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 suspected? Or because—as Angie said—it was dark, he wore a hood, it happened so fast? Or did her motivation lie elsewhere?
The task force had a hot suspect, Kate knew. Quinn was probably interviewing him right now. The caretaker from Jillian's town house complex. He had no inside connection to the case, but she supposed he could have known Angie if she had ever trolled for johns in the area around the Target Center, where he worked as a security guard.
But it didn't make sense for Angie to have a connection to the killer. If she knew him and wanted him caught, she would have given him up. If she knew him and didn't want him caught, she would have given a clear description of a phantom for the cops to chase.
And if she hadn't seen anything at all in the park that night, why would she say she had? For three squares and a place to stay? For attention? Then it would have made more sense for her to be cooperative rather than difficult.
Everything about this kid was a mystery inside a puzzle wrapped in an enigma.
Which is why I don't do kids.
But this one was—had been—her responsibility, and she would find out the truth about her or die trying.
“Poor choice of words, Kate,” she muttered, heading upstairs to change clothes.
Twenty minutes later, she was out the back door. It had snowed another inch during the night, giving the landscape a clean dusting of fresh white powder, coating the back steps . . . where a pair of boots had left tracks.
Quinn had gone out the front this morning, to a waiting cab. The tracks were too small to be his, at any rate. They were more the size of Kate's feet, though that didn't necessarily establish gender.
Carefully staying to one side of them, Kate followed the tracks down the stairs to the yard. The trail led past the end of her garage and down the far side, down the narrow corridor between the building and the neighbor's weathered-gray privacy fence, to the side entrance of the garage. All the doors were closed.
A chill ran through her. She thought back to last night and someone defecating in the garage. She thought of the suddenly burned-out light, the feeling Wednesday night that someone had been watching her as she'd made her way from the garage to the house.
She looked around, down the deserted alley. Most of the neighbors had fences that hid the first stories of their homes from view. Second-story windows looked black and empty. The neighborhood was full of white-collar professionals, most of whom left for work by seven-thirty.
Kate backed away from the garage, heart pumping, hand digging in her bag for her cell phone. Moving toward the house, she pulled the phone out, flipped it open, and punched the power button. Nothing happened. The battery had died in the night. The inconvenience of modern convenience.
She kept her eyes on the garage, thought she saw a movement through the side window. Car thief? Burglar? Rapist? Disgruntled client? Cremator?
She stuffed the phone back in her bag and pulled out her house keys. She let herself in, locked herself in, and breathed again.
“I need this like I need the plague,” she muttered, going into the kitchen. She put her tote and her purse on the table and started to slip out of her coat, when the sound registered in her brain. The low, feral growl of a cat. Thor was under the table, snarling, ears flat.
The fine hair rose up on the back of Kate's neck, and with it the itchy feeling of being watched.