“Are you all right?” Sabin asked.
Kate sank down on the chair, for once not minding when he put his hand on her knee. He knelt beside her, looking at her with concern.
“Kate?”
“Um—no,” she said. She felt dizzy and weak and ill, and suddenly nothing seemed quite real. “I—ah—I don't understand.”
“I'm sorry, Kate,” Rob said again, coming forward suddenly, looking as if it had just occurred to him that he should do something now that it was too late. “I know you were very protective of her.”
“I just tried to call her,” Kate said weakly. “I should have called her Monday, but suddenly there was Angie, and everything just got away from me.”
Images of Melanie Hessler played through her mind in a montage. An ordinary, almost shy woman with a slight build and a bad home perm. Working in an adult bookstore embarrassed her, but she needed the job until she could scrape together enough money to go back to school. A divorce had left her with no cash and no skills. The attack she had suffered months ago had left her fragile—damaged emotionally, psychologically, physically. She had become chronically fearful, skittish, waiting for her attackers to come after her again—a common fear among rape victims. Only it wasn't the men who had raped her Melanie had to fear, as it turned out.
“Oh, Jesus,” Kate said, putting her head in her hands.
She closed her eyes and saw the body, charred and horrible, disfigured, twisted, shrunken, stinking, violated, mutilated. Kate had held Melanie's hand and comforted her as she had related the awful details of her rape, the deep sense of shame and embarrassment she had felt, the confusion that such a terrible thing should have happened to her.
Melanie Hessler, who had been so frightened of being hurt again. Tortured, brutalized, burned beyond recognition.
And in the back of her mind, Kate could hear the store manager's voice: “I haven't heard boo from her all week.”
When had the son of a bitch taken her? How long had he kept her alive? How long had she begged for death, all the while wondering what kind of God could make her suffer that way?
“Dammit.” Kate let the anger well up, trying to draw strength from it. “Goddammit.”
Rob's voice came to her again through the maze of her thoughts. “Kate, you know it would help you to talk about what you're feeling now. Let it out. You knew Melanie. You'd helped her through so much. To think of her the way you saw her last night—”
“Why?” she demanded of no one in particular. “Why would he choose her? I don't understand how this happened.”
“It probably had to do with her working in that adult bookstore,” Rob offered.
Rob knew the case as well as she did. He had sat in on several meetings with Melanie, had gone over the tapes of those meetings with Kate, and suggested a support group for Melanie.
Tapes.
“Oh, God,” Kate whispered, her strength draining again in a rush. “That tape. Oh, my God.” She doubled over, putting her head in her hands.
“What tape?” Rob asked.
The screams of pain, of fear, of torment and anguish. The screams of a woman she had known, a woman who had trusted her and looked to her for support and protection within the justice system.
“Kate?”
“Excuse me,” she mumbled, pushing unsteadily to her feet. “I have to go be sick.”
The dizziness tilted her one way and then another, and she grabbed what solid objects she could as she went. The ladies' room seemed a mile away. The faces she encountered en route were blurred and distorted, the voices warped and muted and slurred.
One of her clients was dead. One was missing. She was the only common link between them.
Crouching beside a toilet, holding her hair back with one hand, she lost what little she'd eaten, her stomach trying to reject not only the food, but the images and ideas she had just been force-fed in Ted Sabin's office, and the thoughts that were now seeping like poison through her brain. Her client, her responsibility. She was the only link . . .
When the spasms stopped, she sank down on the floor of the stall, feeling weak and clammy, not caring where she was, not feeling the cold of the floor through her slacks. The tremors that shook her body came not from the cold, but from shock and from a heavy black sense of foreboding that swept over her soul like a storm cloud.
One of her clients was dead. Tortured, murdered, burned. One was missing, a hastily wiped trail of blood left behind.
She was the only common link between them.
She had to be logical, think straight. It was coincidence, certainly. How could it be anything else? Rob was right: Smokey Joe had chosen Melanie because of her connection to the adult bookstore that happened to be in the same part of town frequented by hookers like the first two victims. And Angie had already been connected to the killer when Kate had been assigned the case.
Still that black cloud hovered, pressing down on her. A strange instinctive reaction she couldn't shake.
Too much stress. Too little sleep. Too much bad luck. She leaned her head back against the wall and tried to force her brain to move past the images from the crime scenes last night.
Do something.
The directive that had gotten her through every crisis she'd ever faced. Don't just sit there. Do something. Action countered helplessness, regardless of outcome. She had to move, go, think, do something.
The first thing she wanted to do was call Quinn, an instinctive urge she immediately defied. Just because they'd spent a night together didn't mean she could lean on him. There had been no guarantee of a future in those few hours. She didn't know that she even wanted to hope for a future with him. They had too much of a past.
At any rate, this wasn't the time to think about it. Now that she knew Angie hadn't been the victim in the car, there was still some hope the girl was alive. There had to be something she could do to help find her.
She hauled herself up off the floor, flushed the john, and left the stall. A woman in a prissy, snot-green suit stood at one of the sinks, redoing her already perfect makeup, tubes and jars spread out on the counter. Kate gave her a wan smile and moved two sinks down to wash her hands and face.
Making a cup of her hand, she rinsed her mouth out. She looked at herself in the mirror, the makeup woman just in the fringe of her peripheral vision. She looked like hell—bruised up, beat up, dragged down, pale. She looked exactly the way she felt.
“This job will be the death of you, Kate,” she muttered to her reflection.
Brandishing a mascara wand, Makeup Woman paused to frown at her.
Kate flashed her a lunatic smile. “Well, I guess they can't start that competency hearing without me,” she said brightly, and walked out.
Rob waited for her in the hall, looking embarrassed to be within proximity of a women's toilet. He pulled a handkerchief out of his hip pocket and dabbed at his forehead. Kate scowled at him.
“What?” she demanded. “Now that Sabin's out of earshot, you're going to tell me how Melanie Hessler's death is somehow my fault? If I'd turned her case over to you on Monday, that would have somehow prevented her from falling into the hands of this sick son of a bitch?”
He faked a look of affront. “No! Why would you say such a thing?”
“Because maybe that's what I'm thinking,” she admitted, going to the railing overlooking the atrium. “I think nobody can do my job as well as I can. But I didn't do my job, and now Melanie's dead.”
“Why would you think you could have prevented what happened?” He stared at her with a mix of bemusement and resentment. “You think you're Wonder Woman or something? You think everything is about you?”