Oh, G.o.d, I'm dead.

"I'm sorry," she said, options racing through her mind. The front door was just ten feet down the hall.

Disgust crossed Rob's face in a spasm. He squeezed his eyes nearly shut, looking as if he'd just caught wind of an open sewer. "No, you're not.

You're not sorry about the way you've treated me. You're sorry I'm goingto kill you for it."

"Angie, run!" Kate shouted. She grabbed the fax machine off the desk,jerking the power cord out the back, and flung the machine at Rob. Ithit him in the chest and knocked him off balance.

She bolted for the door, slipping on one of the victimology reports -amistake that cost her a precious fraction of a second. Rob grabbed ather, caught hold of a coat sleeve with one hand, and swung wildly withthe sap.

Even through the thick wool of her coat collar, Kate felt the weight ofit as it struck her shoulder. Heavy, deadly, serious. If he caught herin the head, she would go down like a rock.

She shied sideways, eluding his grasp, then used his own momentum toshove him into the hall. Grabbing his left arm and twisting it up behindhim as he came past, she ran him into the hall table and bolted awaybefore the crash was over, running for the front door that suddenlyseemed a mile away.

Rob let out a roar and tackled her from behind. They hit the floor hard,Kate crying out as her right arm twisted unnaturally beneath her and shefelt the sickening tear of muscles in her shoulder.

Pain swept through her like a fire. She ignored it as best she could a.s.she tried to kick free and scramble to the door. Rob wrapped a fist inher hair and jerked her head back, hitting her with his fist on theright side of her head. Her vision blurred, her ear rang like a bell andburned like a son of a b.i.t.c.h. Knife-sharp pain shot out across her faceand down her jaw.

"You b.i.t.c.h! You b.i.t.c.h!" he screamed over and over.

And then his hands were around her throat and he was choking her, andhis screams faded from her head. She fought automatically, frantically,clawing at his hands, but his fingers were short and thick and strong.

She couldn't breathe, felt like her eyes were going to burst, felt likeher brain was swelling.

With the last bit of sense she could grab, Kate forced herself to golimp. Rob continued to squeeze for seconds that seemed like an eternity,then slammed her head down on the floor. She knew he was ranting butcouldn't make out the words as the blood roared back up to her brain.She tried not to suck in the great gulps of oxygen she wanted and neededso desperately. She tried not to let her mind stall out. She had to keep-thinking-and not of the crime scene she had visited, not of the charredbody of her client, not of the autopsy photos of four women this man hadtortured and mutilated.

"You think I can't do anything right!" Rob raved, pushing himself up offher. "You think I'm an idiot! You think you're better than everyone andI'm just a nothing!"

Not able to see him, Kate inched her left hand toward her coat pocket.

"You're such a f.u.c.king b.i.t.c.h!" he screamed, and kicked her, too immersed in his ranting to hear her grunt of pain as his boot connected with herhip.

Kate ground her teeth together and concentrated on moving the hand, halfan inch at a time, into her coat pocket.

"You don't know me," Rob declared. He grabbed something from her halltable and threw it. Whatever it was, it crashed somewhere in thevicinity of the kitchen. "You don't know anything about me, about MYTrue Self " And she would never have suspected. G.o.d in heaven, she'dworked beside this man for a year and a half Never once would she havethought he was capable of this. Never once had she questioned hismotives for choosing his profession. On the contrary, his being anadvocate for victims-so ready to listen to them, so ready to spend timewith them-had been his one redeeming quality. Or so she had believed.

"You think I'm n.o.body," he yelled. "I AM SOMEBODY! I AM ETIM'S ANGEL!

I AM THE f.u.c.kING CREAMATOR! Now what do you think of me, Ms. b.i.t.c.h?"

He crouched down beside her and rolled her onto her back. Kate kept hereyes nearly shut, barely seeing more than a blur of colors between herlashes. Her hand was in her pocket, fingers sliding around the shaft ofthe metal nail file.

"I saved you for last," he said. "You're going to beg me to kill you.

And I'm going to love doing it."

CHAPTER 34.

"WHAT HAPPENED that night, Peter?" Quinn asked.

They sat in a small, dingy white room in the bowels of the city hallbuilding, near the booking area of the adult detention center. Bonduranthad waived his rights and refused to go to the hospital. A paramedic hadcleaned the bullet wound to his scalp right there on the stairs where hehad tried to end it all.

Edwyn n.o.ble had thrown a holy fit, insisting to be present duringquestioning, insisting on sending Peter directly to a hospital whetherhe wanted to go or not. But Peter had won out, swearing in front of adozen news cameras he wanted to confess.

Present in the room were Bondurant, Quinn, and Yurek. Peter had wantedonly Quinn, but the police had insisted on having a representativepresent.

Sam Kovac's name was not mentioned.

"Jillian came to dinner," Peter said. He looked small and shrunken, likea longtime heroin junkie. Pale, red-eyed, vacant. "She was in one of hermoods. Up, down, laughing one minute, snapping the next. She was justlike that-volatile. Like her mother. Even as a baby."

"What did you fight about?"

He stared across the room at a rosy stain on the wall that might havebeen blood before someone tried to scrub it away. "School, her music,her therapy, her stepfather, us."

"She wanted to resume her relationship with Leblanc?"

"She'd been speaking with him. She said she was thinking of going back to France."

"You were angry."

"Angry," he said, and sighed. "That's not really the right word. I was

upset. I felt tremendous guilt."

"Why guilt?"

He took a long time formulating his answer, as if he were prechoosing

each word he would use. "Because that was my fault-what happened withJillian and Leblanc. I could have prevented it. I could have foughtSophie for custody, but I just let go."

"She threatened to expose you for molesting Jillian," Quinn remindedhim.

"She threatened to claim I had molested Jillian," Peter corrected him. "She had actually coached Jillie on what to say, how to behave in orderto convince people it was true."

"But it wasn't?"

"She was my child. I could never have done anything to hurt her."

He thought about that answer, his composure cracking and crumbling. He

covered his mouth with a trembling hand and cried silently for a moment.

"How could I have known?"

"You knew Sophie's mental state," Quinn pointed out.

"I was in the process of buying out Don Thorton. I had several huge

government contracts pending. She could have ruined me."

Quinn said nothing, letting Bondurant sort through it himself, as he had undoubtedly done a thousand times in the last week alone.

Bondurant heaved a defeated sigh and looked at the table. "I gave my

daughter to a madwoman and a child-molester. I would have been kinder to

kill her then."

"What happened Friday night?" Quinn asked again, drawing him back to the present.

"We argued about Leblanc. She accused me of not loving her. She locked herself in the music room for a time. I let her alone. I went into the library, sat in front of the fire, drank some cognac.

"About eleven-thirty she came into the room behind me, singing.

She had a beautiful voice-haunting, ethereal. The song was obscene, disgusting, perverse. It was everything Sophie had coached her to say about me all those years ago: the things I had supposedly done to her."

"That made you angry."

"It made me sick. I got up and turned to tell her so, and she wa.s.standing in front of me naked. "Don't you want me, Daddy?' she said.

"Don't you love me?"' Even the memory astonished him, sickened him. Hebent over the wastebasket that had been set beside his chair and retched, but there was nothing left in his stomach. Quinn waited, calm,unemotional, purposely detached.

"D'Did you have s.e.x with her?" Yurek asked.

Quinn glared at him.

"No! My G.o.d!" Peter said, outraged at the suggestion.

"What happened?" Quinn asked. "You fought. She ended up running out."

"Yes," he said, calming. "We fought. I said some things I shouldn'thave. She was so fragile. But I was so shocked, so angry. She ran andput her clothes on and left. I never saw her alive again."

Yurek looked confused and disappointed. "But you said you killed her."

"Don't you see? I could have saved her, but I didn't. I let her go thefirst time to save myself, my business, my fortune. It's my fault shebecame who she did. I let her go Friday night because I didn't want todeal with that, and now she's dead. I killed her, Detective, just a.s.surely as if I had stabbed her in the heart."

Yurek skidded his chair back and got up to pace, looking like a manwho'd just realized he'd been cheated in a sh.e.l.l game. "Come on, Mr.Bondurant. You expect us to believe that?" He didn't have the voice orthe edge to play bad cop-even when he meant it. "You were carrying yourdaughter's head in a bag. What is that about? A little memento the realkiller sent you?" Bondurant said nothing. The mention of Jillian's headupset him, and he began focusing inward again. Quinn could see himslipping away, allowing his mind to be lured to a place other than thisugly reality. He might go there and not come back for a long time.

"Peter, what were you doing in Jillian's town house Sunday morning?"

"I went to see her. To see if she was all right."

"In the middle of the night?" Yurek said doubtfully.

"She wouldn't return my calls. I left her alone Sat.u.r.day on LucasBrandt's advice. By Sunday morning .. . I had to do something."

"So you went there and let yourself in," Quinn said.

Bondurant looked down at a stain on his sweater and scratched at it absently with his thumbnail. "I thought she would be in bed .. . then Iwondered whose bed she was in. I waited for her."

"What did you do while you were waiting?"

"Cleaned," he said, as if that made perfect sense and wasn't in any wayodd. "The apartment looked like-like-a sty," he said, lip curling withdisgust. "Filthy, dirty, full of garbage and mess."

"Like Jillian's life?" Quinn asked gently.

Tears swelled in Bondurant's eyes. The cleaning had been more symbolic than for sanitary purposes. He hadn't been able to change his daughter's

life, but he could clean up her environment. An act of control, and perhaps of affection, Quinn thought.

"You erased the messages on her machine?" he asked.