Ashes to Ashes

32

CHAPTER

KATE SAT ON the old leather couch in her study, curled into one corner, warding off the old house's morning chill with black leggings, thick wool socks, and a baggy old sweatshirt she hadn't worn in years. Quinn had given it to her back when. The name of the gym he frequented was stitched across the front. That she'd kept it all this time should have told her something, but then, she'd always been selectively deaf.

She had pulled it out of her closet after Quinn had gone to meet with the task force, freshening it in the clothes drier for a few minutes, and putting it on while it was still warm, pretending it was his warmth. A poor substitute for the feel of his arms around her. Still, it made her feel closer to him somehow. And after a night in his arms, the need for that was strong.

God, what an inconvenient time to rediscover love. But given their professions and their lives, what choice did they have? They were both too aware that life held no guarantees. Too aware that they had already given up too much time they could never get back because of fear and pride and pain.

Kate imagined she could look down from the height of another dimension and see the two of them as that time had passed. Her time spent focusing myopically on the minutiae of building a “normal” life for herself with a job and hobbies and people she saw socially at the requisite functions and holidays. Nothing deeper. Going through the motions, pretending not to mind the numbness in her soul. Figuring it was preferable to the alternative. Quinn's time poured into the job, the job, the job. Taking on more responsibility to fill the void, until the weight of it threatened to crush him. Crowding his brain with cases and facts until he couldn't keep them straight. Giving away pieces of himself and masking others until he couldn't remember what was genuine. Exhausting the well of strength that had once seemed almost bottomless. Wearing his confidence in his abilities and his judgment as threadbare as the lining of his stomach.

Both of them denying themselves the one thing they had needed most to heal after all that had happened: each other.

Sad, what people could do to themselves, and to each other, Kate thought, her gaze skimming across the pages of the victimologies she had spread out on the coffee table. Four more lives fucked up and ruined before they had ever met the Cremator. Five with Angie. Ruined because they needed love and couldn't find anything but a twisted, cheap replica. Because they wanted things out of their reach. Because it seemed easier to settle for less than work for more. Because they believed they didn't deserve anything better. Because the people around them who should have, didn't believe they deserved better either. Because they were women, and women are automatic targets in American society.

All of those reasons made a victim.

Everyone was a victim of something. The difference in people was what they did about it—succumb or rise above and move beyond. The women whose pictures lay before her would not be given that choice again.

Kate leaned over the coffee table, skimming her gaze across the reports. She had called the office to say she was taking some personal time. She'd been told Rob was out as well, and that office speculation was that they had beaten each other up and didn't want anyone to see the bruises. Kate said it was more likely Rob was still working on his written complaint to put in her personnel file.

At least she was free of him for the day. Which would have been a sweet deal if not for the photographs she had to look at of burned and mutilated women, and if not for all the emotions and depressing realities that those photographs evoked.

Everyone was a victim of something.

This group presented a depressing laundry list. Prostitution, drugs, alcohol, assault, rape, incest—if what Kovac had been told about Jillian Bondurant was true. Victims of crime, victims of their upbringing.

From a distance, Jillian Bondurant would have seemed to have been the anomaly because she wasn't a prostitute or in any sex-associated profession, but from the standpoint of her psychological profile, she wasn't all that far removed from Lila White or Fawn Pierce. Confused and conflicted feelings about sex and about men. Low self-esteem. Emotionally needy. Outwardly, she would seem not to have had as hard a life as a streetwalking prostitute because she wasn't as vulnerable to the same kind of crime and open violence. But there was nothing easy about suffering in silence, covering up pain and damage to save face for the family.

Quinn said there was considerable doubt that Jillian was dead at all, but that didn't mean she wasn't a victim. If she was Smokey Joe's accomplice, she was just a victim of another sort. The Cremator himself had been a victim once. Victimization as a child was one of many components that went into making a serial killer.

Everyone was a victim of something.

Kate turned to her own notes about Angie. Spare. Mostly hunches, things she had learned in her years of studying people to see what shaped their minds and their personalities. Abuse had shaped Angie DiMarco. Likely from a very early age. She expected the worst of people, dared them to show it to her, to prove her right. And that had undoubtedly happened again and again, because the kind of people who lived in Angie's world tended to live down to expectations. Angie included.

She expected people to dislike her, to distrust her, to cheat her, to use her, and made certain that they did. This case had been no exception. Sabin and the police had wanted nothing more than to use her, and Kate had been their tool. Angie's disappearance was an inconvenience to them, not a tragedy. If not for her status as a witness, no one on earth would have posted a reward or flashed her photograph on television asking “Have you seen this girl?” Even then, the police were not putting forth a tremendous search effort to find her. The energies of the task force were all dedicated to finding the suspect, not the AWOL witness.

Kate wondered if Angie might have seen the spots on the news. She would have enjoyed the notoriety, the attention. She might secretly have pretended to believe someone actually cared about her.

“Why would you care what happens to me?” the girl had asked as they stood in the hall outside Kate's office.

“Because no one else does.”

And I didn't care enough, Kate thought with a heavy heart. She'd been afraid to. Just as she had been afraid to let John back into her life. Afraid to feel that deeply. Afraid of the pain that kind of feeling could bring with it.

What a pathetic way to live. No—that wasn't living, that was simply existing.

Was the girl alive? she wondered, getting up from the couch to prowl the room. Was she dead? Had she been taken? Had she just left?

Am I being unrealistic to think there's even a question here?

She'd seen the blood for herself. Too much of it for a benign explanation.

But how could Smokey Joe have known where she was? What were the chances of his having spotted her at the PD and followed her to the Phoenix? Slim. Which would mean he would have to have found out some other way. Which meant he either had some in with the case . . . or an in with Angie.

Who had known where Angie was staying? Sabin, Rob, the task force, a couple of uniforms, the Urskines, Peter Bondurant's lawyer—and therefore Peter Bondurant.

The Urskines, who had known the first victim and had a peripheral connection to the second. They hadn't known Jillian Bondurant, but her connection to these crimes had given Toni Urskine a platform for her cause.

Gregg had been there at the house Wednesday night when Kate had left Angie off. Just Gregg and Rita Renner, who gave all the appearances of being an Urskine puppet. Rita Renner, who had been friends with Fawn Pierce.

Kate had known the Urskines for years. While Toni might drive someone to kill, she couldn't imagine the couple practicing that hobby themselves. Then again, no one in Toronto had ever suspected the Ken and Barbie killers, and that couple had committed murders so hideous, veteran cops had broken down and wept on the witness stand during the trial.

God, what a sinister thought—that the Urskines might take women in using kindness and caring as a front for a sadistic hunting game. But surely they wouldn't be so stupid as to prey on their own clientele. They would be automatic suspects. And if the man Angie had seen in the park that night had been Gregg Urskine, then she would have recognized him at the Phoenix, wouldn't she?

Kate thought of the vague description the girl had given of Smokey Joe, the almost nondescript sketch, trying to make some sense of it all. Had she been so reluctant, so vague, because she was frightened, as Kate had