“What do they know?” Angie sneered, her eyes shining with contempt. “What do they know about ‘dealing with' anything? They don't know shit.”
Neither do I, Kate thought. God, why hadn't she just called in sick Monday?
She considered and discarded the idea of trying to wrestle the knife away from the girl. The potential for disaster was too great. If she could keep her talking, she might eventually persuade her into putting it down. They had all the time in the world—provided they were alone.
“Angie, did you come here by yourself?”
Angie stared at the knife blade as she delicately traced it along the blue lines of the tattoo near her thumb, the letter A with a horizontal line crossing the top of it.
“Did someone bring you?”
“I'm always alone,” she murmured.
“What about the other night, after I took you back to the Phoenix? Were you alone then?”
“No.” She dug the point of the blade into the tattooed blood droplets on the bracelet of thorns that encircled her wrist. “I knew he wanted me. He sent for me.”
“Who wanted you? Gregg Urskine?”
“Evil's Angel.”
“Who is that?” Kate asked.
“I was in the shower,” she said, eyes glazed as she looked back on the memory. “I was cutting myself. Watching the blood and the water. Then he sent for me. Like he smelled my blood or something.”
“Who?” Kate tried again.
“He wasn't happy,” she said ominously. In eerie contrast, a sly smirk twisted her mouth. “He was mad 'cause I didn't follow orders.”
“I can see this is a long story,” Kate said, watching the blood drip from Angie's hand to her dining room rug. “Why don't we go in the other room and sit down? I can get a fire going in the fireplace. Warm you up. How's that sound?”
Distract her from her knife play. Get her out of sight of one telephone and near another, so that one way or another a call might get placed. The phone/fax in the den had 911 on the speed dial. If she could get Angie settled on the couch, she could sit on the desktop, work the phone off the hook, punch the button. It might work. It sure as hell beat standing there, watching the girl bleed.
“My feet are cold,” Angie said.
“Let's go in the other room. You can take those wet boots off.”
The girl looked at her with narrowed eyes, raised her bleeding hand to her mouth and dragged her tongue along one wound. “You go first.”
In front of a psychotic with a knife, possibly going toward some waiting lunatic serial killer. Great. Kate started for the den, walking almost sideways, trying to keep one eye on Angie, one scouting ahead, trying to keep the conversation going. Angie clutched the knife in her hand, ready to use it. She walked a little bent over, with her other arm braced across her stomach, obviously in some pain.
“Did Gregg Urskine hurt you, Angie? I saw the blood in the bathroom.”
She blinked confusion. “I was in the Zone.”
“I don't know what that means.”
“No, you wouldn't.”
Kate led the way into the den.
“Have a seat.” She motioned to the couch where she and Quinn had made love not that many hours before. “I'll get the fire going.”
She thought of using the poker as a weapon, but discarded that idea immediately. If she could get the knife away from Angie by trickery, it would be preferable to violence for many reasons, not the least of which would be Angie's state of mind.
Angie wedged herself into a corner of the couch and began tracing over the bloodstains on her jeans with the point of the knife.
“Who choked you, Angie?” Kate asked, going to the desk. A fax had come in. The call she hadn't answered.
“A friend of a friend.”
“You need a better class of friends.” She eased a hip onto the desktop, her eyes on the fax—a copy of a newspaper article from Milwaukee. “Did you know this guy?”
“Sure,” the girl murmured, staring at the fire. “So do you.”
Kate barely heard her. Her attention was riveted on the fax the legal services secretary had forwarded with a note saying Thought you'd want to see this right away. The article was dated January 21, 1996. The headline read: Sisters Exonerated in Burning Death of Parents. There were two poor, grainy photographs, made worse by the fax. But even so, Kate recognized the girl in the photo on the right. Angie DiMarco.
PETER SAT IN his bedroom, in a small chair by the window, the black duffel bag in his lap, his arms wrapped around it. He was wearing the same clothes he had worn in the night—black slacks and sweater. The slacks were dirty. He had vomited on the sweater. The sour smell of puke and sweat and fear hung around him like a noxious cloud, but he didn't care to change, didn't want to shower.
He imagined he was pale. He felt as if all the blood had been drained out of him. What flowed through his veins now was the acid of guilt, burning, burning, burning. He imagined it might burn him alive from the inside out, turn all his bones to ash.
Edwyn had come to tell him about the arrest of the caretaker, Vanlees, and had found him in the music room, smashing the baby grand piano with a tire iron. Edwyn had called Lucas. Lucas had come with a little black bag full of vials and needles.
Peter had refused the drugs. He didn't want to feel numb. He'd spent too much of his life feeling numb, ignoring the lives of the people around him. Maybe if he'd dared to feel something sooner, things wouldn't have come to this. Now all he could feel was the searing pain of remorse.
Looking out the window, he watched as Kovac nudged the nose of his car against the bumper of Edwyn's Lincoln, then backed up and turned around. A part of him felt relief that John Quinn was leaving. A part of him felt despair.
He had listened to the conversation on the other side of the door. Noble and Brandt making excuses for him, lying for him. Quinn asking the definitive question: Were they protecting him for his sake or for their own?
Time passed as he sat in the chair, thinking back, reliving all of it from Jillian's birth, on through his every devasting mistake, to this moment and beyond. He stared out the window, not seeing the news vans, the reporters waiting for an appearance by him, a sound bite from him. He hugged the duffel bag and rocked from side to side, coming to the only conclusion that made sense to him.
Then he checked his watch, and waited.
KATE STARED AT the fax, a chill running from the top of her head down her entire body. Her brain picked out key words: burning deaths, mother, stepfather, drinking, drugs, foster care, juvenile records, history of abuse.
“What's wrong with you?” Angie asked.
“Nothing,” Kate said automatically, tearing her gaze from the article. “I just felt a little dizzy for a minute there.”
“I thought maybe you were in the Zone.” She smiled like a pixie. “Wouldn't that be funny?”
“I don't know. What's the Zone like?”
The smile vanished. “It's dark and empty and it swallows you whole and you feel like you'll never get out, and no one will ever come to get you,” she said, her eyes bleak again. Not empty but bleak, afraid, full of pain—which meant there was still something in her to save. Whatever had happened to her in a childhood that culminated with the suspicious deaths of her parents, some scrap of humanity had survived. And it had survived the last days in “the Devil's basement,” wherever that was.
“But sometimes it's a safe place too,” she said softly, staring at the blood that ran in rivulets all over her left hand, back and front and around her wrist. “I can hide there . . . if I dare.”