Ashes to Ashes

And so Kate had kept her secret to herself—and the guilt and regret and heartache that were part and parcel of the deal. And she'd built that new life a block at a time, careful to give it a good foundation and balance. The job was eight-to-five most days. Clients came and went. She got to help them in specific ways, and then their lives moved on and out of hers. Her involvement was finite and manageable.

Even as she thought that, she saw Angie in her mind's eye, and took a long pull on the Sapphire. She remembered the girl's tears, the tough kid, the street kid, curled in on herself and crying like the child she would never admit she was. Scared and embarrassed and ashamed—and she would never admit that either.

Kate had kneeled at Angie's feet, maintaining contact with one hand—touching the girl's hand or her knee or stroking her head as she doubled over and tried to hide her face. And the whole time, the same loop of emotions, the same chain of thoughts, played through Kate's mind—that she was nobody's mother, that this connection she was making to this girl was more than Kate wanted and less than Angie needed.

But the stark truth was that Kate was all she had. The ball was in her court and there was no one else to dump it to. There wasn't another advocate in the office who would stand up to Ted Sabin. There weren't that many who would stand up to Angie.

The story the girl told was short and sad and sordid. She had got picked up on Lake Street and dumped out in the park, a disposable sex toy for a man who never even asked her name. He paid her twenty when the going rate was thirty-five, told her to call a cop when she complained, shoved her out of his vehicle, and drove away. He left her there in the middle of the night like an unwanted kitten.

The image of her standing there alone, disheveled, smelling of sex, with a crumpled twenty in her pocket stuck in Kate's mind. Abandoned. Alone. Her life stretching out in front of her like forty miles of bad road. She couldn't have been more than fifteen or sixteen. Not that much older than Emily would have been if she had lived.

The tears rose up in a sneak attack. Kate took another sip of the gin and tried to swallow the knot down with it. There was no time for crying and no point in it. Emily was gone and Angie was no substitute. She didn't even want a substitute. The sudden sense of emptiness could be dodged or numbed. She was an old hand at it. Put the pain back in its box. Keep those walls up high. God forbid anyone see over them . . . herself included.

The fatigue and the alcohol pulled at her as she got up and headed for the den. She had to check her messages. And she wanted to call the Phoenix to make one last connection with Angie for the night—to strengthen the connection that had been made that afternoon.

She refused to let herself think of the girl sitting alone in her room at the Phoenix, feeling vulnerable and afraid and disappointed in herself for reaching out. She refused to think that she should have tried harder to make that connection go deeper.

The entry hall was lit by a streetlight half a block away, the illumination coming soft and silver through a pair of sidelights Kate kept meaning to get rid of. It was a simple matter to break a sidelight and get into a house. That reminder unfailingly came at night just before she went upstairs to bed.

A lamp burned low in the library-cum-office, a room she had left much the way she remembered it from childhood, when her father had been a midlevel executive for Honeywell. Cluttered and masculine with a sturdy oak desk and a couple of hundred books lining the walls, it smelled of leather upholstery and the faintest memory of good cigars. The message light on the answering machine flickered like a flame, but the phone rang before she could hit the playback button.

“Kate Conlan.”

“Kovac. Get your fanny to the Phoenix, Red. Our witness is missing. We'll meet you there.”

“I SHOULD HAVE stayed,” Kate said, pacing the ratty den of the Phoenix with her hands on her hips. “Goddammit, I should have stayed.”

“You can't be with 'em twenty-four/seven, Red,” Kovac said, lighting a cigarette.

“No,” she muttered, turning a furious glare on the narcotics dick Kovac had borrowed to keep an eye on Angie while she was at the Phoenix—a grubby-looking skinny guy in an army jacket with the name Iverson stenciled over the pocket. “That was your job.”

“Hey.” He held up his hands to ward her off. “I was here, but I was told you didn't want me too close. She must have slipped out the back.”

“Well, duh. Where did you think she would ‘slip out'? By definition, that sorta rules out the front door, doesn't it?”

The narc tipped his head back and swaggered toward Kate, cocky and mean, an attitude that played well with dealers and hypes. “I didn't ask for this lame fucking job, and I don't have to take a bunch of shit from a fucking social worker.”

“Hey!” Quinn barked.

Kate stopped Iverson in his tracks with a look and closed the distance between them herself. “You lost the only witness we had, asshole. You don't want to answer to me? Fine. How about the chief? How about the county attorney? Why don't you tell the mayor how you lost the only witness to the burning of Peter Bondurant's daughter's body because you're a hot-shit narc and you think baby-sitting is beneath you?”

Iverson's face went purple to the rims of his ears. “Fuck this,” he said, backing off. “I'm out of here.”

Kovac let him walk out. The front door squeaked open and slammed shut, the sound reverberating in the cavernous hall.

“Every superior in the chain is gonna ream his ass,” he said with a sigh. “He won't be able to sit down on the street sweeper they assign him to tomorrow.”

Kate began to pace again. “Did she leave or was she taken?”

“Iverson said her stuff is gone from her room and there's no sign of forced entry at the back. There was another resident here the whole time. She told him she didn't see or hear anything. Quinn and I got here just ahead of you. We haven't looked for ourselves yet.”

Kate shook her head at her own stupidity. “I'd actually made some progress with her. I should have stayed.”

“What time did you drop her off?”

“I don't know. It must have been after eight. She told me about the john in the park late this afternoon, but then she was embarrassed and upset, and I didn't want to push it. I took her to City Center for something to eat, and let her do a little shopping.”

“Lieutenant Fowler came up with some dough for her?”

Kate made a face and waved the question off. The money had come out of her own pocket, but it didn't matter. “Then I brought her back here.”

Angie growing quieter and quieter the closer they got to the Phoenix. Slipping back inside the tough shell. And I let her, Kate thought.

“I dropped her off and went on to the meeting to tell you—oh, shit. I should have stayed.”

“Who else was here when you let her off?”

“Gregg Urskine—but he was going to the meeting—and one other woman. I don't know who. I didn't see her. Gregg told me she was here. I didn't want Angie alone.”

It was too easy to imagine Angie in this big old house, all but alone. If Smokey Joe had any way of knowing where she was . . . His three victims had vanished with no sign of a struggle. There and gone, simply, easily. And Angie DiMarco claimed she could identify him.

That fast, that easily, the girl was gone. One careless decision . . .

“I blew it, and now we've lost her.”

Kate knew the emotions suddenly threatening to swamp her were out of proportion, but she didn't seem able to pull them back. She felt vaguely ill, slightly dizzy. The aftertaste of gin was like metal in her mouth.

She felt Quinn come up behind her, knew it was he without looking. Her body was still attuned to his. There was a disconcerting thought: that the physical magnetism hadn't faded in all this time.

“It isn't your fault, Kate,” he said softly.

He put a hand on her shoulder, his thumb unerringly finding the knot of tension in her trapezius and rubbing at it in an old, familiar way. Too familiar. Too comforting.

“It doesn't matter now,” she said, turning away stiffly. “What matters is finding her. So let's start looking.”

They went upstairs to the room Angie had been sharing with another Phoenix resident. The walls of the room