In her mind she was suddenly in Kovac's car at the Hessler crime scene, listening to the microcassette the killer had dropped. Melanie Hessler begging for her life, screaming in agony, begging for death.
She thought of Rob going to look at the charred body, coming back agitated, seemingly upset. But what she had mistaken for distress had in fact been excitement.
Oh, my God.
Bile rose up the back of her throat as every rotten thing she'd ever said to him scrolled through her memory.
Oh, God, I'm dead.
“I'm sorry,” she said, options racing through her mind. The front door was just ten feet down the hall.
Disgust crossed Rob's face in a spasm. He squeezed his eyes nearly shut, looking as if he'd just caught wind of an open sewer. “No, you're not. You're not sorry about the way you've treated me. You're sorry I'm going to kill you for it.”
“Angie, run!” Kate shouted. She grabbed the fax machine off the desk, jerking the power cord out the back, and flung the machine at Rob. It hit him in the chest and knocked him off balance.
She bolted for the door, slipping on one of the victimology reports—a mistake that cost her a precious fraction of a second. Rob grabbed at her, caught hold of a coat sleeve with one hand, and swung wildly with the sap.
Even through the thick wool of her coat collar, Kate felt the weight of it as it struck her shoulder. Heavy, deadly, serious. If he caught her in the head, she would go down like a rock.
She shied sideways, eluding his grasp, then used his own momentum to shove him into the hall. Grabbing his left arm and twisting it up behind him as he came past, she ran him into the hall table and bolted away before the crash was over, running for the front door that suddenly seemed a mile away.
Rob let out a roar and tackled her from behind. They hit the floor hard, Kate crying out as her right arm twisted unnaturally beneath her and she felt the sickening tear of muscles in her shoulder.
Pain swept through her like a fire. She ignored it as best she could as she tried to kick free and scramble to the door. Rob wrapped a fist in her hair and jerked her head back, hitting her with his fist on the right side of her head. Her vision blurred, her ear rang like a bell and burned like a son of a bitch. Knife-sharp pain shot out across her face and down her jaw.
“You bitch! You bitch!” he screamed over and over.
And then his hands were around her throat and he was choking her, and his screams faded from her head. She fought automatically, frantically, clawing at his hands, but his fingers were short and thick and strong.
She couldn't breathe, felt like her eyes were going to burst, felt like her brain was swelling.
With the last bit of sense she could grab, Kate forced herself to go limp. Rob continued to squeeze for seconds that seemed like an eternity, then slammed her head down on the floor. She knew he was ranting but couldn't make out the words as the blood roared back up to her brain. She tried not to suck in the great gulps of oxygen she wanted and needed so desperately. She tried not to let her mind stall out. She had to keep thinking—and not of the crime scene she had visited, not of the charred body of her client, not of the autopsy photos of four women this man had tortured and mutilated.
“You think I can't do anything right!” Rob raved, pushing himself up off her. “You think I'm an idiot! You think you're better than everyone and I'm just a nothing!”
Not able to see him, Kate inched her left hand toward her coat pocket.
“You're such a fucking bitch!” he screamed, and kicked her, too immersed in his ranting to hear her grunt of pain as his boot connected with her hip.
Kate ground her teeth together and concentrated on moving the hand, half an inch at a time, into her coat pocket.
“You don't know me,” Rob declared. He grabbed something from her hall table and threw it. Whatever it was, it crashed somewhere in the vicinity of the kitchen. “You don't know anything about me, about my True Self.”
And she would never have suspected. God in heaven, she'd worked beside this man for a year and a half. Never once would she have thought he was capable of this. Never once had she questioned his motives for choosing his profession. On the contrary, his being an advocate for victims—so ready to listen to them, so ready to spend time with them—had been his one redeeming quality. Or so she had believed.
“You think I'm nobody,” he yelled. “I AM SOMEBODY! I AM EVIL'S ANGEL! I AM THE FUCKING CREMATOR! Now what do you think of me, Ms. Bitch?”
He crouched down beside her and rolled her onto her back. Kate kept her eyes nearly shut, barely seeing more than a blur of colors between her lashes. Her hand was in her pocket, fingers sliding around the shaft of the metal nail file.
“I saved you for last,” he said. “You're going to beg me to kill you. And I'm going to love doing it.”
36
CHAPTER
“WHAT HAPPENED THAT night, Peter?” Quinn asked.
They sat in a small, dingy white room in the bowels of the city hall building, near the booking area of the adult detention center. Bondurant had waived his rights and refused to go to the hospital. A paramedic had cleaned the bullet wound to his scalp right there on the stairs where he had tried to end it all.
Edwyn Noble had thrown a holy fit, insisting to be present during questioning, insisting on sending Peter directly to a hospital whether he wanted to go or not. But Peter had won out, swearing in front of a dozen news cameras he wanted to confess.
Present in the room were Bondurant, Quinn, and Yurek. Peter had wanted only Quinn, but the police had insisted on having a representative present. Sam Kovac's name was not mentioned.
“Jillian came to dinner,” Peter said. He looked small and shrunken, like a longtime heroin junkie. Pale, red-eyed, vacant. “She was in one of her moods. Up, down, laughing one minute, snapping the next. She was just like that—volatile. Like her mother. Even as a baby.”
“What did you fight about?”
He stared across the room at a rosy stain on the wall that might have been blood before someone tried to scrub it away. “School, her music, her therapy, her stepfather, us.”
“She wanted to resume her relationship with LeBlanc?”
“She'd been speaking with him. She said she was thinking of going back to France.”
“You were angry.”
“Angry,” he said, and sighed. “That's not really the right word. I was upset. I felt tremendous guilt.”
“Why guilt?”
He took a long time formulating his answer, as if he were pre-choosing each word he would use. “Because that was my fault—what happened with Jillian and LeBlanc. I could have prevented it. I could have fought Sophie for custody, but I just let go.”
“She threatened to expose you for molesting Jillian,” Quinn reminded him.
“She threatened to claim I had molested Jillian,” Peter corrected him. “She had actually coached Jillie on what to say, how to behave in order to convince people it was true.”
“But it wasn't?”
“She was my child. I could never have done anything to hurt her.”
He thought about that answer, his composure cracking and crumbling. He covered his mouth with a trembling hand and cried silently for a moment. “How could I have known?”
“You knew Sophie's mental state,” Quinn pointed out.
“I was in the process of buying out Don Thorton. I had several huge government contracts pending. She could have ruined me.”
Quinn said nothing, letting Bondurant sort through it himself, as he had undoubtedly done a thousand times in the last week alone.