“Iverson said her stuff is gone from her room and there's no sign of forced entry at the back. There was another resident here the whole time. She told him she didn't see or hear anything. Quinn and I got here just ahead of you. We haven't looked for ourselves yet.”
Kate shook her head at her own stupidity. “I'd actually made some progress with her. I should have stayed.”
“What time did you drop her off?”
“I don't know. It must have been after eight. She told me about the john in the park late this afternoon, but then she was embarrassed and upset, and I didn't want to push it. I took her to City Center for something to eat, and let her do a little shopping.”
“Lieutenant Fowler came up with some dough for her?”
Kate made a face and waved the question off. The money had come out of her own pocket, but it didn't matter. “Then I brought her back here.”
Angie growing quieter and quieter the closer they got to the Phoenix. Slipping back inside the tough shell. And I let her, Kate thought.
“I dropped her off and went on to the meeting to tell you—oh, shit. I should have stayed.”
“Who else was here when you let her off?”
“Gregg Urskine—but he was going to the meeting—and one other woman. I don't know who. I didn't see her. Gregg told me she was here. I didn't want Angie alone.”
It was too easy to imagine Angie in this big old house, all but alone. If Smokey Joe had any way of knowing where she was . . . His three victims had vanished with no sign of a struggle. There and gone, simply, easily. And Angie DiMarco claimed she could identify him.
That fast, that easily, the girl was gone. One careless decision . . .
“I blew it, and now we've lost her.”
Kate knew the emotions suddenly threatening to swamp her were out of proportion, but she didn't seem able to pull them back. She felt vaguely ill, slightly dizzy. The aftertaste of gin was like metal in her mouth.
She felt Quinn come up behind her, knew it was he without looking. Her body was still attuned to his. There was a disconcerting thought: that the physical magnetism hadn't faded in all this time.
“It isn't your fault, Kate,” he said softly.
He put a hand on her shoulder, his thumb unerringly finding the knot of tension in her trapezius and rubbing at it in an old, familiar way. Too familiar. Too comforting.
“It doesn't matter now,” she said, turning away stiffly. “What matters is finding her. So let's start looking.”
They went upstairs to the room Angie had been sharing with another Phoenix resident. The walls of the room were a nasty shade of yellow, the old woodwork dark with age and varnish. As it was all through the house, the furniture was mismatched and ill proportioned.
Angie's bed was a wad of unmade sheets. The shopping bag from their excursion to City Center lay in the midst of the mess, tissue tumbling out of it, the jeans and sweater she'd bought nowhere in sight. The dirty backpack was conspicuously absent, suggesting the girl had flown the coop of her own accord.
Sitting on the nightstand beside the cheap glass lamp was a tiny statue of an angel.
Kate picked it up and looked at it: an inch-high piece of pottery she'd bought for five bucks from a Navajo woman on the plaza in Santa Fe. She had slipped the old woman's five-year-old granddaughter an extra dollar for carefully wrapping the doll in tissue, her little brow furrowed as she concentrated on the importance of her task. Watching the little girl, she'd thought of Emily and, to her extreme embarrassment, had nearly started to cry.
“You know something about that?” Quinn asked softly, standing too close again.
“Sure. She stole it off my desk today.” She touched the gold-painted halo on the angel's dark head. “I have a collection of guardian angels. Ironic, huh? I don't really believe in them. If there were such things as guardian angels, then you and I wouldn't have jobs, and I wouldn't have lost my daughter, and we wouldn't have kids living lives like Angie's.
“Stupid,” she said, rubbing the angel's wings gently between her fingers. “I wish she'd taken this with her.”
The statue slipped from her grasp and fell to the old rug beside the bed. Kate knelt down to get it, putting her left hand down on the floor for balance. Her heart thumped hard in her chest, and she sat back against her heels as she raised the same hand, turning it palm up.
“Oh, Jesus,” she breathed, staring at the smear of blood.
Quinn swore, grabbing her hand, pulling it closer to the light.
Kate pulled away from him, twisting around, crouching low and straining to see against the dark wood of the old floor. The angle had to be perfect. The light had to hit it just right . . . Iverson hadn't seen it because he hadn't been looking hard enough.
“No,” she muttered, finding another droplet, then a smear where someone had tried to hastily clean up. I should have stayed with her.
The trail led to the hall. The hall led to the bathroom.
Panic fell like stone in Kate's stomach. “Oh, God, no.”
I should have stayed with her.
She stumbled to her feet and down the hall, all senses magnified, the pounding of her heart like a jack-hammer in her ears.
“Don't touch anything!” Kovac yelled, coming behind her.
Kate pulled up short of the bathroom door, which stood ajar, and allowed Kovac to bump it open with his shoulder. He pulled a ballpoint pen from his coat pocket and flipped on the light.
The room was awash in brain-bending hot pink, orange, and silver foil wallpaper from the seventies. The fixtures were older, the two-inch floor tiles long past being white. Dotted with blood. A fleck here. A smeared stain there.
Why didn't I stay with her?
“Come out in the hall, honey,” Quinn said, setting his hands on Kate's shoulders as Kovac moved to pull back the shower curtain.
“No.”
She held her ground, trembling, the breath held tight in her lungs. Quinn slipped an arm around her, ready to pull her out as Kovac drew the shower curtain back.
There was no body. Angie wasn't lying dead in the tub. Still Kate's stomach turned and a wave of cold washed over her. Quinn's arm tightened around her and she sagged back against him.
Blood streaked the tiled wall in pale smudges, like a faded fingerpainting. A thin line of water tinted rusty with diluted blood led from the center of the tub to the drain.
Kate pressed a hand across her mouth, smearing the blood on her palm across her chin.
“Shit,” Kovac breathed, backing away from the tub.
He went to the plastic hamper beside the sink and opened it gingerly with the same pen he had used to turn on the light.
“Hey, Kojak,” Elwood said, sticking his big head in the door. “What's up?”
“Call the crime scene guys.” He pulled one towel and then another from the hamper, both of them wet and bloody. “Looks like we've got us a crime scene.”
19
CHAPTER
TONI URSKINE ENTERED the front room still dressed to impress in slim black slacks and a cardinal-red blazer over a white blouse with an elaborate cravat. The fire of righteous indignation burned bright in her eyes.
“I don't appreciate those police cars out front. Could they at least turn their lights off? This is a neighborhood, Sergeant, and our neighbors are none too gracious about us being here as it is.”
“I'm sorry for the disruption, Ms. Urskine,” Kovac said dryly. “Abductions, murders, they're a big damn pain in the ass, I know.”
A redhead with the thin, brittle look of a crack addict came into the room behind Toni Urskine, followed by Gregg Urskine, who looked like a model for Eddie Bauer in scuffed work boots, jeans, and a flannel shirt open at the throat to reveal a white T-shirt. He put a hand on the redhead's back and urged her forward.