Ashes to Ashes (21 page)

He knows that for killers such as himself, these thoughts are a sustained part of the internal processing and cognitive operations. They are, in effect, natural for him. Natural, and, therefore, not deviant.

He exits on 36th and drives west on tree-lined side streets toward Lake Calhoun. The blonde is gone and the fantasy with her. He thinks again of the afternoon press briefing, both amused and frustrated. The police had a sketch—this amused him. He stood there in the crowd as Chief Greer held up the drawing that was supposed to be a rendition of him so accurate that people would recognize him at a glance on the street. And when the briefing had ended, all those reporters had walked right past him.

The frustration has its source in John Quinn. Quinn made no appearance at the briefing, and has made no official statement, which seems a deliberate slight. Quinn is too wrapped up in his deduction and speculation. He is probably focusing all his attention on the victims. Who they were and what they were, wondering why they were chosen.

“In a sense the victim shapes and molds the criminal … To know one we must be acquainted with the complementary partner.”—Hans von Hentig.

Quinn believes this too. Quinn’s textbook on sexual homicide is among many on his shelf.
Seductions of Crime
by Katz,
Inside the Criminal Mind
by Samenow,
Without Conscience
by Hare,
Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives
by Ressler, Burgess, and Douglas. He has studied all of them and more. A voyage of self-exploration.

He turns onto his block. Because of the way the lakes lie in this part of town, the streets immediately around them are often irregular. This one has a bend in it that gives the houses larger lots than usual. More privacy. He parks the car on the concrete apron outside the garage and gets out.

Night has inked out what meager daylight there had been earlier. The wind is blowing out of the west and bringing with it the scent of fresh dog shit. The smell hits his nostrils a split second before the sound of rapid-fire toy-dog barking.

Out of the darkness of the neighbor’s yard darts Mrs. Vetter’s bichon frise, a creature that looks like a collection of white pompoms sewn loosely together. The dog runs to within five feet of him, then stops and stands its ground, barking, snarling like a rabid squirrel.

The noise instantly sets off his temper. He hates the dog. He especially hates the dog now because it has triggered the return of his foul mood from the traffic jam. He wants to kick the dog as hard as he can. He can imagine the high-pitched yip, the animal’s limp body as he picks it up by the throat and crushes its windpipe.

“Bitsy!” Mrs. Vetter shrieks from her front step. “Bitsy, come here!”

Yvonne Vetter is in her sixties, a widow, an unpleasant woman with a round, sour face and a shrill voice. He hates her in a deeply visceral way, and thinks of killing her every time he sees her, but something equally deep and fundamental holds him back. He refuses to examine what that feeling is, and becomes angrier imagining what John Quinn would make of it.

“Bitsy! Come here!”

The dog snarls at him, then turns and runs up and down the length of the garage, stopping to pee on the corners of the building.

“Bit-sy!!”

A pulse begins to throb in his head and warmth floods his brain and washes down through his body. If Yvonne Vetter were to cross the lawn now, he will kill her. He will grab her and smother her screams with the newspapers he holds. He will quickly pull her into the garage, smash her head against the wall to knock her out, then kill the dog first to stop its infernal barking. Then he will let loose his temper and kill Yvonne Vetter in a way that will satiate a vicious hunger buried deep within him.

She begins to descend the front steps of her house.

The muscles across his back and shoulders tighten. His pulse quickens.

“Bit-sy!! Come now!!”

His lungs fill. His fingers flex on the edge of the newspapers.

The dog barks at him one last time, then darts back to its mistress. Fifteen feet away, Vetter bends down and scoops the dog into her arms as if he were a child.

Opportunity dies like an unsung song.

“He’s excited tonight,” he says, smiling.

“He gets that way when he’s inside too much. He doesn’t like you either,” Mrs. Vetter says defensively, and takes the dog back to her house.

“Fucking bitch,” he whispers. The anger will vibrate within him for a long while, like a tuning fork still trembling long after it’s been struck. He will play through the fantasy of killing Yvonne Vetter again and again and again.

He goes into the garage, where the Blazer and a red Saab sit, and enters the house through a side door, eager to read about the Cremator in the two newspapers. He will cut out all stories pertaining to the investigation and make photocopies of them, because newsprint is cheap and doesn’t hold up over time. He has taped both the network evening news and the local evening news, and will watch for any mention of the Cremator.

The Cremator. The name amuses him. It sounds like something from a comic book. It conjures images of Nazi war criminals or B-movie monsters. The stuff of nightmares.

He
is the stuff of nightmares.

And like the creatures of childhood nightmares, he goes to the basement. The basement is his personal space, his ideal sanctuary. The main room is outfitted with an amateur sound studio. Walls and ceiling of sound-absorbing acoustic tile. Flat carpet the color of slate. He likes the low ceiling, the lack of natural light, the sensation of being in the earth with thick concrete walls around him. His own safe world. Just like when he was a boy.

He goes down the hall and into the game room, holding the newspapers out in front of him to admire the headlines.

“Yes, I am famous,” he says, smiling. “But don’t feel bad. You’ll be famous soon too. There’s nothing quite like it.”

He turns toward the pool table, holding the newspapers at an angle so that the naked woman bound spread-eagle on it can glance at the headlines if she wants to. She stares, instead, at him, her eyes glassy with terror and tears. The sounds she makes are not words, but the most basic vocalizations of that most basic emotion—fear.

The sounds touch him like electrical currents, energizing him. Her fear gives him control of her. Control is power. Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

“Soon you’ll be a part of this headline,” he says, running a finger beneath the bold black print on page one of the
Star Tribune. “Ashes to Ashes
.”

DAY SLIPPED INTO evening, into night. Quinn’s only indicator was his watch, which he seldom checked. There were no windows in the office he’d been given, only walls, which he’d spent the day papering with notes, often with the telephone receiver sandwiched between ear and shoulder, consulting on the Blacksburg case, where the suspect seemed on the brink of confession. He should have been there. His need for control fostered the conceit that he could prevent all mistakes, even though he knew that wasn’t true.

Kovac had offered him space at what the task force had unofficially dubbed the Loving Touch of Death offices. He had declined. He needed separation, isolation. He couldn’t be there when a dozen cops were tossing theories and suspect names like a chopped salad. He already felt tainted as it was.

Now word was out that John Quinn had been brought on board the Cremator case. Kovac had called with the bad news after the press briefing. It was only a matter of hours before he would have to deal with the media himself.

Damn, he’d wanted more time. He had these next few hours. He should have settled in and lost himself, but he couldn’t seem to. Exhaustion pulled at him. His ulcer was burning. He was hungry and knew he needed fuel to keep his brain running, but he didn’t want to waste the time going out. There was too much information and the buzz of too much caffeine swarming in his head. And there was a familiar sense of restlessness vibrating deep within—the urgency that came with every on-site case, compounded this time by extenuating circumstances and intrusive, fragmented memories from the past. Compounded again by a feeling that had been creeping up on him more and more and more lately—fear. The fear that he wouldn’t make a difference in the case fast enough. The fear that he would screw up. The fear that the fatigue pressing down on him would suddenly be too much. The fear that what he really wanted was to just walk away from it all.

Needing to move to escape the emotions, he began to pace back and forth in front of the wall of notes, taking in snatches of them at a glance. The faces of Bondurant and Brandt blew around inside his head like leaves.

Peter Bondurant was holding back more than he was giving them.

Lucas Brandt had a license to keep secrets.

Quinn wished he’d never met either of them. He should have argued harder against coming here so early in the investigation, he thought, rubbing at a knot in his right shoulder. The issue was control. If he walked onstage with his strategy mapped out, he had the upper hand.

That methodology applied to more than just this case. It was how he ran his whole life—from dealing with the bureaucracy on the job, to dealing with the Chinese people who ran the mailbox place where he kept a box, to buying his groceries. In any and all situations and relationships, control was key.

Kate slipped into the back of his mind, as if to taunt him. How many times over the years had he replayed what had happened between them, adjusting his own actions and reactions to get a different outcome? More times than he would admit. Control and strategy were his watchwords. He’d had neither where Kate was concerned. One minute they’d been acquaintances, then friends, then in over their heads. No time to think, too tangled up in the moment to have any perspective, drawn together by a need and a passion that was stronger than either of them. And then it was over, and she was gone, and … nothing. Nothing but regrets that he had let lie, sure that they both would eventually see it was for the best.

It
was
for the best. For Kate anyway. She had a life here. She had a new career, friends, a home. He should have had sense enough to back away from all that, leave well enough alone, but the temptation of opportunity lured him like a crooked finger and a seductive smile. And the force of all those regrets pushed him from behind.

He supposed five years was a long time to carry regrets, but he’d carried others longer. Cases not solved, trials lost, a child-killer who had slipped away. His marriage, his mother’s death, his father’s alcoholism. Maybe he never let anything go. Maybe that was why he felt so hollow inside: There was no room left for anything but the dried detritus of his past.

He swore under his breath, disgusted with himself. He was supposed to be delving into the mind of a criminal, not his own.

He didn’t remember sitting back against the desk, had no idea how many minutes he’d lost. He rubbed his big hands over his face, licked his lips, and caught the phantom taste of scotch. An odd psychological quirk, and a need that would go unfulfilled. He didn’t allow himself to drink. He didn’t allow himself to smoke. He didn’t allow himself much. If he added regret to that list, what would he have left?

He walked to the section of wall where he had taped up brief notes on the Cremator’s victims, scrawled in his own hand in colored markers. All caps. Tight, with a hard right-hand slant. The kind of handwriting that made graphologists raise their brows and give him a wide berth.

Photographs of all three women were taped above his notes. A three-ring binder lay open on the desk, filled with page after page of neatly typed reports, maps, scale drawings of the crime scenes, crime scene photographs, autopsy protocols—his portable bible of the case. But he found it helpful to lay out some of the basic information in a more linear way, and thus the notes on the wall and the photographs of three smiling women—gone now from this world, their lives snuffed out like candles, their dignity torn violently from them.

Three white women. All between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-three. Height varied from five five to five nine. Body types ranged from large-boned Lila White to petite Fawn Pierce to average Jane Doe/Jillian Bondurant.

Two prostitutes and a college student. They had lived in different parts of town. The hookers worked two different neighborhoods as a rule, neither of which was frequented by Jillian Bondurant. Lila and Fawn may have crossed paths occasionally, but it was highly unlikely Jillian would have frequented any of the same bars or restaurants or stores.

He had considered the drug connection, but they had nothing to support it so far. Lila White had gotten straight after entering a county program more than a year ago. Fawn Pierce had never been known to use, although she’d had a reputation for the occasional days-long bender on cheap vodka. And Jillian? No drugs had been found in her home, none in her system. She had no criminal record relating to drug use. As yet, no anecdotal stories of drug use.

“You think they’d like people to know why their daughters became whores and drug addicts?”

He could still hear the bitterness in Peter Bondurant’s voice. Where had it come from?

Jillian was the piece that didn’t fit in the puzzle of these crimes. She was the one that skewed the profile. There was a common type of killer who preyed on prostitutes. Prostitutes were high-risk victims, easy pickings. Their killers tended to be socially inadequate, underemployed white males who had a history of humiliating experiences with women and sought to get back at the gender by punishing what they considered to be the worst of the lot.

Unless Jillian had led a secret life as a hooker … Not beyond the realm, he supposed, but so far there were no indications Jillian had had a single boyfriend, let alone a list of johns.

“Boys didn’t interest her. She didn’t want temporary relationships. She’d been through so much… .”

What had she been through? Her parents’ divorce. Her mother’s illness. A stepfather in a new country. What else? Something deeper? Darker? Something that pushed her into therapy with Lucas Brandt.