Hoops about three inches in diameter, each holding its own miniaturework of art. The light coming through them gave the colors a sense of life.

The air from a register above the window made them quiver against thegla.s.s like b.u.t.terfly wings, and fluttered the decorations that wereattached to each-a piece of ribbon, a pearl b.u.t.ton on a string, adangling earring, a finely braided lock of hair .. .

Liska's face dropped as she stopped beside Quinn, the realizationhitting her.

Lila White's calla lily. Fawn Pierce's shamrock. A mouth with a tonguesticking out. A heart with the word "Daddy." There were half a dozen.

Tattoos.

The tattoos that had been cut from the bodies of the Cremator's victims.

Stretched tight in little craft hoops, drying in the sun. Decorated withmementos of the women they had been cut from. Souvenirs of torture andmurder.

CHAPTER 36.

HIS TRIUMPH is at hand. His crowning glory. His finale-for now, for thisplace. He has arranged the b.i.t.c.h on the table to his satisfaction andbound her hands and feet to the table legs with plastic twine he haspilfered from the mailroom at the office. A length of it is wrappedaround the b.i.t.c.h's throat with long free ends trailing for him to wraparound his fists. For mood lighting he has brought candles down to thebas.e.m.e.nt from other parts of the house. He finds the flames verysensual, exciting, erotic. That excitement is heightened by the smell ofgasoline heavy in the air.

He stands back and surveys the tableau. The b.i.t.c.h under his absolutecontrol. She is still clothed because he wants her conscious for her degradation. He wants her to feel every second of her humiliation. Hewants to capture it all on tape.

He loads the microca.s.sette recorder with a fresh tape and sets it on ablack vinyl barstool with a ripped seat. He doesn't worry aboutfingerprints. The world will shortly discover the Cremator's "true"ident.i.ty.

He sees no reason not to carry through with the plan. Michele might beout of the picture, but he still has Angie. If she pa.s.ses her test, hemight take her with him. If she fails, he will kill her. She isn'tMichele-his perfect complement. Michele, who would do anything he askedif she thought compliance would make him love her. Michele, who hadfollowed his lead in the tororture games, who had encouraged him to burnthe bodies, and reveled in her tattoo arts and crafts.

He misses her as much as he can miss anyone. With a vague detachment.

Mrs. Vetter will miss her horrid little dog more.

Angie watches him as he unties the leather roll that holds all hisfavorite tools and spreads it out on the table. She looks like somethingfrom a teenage slasher movie. Her clothes are disheveled, the thighs ofher jeans shredded and blood-soaked. She still holds the butcher knifefrom the kitchen and surrept.i.tiously p.r.i.c.ks the end of her thumb with the point of it and watches the blood head. Crazy little b.i.t.c.h.

He looks at the choke marks on her throat, thinks about all the ways shehas defied him during the execution of his Great Plan. Making him lookstupid during her first interview, refusing to give the name of the barwhere he'd picked her up that night to lend credibility to her story.

Refusing to describe the Cremator to the sketch artist the way he hadinstructed her to. He had spent considerable time creating the image ofa phantom killer in his mind. The girl had willfully given a descriptionso vague it might fit half the men in the Twin Cities-including thehapless Vanlees. The idea of Vanlees getting credit as the Crematormakes him furious. And, even after the beatings he'd given her sinceWednesday, she had refused him his perfect moment of revelation inKate's living room.

"Who came to take you, Angie?"

"No."

"Who came to take you?"

"No. I won't do it." "Angie, who came to take you?"

"No. You can't make me." She had been coached to say "Evil's Angel."

No matter that he hadn't taken her, that Michele had been the one who'dsaved the stupid little s.l.u.t from slicing herself to ribbons in theshower, who'd cleaned up the mess and slipped the two of them out theback door of the house. The girl had her instructions and she defiedthem openly.

He decides he will kill her after all, despite her cooperation in thekitchen. She is too unpredictable.

He will kill her here. After the b.i.t.c.h is dead. He pictures himself in afrenzy, wild with the euphoria of killing the b.i.t.c.h. He sees himselfthrowing the girl onto the table, on top of the b.l.o.o.d.y, mutilated body,tying her there, f.u.c.king her, choking her, stabbing her in the face overand over and over and over. Punishing her exactly as he plans to punishthe b.i.t.c.h.

He will kill them both, then burn them together, here, and burn thehouse as well. He has already set the stage for the fire, pouring theaccelerant-gas from a can he put in the b.i.t.c.h's garage himself the nighthe s.h.i.t on the floor.

The fantasy of the murders he is about to commit excites him asfantasies always have-intellectually, s.e.xually, fundamentally. Thepattern of the mind of his breed: fantasy, violent fantasy; thenfacilitators that trigger action: murder. The natural cycle of hislife and his victims' death.

Decision made, he turns his thoughts to the matter at hand: Kate Conlan.

CONSCIOUSNESS RETURNED FOR Kate in fits and starts, like a televisionwith bad reception. She could hear but not see. Then she had someblurred vision, but nothing more than a horrific ringing in her ears.The only clear, constant signal was pain hammering at the back of herskull. She felt sick with it. She couldn't seem to move her arms or legs and wondered if Rob had broken her neck or severed her spinal cord. Thenshe realized she could still feel her hands, and that they hurt likeh.e.l.l.

Tied.

The ceiling tile, the smell of dust, the vague sense of dampness.

The bas.e.m.e.nt. She was tied spread-eagle on the old Ping-Pong table inher own bas.e.m.e.nt.

Another scent--out of place---came to her, thick, oily, and bitter.

Gasoline.

Oh, sweet Jesus.

She looked at Rob Marshall standing at the foot of the table, staring ather. Rob Marshall, a serial killer. The incongruity made her want tobelieve she was just having a nightmare, but she knew better.

She'd seen too much when she was an agent. The stories were stacked upin her memory like files in a cabinet. The NASA engineer who hadkidnapped hitchhikers and drained their blood to drink it. Theelectronics technician, a married father of two, who kept chosen bodyparts of his victims in his meat freezer in his garage. The youngRepublican law student who volunteered at a suicide hotline and turnedout to be Ted Bundy.

Add to the stack the victim advocate who chose his own victims from the department's client list. She felt like a fool for not having seen it,even though she knew a killer as sophisticated as Smokey Joe was one ofnature's perfect chameleons. Even now she didn't want to think of RobMarshall as being that clever.

He had taken his coat off, revealing a gray sweater soaked at the throatwith blood from where she'd stabbed him with the nail file. An inch in the right direction and she would have hit his jugular.

"Did I miss anything?" she asked, her voice rusty from the choking he'dgiven her.

She could see the surprise in his face, the confusion. Score one for thevictim.

"Still with the smart mouth," he said. "You don't learn, b.i.t.c.h."

"Why should I? What will you do, Rob? Torture and kill me?" She trieddesperately to keep the fear out of her voice. She felt as if it had herby the throat, then remembered with another jolt of adrenaline theligature marks on the throats of his victims. "You'll do that eitherway. I might as well have the satisfaction of calling you a d.i.c.klessloser to your face."

Standing to one side of the table, backlit by candles, butcher knife inhand, Angie sucked in a breath and made a pitious sound in her throat.She clutched the knife to her as if it were a treasured toy to comfortherself.

Rob's face hardened. He pulled a penknife from his pocket and jabbed it, all the way to the handle, into the bottom of Kate's right foot, and shelearned very quickly and painfully the price he was going to make herpay for the strategy she'd chosen.

Kate cried out and her whole body convulsed against the restraints thatbit deep into the skin of her wrists and ankles. When she fell back, thebindings seemed to have stretched to give her slightly more mobility.

She pulled her mind back together by focusing on Angie, thinking of thelook she'd seen in the girl's eyes earlier, when she'd been struck bythe thought that Angie's eyes weren't empty, that as long as there wa.s.some light in the darkness, there was still hope. She thought of the waythe girl had started to go after Rob with the utility knife.

"Angie, get out!" she rasped. "Save yourself!"

The girl flinched and glanced nervously at Rob.

"She'll stay," he snapped, stabbing the knife into her foot again,winning another cry from Kate. "She's mine," he said, eyes glowing withthe intoxication he achieved from inflicting pain.

"I don't think so." Kate sucked in a sharp breath. "She's not Stupid.

"No, you're the stupid one," he said, backing away a step. He pulled along taper from the candelabrum he'd taken from her dining room and seton the clothes drier.

"Because I know the kind of pathetic, warped excuse for a human beingyou are?"

"How pathetic am I now, b.i.t.c.h?" he demanded, dragging the flame of thecandle from toe to toe on her right foot.

Instinctively, Kate kicked at the source of her torment, knocking thecandle from his hand. Rob pounced on it, swearing, disappearing fromview at the end of the table.

"Stupid b.i.t.c.h!" he cursed frantically. "Stupid f.u.c.king b.i.t.c.h!"

The scent of the gasoline pressed over Kate's nose and mouth, and sheshuddered at the notion of burning alive. The terror was like a fist inthe base of her throat. The pain where Rob had already burned her waslike a live thing, as if her foot had ignited and now the flames wouldshoot up her leg.

"What's the matter, Rob?" she asked, fighting the need to cry. "Ithought you liked fire. Are you afraid of it?"

He scrambled to his feet, glaring at her. "I am the Cremator!" heshouted, the candle clutched in his fist. She could see his increasingagitation in his respiration rate, in the quick jerkiness of hismovements.

This wasn't going the way it had in his fantasies.

"I am superior!" he shouted, wild-eyed. "I am Evil's Angel! I hold yourlife in my hands! I am your G.o.d!"

Kate channeled her pain into her anger. "You're a leech. You're a parasite. You're nothing."

She was probably goading him into stabbing her forty-seven times,cutting her larynx out and running it down the garbage disposal. Thenshe thought of the photographs of his other victims, of the tape ofMelanie Hessler, of the hours of torture, rape, repeated strangulation.

She'd take her chances. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

"You make me sick, you spineless little s.h.i.t."

That was the truth. It made her want to vomit to think she'd worked beside him day in and day out, and every time his mind wandered itwandered to fantasies of abuse and brutality and murder--4he very thingsthey tried to help their clients live through and get past.

He paced at the foot of the table, muttering under his breath, as if hemight be speaking to voices in his head, though Kate thought it unlikelyhe heard any. Rob Marshall wasn't psychotic. He was perfectly aware ofeverything he did. His actions were a conscious choice -though, if hewere caught, he would probably try to convince the authoritiesotherwise.

"You can't get it up without the domination, can you?" Kate pressed on.

"What woman would have you if you didn't tie her down?"

"Shut up!" he screamed. "Shut the f.u.c.k up!"

He threw the candle at her, missing her head by three feet. He rushed upalongside her, grabbed a boning knife off the table beside her andjammed the point of It against her larynx. Kate swallowed reflexively,felt the tip of the steel bite into her skin.

"I'll cut it out!" he shouted in her face. "I'll f.u.c.king cut it out!

I'm so sick of your b.i.t.c.hing! I'm so sick of your voice!"

Kate closed her eyes and tried not to swallow again, holding herselfrigid as he started to push the small, sharp blade into her throat.

Terror tore through her. Instinct told her to jerk away. Logic told hernot to move. And then the pressure stopped, eased away.

Rob stared at the tape recorder he'd left on the old barstool. He maynot have wanted to hear her criticism of him, but he wanted to listen toher screams as he had listened to the screams and cries and pleading ofall his victims. In fact, with her, he probably wanted it more. If hecut her voice out, he couldn't get that. If he couldn't get that, theact of killing her lost its meaning.

"You want to hear it, don't you, Rob?" she asked. "You want to be ableto listen later and hear the exact moment I became frightened of you andgave you control. You don't want to give that up, do you?"

He picked up the tape recorder and held it close to her mouth. He putdown the knife, picked up a pliers, and grabbed hold of the tip of herbreast, squeezing brutally. Even through the buffer of her sweater andbra, the bite was sharp, then excruciating, making her scream.

When he finally let go, he stepped back with a vicious smile and held upthe ca.s.sette recorder.

"There," he said. "I've got it."

It seemed an eternity pa.s.sed before the white noise faded from Kate'shead. She was breathing as if she'd run the four-hundred-yard dash,sweating, shaking. The haze cleared from her vision and she was lookingat Angie, the girl still standing in the same spot, clutching the knifeto her. Kate wondered if she'd gone catatonic. Angie was her only hope,the weakest link in Rob's scenario. She needed the girl with her, lucidand able to act.

"Angie," Kate croaked. "He doesn't own you. You can fight him.

You've been fighting him, haven't you?" She thought of the scene thathad played out upstairs-Rob wanting Angie to describe what he'd done toher after taking her from the Phoenix House, Angie refusing, defyinghim, taunting him. She'd done it before-in the offices.

Rob's face reddened. "Quit talking to her!"

"Afraid she might turn on you, Rob?" Kate asked with not nearly theatt.i.tude she'd had five minutes earlier.

"Shut up. She's mine. And you're mine too, b.i.t.c.h!"

He lunged at her, grabbed hold of the neck of her sweater and tore at itwith his hands, trying without success to rip it. Swearing, sputtering,fl.u.s.tered, embarra.s.sed, he fumbled for another knife among the array oftools he had so carefully laid out on the table.

"You don't own her any more than you own me," Kate said, glaring at him,straining against the bonds. "And you will never, ever own me, youtoad."

"Shut up!" he screamed again. He turned and slapped her across the mouthwith the back of his hand. "Shut up! Shut up! You f.u.c.king b.i.t.c.h!"

The knives clattered together and he came away with a big one.

Kate sucked in what she imagined might be her last breath and held it.

Rob grabbed the neck of her sweater again and cut through it with theknife, violently rending the fabric with big, jagged tears. The tip ofthe knife bit into her breast, skipped along her belly, nicked the pointof her hip.

"I'll show you! I'll show you! Angie!" he barked, swinging toward thegirl. "Come here! Come here, now!"

He didn't wait. He rushed around the end of the table, grabbed the girlby the arm, and dragged her back to Kate.

"Do it!" he said in her ear. "For Michele. You want to do this for Michele. You want Michele to love you, don't you, Angie?"

Michele? Wild card, Kate thought, a fresh wave of terror flashingthrough her. Who the h.e.l.l was Michele, and what did she mean to Angie?

How could she fight an enemy she'd never seen?