His attention shifted further away, and he frowned harder. Liska glanced over her shoulder. Michele Fine stood at the bottom of the steps with her messy pile of black clothing clutched to her. She looked offended by Vanlees's presence.
“Mr. Vanlees?” Liska prompted, turning back to him as Michele went into the kitchen. “No one's been in the house that you know of, right?”
“Right.” He moved back a step toward the door, his hand resting on the butt of the Python. He kept his gaze on Michele, watching her as she dumped her clothes on the counter that divided kitchen and eating area. “I gotta go,” he said glumly. “I was just keeping an eye out, that's all.”
Liska followed him out onto the stoop. “Hey, Gil, I'm sorry if I snapped at you back there. You got the drop on me. Shook me up, you know.”
He didn't bite this time. She had questioned his honor, impugned his status as a peer, bruised his ego. The rapport she had built two days ago teetered on its foundation. She had expected it to hold up better, and found its fragility telling. Another point to bring up with Quinn: Vanlees's self-image.
He barely looked at her, pouting. “Sure. No problem.”
“I'm glad you're keeping an eye out,” she said. “You heard about the community meeting tonight, right? You might want to drop by that if you get a chance.”
Liska watched him walk away, wondering. From a distance Vanlees looked like a city cop in his blue-over-black uniform. It would be an easy thing for a guy in a uniform to get a woman to stop for him, talk to him. All three of Smokey Joe's victims had vanished with no report of a scream, no suspicious activity in the area. On the other hand, no one had mentioned seeing a uniform in the vicinity either.
“I'm ready.”
She started a little at Michele Fine's announcement, and turned to find her standing in the doorway, her clothes crammed into a plastic bag from Rainbow Foods.
“Right. Great. I'll drive you back.”
She locked up the house, Fine waiting for her at the bottom of the steps. Vanlees had disappeared down the winding path, but not from Liska's mind.
“You know that guy?” she asked as they settled into the car.
“Not personally,” Fine said, hugging her Rainbow bag as if it were an infant. “Like I said before, who pays any attention to the losers?”
No one, Liska thought as she put the car in gear. And while no one was paying any attention to them, the losers were allowed to brood and fantasize and imagine getting back at all the women who didn't want them and would never love them.
15
CHAPTER
“SO, WHAT DO you think, John?” Sabin asked. “Is the girl holding back on us?”
They sat in a conference room in the county attorney's offices: Quinn, Sabin, Kate, and Marshall. Quinn looked at Kate, sitting across from him with her jaw set and fire in her eyes, plainly telegraphing violence if he stepped on the wrong side of this argument. Just another minefield to cross. He kept his gaze on hers.
“Yes.” The fire flared brighter. “Because she's afraid. She's probably feeling that the killer somehow knows what she's doing, as if he's watching her when she's talking with the police or describing him to your sketch artist. It's a common phenomenon. Isn't that right, Kate?”
“Yes.” A banked fire in the eyes now. Reserving the right to burn him later. He liked it too much that she could still feel that strongly about him. Negative emotion was still emotion. Indifference was the thing to dread.
“A sense of omniscient evil,” Marshall said, nodding wisely. “I've seen it time and again. It's fascinating. Even the most logical, sensible victims experience it.”
He played with the VCR remote, running the tape back to the beginning of Angie DiMarco's initial interview, which had occurred within an hour of her being picked up. They had already gone through it. Freezing the tape at significant points, when Marshall and Sabin would then turn and stare at Quinn, waiting for a revelation like the disciples sitting at the feet of Christ.
“She's clearly terrified here,” Marshall said, repeating with authority what Quinn had said the first time they'd run through it. “You can see her shaking. You can hear it in her voice. You're absolutely right, John.”
John. My buddy, my pal, my colleague. The familiarity rubbed Quinn the wrong way, even though it was something he purposely cultivated. He was tired of people pretending to know him, and even more tired of the people overly impressed with him. He wondered how impressed Rob Marshall would be to know he woke up in the middle of most nights, shaking and sick because he couldn't handle it anymore.
Marshall edged up the volume at a point where the girl lost her temper and shouted, voice quavering, “I don't know him! He set a fucking body on fire! He's some kind of fucking psycho!”
“She's not faking that,” he pronounced quietly, squinting hard at the television screen, as if that would sharpen his myopic vision and allow him to see into the girl's mind.
Sabin looked displeased, as though he had been hoping for some excuse to put the girl on the rack. “Maybe she'd feel safer behind bars.”
“Angie hasn't done anything wrong,” Kate snapped. “She never had to admit she even saw this creep. She needs our help, not your threats.”
Color starting creeping up from the county attorney's collar.
“We don't want an adversarial situation here, Ted,” Quinn said calmly. Mr. Laid Back. Mr. Coolheaded.
“The girl set herself up that way,” Sabin argued. “I had a bad feeling about her the minute I set eyes on her. We should have called her bluff right off the bat. Let her know we're not screwing around here.”
“I think you handled her perfectly,” Quinn said. “A kid like Angie doesn't trust the system. You needed to give her a friend, and Kate was the ideal choice. She's genuine, she's blunt, she's not full of crap and phony sympathy. Let Kate handle her. You won't get anything out of her with threats. She expects threats; they'll just bounce off her.”
“If she doesn't give us something we can use, there's nothing to handle,” Sabin came back. “If she can't give us anything, then there's no point in wasting county resources on her.”
“It's not a waste,” Kate insisted.
“What do you think here, John?” Marshall asked, pointing to the screen with the remote. He had run the tape back again. “Her use of personal pronouns—I don't know him. He's some kind of psycho. Do you think it could be significant?”
Quinn blew out a breath, impatience creeping in on his temper. “What's she going to call the guy—it?”
One corner of Kate's mouth twitched.
Marshall sulked. “I've taken courses in psycholinguistics. The use of language can be very telling.”
“I agree,” Quinn offered, recovering diplomatically. “But there is such a thing as overanalyzing. I think the best thing you can do with this girl is step back and let Kate deal with her.”
“Dammit, we need a break,” Sabin said almost to himself. “She barely added anything to that sketch today. She stood right there and looked at the guy, and the picture she gives us could be anybody.”
“It might be all her mind is allowing her to see,” Kate said. “What do you want her to do, Ted? Make something up just so you believe she's trying harder?”
“I'm sure that's not what Mr. Sabin was suggesting, Kate,” Marshall said with disapproval.
“I was being facetious to make a point, Rob.”
“She's valuable to the investigation regardless,” Quinn said. “We can use the threat of her. We can leak things to the press. Make it sound like she's told us more than she has. We can use her any number of ways. At this point she doesn't have to be a Girl Scout and she doesn't have to have total recall.”