Angie watched from the doorway, her attention on the women. A couple of them weren't much older than she was. Four were in their twenties. One was older, fat, and ugly. The fat one wore a sleeveless top because the furnace had gone haywire and the house was as hot and dry as a desert. Her upper arms were flabby and fish-belly white. Her stomach rested on her thighs when she sat down.
Angie knew the woman had been a hooker, but she couldn't imagine a man ever being hard up enough to pay to have sex with her. Men liked pretty girls, young girls. Didn't matter how old or ugly the man was, they all wanted pretty girls. That was Angie's experience. Maybe that was why Fat Arlene was there. Maybe she couldn't get a man to pay her, and the Phoenix was her retirement home.
A redhead who had the thin, pale, bruised look of an addict started to cry when photographs of the three murder victims came onscreen. The other women pretended not to notice. Toni Urskine, who ran the Phoenix, perched on the arm of the redhead's chair, leaned down, and touched her shoulder.
“It's okay,” she said softly. “It's okay to cry. Fawn was your friend, Rita.”
The redhead pulled her bony bare feet up onto the seat of her chair and buried her head against her knees, sobbing. “Why'd he have to kill her that way? She didn't hurt nobody!”
“There's no making sense of it,” another one said. “It could have been any of us.”
A fact that was clear to all of them, even the ones who tried to deny it.
Fat Arlene said, “You gotta be smart about who you go with. You gotta have a sense about it.”
A black woman with ratty dreadlocks shot her a mean glare. “Like you got to pick and choose. Who wanna tie your fat ass down? See all that fat jiggling like Jell-O while he cut you up.”
Arlene's face went red and squeezed tight, eyes disappearing in the round mounds of cheeks and puffy brows. She looked like a chow chow Angie had seen once. “You can just shut your hole, you bony bitch!”
Looking angry, Toni Urskine left the crying redhead and moved toward the middle of the room, holding her hands up like a referee. “Hey! None of that! We've got to learn to respect and care for one another. Remember: group esteem, gender esteem, self-esteem.”
Easy for her to say, Angie thought, slipping back from the door. Toni Urskine had never had to go down on some old pervert to get enough money for a meal. She was little miss do-gooder, in her casual-chic outfits from Dayton's and a hundred-dollar hairdo by Horst. She drove up to this crappy house in her Ford Explorer from some beautiful home out in Edina or Minnetonka. She didn't know what it did to a person inside to find out she was worth only twenty-five bucks.
“We all care about these murder victims,” Urskine said passionately, dark eyes shining, her sharp-featured face aglow. “We all are angry that the police have done virtually nothing until now. It's an outrage. It's a slap in the face. It's the city of Minneapolis telling us the lives of women in desperate circumstances mean nothing. We need to be angry about that, not angry with each other.”
The women listened, some intent, some halfheartedly, some pretending not to.
“I think what we need here is involvement. We need to be proactive,” Urskine said. “We'll go down to city hall tomorrow. The press can hear our side of it. We'll get copies of the composite sketch and canvass . . .”
Angie backed away from the door and moved silently down the hall. She didn't like it when people started talking about the Cremator cases. The Phoenix women weren't supposed to know who she was or that she was involved in the case, but Angie always got the tense feeling that the other women would look at her and somehow figure out she was the mystery witness. She didn't want anyone to know.
She didn't want it to be true.
Sudden tears filled her eyes and she rubbed her hands against them. No show of emotion. If she showed what she felt, then someone would see a weakness in her, or a need, or the madness that sucked her into the Zone and made her cut herself. No one would understand that the blade severed the connection to insanity.
“Is everything all right?”
Startled, Angie jerked around and stared at the man standing in the open doorway to the basement. Late thirties, good-looking, dressed in tan chinos and a Ralph Lauren Polo shirt to work on the furnace: He had to be some relation to Toni Urskine. Sweat and dirt streaked his face. He worked a gray rag between hands dark with grime and something the color of blood.
He glanced down as Angie did and looked back up with a crooked smile. “The old furnace in this place,” he said by way of explanation. “I keep it running with willpower and rubber bands.
“Greggory Urskine,” he said, sticking out his hand.
“You cut yourself,” Angie said, not accepting the gesture, her gaze still on the smear of blood that crossed his palm.
Urskine looked at it and rubbed the rag over it, chuckling in that nervous way people sometimes have when they are trying to make a good impression. Angie just stared at him. He looked a little like Kurt Russell, she thought: a wide jaw and small nose, tousled sandy hair. He wore glasses with silver wire rims. He had cut himself that morning shaving his upper lip.
“Aren't you hot in that jacket?” he asked.
Angie said nothing. She was sweating like a horse, but the sleeves of her sweater were too short and didn't cover all the scars on her arms. The jacket was a necessity. If she got any money out of Kate, she was going to buy herself some clothes. Maybe something brand new and not from the Goodwill or a thrift shop.
“I'm Toni's husband—and handyman,” Urskine said. He narrowed his eyes. “I'm guessing you're Angie.”
Angie just stared at him.
“I won't tell anyone,” Urskine said in a confidential tone. “Your secret's safe with me.”
It seemed like he was making fun of her somehow. Angie decided she didn't like him, handsome or not. There was something about the eyes behind the expensive designer glasses that bothered her. Like he was looking down at her, like she was a bug or something. She wondered idly if he had ever paid a woman for sex. His wife seemed like the kind of woman who thought sex was dirty. Saving women from having to do it was Toni Urskine's mission in life.
“We're all very concerned about this case,” he went on, looking serious. “The first victim—Lila White—was a resident here for a while. Toni took it hard. She loves this place. Loves the women. Works like a trooper for the cause.”
Angie crossed her arms. “And what do you do?”
Again with the flashing smile, the nervous chuckle. “I'm an engineer at Honeywell. Currently on leave so I can help fix this place up before winter—and finally finish my master's thesis.”
He laughed like that was some kind of big joke. He didn't ask Angie what she did, even though not all of the women in this place were hookers. He was looking at her stomach, at the navel ring and tattoos revealed as her too-small sweater crept up. She cocked a hip, flashing a little more skin, and wondered if he was thinking he might want her.
He glanced back up at her. “So, they've got a good chance of catching this guy, thanks to you,” he said as a half-statement, half-question. “You actually saw him.”
“No one's supposed to know that,” Angie said bluntly. “I'm not supposed to talk about it.”
End of conversation. She ignored the closing niceties, backed away from him, then headed up the stairs. She felt Greggory Urskine's eyes on her as she went.
“Uh, good night, then,” he called as she disappeared into the darkness of the second story.
She went to the room she shared with a woman whose ex-boyfriend had held her down and cut all her hair off with a hunting knife because she refused to give him her AFDC check so he could buy crack. The woman's kids were in foster care now. The boyfriend had skipped to Wisconsin. The woman had been through drug rehab and come out of it with a need to confess. Therapy did that to some people. Angie had been too smart to let it happen to her.