Ashes to Ashes Read Online Free Page A

be. I’m on nights this rotation, you know. I oughta be home in bed. My
team
is on nights. I hate this team-concept crap. Give me a partner and leave me the hell alone. You know what I mean? I got half a mind to transfer out to sex crimes.”
    “And turn your back on all this fame and glamour?” Kate teased, bumping him with a subtle elbow.
    He gave her a look, tilting his head down in conspiracy. A spark of wry humor lit his eyes. “Shit, Red. I like my stiffs uncomplicated, you know.”
    “I’ve heard that about you, Sam,” she joked, knowing he was the best investigator in the PD, a straight-up good guy who lived the job and hated the politics of it.
    He huffed a laugh and pulled open the door to a small room that looked into another through the murky glass of a one-way mirror. On the other side of the glass, Nikki Liska, another detective, stood leaning against one wall, eyes locked in a staredown with the girl who sat on the far side of the fake-woodgrain table. A bad sign. The situation had already become adversarial. The table was littered with soda cans and paper coffee cups and doughnut chunks and fragments.
    The sense of dread in Kate’s belly gained a pound as she stared through the glass. She put the girl at maybe fifteen or sixteen. Pale and thin, she had a button nose and the lush, ripe mouth of a high-priced call girl. Her face was a narrow oval, the chin a little too long, so that she would probably look defiant without trying. Her eyes tilted at an exotic Slavic angle, and looked twenty years too old.
    “She’s a kid,” Kate declared flatly, looking to Rob with confusion and accusation. “I don’t do kids. You know that.”
    “We need you to do this one, Kate.”
    “Why?” she demanded. “You’ve got a whole juvenile division at your disposal. God knows they deal with murder on a regular basis.”
    “This is different. This isn’t some gang shoot-’em-up we’re dealing with,” Rob said, seemingly relegating some of the most violent crime in the city to the same category as shoplifting and traffic mishaps. “We’re dealing with a serial killer.”
    Even in a profession that dealt with murder as a matter of routine, the words
serial killer
struck a chord. Kate wondered if their bad guy was aware of that, if he reveled in the idea, or if he was too completely bound up in his own small world of hunting and killing. She had seen both types. All their victims ended up equally dead.
    She turned from her director and looked again at the girl who had crossed paths with this latest predator. Angie DiMarco glared at the mirror, resentment pulsing from her in invisible waves. She picked up a fat black pen from the table and very deliberately drew the cap end slowly back and forth along her full lower lip in a gesture that was both impatient and sensuous.
    Sabin gave Kate his profile as if he were posing for a currency engraver. “You’ve dealt with this kind of case before, Kate. With the Bureau. You have a frame of reference. You know what to expect with the investigation and with the media. You may well know the agent they send from the Investigative Support Unit. That could be helpful. We need every edge we can get.”
    “I studied victims. I dealt with dead people.” She didn’t like the anxiety coming to life inside her. Didn’t like having it, didn’t want to examine its source. “There’s a big difference between working with a dead person and working with a kid. Last I heard, dead people were more cooperative than teenagers.”
    “You’re a witness advocate,” Rob said, his voice taking on a slight whine. “She’s a witness.”
    Kovac, who had propped himself up against the wall to watch the exchange, gave her a wan smile. “Can’t pick your relatives or your witnesses, Red. I would have liked Mother Teresa to come running out of that park last night.”
    “No, you wouldn’t,” Kate returned. “The defense would claim she had cataracts and Alzheimer’s, and say anyone