Ashes to Ashes (49 page)

If
Peter had abused her.

If
Jillian wasn’t a dead victim, but a willing victim.

If
Gil Vanlees was her partner in this sickness.

If
Gil Vanlees was a killer at all.

If if if if …

Vanlees seemed a perfect fit—except he didn’t strike Quinn as having the brainpower to outsmart the cops for this long, or the balls to play the kind of taunting game this killer played. Not the Gil Vanlees he’d seen in that interview room today. But he knew from experience people could have more than one side, and that a dark side that was capable of killing the way the Cremator killed was capable of anything, including disguising itself very, very well.

He pictured Gil Vanlees in his mind and waited for that twist in his gut that told him this was the guy. But the feeling didn’t come. He couldn’t remember the last time it had. Not even after the fact, after a killer had been caught and fit his profile point by point. That sense of knowing didn’t come anymore. The arrogance of certainty had abandoned him. Dread had taken its place.

He flipped farther into the murder book, to the fresh photographs from Melanie Hessler’s autopsy. As with the third victim, the wounds inflicted both before and after death had been brutal, unspeakably cruel, worse than with the first two victims. As he looked at the photographs he could hear the echo of the tape recording in his head. Scream after scream after scream.

The screams ran into one another and into the cacophony that filled his nightmares, growing louder and louder. The sound swelled and expanded in his brain until he felt as if his head would burst and the contents run out in a sickly gray ooze. And all the while he stared at the autopsy photographs, at the charred, mutilated thing that had once been a woman, and he thought of the kind of rage it took to do that to another person. The kind of poisonous, black emotions kept under tight control until the pressure became too much. And he thought of Peter Bondurant and Gil Vanlees and a thousand nameless faces walking the streets of these cities just waiting for that main line of hate to blow and push them over the edge.

Any of them could have been this killer. The necessary components resided in a great many people, and needed only the proper catalyst to set them off. The task force was putting its money on Vanlees, based on circumstance and the profile. But all they had was logic and a hunch. No physical evidence. Could Gil Vanlees have been that careful, that clever? They had no witness to put him with any of the victims. Their witness was gone. They had no obvious connection between all four victims or anything tying Vanlees to any victim other than Jillian—if Jillian was a victim.

If this. If that.

Quinn dug a Tagamet out of his pants pocket and washed it down with diet Coke. The case was crowding in on him; he couldn’t get perspective. The players were too close around him, their ideas, their emotions, bleeding into the cold facts that were all he needed for his analysis.

The professional in him still wished for the distance of his office in Quantico. But if he had stayed in Quantico, then he and Kate would have remained in the past tense.

On impulse, he grabbed up the telephone receiver and dialed her office number. On the fourth ring her machine picked up. He left his number again, hung up, picked up again, and dialed her home line with the same result. It was seven now. Where the hell was she?

Instantly he flashed on the decrepit garage in the dark alley behind her house and muttered a curse. Then he reminded himself—as Kate herself would surely do—that she had gotten along just fine without him for the past five years.

He could have used her expertise tonight, to say nothing of a long, slow kiss and a warm embrace. He turned back to the casebook and flipped to the victimologies, looking for the one thing he felt he’d missed that would tie it all together and point the finger.

The notes on Melanie Hessler were in his own hand, sketchy, too brief. Kovac had set Moss to the task of gathering the information on the latest of the Cremator’s victims, but she had yet to bring him anything. He knew she’d worked in an adult bookstore—which, in the killer’s mind, likely put her into the same category as the two hookers. She’d been attacked in the alley behind the store just months before, but the two men who had raped her had solid alibis and were not considered suspects in her death.

It was sad to think how each of these women had been victimized repeatedly in their brief lives. Lila White and Fawn Pierce in a profession and a lifestyle that specialized in abuse and degradation. White had been assaulted by her drug dealer just last summer. Pierce had been hospitalized three times in two years, the victim of her pimp once, once a mugging victim, and once a rape victim.

Jillian Bondurant’s victimization had taken place behind the closed doors of her home. If Jillian was a victim.

He turned back to the photographs of victim number three once again and stared at the stab wounds to her chest. The signature. Long wound, short wound, long wound, short wound, like the arms of a star or the petals of a gruesome flower.
I love you, I love you not. Cross my heart, hope to die
.

He thought of the faint voices on the tape.

“… Turn … do it …”

“… Want to … of me …”

Too easily he could picture the killers standing on either side of their victim’s warm, lifeless body, each with a knife, taking turns punching their signature into the woman’s chest, sealing the pact of their partnership.

It should have horrified him to think it, but it wasn’t the worst thing he’d ever seen. Not by a long way. Mostly it left him numb.

That
made him shudder.

A man and a woman. He scrolled through the possibilities, considering people known to be attached to the victims in some way. Gil Vanlees, Bondurant, Lucas Brandt. The Urskines—possibilities there. The hooker who had been at the Phoenix last night when the DiMarco girl had disappeared—and claimed not to have seen or heard a thing, who had also known the second victim. Michele Fine, Jillian’s only friend. Strange and shaky. Scarred—physically and emotionally. A woman with a long, dark story behind her, no doubt—and no good alibi for the night Jillian went missing.

He reached for the sheet music Fine had handed over to him and wondered about Jillian’s compositions she’d kept to herself.

Outsider
Outside
On the dark side
Alone
Looking in
On a whim
Want a home
Outsider
In my blood
In my bones
Can’t have
What I want
Doomed to roam
All alone
On the outside
Let me in
Want a friend
Need a lover
Be with me
Be my boy
Be my father
Outsider
In my blood
In my bones
Can’t have
What I want
Doomed to roam
All alone
On the outside

Knuckles cracked against the door, and Kovac stuck his head in without waiting for an invitation.

“Can you smell it?” he asked, letting himself in. He leaned back against Quinn’s wall of notes, suit rumpled, lip swollen where Peter Bondurant had popped him, tie askew. “Cooked goose, burned ass, toast.”

“You’re out,” Quinn said.

“Give the man a cigar. I’m off the task force. They’ll name my successor at a press conference sometime tomorrow.”

“At least Bondurant didn’t get you thrown off the force altogether,” Quinn said. “You played bad cop a little too hard this time, Sam.”

“Bad cop,” Kovac said with disgust. “That was me, and I meant every word of it. I’m fed up to my back teeth with Peter Bondurant, and his money and his power and his people. What Cheryl Thorton told me pushed me over the edge. I just kept thinking about the dead women nobody cared about, and Bondurant playing with the case like it was his own personal live game of Clue. I kept thinking about his daughter and how she should have had such a great life, but instead—dead or alive—she’s fucked up forever, thanks to him.”

“
If
he molested her. We don’t know what Cheryl Thorton said is true.”

“Bondurant pays her husband’s medical bills. Why would she say something that rotten against the man if it wasn’t true?”

“Did she give any indication she thinks Peter killed Jillian?”

“She wouldn’t go that far.”

Quinn held out the sheet of music. “Make what you want of that. It could say you’re on a hot trail.”

Kovac scowled as he read the lyrics of the song. “Jesus.”

Quinn spread his hands. “Could be sexual or not. Might refer to her father or her stepfather or not mean anything at all. I want to talk more with her friend Michele. See if she has an interpretation—if she’ll give it to me.”

Kovac turned and looked at the photographs Quinn had taped up. The victims when they were alive and smiling. “There’s nothing I hate more than a child-molester. That’s why I don’t work sex crimes—even if they do get better hours. If I ever worked sex crimes, I’d be in the tank so fast, I’d get whiplash. I’d get my hands on some son of a bitch who raped his own kid, and I’d just fucking kill him. Get ’em out of the gene pool, you know what I’m saying?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“I don’t know how a man can look at his own daughter and think, ‘Hey, I gotta have me some of that.’”

He shook his head and dug a cigarette out of the pack in the breast pocket of his limp white shirt. The FBI offices were nonsmoking, but Quinn said nothing.

“I’ve got a daughter, you know,” Kovac said, exhaling his first lungful. “Well, you
don’t
know. Hardly anyone knows. From my first marriage, which lasted about a minute and a half after I joined the force. Gina. She’s sixteen now. I never see her. Her mother remarried with embarrassing haste and moved to Seattle. Some other guy got to be her dad.”

He moved his shoulders and looked at the pictures again. “Not so different from Bondurant, huh?” he said, his mouth twisting. The shoulders sagged on a long sigh. “Christ, I hate irony.”

Quinn could see the regret in his eyes. He’d seen it many times in many faces across the country. The job took a toll, and the people who were willing to pay it didn’t get nearly enough in return.

“What’re you going to do about the case?” he asked.

Kovac looked surprised by the question. “Work the damn task force, that’s what. I don’t care what Little Dick says. It’s my case, I’m lead. They can
name
whoever they want.”

“Your lieutenant won’t reassign you?”

“Fowler’s on my side. He put me on the support team on the QT. I’m supposed to keep my head down and my mouth shut.”

“How long has he known you?”

“Long enough to know better.”

Quinn found a weary laugh. “Sam, you’re something.”

“Yeah, I am. Just don’t ask too many people what.” Kovac grinned, then it faded away. He dropped the last of his cigarette into an empty diet Coke can. “It’s no ego trip, you know. I don’t need my name in the paper. I don’t care what goes in my jacket. I’ve never looked for a promotion, and I sure as hell don’t expect to ever see another.

“I want this scumbag,” he said with steel in his voice. “I should’ve wanted him this bad when Lila White was killed, but I didn’t. Not that I didn’t care about her, but you were right: I went through the motions. I didn’t hang in, didn’t dig hard enough. When it didn’t wrap up fast, I let it slide ’cause the brass was on my case and she was a hooker and hookers get whacked every once in a while. Hazard of the profession. Now we’re up to four. I want Smokey Joe’s ass on a platter before the body count goes up again.”

Quinn listened as Kovac said his piece, and nodded at the end of it. This was a good cop standing in front of him. A good man. And this case would break his career more easily than it would make it—even if he solved the mystery. But especially if the answer to the question turned out to be Peter Bondurant.

“What’s the latest on Vanlees?” he asked.

“Tippen’s riding his tail like a cat on a mouse. They pulled him over on Hennepin to ask about his buddy, the electronics dealer. Tip says the guy about shit his pants.”

“What about the electronics?”

“Adler checked out the guy’s Web page. He specializes in computers and related gizmos, but if it plugs into a wall, he can get it for you. So there’s nothing to say that he isn’t up to his ears in recording equipment. I wish we could get a search warrant for his house, but there isn’t a judge in the state who’d give us one based on what we’ve got on this mutt—which is nothing.”

“That bothers me,” Quinn admitted, tapping a pen against the file on Vanlees. “I don’t think Gil’s the brightest bulb in the chandelier. He’s a good fit to the profile on a lot of points, but Smokey Joe is smart and he’s bold, and Vanlees seems to be neither—which also makes him a perfect fall guy.”

Kovac fell into a chair as if the weight of this latest concern made the burden all suddenly too much for him. “Vanlees is connected to Jillian,
and
to Peter. I don’t like that. I keep having this nightmare that Bondurant is Smokey Joe, and that no one will listen to me and no one else will look at him, and the son of a bitch will get away with it.

“I try to dig on him a little and he damn near gets me fired. I don’t like it.” He pulled out another cigarette and just ran his fingers over it, as if he hoped that alone might calm him. “And then I think, ‘Sam, you’re an idiot. Bondurant brought in Quinn.’ Why would he do that if he was the killer?”

“For the challenge,” Quinn said without hesitation. “Or to get himself caught. I’d go with the first in this case. He’d get off on knowing I’m here and unable to spot him. Outsmarting the cops is big with this killer. But if Bondurant is Smokey Joe, then who’s his accomplice?”

“Jillian,” Kovac offered. “And this whole thing with her murder is a sham.”

Quinn shook his head. “I don’t think so. Bondurant believes his daughter is dead. Believes it more strongly than we do. That’s no act.”