Kate looked up at her house, flames visible now through the windows of the first floor. Behind Kovac's car, Angie was being loaded into an ambulance. The fear, the panic she had fought to keep at bay during the ordeal, hit her belatedly in a pounding wave.
She turned back to Quinn, shaking. “No,” she whispered as the flood of tears came. And he folded her into his arms and held her.
39
CHAPTER
“I NEVER LIKED him,” Yvonne Vetter said to the uniformed officer who stood guard outside Rob Marshall's garage door. She was huddled into a lumpy wool coat that made her look misshapen. Her round, sour face squinted up at him from beneath an incongruously jaunty red beret. “I called your hotline several times. I believe he cannibalized my Bitsy.”
“Your what, ma'am?”
“My Bitsy. My sweet little dog!”
“Wouldn't that be animalized?” Tippen speculated.
Liska cuffed him one on the arm.
The task force would get the first look around Rob's chamber of horrors before the collection of evidence began. The videographer followed right behind them. Even as they entered the house, the news crews were pulling up to the curbs on both sides of the street.
It was a nice house on a quiet street in a quiet neighborhood. An extra-large tree-studded lot near one of the most popular lakes in the Cities. A beautifully finished basement. Realtors would have been drooling over the opportunity to sell it if not for the fact Rob Marshall had tortured and murdered at least four women there.
They started in the basement, wandering through a media room equipped with several televisions, VCRs, stereo equipment, a bookcase lined with video- and audiotapes.
Tippen turned to the videographer. “Don't shoot the stereo equipment yet. I really need a new tuner and tape deck.”
The videographer immediately turned the camera on the recording equipment.
Tippen rolled his eyes. “It was a joke. You technogeeks have no sense of humor.”
The camera guy turned his lens on Tippen's ass as he walked away.
A headless mannequin stood in one corner of the room decked out in a skimpy see-through black lace bra and a purple spandex miniskirt.
“Hey, Tinks, you could pick up some new outfits,” Tippen called, eyeballing a sticky-looking residue on the shoulders of the mannequin. Possibly blood mixed with some other, clearer fluid.
Liska continued down the hall, checking out a utility room, moving on. Her boys would have loved this house. They talked endlessly about getting a house like their friend Mark had, with a cool rec room in the basement—where they could escape Mom's scrutiny—with a pool table and a big-screen TV.
There was a pool table here in the room at the end of the hall. It was draped with bloodstained white plastic, and there was a body on it. The smell of blood, urine, and excrement hung thick in the air. The stench of violent death.
“Tippen!” Liska hollered, bolting for the table.
Michele Fine lay twisted at an odd angle on her back, staring up at the light glaring in her face. She didn't blink. Her eyes had the flat look of a corpse's. Her mouth hung open, drool crusted white in a trail down her chin. Her lips moved ever so slightly.
Liska bent close, laying two fingers on the side of Fine's neck to feel for a pulse, unable to detect one.
“. . . elp . . . me . . . elp . . . me . . .” Fragments of words on the thinnest of breaths.
Tippen jogged in and stopped cold. “Shit.”
“Get an ambulance,” Liska ordered. “She may just live to tell the tale.”
40
CHAPTER
“I DIDN'T WANT to help,” Angie said softly.
It didn't sound like her voice. The thought drifted through her drug-fogged brain on a cloud. It sounded like the voice of the little girl inside her, the one she always tried to hide, to protect. She stared at the bandage on her left arm, the desire to pull it off and make the wound bleed lurking at the dark edge of her mind.
“I didn't want to do what he said.”
She waited for the Voice to sneer at her, but it was strangely silent. She waited for the Zone to zoom up on her, but the drugs held it off.
She sat at a table in a room that wasn't supposed to look like part of a hospital. The blue print gown she wore had short sleeves and exposed her thin, scarred arms for all to see. She looked at the scars, one beside another and another, like bars in a prison cell door. Marks she had carved into her own flesh. Marks life had carved into her soul. A constant reminder so she could never forget exactly who and what she was.
“Was Rob Marshall the one who took you to the park that night, Angie?” Kate asked quietly. She sat at the table too, beside Angie with her chair turned so that she was facing the girl. “Was he the john you told me about?”
Angie nodded, still looking down at the scars. “His Great Plan,” she murmured.
She wished the drugs would fog the memories, but the pictures were clear in her head, like watching them on television. Sitting in the truck, knowing the dead woman's body was in the back, knowing that the man at the wheel had killed her, knowing Michele had been a part of that too. She could see them stabbing her over and over, could see the sexual excitement in them growing with every thrust of the knives. Michele had given her to him afterward, and he had taken her again that night in the park, excited because of the dead woman in the back and because of his Great Plan.
“I was supposed to describe someone else.”
“As the killer?” Kate asked.
“Someone he made up. All these details. He made me repeat them over and over and over.”
Angie picked at a loose thread on the edge of her bandage, wishing blood would seep up through the layers of white gauze. The sight would comfort her, make her feel less terrible about sitting beside Kate. She couldn't look her in the face after all that had happened.
“I hate him.”
Present tense, Kate thought. As if she didn't know he was dead, that she had killed him. Maybe she didn't. Maybe her mind would allow her that one consolation.
“I hate him too,” Kate said softly.
Facts about Rob and the Finlow sisters were coming out of Wisconsin and piecing together into a terrible, sordid story America received new episodes of every night on the news. The lurid quality of lover-killers and the fall of a billionaire made for juicy ratings bait. Michele Finlow, who had lingered for ten hours after being found in Rob's basement, had filled in some of the blanks herself. And Angie would supply what fragments her mind would allow.
Daughters of two different men and a mother with a history of drug abuse and assorted domestic misery, Michele and Angie had been in and out of the child welfare system, never finding the care they needed. Children falling through the cracks of a system that was poor at best. Both girls had juvenile records, Michele's being longer and more inclined to violent behavior.
Kate had read the news accounts of the fire that had killed the mother and stepfather. The general consensus of the investigators on the case was that one or both of the girls had started it, but there hadn't been enough evidence to take to court. One witness had recalled seeing Michele calmly standing in the yard while the house burned, listening to the screams of the two people trapped inside. She had, in fact, been standing too near a window, and was burned when the window exploded and the fire rolled outside to consume fresh oxygen. The case had brought Rob Marshall into their lives via the court system. And Rob had brought the girls to Minneapolis.