Ashes to Ashes

by Tami Hoag

  Kate raised her head and gave him a long, level, venomous stare, screwing up her courage as she sucked at the cut in her mouth. He would make her pay for this, but it seemed the way to go.

  Very deliberately, she spit the blood in his face. “The hell you will, you miserable little shit.”

  Instantly furious, he swung at her with the sap. Kate ducked the punch and launched herself upward, bringing her right elbow up under his chin, knocking his teeth together. She pulled the nail file and stabbed it into his neck to the hilt just above his collarbone.

  Rob screamed and grabbed at the file, falling back, crashing into the hall table. Kate ran for the kitchen.

  If she could just get out of the house, get to the street. Surely he would have disabled her car somehow, or blocked it in. To get help, she had to get to the street.

  She dashed through the dining room, knocking chairs over as she ran past. Rob came behind her, grunting as he hit something, swearing, spitting the words out between his teeth like bullets.

  He couldn't outrun her on his stubby legs. He seemed not to have a gun. Through the kitchen and she was home free. She'd run to the neighbor across the street. The graphic designer who had his office in his attic. He was always home.

  She burst into the kitchen, faltered, then pulled up, her heart plummeting.

  Angie stood just inside the back door, tears streaming down her face, a butcher's knife in her hand—pointed directly at Kate's chest.

  “I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry,” she sobbed, shaking badly.

  Suddenly, the conversation that had taken place between Angie and Rob in the den took on a whole new dimension. Pieces of the truth began to click into place. The picture they made was distorted and surreal.

  If Rob was the Cremator, then it was Rob Angie had seen in the park. Yet the man in the sketch Oscar had drawn at her instruction looked no more like Rob Marshall than he looked like Ted Sabin. She had sat across from him in the interview room, giving no indication . . .

  In the next second Rob Marshall was through the door behind her and six ounces of steel packed in sand and bound in leather connected with the back of her skull. Her legs folded beneath her and she dropped to her knees on the kitchen floor, her last sight: Angie DiMarco.

  This is why I don't do kids. You never know what they're thinking.

  Then everything went dark.

  THE TRAVEL MAGAZINES were still scattered on Michele Fine's coffee table with pages folded and destinations circled with notations in the margins. Get a tan! Too $$$. Nightlife!

  The murderer as a tourist, Quinn thought, turning the pages.

  When the police checked with the airlines, they might find she had booked flights to one or more of those locations. If they were very lucky, they would also find matching flights booked in the name of her partner. Whoever he was.

  With the amount of blood at the scene in the sculpture garden, it seemed highly unlikely Fine had taken herself out of the park. Gil Vanlees had been in custody. Both Fine and the money Peter Bondurant had brought to the scene and subsequently walked away from were gone.

  The cops swarmed over the apartment like ants, invading every cupboard, crack, and crevice, looking for anything that might give them a clue as to who Fine's partner in murder was. A scribbled note, a doodled phone number, an envelope, a photograph, something, anything. Adler and Yurek were canvassing the neighbors for information. Did they know her? Had they seen her? What about a boyfriend?

  The main living areas of the apartment looked exactly as they had the day before. Same dust, same filthy ashtray. Tippen found a crack pipe in an end table drawer.

  Quinn went down the hall, glancing into a bathroom worthy of a speedtrap gas station, and on to Michele Fine's bedroom. The bed was unmade. Clothes lay strewn around the room like outlines where dead bodies had fallen. Just as in the rest of the apartment, there were no personal touches, nothing decorative—except in the window that faced south and the back side of another building.

  “Look at the sun catchers,” Liska said, moving across the room.

  They hung from hooks on little suction cups stuck to the window. Hoops about three inches in diameter, each holding its own miniature work of art. The light coming through them gave the colors a sense of life. The air from a register above the window made them quiver against the glass like butterfly wings, and fluttered the decorations that were attached to each—a piece of ribbon, a pearl button on a string, a dangling earring, a finely braided lock of hair . . .

  Liska's face dropped as she stopped beside Quinn, the realization hitting her.

  Lila White's calla lily. Fawn Pierce's shamrock. A mouth with a tongue sticking out. A heart with the word “Daddy.” There were half a dozen.

  Tattoos.

  The tattoos that had been cut from the bodies of the Cremator's victims. Stretched tight in little craft hoops, drying in the sun. Decorated with mementos of the women they had been cut from. Souvenirs of torture and murder.

  38

  CHAPTER

  HIS TRIUMPH IS at hand. His crowning glory. His finale—for now, for this place. He has arranged the Bitch on the table to his satisfaction and bound her hands and feet to the table legs with plastic twine he has pilfered from the mailroom at the office. A length of it is wrapped around the Bitch's throat with long free ends trailing for him to wrap around his fists. For mood lighting he has brought candles down to the basement from other parts of the house. He finds the flames very sensual, exciting, erotic. That excitement is heightened by the smell of gasoline heavy in the air.

  He stands back and surveys the tableau. The Bitch under his absolute control. She is still clothed because he wants her conscious for her degradation. He wants her to feel every second of her humiliation. He wants to capture it all on tape.

  He loads the microcassette recorder with a fresh tape and sets it on a black vinyl barstool with a ripped seat. He doesn't worry about fingerprints. The world will shortly discover the Cremator's “true” identity.

  He sees no reason not to carry through with the plan. Michele might be out of the picture, but he still has Angie. If she passes her test, he might take her with him. If she fails, he will kill her. She isn't Michele—his perfect complement. Michele, who would do anything he asked if she thought compliance would make him love her. Michele, who had followed his lead in the torture games, who had encouraged him to burn the bodies, and reveled in her tattoo arts and crafts.

  He misses her as much as he can miss anyone. With a vague detachment. Mrs. Vetter will miss her horrid little dog more.

  Angie watches him as he unties the leather roll that holds all his favorite tools and spreads it out on the table. She looks like something from a teenage slasher movie. Her clothes are disheveled, the thighs of her jeans shredded and blood-soaked. She still holds the butcher knife from the kitchen and surreptitiously pricks the end of her thumb with the point of it and watches the blood bead. Crazy little bitch.

  He looks at the choke marks on her throat, thinks about all the ways she has defied him during the execution of his Great Plan. Making him look stupid during her first interview, refusing to give the name of the bar where he'd picked her up that night to lend credibility to her story. Refusing to describe the Cremator to the sketch artist the way he had instructed her to. He had spent considerable time creating the image of a phantom killer in his mind. The girl had willfully given a description so vague it might fit half the men in the Twin Cities—including the hapless Vanlees. The idea of Vanlees getting credit as the Cremator makes him furious. And, even after the beatings he'd given her since Wednesday, she had refused him his perfect moment of revelation in Kate's living room.

  “Who came to take you, Angie?”

  “No.”

  “Who came to take you?”

  “No. I won't do it.”

  “Angie, who came to take you?”

  “No. You can't make me.”

  She had been coached to say “Evil's Angel.” No matter that he ha
dn't taken her, that Michele had been the one who'd saved the stupid little slut from slicing herself to ribbons in the shower, who'd cleaned up the mess and slipped the two of them out the back door of the house. The girl had her instructions and she defied them openly.

  He decides he will kill her after all, despite her cooperation in the kitchen. She is too unpredictable.

  He will kill her here. After the Bitch is dead. He pictures himself in a frenzy, wild with the euphoria of killing the Bitch. He sees himself throwing the girl onto the table, on top of the bloody, mutilated body, tying her there, fucking her, choking her, stabbing her in the face over and over and over and over. Punishing her exactly as he plans to punish the Bitch.

  He will kill them both, then burn them together, here, and burn the house as well. He has already set the stage for the fire, pouring the accelerant—gas from a can he put in the Bitch's garage himself the night he shit on the floor.

  The fantasy of the murders he is about to commit excites him as fantasies always have—intellectually, sexually, fundamentally. The pattern of the mind of his breed: fantasy, violent fantasy; then facilitators that trigger action: murder. The natural cycle of his life—and his victims' death.

  Decision made, he turns his thoughts to the matter at hand: Kate Conlan.

  CONSCIOUSNESS RETURNED FOR Kate in fits and starts, like a television with bad reception. She could hear but not see. Then she had some blurred vision, but nothing more than a horrific ringing in her ears. The only clear, constant signal was pain hammering at the back of her skull. She felt sick with it. She couldn't seem to move her arms or legs and wondered if Rob had broken her neck or severed her spinal cord. Then she realized she could still feel her hands, and that they hurt like hell.

  Tied.

  The ceiling tile, the smell of dust, the vague sense of dampness. The basement. She was tied spread-eagle on the old Ping-Pong table in her own basement.

  Another scent—out of place—came to her, thick, oily, and bitter. Lighter fluid.

  Oh, sweet Jesus.

  She looked at Rob Marshall standing at the foot of the table, staring at her. Rob Marshall, a serial killer. The incongruity made her want to believe she was just having a nightmare, but she knew better. She'd seen too much when she was an agent. The stories were stacked up in her memory like files in a cabinet. The NASA engineer who had kidnapped hitchhikers and drained their blood to drink it. The electronics technician, a married father of two, who kept chosen body parts of his victims in his meat freezer in his garage. The young Republican law student who volunteered at a suicide hotline and turned out to be Ted Bundy.

  Add to the stack the victim advocate who chose his own victims from the department's client list. She felt like a fool for not having seen it, even though she knew a killer as sophisticated as Smokey Joe was one of nature's perfect chameleons. Even now she didn't want to think of Rob Marshall as being that clever.

  He had taken his coat off, revealing a gray sweater soaked at the throat with blood from where she'd stabbed him with the nail file. An inch in the right direction and she would have hit his jugular.

  “Did I miss anything?” she asked, her voice rusty from the choking he'd given her.

  She could see the surprise in his face, the confusion. Score one for the victim.

  “Still with the smart mouth,” he said. “You don't learn, bitch.”

  “Why should I? What will you do, Rob? Torture and kill me?” She tried desperately to keep the fear out of her voice. She felt as if it had her by the throat, then remembered with another jolt of adrenaline the ligature marks on the throats of his victims. “You'll do that either way. I might as well have the satisfaction of calling you a dickless loser to your face.”

  Standing to one side of the table, backlit by candles, butcher knife in hand, Angie sucked in a breath and made a pitious sound in her throat. She clutched the knife to her as if it were a treasured toy to comfort herself.

  Rob's face hardened. He pulled a penknife from his pocket and jabbed it, all the way to the handle, into the bottom of Kate's right foot, and she learned very quickly and painfully the price he was going to make her pay for the strategy she'd chosen.

  Kate cried out and her whole body convulsed against the restraints that bit deep into the skin of her wrists and ankles. When she fell back, the bindings seemed to have stretched to give her slightly more mobility.

  She pulled her mind back together by focusing on Angie, thinking of the look she'd seen in the girl's eyes earlier, when she'd been struck by the thought that Angie's eyes weren't empty, that as long as there was some light in the darkness, there was still hope. She thought of the way the girl had started to go after Rob with the utility knife.

  “Angie, get out!” she rasped. “Save yourself!”

  The girl flinched and glanced nervously at Rob.

  “She'll stay,” he snapped, stabbing the knife into her foot again, winning another cry from Kate. “She's mine,” he said, eyes glowing with the intoxication he achieved from inflicting pain.

  “I don't think so.” Kate sucked in a sharp breath. “She's not stupid.”

  “No, you're the stupid one,” he said, backing away a step. He pulled a long taper from the candelabrum he'd taken from her dining room and set on the clothes drier.

  “Because I know the kind of pathetic, warped excuse for a human being you are?”

  “How pathetic am I now, bitch?” he demanded, dragging the flame of the candle from toe to toe on her right foot.

  Instinctively, Kate kicked at the source of her torment, knocking the candle from his hand. Rob pounced on it, swearing, disappearing from view at the end of the table.

  “Stupid bitch!” he cursed frantically. “Stupid fucking bitch!”

  The scent of the gasoline pressed over Kate's nose and mouth, and she shuddered at the notion of burning alive. The terror was like a fist in the base of her throat. The pain where Rob had already burned her was like a live thing, as if her foot had ignited and now the flames would shoot up her leg.

  “What's the matter, Rob?” she asked, fighting the need to cry. “I thought you liked fire. Are you afraid of it?”

  He scrambled to his feet, glaring at her. “I am the Cremator!” he shouted, the candle clutched in his fist. She could see his increasing agitation in his respiration rate, in the quick jerkiness of his movements. This wasn't going the way it had in his fantasies.

  “I am superior!” he shouted, wild-eyed. “I am Evil's Angel! I hold your life in my hands! I am your god!”

  Kate channeled her pain into her anger. “You're a leech. You're a parasite. You're nothing.”

  She was probably goading him into stabbing her forty-seven times, cutting her larynx out and running it down the garbage disposal. Then she thought of the photographs of his other victims, of the tape of Melanie Hessler, of the hours of torture, rape, repeated strangulation.

  She'd take her chances. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

  “You make me sick, you spineless little shit.”

  That was the truth. It made her want to vomit to think she'd worked beside him day in and day out, and every time his mind wandered it wandered to fantasies of abuse and brutality and murder—the very things they tried to help their clients live through and get past.

  He paced at the foot of the table, muttering under his breath, as if he might be speaking to voices in his head, though Kate thought it unlikely he heard any. Rob Marshall wasn't psychotic. He was perfectly aware of everything he did. His actions were a conscious choice—though, if he were caught, he would probably try to convince the authorities otherwise.

  “You can't get it up without the domination, can you?” Kate pressed on. “What woman would have you if you didn't tie her down?”

  “Shut up!” he screamed. “Shut the fuck up!”

  He threw the candle at her, missing her head by three feet. He rushed up alongside her, grabbed a boning knife off the table beside her and jammed the point of it against her l
arynx. Kate swallowed reflexively, felt the tip of the steel bite into her skin.

  “I'll cut it out!” he shouted in her face. “I'll fucking cut it out! I'm so sick of your bitching! I'm so sick of your voice!”

  Kate closed her eyes and tried not to swallow again, holding herself rigid as he started to push the small, sharp blade into her throat. Terror tore through her. Instinct told her to jerk away. Logic told her not to move. And then the pressure stopped, eased away.

  Rob stared at the tape recorder he'd left on the old barstool. He may not have wanted to hear her criticism of him, but he wanted to listen to her screams as he had listened to the screams and cries and pleading of all his victims. In fact, with her, he probably wanted it more. If he cut her voice out, he couldn't get that. If he couldn't get that, the act of killing her lost its meaning.

  “You want to hear it, don't you, Rob?” she asked. “You want to be able to listen later and hear the exact moment I became frightened of you and gave you control. You don't want to give that up, do you?”

  He picked up the tape recorder and held it close to her mouth. He put down the knife, picked up a pliers, and grabbed hold of the tip of her breast, squeezing brutally. Even through the buffer of her sweater and bra, the bite was sharp, then excruciating, making her scream. When he finally let go, he stepped back with a vicious smile and held up the cassette recorder.

  “There,” he said. “I've got it.”

  It seemed an eternity passed before the white noise faded from Kate's head. She was breathing as if she'd run the four-hundred-yard dash, sweating, shaking. The haze cleared from her vision and she was looking at Angie, the girl still standing in the same spot, clutching the knife to her. Kate wondered if she'd gone catatonic. Angie was her only hope, the weakest link in Rob's scenario. She needed the girl with her, lucid and able to act.

  “Angie,” Kate croaked. “He doesn't own you. You can fight him. You've been fighting him, haven't you?” She thought of the scene that had played out upstairs—Rob wanting Angie to decribe what he'd done to her after taking her from the Phoenix House, Angie refusing, defying him, taunting him. She'd done it before—in the offices.