There were tougher jobs ahead than selecting new kitchen cabinets.
Kate picked her way through the charred mess that had been the first floor. A buddy of Kovac's who had done a lot of arson investigation had gone through the structure for her, telling her where she could and couldn't go, what she should and shouldn't do. She wore the yellow hardhat he'd given her to protect herself from falling chunks of plaster. On one foot she wore a thick-soled hiking boot. Over the bandages on the other foot was a thick wool sock and a heavy-duty plastic garbage bag.
She sorted through the debris with long-handled tongs, for things worth keeping. The job depressed her beyond tears. Even with the timely arrival of the fire department, the explosion of paint and solvents in the basement had damaged much of the first floor. And what the fire hadn't ruined, the fire hoses had.
The loss of ordinary possessions didn't bother her. She could buy another television. A sofa was a sofa. Her wardrobe was smoke-damaged, but insurance would buy her another. It was the loss of things richly steeped in memories that hurt. She'd grown up in this house. The thing that now looked like a pair of burned tree stumps had been her father's desk. She could remember crawling into the knee well during games of hide-and-seek with her sister. The rocking chair in the living room had belonged to her great-aunt. Photograph albums holding a lifetime's worth of memories had burned, melted, or been soaked, then frozen and thawed again.
She picked up what was left of an album with pictures of Emily and started to page through, tears coming as she realized the photographs were mostly ruined. It was like losing her child all over again.
She closed the book and held it to her chest, looking around through the blur at the devastation. Maybe this wasn't the day to do this job. Quinn had tried to talk her out of it on the phone. She had insisted she was strong enough, that she needed to do something positive.
But she wasn't strong enough. Not in the way that she needed to be. She felt too raw, too tired, emotions too close to the surface. She felt as if she'd lost more than what the fire had taken. Her faith in her judgment had been shaken. The order of her world had been upended. She felt very strongly that she should have been able to prevent what had happened.
The curse of the victim. Second-guessing herself. Hating her lack of control of the world around her. The test was whether a person could rise above it, push past it, grow beyond the experience.
She carried the photo album outside and set it in a box on the back steps. The backyard was awash in yellow-orange light as the sun began its early exit from the day. The grainy light fell like mist on her winter-dead garden in the far corner of the yard, and a statue she had forgotten to put away for the season—a fairy sitting on a pedestal, reading a book. With nothing but dead stems around it, it looked far too exposed and vulnerable. She had the strangest urge to pick it up and hold it like a child. Protect it.
Another wave of emotion pushed tears up in her eyes as she thought again of Angie looking so small and so young and so lost sitting in the too-big hospital gown, her gaze on the tiny guardian angel statue in her hand.
A car door slammed out front and she peered around the corner of the house to see Quinn walking away from a cab. Instantly her heart lifted at the sight of him, at the way he looked, the way he moved, the frown on his face as he looked up at the house without realizing she was watching him. And just as instantly her nerves tightened a notch.
They hadn't seen much of each other in the days since the fire. The wrap-up of the case had taken much of Quinn's time. He'd been in demand by the media as they had insisted on rehashing, analyzing and re-analyzing every aspect of it. And then the official summons back to Quantico, where he had several cases coming to a head at once. Even their phone conversations had been brief, and both of them had skated around the big issues of their relationship. The case had brought him to Minneapolis. The case had brought them together. The case was over. Now what?
“I'm out back!” Kate called.
Quinn fixed his gaze on her as he came up the walk beside the house. She looked ridiculous and beautiful in a hardhat and a green canvas coat that was a bit too big for her. Beautiful, even battered and bruised and shaken from the inside out.
He'd almost lost her. Again. Forever. The idea struck him with the force of a hammer to the solar plexus about every five minutes. He'd almost lost her in part because he hadn't been able to see right in front of him the monster he was supposed to know as well as any man on earth.
“Hey, pretty,” he said. He dropped his bags on the ground, took her into his arms, and kissed her—not in a sexual way, but in a way that gave them both comfort. The hardhat tipped back on her head and fell off, letting her hair cascade down her back. “How's it going?”
“It sucks. I hate it,” she said plainly, Kate-style. “I liked my house. I liked my stuff. I had to start over once. I don't want to have to do it again. But life says, ‘Tough bounce,' and what are my options? Take it on the chin and keep marching.”
She gave a shrug and broke eye contact. “Better than the deal Angie got. Or Melanie Hessler.”
Quinn took her stubborn chin in his hand and turned her face back to his. “Are you beating yourself up, Kathryn Elizabeth?”
She nodded and let him wipe the tears from her cheeks with his thumbs.
“So am I,” he confessed, and found a wry smile. “We're a pair. Think how great the world would be if you and I really did control it.”
“We'd do a better job of it than whoever has the job now,” she promised, then shivered. “Or I'd blow it, and people I cared about would get hurt.”
“Well, here's an ugly rumor I heard today: We're only human. Mistakes come with the territory.”
Kate knitted her brow. “Human?” She took his hand and led him to the old weathered cedar garden bench. “You and I? Who told you that? Let me go melt their brain with death rays.”
They sat, and his arm automatically went around her shoulders, just as her head automatically found his shoulder.
“Hey, you. You're early,” she said.
“Well, I didn't want to miss Turkey Wake,” he said, deadpan. “Happy to see me?”
“Not after that answer.”
He laughed and brushed a kiss against her temple. They sat in silence for another few minutes, staring at the blackened back door of the house where Quinn and Kovac had carried her out.
“I came back here and built this very specific life,” Kate said softly. “Thinking if I did it that way, I could have control of it, and bad things wouldn't happen. How's that for naive?”
Quinn shrugged. “I thought if I could grab my world by the balls, I could ride all the demons out of it. But it doesn't work that way. There's always another demon. I can't count them all anymore. I can't keep them straight. Hell, I can't even see them right in front of me.”
Kate could hear the hint of desperation underlying the toughness, and knew his faith in his abilities had been shaken too. The Mighty Quinn. Always right, always sure, moving forward like an arrow. She had always loved his unfailing strength, had always admired his bullheadedness. She loved him as much for his vulnerability.
“No one saw this coming, John. I hated the guy from the day he took the job, and not even I suspected this. We see what we expect to see. Scary, considering what can lie beneath the surface.”
She stared at the garden, dead and brown, surreal in the fading light. “Imagine the most horrific, repulsive cruelty one human being can commit against another. Someone's out there doing it right now. I don't know how you stand it anymore, John.”