He'd been punishing her, Kate knew.
Finally, he'd hit the nerve one time too many. Kate stood, leaned across the table, and pressed stop.
“You've made your point. You've had your revenge. Enough is enough,” she said quietly.
“I don't know what you're talking about.” He said it almost as a taunt, without a speck of sincerity. He wouldn't look directly at her.
“I like this office, Rob. I like most of the people I work with. But I'm damn good at what I do, and I can get another job in a heartbeat. I won't take you trying to manipulate me and punish me.
“Now you'll excuse me,” she went on. “Because I've just had the third worst twenty-four hours of my life and I feel like I'm on the verge of a psychotic break. I'm going home. Call if you don't want me to come back.”
He hadn't said a word as she walked out. At least she hadn't heard him for the pulse roaring in her ears. God knew she probably deserved to have him fire her, but there simply wasn't any tact left in her. All pretense of manners and social bullshit had been scraped away, leaving nothing but raw emotion.
She felt it flooding through her still, as if some vital artery had ruptured inside her. She felt as if she might choke on it, drown in it.
And all she wanted was to find Quinn and fall into his arms.
She'd worked so hard to put her life back together, piece by piece on a new foundation, and now that foundation was shifting. No. Worse—she'd discovered it was built directly over the fault line of her past, just covering up. Not new, not stronger, just a lie she'd told herself every day for the last five years: that she didn't need John Quinn to feel complete.
Tears welled in her eyes, and despair yawned through her, leaving her aching and empty and alone and afraid. And God, she was so tired. But she choked the tears back and put one foot in front of the other. Go home, regroup, have a drink, try to sleep. Tomorrow was another day.
She pulled her coat on, scooped up her file on Angie, grabbed her mail and her messages and the faxes that had piled up in the tray during the day, and dumped it all into her briefcase. She reached to turn the desk lamp off, but her hand strayed to the shelves, and she plucked out the little framed photo of Emily.
Sweet, smiling little cherub in a sunny yellow dress. The future bright before her. Or so anyone with ordinary human arrogance would have thought. Kate wondered if tucked away somewhere in someone's old shoe box there might be a similar photograph of Angie DiMarco . . . or Melanie Hessler . . . Lila White, Fawn Pierce, Jillian Bondurant.
Life didn't come with any guarantee. There'd never been a promise made that couldn't be broken. She knew that firsthand. She'd made too many with the best of intentions, then watched them crack and come apart.
“I'm sorry, Em,” she whispered. She pressed the picture to her lips for a good-night kiss, then tucked the frame back into its hiding place, where the cleaning woman would find it and dig it back out.
She let herself out of the office and locked the door behind her. A vacuum cleaner was running in the office across from hers. Down the hall, Rob Marshall's door was closed. He might still have been there, plotting how to screw her out of her severance pay. Or he might have gone home to—to what? She didn't even know if he had a girlfriend—or a boyfriend, for that matter. Thursday could have been his bowling league night for all she knew about him. He didn't have any close personal friends within the department. Kate had never socialized with him outside the obligatory office Christmas party. She wondered now if he had someone to go home to and complain to about that bitch from the office.
The snow had finally stopped, she noticed as she took the skyway to the Fourth Street ramp. Six inches total, she'd heard someone say. The street below was a mess that city crews would clear away overnight, though this time of year they might decide to leave it and hope for a couple of warm days to save the city some money for the storms that were sure to come in the next few months.
She pulled her keys out and folded them into her fist, the longest, sharpest one protruding between her index and middle fingers—a habit she'd developed living in the D.C. suburbs. The ramp was well lit, but not busy this time of night, and it always made her edgy walking around in it alone. More so tonight, after all that had gone on. Between the murders and the lack of sleep, her paranoia was running high. A shadow falling between cars, the scrape of a footstep, the sudden thump of a door—her nerves twisted tight every time. The 4Runner seemed a mile away.
Then she was in it, doors locked, motor running, heading home, one layer of tension peeling away. She tried to focus on letting the knots out of her shoulders. Pajamas, a drink, and bed. She'd drag her briefcase there with her and sit propped up by pillows on the sheets still rumpled from lovemaking.
Maybe she would change the sheets.
The enterprising guy from down the block kept a blade on the front of his pickup five months a year and supplemented his income plowing driveways. He had plowed the alley. Kate would write him a check and leave it in his mailbox tomorrow.
She drove into the garage, remembering too late the burned-out light. Swearing under her breath, she dug the big flashlight out of her glove compartment, then climbed down from the truck, juggling too much stuff.
The smell hit her nose just a second before her foot hit the soft, squishy pile.
“Oh, shit!” Literally. “Shit!”
“Kate?”
The voice came from toward the house. Quinn's voice.
“I'm in here!” she called back, fumbling with the briefcase and the flashlight and her purse.
“What's wrong? I heard you swearing,” he said, coming in.
“I just stepped in a pile of shit.”
“What—Jesus, I smell it. That must have been some dog.”
The flashlight clicked on and she shined it down at the mess. “It couldn't have been a dog. The door was shut. Gross!”
“That looks human,” Quinn said. “Where's your shovel?”
Kate flashed the beam of light at the wall. “Right there. My God, you think someone came into my garage and did this?”
“You have a more viable theory?” he asked.
“I just can't imagine why anyone would do that.”
“It's a sign of disrespect.”
“I know that. I mean, why to me? Who do I know who would do something that strange, that primitive?”
“Who've you pissed off lately?”
“My boss. But somehow I can't envision him squatting in my garage. Nor would I want to.” She limped outside with him, stepping only with the toe of her soiled boot, trying not to smear more feces on her garage floor.
“Do your clients know where you live?”
“If any of them do, it's not because I gave them the information. They have my office number—which forwards to my house machine after hours—and they have my cell phone number for emergencies. That's it. My home number is unlisted, not that that would necessarily stop anyone from finding me. It isn't that hard to do if you know how.”
Quinn dumped the mess between the garage and the neighbor's privacy fence. He cleaned the shovel off in a snowbank while Kate tried to do the same with her boot.
“This is just the exclamation point at the end of my day,” she grumbled as they went back into the garage to put the shovel away. She shone the light around to see if anything was missing. Nothing seemed to be.
“Have you had any odd things happen lately?”
She laughed without humor. “What about my life lately isn't odd?”