Ashes to Ashes

He gave the nervous laugh, and she thought what an annoying habit that was, on a par with the Rob Marshall bootlicker's grin.

“Angie never has anything to say to me. She avoids me like the plague.”

“What time did you leave for the meeting?” Kovac asked.

Urskine's brows went up above the rims of his glasses. “Am I under suspicion of something?” he asked, pretending to be amused.

Toni glared at Kovac. “We're being punished, Gregg. Can't you see that? The police don't appreciate having attention called to their shortcomings.”

Kovac gave her the cop eyes. “I'm just trying to get our time line straight, ma'am. That's all.”

“I left not long after Kate,” Gregg said. “I must have gotten to the meeting about—what, honey?—eight- thirty, quarter to nine?”

“Something like that,” his wife said, pouting. “You were late.”

“I was working on the furnace.” A muscle flexed in Urskine's jaw, and he turned again to Elwood. “I'll show you that cellar door now.”

“Are we free to go, Sergeant?” Toni Urskine asked. “It's been a very long evening.”

“You're telling me,” Kovac muttered, waving them off.

Kate followed them out of the room, but took a right to the front door, leaving Toni Urskine to rant to her captive audience of residents gathered in the living room.

OUR LIVES MATTER TOO. The banner stretched across the front porch of the Phoenix, the oilcloth crackling as the wind picked up.

“It's going to snow,” she said, burying her hands in her coat pockets and hunching her shoulders, not against the weather, but against a cold that was internal. She wandered to the far end of the porch, almost out of reach of the yellow bug light that hadn't been changed at summer's end, away from the traffic that came and went through the front door.

If Toni Urskine was unhappy with two cruisers parked at the curb, she would be livid soon, Kate thought as the crime scene people parked their van on the front lawn. Uniforms had already begun KOD duty—knocking on doors in search of a neighbor who might have seen a strange car, or a man on foot, or a man carrying something, or a man and a young woman together—anything that might give them a time frame or a lead. Despite the late hour, the neighborhood homes were well lit, and the occasional figure could be seen at a window, pulling the drapes back to look out.

“Kate, we don't know what happened,” Quinn said.

“Well, I think it's safe to say Angie didn't cut herself shaving her legs.”

A tremor went through her as she saw the blood again in her mind. The blood on the floor, the blood- streaked tile, the bloody towels. She stiffened against the nauseating weakness seeping through her muscles.

Gotta be tough, Kate. Put those feelings in a box. Put the box in its proper cubicle. Keep the walls intact.

“Looks this way to me,” she said around the knot in her throat. “He slips into the house through the back. Grabs her upstairs. There's a struggle, judging by the bloody handprints in the tub—I'm guessing they're Angie's. Maybe he kills her, or maybe he just starts the job—probably the first. And he lets her bleed out in the tub, otherwise there would have been more mess elsewhere. He wants to make it look like she just left, so he tries to clean up, but he's in a hurry and he does a poor job of it. Still, even the poor job he did would have bought him some time if we hadn't come looking tonight.”

“How did he know she was here?”

“I don't know. She felt like he was watching her. Maybe he was.”

“And how does all this go down with no one hearing, no one seeing anything?”

“He'd already managed to grab, torture, and murder three women without anyone hearing or seeing a thing. Rita Renner was asleep on the first floor with the television going. It's a big house.”

Quinn shook his head. “It doesn't feel right.”

“Why not? Because you wanted him to be at the meeting?”

He sat back against the railing, shoulders hunched inside his trench coat. “He could still have been at the meeting. We're only a few blocks away, and the meeting was over half an hour before Kovac and I started over here. My question is, why would he risk it? The girl hadn't given the cops anything worthwhile—not a name, not a decent composite, she pulled nothing from the mug books. Why would he risk this?”

“To show us he can,” Kate said. “What a nose-thumbing. The night of the meeting intended to draw him out, he slips into a house and takes the only witness to his crimes. A killer like this one, he'll have a hard-on the size of a Louisville Slugger over that. You know it.”

Quinn looked over as one of the evidence guys carried a vacuum cleaner into the house.

“Why did you come here tonight?” Kate asked. “Kovac never said.”

“When you told him about Angie and her john in the park Sunday night, you mentioned the guy was in an SUV. I think there's a good chance Smokey Joe is transporting his bodies to the parks in a truck of some kind. Something resembling a parks department vehicle. Possibly an SUV.”

Kate felt her stomach turn. A chill pebbled her flesh from head to toe. “Oh, God, John. You don't think he was her customer?”

“It would be right on target. He hates women, particularly the sexually promiscuous variety. He's got a dead one in the back of his truck. He picks up another and takes her to his dumping grounds to have sex with her. This excites him. That excitement reminds him of the thrill and stimulation of the kill. At the same time he's mentally asserting domination and control over the woman he's with. The secret knowledge that he could do to his current partner what he did to his victim but chooses not to gives him a sense of control both over her and over his compulsion to kill.”

“That decision not to kill bolsters his sense of power. And everything is building toward the burning ceremony—the completion of the cycle,” Kate finished.

“Looks good on paper.”

“Angie said the guy shoved her out of his truck and she watched him drive away. From where he left her, he would have had to have doubled around to that back lot in a hurry in order for her to have seen him burning that body.”

Quinn moved his shoulders. “It's still just a theory.”

A theory from a man who knew more about sexually sadistic killers than perhaps anyone else in the country. Kate stared out into the darkness, watching the cloud of her breath float away.

“But if it was the same guy, why wouldn't she have told me? And why wouldn't she give us a better composite? She saw this john up close and personal.”

“Those are questions only she can answer.”

“And she can't answer them now,” Kate said quietly. “It was so hard for her to tell me about it this afternoon. From the beginning of this mess, she'd talk so tough, give so much attitude, but when she finally told me about this john, it was like she was ashamed. She kept saying that she didn't like doing it, that she was so sorry. And she cried and cried.”

Her own emotions threatened to rise up at the memory, just as they had that afternoon with Angie.

“You like this girl,” Quinn declared.

She huffed a breath. “What's to like? She's a lying, thieving, foul-mouthed prostitute.”

“And she needs you,” he said simply.

“Yeah, well, look what that got her.”

“This isn't your fault, Kate.”

“I should have stayed with her.”

“You couldn't have known this would happen.”

“She was at a vulnerable point,” she reasoned. “I should have stayed with her if for no other reason than to get something out of her. But I didn't because—”

She choked herself off, not wanting to admit it. Not here. Not to Quinn. He knew her too well—or once had. He knew every raw spot in her soul. He'd held her more times than she could count when she'd been so racked with the pain and guilt of Emily's death that the anguish was beyond sound. He had given her comfort and offered his strength and soothed her with his touch. She couldn't let him do that now, and she didn't want to find out that