Ashes to Ashes (3 page)

“I’d like a composite sketch in time for the press conference,” Sabin announced.

Kate ground her molars. Oh, yeah, this was going to be a peach of a case. “A good sketch takes time, Ted. It pays to get it right.”

“Yes, well, the sooner we get a description out there, a picture out there, the better.”

In her mind’s eye she could envision Sabin wringing information out of the witness, then tossing her aside like a rag.

“We’ll do everything we can to expedite the situation, Mr. Sabin,” Rob promised. Kate shot him a dirty look.

The city hall building had at one time in its history been the Hennepin County courthouse, and had been constructed with a sense of sober grandiosity to impress visitors. The Fourth Street entrance, which Kate seldom had cause to pass through, was as stunning as a palace, with a marble double grand staircase, incredible stained glass, and the enormous
Father of the Waters
sculpture. The main body of the building had always reminded her of an old hospital with its tiled floor and white marble wainscoting. There was forever a vacant feeling about the place, although Kate knew it was all but bursting at the seams with cops and crooks, city officials and reporters and citizens looking for justice or a favor.

The criminal investigative division of the PD had been crammed into a gloomy warren of rooms at the end of a cavernous hall while remodeling went on in their usual digs. The reception area was cut up with temporary partitions. There were files and boxes stacked everywhere, beat-up dingy gray metal file cabinets had been pushed into every available corner. Tacked to the wall beside the door into the converted broom closet that now housed sex crimes investigators was a sign that proclaimed:

Sabin gave the receptionist a dismissive wave and took a right into the homicide offices. The room was a maze of ugly steel desks the color of dirty putty. Some desks were occupied, most were not. Some were neat, most were awash in paperwork. Notes and photographs and cartoons were tacked and taped to walls and cabinets. A notice on one side of the door ordered: HOMICIDE—LOCK UP YOUR GUNS!

Telephone receiver pressed to his ear, Sam Kovac spotted them, scowled, and waved them over. A twenty-two-year veteran, Kovac had that universal cop look about him with the requisite mustache and cheap haircut, both sandy brown and liberally threaded with silver.

“Yeah, I realize you’re dating my second wife’s sister, Sid.” He pulled a fresh pack of Salems from a carton on his desk and fumbled with the cellophane wrapper. He had shed the jacket of his rumpled brown suit and jerked his tie loose. “That doesn’t entitle you to inside information on this murder. All that’ll get you is my sympathy. Yeah? Yeah? She said that? Well, why do you think I left her? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Is that right?”

He bit at the tab on the cigarette wrapper and ripped the pack open with his teeth. “You hear that, Sid? That’s the sound of me tearing you a new one if you print a word of that. You understand me? You want information? Come to the press conference with everybody else. Yeah? Well, same to you.”

He slammed the receiver down and turned his scowl on the county attorney. His eyes were the green-brown of damp bark, bloodshot, and hard and bright with intelligence. “Damn newsies. This is gonna get uglier than my aunt Selma, and she has a face that could make a bulldog puke.”

“Do they have Bondurant’s name?” Sabin asked.

“Of course they do.” He pulled a cigarette from the pack and let it dangle from his lip as he rummaged through the junk on his desk. “They’re all over this like flies on dog crap,” he said, glancing back at them over his shoulder. “Hi, Kate—Jesus, what happened to you?”

“Long story. I’m sure you’ll hear it at Patrick’s tonight. Where’s our witness?”

“Down the hall.”

“Is she working with the sketch artist yet?” Sabin asked.

Kovac blew air between his lips and made a sound like a disgusted horse. “She’s not even working with
us
yet. Our citizen isn’t exactly overjoyed to be the center of attention here.”

Rob Marshall looked alarmed. “She’s not a problem, is she?” He flashed the bootlicker’s smile at Sabin. “I suppose she’s just shaken up, Mr. Sabin. Kate will settle her down.”

“What’s your take on the witness, Detective?” Sabin asked.

Kovac snatched up a Bic lighter and a messy file and started for the door. World-weary and nicked up, his build was at once solid and rangy, utilitarian rather than ornamental. His brown pants were a little baggy and a little too long, the cuffs puddling over the tops of his heel-worn oxfords.

“Oh, she’s a daisy,” he said with sarcasm. “She gives us what’s gotta be a stolen out-of-state driver’s license. Tells us she’s living at an apartment in the Phillips neighborhood but she’s got no keys for it and can’t tell us who has. If she hasn’t got a sheet, I’ll shave my ass and paint it blue.”

“So, you ran her and what?” Kate asked, forcing herself to keep pace with him, so that Sabin and Rob had to fall in behind. She had learned long ago to cultivate friendships with the cops who worked her cases. It was to her advantage to have them as allies rather than adversaries. Besides, she liked the good ones, like Kovac. They did a hard job for little credit and not enough pay for the plain old-fashioned reason that they believed in the necessity of it. She and Kovac had built a nice rapport in five years.

“I tried to run the name she’s using today,” he qualified. “The fucking computer’s down. Swell day this is gonna be. I’m on nights this rotation, you know. I oughta be home in bed. My
team
is on nights. I hate this team-concept crap. Give me a partner and leave me the hell alone. You know what I mean? I got half a mind to transfer out to sex crimes.”

“And turn your back on all this fame and glamour?” Kate teased, bumping him with a subtle elbow.

He gave her a look, tilting his head down in conspiracy. A spark of wry humor lit his eyes. “Shit, Red. I like my stiffs uncomplicated, you know.”

“I’ve heard that about you, Sam,” she joked, knowing he was the best investigator in the PD, a straight-up good guy who lived the job and hated the politics of it.

He huffed a laugh and pulled open the door to a small room that looked into another through the murky glass of a one-way mirror. On the other side of the glass, Nikki Liska, another detective, stood leaning against one wall, eyes locked in a staredown with the girl who sat on the far side of the fake-woodgrain table. A bad sign. The situation had already become adversarial. The table was littered with soda cans and paper coffee cups and doughnut chunks and fragments.

The sense of dread in Kate’s belly gained a pound as she stared through the glass. She put the girl at maybe fifteen or sixteen. Pale and thin, she had a button nose and the lush, ripe mouth of a high-priced call girl. Her face was a narrow oval, the chin a little too long, so that she would probably look defiant without trying. Her eyes tilted at an exotic Slavic angle, and looked twenty years too old.

“She’s a kid,” Kate declared flatly, looking to Rob with confusion and accusation. “I don’t do kids. You know that.”

“We need you to do this one, Kate.”

“Why?” she demanded. “You’ve got a whole juvenile division at your disposal. God knows they deal with murder on a regular basis.”

“This is different. This isn’t some gang shoot-’em-up we’re dealing with,” Rob said, seemingly relegating some of the most violent crime in the city to the same category as shoplifting and traffic mishaps. “We’re dealing with a serial killer.”

Even in a profession that dealt with murder as a matter of routine, the words
serial killer
struck a chord. Kate wondered if their bad guy was aware of that, if he reveled in the idea, or if he was too completely bound up in his own small world of hunting and killing. She had seen both types. All their victims ended up equally dead.

She turned from her director and looked again at the girl who had crossed paths with this latest predator. Angie DiMarco glared at the mirror, resentment pulsing from her in invisible waves. She picked up a fat black pen from the table and very deliberately drew the cap end slowly back and forth along her full lower lip in a gesture that was both impatient and sensuous.

Sabin gave Kate his profile as if he were posing for a currency engraver. “You’ve dealt with this kind of case before, Kate. With the Bureau. You have a frame of reference. You know what to expect with the investigation and with the media. You may well know the agent they send from the Investigative Support Unit. That could be helpful. We need every edge we can get.”

“I studied victims. I dealt with dead people.” She didn’t like the anxiety coming to life inside her. Didn’t like having it, didn’t want to examine its source. “There’s a big difference between working with a dead person and working with a kid. Last I heard, dead people were more cooperative than teenagers.”

“You’re a witness advocate,” Rob said, his voice taking on a slight whine. “She’s a witness.”

Kovac, who had propped himself up against the wall to watch the exchange, gave her a wan smile. “Can’t pick your relatives or your witnesses, Red. I would have liked Mother Teresa to come running out of that park last night.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” Kate returned. “The defense would claim she had cataracts and Alzheimer’s, and say anyone who believes a man can rise from the dead three days after the fact is a less than credible witness.”

Kovac’s mustache twitched. “Scum lawyers.”

Rob looked bemused. “Mother Teresa’s dead.”

Kate and Kovac rolled their eyes in unison.

Sabin cleared his throat and looked pointedly at his watch. “We need to get going with this. I want to hear what she has to say.”

Kate arched a brow. “And you think she’ll just tell you? You don’t get out of the office enough, Ted.”

“She’d damn well better tell us,” he said ominously, and started for the door.

Kate stared through the glass for one last moment, her eyes meeting those of her witness, even though she knew the girl couldn’t see her. A teenager. Christ, they could just as well have assigned her a Martian. She was nobody’s mother. And there was a reminder she didn’t need or want.

She looked into the girl’s pale face and saw anger and defiance and experience no kid that age should have. And she saw fear. Buried beneath everything else, held as tight inside her as a secret, there was fear. Kate didn’t let herself acknowledge what it was inside her own soul that let her recognize that fear.

In the interview room, Angie DiMarco flicked a glance at Liska, who was looking at her watch. She turned her eyes back to the one-way glass and slipped the pilfered pen inside the neckline of her sweater.

“A kid,” Kate muttered as Sabin and Rob Marshall stepped out into the hall ahead of her. “I wasn’t even good at being one.”

“That’s perfect,” Kovac said, holding the door open for her. “Neither is she.”

LISKA, SHORT, BLOND, and athletic with a boy’s haircut, rolled away from the wall and gave them all a weary smile as they entered the interview room. She looked like Tinker Bell on steroids—or so Kovac had declared when he christened her with the nickname Tinks.

“Welcome to the fun house,” she said. “Coffee, anybody?”

“Decaf for me and one for our friend at the table, please, Nikki,” Kate said softly, never taking her eyes off the girl, trying to formulate a strategy.

Kovac spilled himself into a chair and leaned against the table with one arm, his blunt-tipped fingers scratching at chocolate sprinkles that lay scattered like mouse turds on the tabletop.

“Kate, this is Angie DiMarco,” he said casually. “Angie, this is Kate Conlan from the victim/witness program. She’s being assigned to your case.”

“I’m not a case,” the girl snapped. “Who are they?”

“County Attorney Ted Sabin and Rob Marshall from victim/witness.” Kovac pointed to one and then the other as the men took seats across the table from their prized witness.

Sabin gave her his best Ward Cleaver expression. “We’re very interested in what you have to say, Angie. This killer we’re after is a dangerous man.”

“No shit.” The girl turned back to Kovac. Her glare homed in on his mouth. “Can I have a smoke?”

He pulled the cigarette from his lips and looked at it. “Hell,
I
can’t even have one,” he confessed. “It’s a smoke-free building. I was going outside with this.”

“That sucks. I’m stuck in this fucking room half the fucking night and I can’t even have a fucking cigarette!”

She sat back and crossed her arms over her chest. Her brown hair was oily and parted down the middle, falling loose around her shoulders. She wore too much mascara, which had smudged beneath her eyes, and a faded Calvin Klein denim jacket that had once belonged to someone named Rick. The name was printed in indelible ink above the left breast pocket. She kept the jacket on despite the fact that the room was warm. Security or hiding needle tracks, Kate figured.

“Oh, for godsake, Sam, give her a cigarette,” Kate said, shoving up the sleeves of her sweater. She took the vacant chair on the girl’s side of the table. “And give me one too, while you’re at it. If the PC Nazis catch us, we’ll all go down together. What’re they gonna do? Ask us to leave this rat hole?”

She watched the girl out of the corner of her eye as Kovac shook two more cigarettes out of the pack. Angie’s fingernails were bitten to the quick and painted metallic ice blue. Her hand trembled as she took the gift. She wore an assortment of cheap silver rings, and two small, crude ballpoint tattoos marred her pale skin—a cross near her thumb, and the letter A with a horizontal line across the top. A professional job circled her wrist, a delicate blue ink bracelet of thorns.

“You’ve been here all night, Angie?” Kate asked, drawing on the cigarette. It tasted like dried shit. She couldn’t imagine why she had ever taken up the habit in her college days. The price of cool, she supposed. And now it was the price of bonding.

“Yes.” Angie fired a stream of smoke up at the ceiling. “And they wouldn’t get me a lawyer either.”