bondurant filled one corner of the screen. Reward and hotline information followed, and they were on to the next hot topic: beat cops warming themselves these chilly nights in the strip clubs downtown.

Kate left the news to Thor and wandered into the dining room, flipping on the old mission-style chandelier she had salvaged and rewired herself, thinking about the Bondurant connection and how Jillian did or didn't fit the victim profile.

“Damn you, John,” she muttered.

“We'll talk about the case. I've got some ideas I'd like to bounce off you.”

“It's not my job. I'm not with BSU anymore.”

“You were an expert in the field . . .”

And he had access to every expert in the field. He didn't need her.

She hung her coat on the back of a chair and sat down at the oak table she'd refinished that first summer after she'd left the Bureau. She had been wound, wired, still reeling from Emily's death and the wreck of both her marriage and her relationship with Quinn. Life as she knew it had ended, and she had to start over again. Alone, except for the ghosts.

She'd never told anyone close to her about Quinn, not her sister or her parents. They didn't know her resignation from the Bureau had come under a cloud of scandal. She couldn't have adequately explained the connection she'd felt to Quinn as Steven had drifted away from her on a tide of grief and anger. Even severed, that connection had been too precious to share with people who wouldn't understand. And her parents wouldn't have understood any more than any of her colleagues back in Quantico had.

She'd had an affair, cheated on her husband. She was a villain. That was what people wanted to believe—the worst and most sordid. No one wanted to know how alone she'd felt, how in need of comfort and support she'd been. They didn't want to hear about the powerful pull of something far beyond physical attraction that had drawn her to John Quinn—and he to her. People preferred to believe the worst because it seemed less apt to touch their own lives.