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 hadn'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.”