Ashes to Ashes

by Tami Hoag

  “But he won't call me as a surprise witness or anything?” He looked half terrified, half hopeful at the prospect.

  Somehow, Kate knew this was just how David Willis had looked in his high school yearbook back in the seventies: out-of-date crew cut and nerd glasses, pants that were an odd shade of green and an inch too high-waisted. People had probably assaulted him regularly all his life.

  For the occasion of the hearing, he had worn the black horn-rimmed glasses that had been broken in the course of his assault. They were held together in two places by adhesive tape. His left wrist was encased in a molded plastic cast, and he wore a cervical collar like a thick turtleneck.

  “Surprise witnesses happen only on Matlock,” Kate said.

  “Because I'm just not ready for that. I'm going to have to work myself up to that, you know.”

  “Yes, I think we're all aware of that, Mr. Willis.” Because he had called every day for the last week to remind them: Kate, Ken Merced, Ken's secretary, the legal services receptionist.

  “I won't be in any physical danger, will I? He'll be in handcuffs and leg irons, right?”

  “You'll be perfectly safe.”

  “Because, you know, situational stress can push people over the edge. I've been reading up on it. I've been religiously attending the victims' group you set me up with, Ms. Conlan, and I've been reading everything I can get my hands on about the criminal mind, and the psychology of victims, and post-traumatic stress disorder—just the way you told me to do.”

  Kate often recommended her clients educate themselves as to what to expect of their own reactions and emotions following a crime. It gave them a sense of understanding and a small feeling of control. She didn't recommend it as an all-consuming hobby.

  Knowing Willis would want to be close to the action, she chose the first row in the gallery behind the prosecution's table, where Ken Merced was going over some notes. Willis bumped into her as she stopped to indicate the row, then tripped over his own feet trying to move aside and gallantly motion Kate in ahead of him.

  Kate shook her head as she stepped into the row and took a seat. Willis fumbled with the cheap briefcase he'd brought with him. Filled with news clippings about his case, Polaroids taken of him in the ER after the attack, brochures on victims' groups and therapists, and a hardcover copy of Coping After the Crime. He pulled out a yellow legal pad and prepared to take notes of the proceedings—as he had at every meeting Kate had had with him.

  Merced turned to them with a pleasant poker face. “We're all set, Mr. Willis. This won't take long.”

  “You're certain you won't need me to testify?”

  “Not today.”

  He gave a shuddering sigh. “Because I'm not ready for that.”

  “No.” Merced turned back toward the table. “None of us are.”

  Kate sat back and tried to will the tension out of her jaw as Willis became engrossed in making his preliminary notes.

  “You always were a secret soft touch.”

  The low whisper rumbled over her right shoulder, the breath caressing the delicate skin of her neck. Kate jerked around, scowling. Quinn leaned ahead on his chair, elbows braced on his knees, dark eyes gleaming, that little-boy-caught-with-his-hand-in-the-cookie-jar smile firmly and calculatingly in place.

  “I need to talk to you,” he murmured.

  “You have my office number.”

  “I do,” he admitted. “However, you seem not to want to answer my messages.”

  “I'm a very busy person.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Don't mock me,” she snapped.

  David Willis grabbed hold of her forearm and she turned back around. The side door had opened, and O. T. Zubek entered the courtroom with his lawyer, a deputy trailing after them. Zubek was a human fireplug, squat with thick limbs and a protruding belly. He wore a cheap navy-blue suit that showed a dusting of dandruff on the shoulders, and a baby-blue knit shirt underneath, untucked and too snug around the middle. He looked right at Willis and scowled, his face the doughy caricature of a cartoon tough guy with a blue-shadowed jaw.

  Willis stared at him, bug-eyed for a second, then twisted toward Kate. “Did you see that? He threatened me! That was threatening eye contact. I perceived that as a threat. Why isn't he in handcuffs?”

  “Try to stay calm, Mr. Willis, or the judge will have you removed from the courtroom.”

  “I'm not the criminal here!”

  “Everyone knows that.”

  The judge entered from chambers and everyone rose, then sat again. The docket number and charges were read, the prosecution and defense attorneys stated their names for the record, and the probable-cause hearing was under way.

  Merced called his first witness, a pear-shaped man who serviced Slurpee machines at 7-Eleven stores in the greater Twin Cities metropolitan area. He testified he had heard Willis arguing with Zubek about the condition of a delivery of Hostess Twinkies and assorted snack cakes in the store Willis managed, and that he had seen the two come tumbling down the chips aisle, Zubek striking Willis repeatedly.

  “And did you hear who started this alleged argument?” the defense attorney questioned on cross-examination.

  “No.”

  “So for all you know, Mr. Willis may have provoked the argument?”

  “Objection. Calls for speculation.”

  “Withdrawn. And did you see who threw the first punch in this so-called attack?”

  “No.”

  “Might it have been Mr. Willis?”

  Willis trembled and twitched beside Kate. “I didn't!”

  “Shhh!”

  Merced sighed. “Your honor . . .”

  The judge frowned at the defense attorney, who had come costumed as a bad used-car salesman. He looked seedy enough that he might have been Zubek's cousin. “Mr. Krupke, this is a hearing, not a trial. The court is more concerned with what the witnesses saw than with what they did not see.”

  “Not exactly the Richmond Ripper case, is it?” Quinn murmured in Kate's ear. She gave him the evil eye over her shoulder. The stiffness in her jaw began radiating down into her neck.

  Merced's second witness corroborated the testimony of the Slurpee mechanic. Krupke went through the same cross, with Merced voicing the same objections, and the judge getting crankier and crankier. Willis fidgeted and recorded copious notes in tiny bold print that said frightening things about the inner workings of his mind. Merced entered into evidence the security surveillance tape showing much of the fight, then rested his case.

  Krupke had no witnesses and put on no defense.

  “We don't dispute that an altercation took place, your honor.”

  “Then why are you wasting my time with this hearing, Mr. Krupke?”

  “We wanted to establish that events may not have taken place exactly as Mr. Willis claims.”

  “That's a lie!” Willis shouted.

  The judge cracked his gavel. The bailiff frowned at Willis but didn't move from his post. Kate put a vise grip on her client's arm and whispered furiously, “Mr. Willis, be quiet!”

  “I suggest you listen to your advocate, Mr. Willis,” the judge said. “You'll have your turn to speak.”

  “Today?”

  “No!” the judge snorted, turning his glare on Merced, who spread his hands and shrugged. He turned back to the defense. “Mr. Krupke, write me a check for two hundred dollars for wasting my time. If you had no intention of disputing the charges, you should have waived rights and asked for a trial date at the arraignment.”

  The date for the trial was set and the proceedings were over. Kate breathed a sigh of relief. Merced got up from the table and collected his papers. Kate leaned across the bar and whispered, “Can't you get this guy to cop, Ken? I'd rather gouge my eyes out than sit through a trial with this man.”

  “Christ, I'd pay Zubek to take a plea if it wouldn't get me disbarred.”

  Krupke asked someone to lend him a pen so he could write out the check for contempt o
f court. Willis looked around like he had just awakened from a nap and had no idea where he was.

  “That's it?”

  “That's it, Mr. Willis,” Kate said, standing. “I told you it wouldn't take long.”

  “But—but—” He swung his blue-casted arm in the direction of Zubek. “They called me a liar! Don't I get to defend myself?”

  Zubek leaned over the rail, sneering. “Everyone can see what a shitty job you do of that, Willis.”

  “We should leave now,” Kate suggested, handing Willis his briefcase. The thing weighed a ton.

  He fumbled with the case and his notepad and pen as she herded him toward the aisle. Kate was more concerned with what she was going to do about Quinn. He had already moved into the aisle and was backing toward the door, his gaze on her, trying to get her to look at him. Sabin must have called him the second she was out of the office.

  “But I don't understand,” Willis whined. “There should have been more. He hurt me! He hurt me and he called me a liar!”

  Zubek twitched his shoulders like a boxer and made a Bluto face. “Weenie wuss.”

  Kate saw Quinn's reaction the second the war cry curdled up out of David Willis. She spun around as Willis launched himself at Zubek, swinging. The briefcase hit Zubek in the side of the head like a frying pan and knocked him backward across the defense table. The locks sprung and the contents exploded out of the briefcase.

  Kate hurled herself at Willis as he drew his arm back to swing again. She grabbed both his shoulders, and the two of them tumbled headfirst over the bar and into a sea of table legs and chairs and scrambling people. Zubek was squealing like a stuck pig. The judge was shouting at the bailiff, the bailiff was shouting at Krupke, who was screaming at Willis and trying to kick him. His wingtip connected with Kate's thigh, and she swore and kicked back, nailing Willis.

  It seemed to take forever for order to be restored and for Willis to be hauled off her. Kate sat up slowly, muttering a string of obscenities under her breath.

  Quinn squatted down in front of her, reached out, and brushed a rope of red-gold hair back behind her ear. “You really ought to come back to the FBI, Kate. This job's going to be the death of you.”

  “DON'T YOU DARE be amused at me,” Kate snapped, surveying the damage to herself and her clothes. Quinn leaned back against her desk, watching as she plucked at a hole in her stockings that was big enough to put her fist through. “This is my second pair of good tights this week. That's it: I'm giving up skirts.”

  “The men in the building will have to wear black armbands,” Quinn said. He held his hands up in surrender as she shot him another deadly glare. “Hey, you always had a nice set of pegs on you, Kate. You can't argue.”

  “The subject is inappropriate and irrelevant.”

  He gave her innocence. “Political correctness prohibits one old friend from complimenting another?”

  She straightened slowly in her chair, forgetting about the ruined tights. “Is that what we are?” she asked quietly. “Old friends?”

  He sobered at that. He couldn't look her in the eye and be glib about the past that lay behind them and between them. The awkwardness was a palpable entity.

  “That's not exactly the way we parted company,” she said.

  “No.” He moved away from the desk, sticking his hands in his pants pockets, pretending an interest in the notices and cartoons she had tacked up on her bulletin board. “That was a long time ago.”

  Which meant what, she wondered. That it was all water under the bridge? While a part of her wanted to say yes, there was another part of her that held those bitter memories in a fist. For her, nothing was forgotten. The idea that it might be for him upset her in a way she wished weren't so. It made her feel weak, a word she never wanted associated with her.

  Quinn looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “Five years is a long time to stay mad.”

  “I'm not mad at you.”

  He laughed. “The hell you're not. You won't return my phone calls. You don't want to have a conversation with me. Your back goes up every time you see me.”

  “I've seen you what—twice since you got here? The first time you used me to get your way, and the second time you made fun of my job—”

  “I did not make fun of your job,” he protested. “I made fun of your client.”

  “Oh, that makes all the difference,” she said with sarcasm, conveniently forgetting that everyone made fun of David Willis, including her. She stood, not wanting him looking down on her any more than their height difference allowed. “What I do here is important, John. Maybe not in the same way as what you do, but it is important.”

  “I'm not disagreeing with you, Kate.”

  “No? As I recall, when I decided to leave the Bureau, you told me I was throwing my life away.”

  The reminder struck a spark, and old frustration came alive in his dark eyes. “You threw away a solid career. You had what? Fourteen, fifteen years in? You were a tremendous asset to the BSU. You were a good agent, Kate, and—”

  “And I'm a better advocate. I get to deal with people while they're still alive. I get to make a difference for them one-on-one, help them through a hard time, help them empower themselves, help them take steps to make a difference in their own lives. How is that not valuable?”

  “I'm not against you being an advocate,” Quinn argued. “I was against you leaving the Bureau. Those are two separate issues. You let Steven push you out—”

  “I did not!”

  “The hell you didn't! He wanted to punish you—”

  “And I didn't let him.”

  “You cut and ran. You let him win.”

  “He didn't win,” Kate returned. “His victory would have been in crushing the life out of my career one drop of blood at a time. I was supposed to stick around for that just to show him how tough I was? What was I supposed to do? Transfer and transfer until he ran out of cronies in his ol' boy network? Until I ended up at the resident agency in Gallup, New Mexico, with nothing to do but count the snakes and tarantulas crossing the road?”

  “You could have fought him, Kate,” he insisted. “I would have helped you.”

  She crossed her arms and arched a brow. “Oh, really? As I remember it, you didn't want much to do with me after your little run-in with the Office of Professional Responsibility.”

  “That had nothing to do with it,” he said angrily. “The OPR never scared me. Steven and his petty little bureaucratic bullshit games didn't scare me. I was tied up. I was juggling maybe seventy-five cases including the Cleveland Cannibal—”

  “Oh, I know all about it, John,” she said caustically. “The Mighty Quinn, bearing the weight of the criminal world on your shoulders.”

  “What's that supposed to mean?” he demanded. “I've got a job and I do it.”

  And to hell with the rest of the world, thought Kate, including me. But she didn't say it. What good would it do now? It wouldn't change history as she remembered it. And it wouldn't help to argue that he surely did give a damn what the OPR put in his file. There was no sense arguing that to Quinn the job was everything.

  Long story short: She'd had an affair that had delivered the death blows to a marriage already battered beyond recognition. Her husband's retaliation had forced her out of her career. And Quinn had walked away from the wreck and lost himself in his first love—his work. When push had come to shove, he stepped back and let her fall. When she turned to go, he hadn't asked her not to.

  In five years he hadn't called her once.

  Not that she'd wanted him to.

  The argument had drawn them closer together one step at a time. He was near enough now that she could smell the faint hint of a subtle aftershave. She could sense the tension in his body. And fragments of a thousand memories she'd locked away came rushing to the surface. The strength of his arms, the warmth of his body, the comfort he had offered that she had soaked up like a dry sponge.

  Her mistake had been in needing. She didn't ne
ed him now.

  She turned away from him and sat back on the desk, trying to convince herself that it wasn't a sign of anything that they'd fallen so readily into this argument.

  “I've got a job to do too,” she said, looking pointedly at her watch. “I suppose that's why you showed up. Sabin called you?”

  Quinn let out the air he'd held in his lungs. His shoulders dropped three inches. He hadn't expected the emotions to erupt so easily. It wasn't like him to let that happen. Nor was it like him to abandon a fight until he won. The relief he felt in doing so was strong enough to induce embarrassment.

  He retreated a step. “He wants me to sit in with you and your witness when she comes back to work on the sketch.”

  “I don't care what he wants,” Kate said stubbornly. “I won't have you there. This girl is hanging with me by a thread. Somebody whispers the letters FBI and she'll bolt.”

  “Then we won't mention those letters.”

  “She can smell a lie a mile off.”

  “She'll never have to know I'm there. I'll be a mouse in the corner.”

  Kate almost laughed. Yeah, who would notice Quinn? Six feet of dark, handsome masculinity in an Italian suit. Naw, a girl like Angie wouldn't notice him at all.

  “I'd like to get a sense of this girl,” he said. “What's your take on her? Is she a credible witness?”

  “She's a foul-mouthed, lying, scheming little bitch,” Kate said bluntly. “She's probably a runaway. She's maybe sixteen going on forty-two. She's had some hard knocks, she's alone, and she's scared spitless.”

  “The well-rounded American child,” Quinn said dryly. “So, did she see Smokey Joe?”

  Kate considered for a moment, weighing all that Angie was and was not. Whatever the girl hoped to gain in terms of a reward, whatever lies she may have told, seeing the face of evil was for real. Kate could feel the truth in that. The tension in the girl every time she had to retell the story was something virtually impossible to fake convincingly. “Yes. I believe she did.”