Ashes to Ashes

14

CHAPTER

LOCATED IN THE Lowry Hill area, just south of the tangle of interstate highways that corralled downtown Minneapolis, D'Cup was the kind of coffeehouse funky enough for the artsy crowd and just clean enough for the patrons of the nearby Guthrie Theater and Walker Art Center. Liska walked in and breathed deep the rich aroma of exotic imported beans.

She and Moss had split the duties for the day, needing to cover as much ground as they could. Mother Mary, with her twenty-some years of maternal experience, had taken the unenviable task of talking with the families of the first two victims. She would open the old wounds as gently as possible. Liska had gladly taken the job of meeting with one of Jillian Bondurant's only known friends: Michele Fine.

Fine worked at D'Cup as a waitress and sometimes sang and played guitar on the small stage wedged into a corner near the front window. The three customers in the place sat at small tables near the window, absorbing the weak sunlight filtering in after three days of November gloom. Two older men—one tall and slender with a silver goatee, one shorter and wider with a black beret—sipped their espressos and argued the merits of the National Endowment for the Arts. A younger blond man with bug-eye gargoyle sunglasses and a black turtleneck nursed a grande something-or-other and worked a newspaper crossword puzzle. A cigarette smoldered in the ashtray beside his drink. He had the thin, vaguely seedy look of a struggling actor.

Liska went to the counter, where a hunky Italian-looking guy with a wavy black ponytail was pressing grounds into the fine cone-shaped basket of an espresso machine. He glanced up at her with eyes the color of dark Godiva chocolate. She resisted the urge to swoon. Barely. She wasn't as successful in resisting the automatic counting of the weeks since she'd had sex. Moss would have told her mothers of nine- and eleven-year-old boys weren't supposed to have sex.

“I'm looking for Michele.”

He nodded, shoved the basket into place on the machine, and cranked the handle around. “Chell!”

Fine came through the archway that led into a back room carrying a tray of clean Fiestaware coffee cups the size of soup bowls. She was tall and thin with a narrow, bony face bearing several old scars that made Liska think she must have been in a car accident a long time ago. One curled down at one corner of her wide mouth. Another rode the crest of a high cheekbone like a short, flat worm. Her dark hair had an unnatural maroon sheen, and she had slicked it back against her head and bound it at the nape of her neck. The length of it bushed out in a kinky mass fatter than a fox tail.

Liska flashed her ID discreetly. “Thanks for agreeing to meet with me, Michele. Can we sit down?”

Fine set the tray aside and pulled her purse out from under the counter. “You mind if I smoke?”

“No.”

“I can't seem to stop,” she said, her voice as rusty as an old gate hinge. She led the way to a table in the smoking section, as far away from the blond man as possible. “This whole business with Jillie . . . my nerves are raw.”

Her hand was trembling slightly as she extracted a long, thin cigarette from a cheap green vinyl case. Puckered, discolored flesh warped the back of her right hand. Tattooed around the scar, an elegant, intricately drawn snake coiled around Fine's wrist, its head resting on the back of her hand, a small red apple in its mouth.

“Looks like that was a nasty burn,” Liska said, pointing to the scar with her pen as she flipped open her pocket notebook.

Fine held her hand out, as if to admire it. “Grease fire,” she said dispassionately. “When I was a kid.”

She flicked her lighter and stared at the flame, frowning for a second. “It hurt like hell.”

“I'll bet.”

“So,” she said, snapping out of the old memories. “What's the deal? No one will say for sure that Jillie's dead, but she is, isn't she? All the news reports talk about ‘speculation' and ‘likelihood,' but Peter Bondurant is involved and giving a reward. Why would he do that if it wasn't Jillie? Why won't anyone just say it's her?”

“I'm afraid I'm not at liberty to comment. How long have you known Jillian?”

“About a year. She comes in here every Friday, either before or after her session with her shrink. We got to know each other.”

She took a deep pull on her cigarette and exhaled through teeth set wide apart. Her eyes were hazel, too narrow and too heavily lined with black, the lashes stubby and crusty with mascara. A mean look, Vanlees had called it. Nikki thought tough was a better word.

“And when was the last time you saw Jillian?”

“Friday. She stopped in on her way to see the psychic vampire.”

“You don't approve of Dr. Brandt? Do you know him?”

She squinted through the haze of smoke. “I know he's a money-sucking leech who doesn't give a damn about helping anyone but himself. I kept telling her to dump him and get a woman therapist. He was the last thing she needed. All he was interested in was keeping his hand in Daddy's pocket.”

“Do you know why she was seeing him?”

She looked just over Liska's shoulder and out the window. “Depression. Unresolved stuff with her parents' divorce and her mom and her stepfather. The usual family shit, right?”

“Glad to say I wouldn't know. Did she tell you specifics?”

“No.”

Lie, Nikki thought. “Did she ever do drugs that you know of?”

“Nothing serious.”

“What's that mean?”

“A little weed once in a while when she was wired.”

“Who'd she buy it from?”

Fine's expression tightened, the scars on her face seeming darker and shinier. “A friend.”

Meaning herself, Liska figured. She spread her hands. “Hey, I'm not interested in busting anybody's ass over a little weed. I just want to know if Jillian could have had an enemy in that line.”

“No. She hardly ever did it anyway. Not like when she lived in Europe. She was into everything there—sex, drugs, booze. But she kicked all that when she came here.”

“Just like that? She comes over here and lives like a nun?”

Fine shrugged, tapping off her cigarette. “She tried to kill herself. I guess that changes a person.”

“In France? She tried to kill herself?”

“That's what she told me. Her stepfather locked her up in a mental hospital for a while. Ironic, seeing as how she was going crazy because of him.”

“How's that?”

“He was fucking her. She actually believed he was in love with her for a while. She wanted him to divorce her mother and marry her.” She related the information in an almost offhand manner, as if that kind of behavior were the norm in her world. “She ended up taking a bunch of pills. Stepdaddy had her put away. When she got out, she came back here.”

Liska scribbled the news in a personal shorthand no one but she could read, excitement making it all the more illegible. She'd hit the mother lode of dirt here. Kovac would love it. “Did her stepfather ever come here to see her?”

“No. The suicide thing freaked him out, I guess. Jillie said he never even came to see her in the loony bin.” She sighed a cloud of smoke and stared off past the blond guy. “It's sad what passes for love, isn't it?”

“What kind of mood was she in Friday?”

The bony shoulders lifted and fell. “I don't know. Kind of wired, I guess. It was busy in here. We didn't have time to talk. I told her I'd call her Saturday.”

“And did you?”

“Yeah. Got the machine. I left a message, but she never called back.”

She stared out the window again, but without seeing anything in the street. Looking back to the weekend. Wondering if anything she could have done differently might have prevented a tragedy. Nikki had seen the expression many times. Tears washed across Michele Fine's mean eyes and she pressed her wide, scarred mouth into a line.

“I just figured she stayed over at her dad's,” she said, her throat tightening on the words. “I thought about trying to catch her Sunday, but then . . . I just didn't. . . .”

“What'd you do Sunday?”

She wagged her head a little. “Nothing. Slept late. Walked around the lakes. Nothing.”

She pressed her free hand over her mouth and squeezed her eyes shut, fighting for composure. Color flooded her pale face as she held her breath against the need to cry. Liska waited a moment.

The old guys were arguing now about performance art.

“How is pissing in a bottle full of crucifixes art?” Beret Man demanded.

The goatee spread his hands. “It makes a statement! Art makes a statement!”

The blond guy turned his paper over to the want ads and snuck a look at Michele. Liska gave him the cop glare and he went back to his reading.

“What about the rest of the weekend?” she asked, coming back to Fine. “What'd you do after work Friday night?”

“Why?” The suspicion was instantaneous, edged with affront and a little bit of panic.

“It's just routine. We need to establish where Jillian's family and friends were in case she might have tried to contact them.”

“She didn't.”

“You were home, then?”

“I went to a late movie, but I have a machine. She would have left a message.”

“Did you ever stay over at Jillian's apartment?”

Fine sniffed, wiped her eyes and nose with her hand, and took another ragged puff on her cigarette. Her hand was shaking. “Yeah, sometimes. We wrote music together. Jillie won't perform, but she's good.”

In and out of present tense when she talked about her friend. That was always a difficult transition for people to make after a death.

“We found some clothes in the dresser of the second bedroom that didn't look to be hers.”

“That's my stuff. She's way the hell over by the river. Sometimes we'd sit up late working on a song and I'd just stay over.”

“Do you have a key to her place?”

“No. Why would I? I didn't live there.”

“What kind of housekeeper is she?”

“What difference does that make?”

“Neat? Sloppy?”

Fine fussed, impatient with what she didn't understand. “Sloppy. She left stuff everywhere—clothes, dishes, ashtrays. What difference does it make? She's dead.”

She ducked her head then, and reddened and struggled as another wave of emotion hit on the heels of that final statement. “She's dead. He burned her. Oh, God.” A pair of tears squeezed through her lashes and splashed on the paper place mat.

“We don't know for a fact that anything's happened to her, Michele.”

Fine abandoned her cigarette in the ashtray and put her face in her hands. Not sobbing, but still struggling to choke the emotions back.

“Maybe she left town for a few days,” Liska said. “We don't know. Do you?”

“No.”

“Do you know of anyone who would want to hurt Jillian?”

She shook her head.

“She have a boyfriend? Ex-boyfriend? A guy who was interested in her?”

“No.”

“How about yourself? Got a boyfriend?”

“No,” she answered, looking down at the smoldering butt in the ashtray. “Why would I want one?”

“Jillian ever say anything about a man bothering her? Watching her, maybe? Hitting on her?”

Her laugh this time was bitter. “You know how men are. They all look. They all think they have a shot. Who pays any attention to the losers?”

She sniffed and pulled in a deep breath, then let it go slowly and reached for another cigarette. Her nails were bitten to the quick.

“What about her relationship with her father? They get along?”

Fine's mouth twisted. “She adores him. I don't know why.”

“You don't like him?”

“Never met him. But he controls her, doesn't he? He owns the town house, pays for school, picks the therapist, pays for the therapist. Dinner every Friday. A car.”

It sounded like a sweet deal to Liska. Maybe she could get Bondurant to adopt her. She let the subject drop. It was beginning to sound like if it had a penis, Michele didn't like it.

“Michele, do you know if Jillian had any distinguishing marks on her body: moles, scars, tattoos?”

Fine gave her a cross look. “How would I know that? We weren't lovers.”

“Nothing obvious, then. No scar on her arm. No snake tattooed around her wrist.”

“Not that I ever noticed.”

“If you were to look around Jillian's apartment, would you know if things were missing? Like if she'd packed some clothes and gone somewhere?”

She shrugged. “I guess.”

“Good. Let's see if we can take a ride.”

WHILE MICHELE FINE squared an hour's absence with her boss, the Italian stallion, Liska stepped out of the coffeehouse, pulled her cell phone out of her pocket, and dialed Kovac.

The air was crisp, a stiff breeze blowing, as was common for November. Not a bad day. A paler imitation of the glorious weather of late September and early October that made Minnesota rival any state in the union for perfection. Her boys would be out on their bikes after school, trying to squeeze in every last wheelie they could before the snow flew and the sleds came out of storage. They were lucky that hadn't happened already.

“Moose Lodge,” the gruff voice barked in her ear.

“Can I speak to Bullwinkle? I hear he's got a dick as long as my arm.”

“Christ, Liska. Is that all you ever think about?”

“That and my bank balance. I can't get enough either way.”

“You're preaching to the choir. What have you got for me?”

“Besides the hots? A question. When you went through Jillian's town house Monday, did you take a tape out of the answering machine?”

“It was digital. No messages.”

“This friend of hers says she called Saturday and left a message. So who erased it?”

“Ooo, a mystery. I hate a mystery. Get anything else?”

“Oh, yeah.” She looked through the window back into the coffee shop. “A tale to rival Shakespeare.”

“SHE WAS PUTTING her life back together,” Lila White's mother insisted. Her expression had the hard look of someone grown stubborn in the telling and retelling of a lie. A lie she wanted too badly to believe in and couldn't deep down in her heart.

Mary Moss felt a deep sadness for the woman.

The White family lived in the small farming community of Glencoe, the kind of place where gossip was a common hobby and rumors cut like broken glass. Mr. White was a mechanic at a farm implement dealership. They lived on the edge of town in a neat rambler with a family of concrete deer in the front yard and a swingset out back. The swingset was for the grandchild they were raising: Lila's daughter, Kylie, a tow-headed four-year-old blessedly immune to the facts of her mother's death. For now.

“She called us that Thursday night. She'd kicked the drugs, you know. It was the drugs that dragged her down.” The features of Mrs. White's lumpy face puckered, as if the bitterness of her feelings left a taste in her mouth. “It's all the fault of that Ostertag boy. He's the one got her started on the drugs.”

“Now, Jeannie,” Mr. White said with the weariness of pointless repetition. He was a tall, rawboned man with eyes the color of washed-out denim. He had farmer's creases in his face from too many years of squinting under a bright sun.

“Don't Jeannie me,” his wife snapped. “Everyone in town knows he peddles drugs, and his parents walk around pretending their shit don't stink. It makes me sick.”

“Allan Ostertag?” Moss said, referring to her notes. “Your daughter went to high school with him?”

Mr. White sighed and nodded, enduring the process, waiting for it to be over so they could start the healing again and hope this was the last time the wounds would have to be reopened. His wife went on about the Ostertags. Moss waited patiently, knowing that Allan Ostertag was not and had never been a viable suspect in Lila White's murder, and was, therefore, irrelevant to her. He was not irrelevant to the Whites.

“Had she mentioned seeing anyone in particular last summer?” she asked when the rant ended. “A steady boyfriend? Someone who might have been a problem to her?”

“We've answered all these questions before,” Jeannie White said impatiently. “It's like you people don't bother to write anything down. 'Course it didn't matter when it was just our girl dead,” she said, the sarcasm as pointed as a needle. “We didn't see no task force on the news when it was just our Lila murdered. The police never cared—”

“That's not true, Mrs. White.”

“They never cared when that drug dealer beat her up last fall neither. They never even bothered to have a trial. It's like our girl didn't count.” The woman's eyes and throat filled with tears. “She wasn't important enough to anyone but us.”

Moss offered apologies, knowing they wouldn't be accepted. No explanation could penetrate the hurt, the imagined insult, the anger, the pain. It didn't matter to the Whites that an individual murder was, by necessity, handled differently from a string of related murders. It mattered to them that the child they had loved had fallen down one of life's darker paths. It mattered to them she had died a prostitute. That was how she would be remembered by the world, when she was remembered at all. Victim number one, convicted prostitute and drug addict.

The Whites probably saw the headlines in their sleep. The hopes they had held for their daughter to turn her life around had died unfulfilled, and no one else in the world cared that Lila had wanted to become a counselor or that she had been a B student in high school or that she had often cried her heart out over not being able to raise her own child.

In the file folder on the passenger seat of Moss's car were snapshots of Lila and Kylie in the Whites' backyard. Smiling and laughing, and wearing party hats for Kylie's fourth birthday. Photos of mother and daughter splashing in a green plastic wading pool. Three weeks later someone had tortured the life from Lila White, desecrated her body and set it on fire like a pile of garbage.

Victim number one, convicted prostitute and drug addict.

Moss went through the reassurances in her own mind. The police couldn't form a task force for every homicide in the city. Lila White's murder had been investigated fully. Sam Kovac had caught the case, and Kovac's reputation was that he did his best for every victim, regardless of who or what they had been in life.

Still, she couldn't help but wonder—as Jeannie White had wondered aloud—how differently things might have turned out if Jillian Bondurant had been victim number one.

THE LOCKS HAD been changed on Jillian Bondurant's town house at Edgewater and a new key delivered to the PD. Liska worked the shiny new key into the dead bolt and opened the door. She went to the bedrooms with Michele Fine and watched as Fine looked through the closets, pausing now and again to linger briefly over something that struck a memory for her.

“Jesus, it's eerie,” she said, looking around. “Seeing the place so clean.”

“Jillian didn't have a cleaning service?”

“No. Her old man tried to give her maid service as a present once. He's the most anal man on the planet. Jillie said no. She didn't want people going through her stuff.

“I don't see anything missing,” she said finally.

As she stood at Jillian's dresser, her gaze drifted across the few objects there: a mahogany jewelry box, some scented candles in mismatched holders, a small porcelain figurine of an elegant woman in a flowing blue dress. She touched the figurine carefully, her expression wistful.

As Fine gathered her few clothing items from the guest bedroom, Liska walked down the steps and took in the main rooms at a glance, seeing the place differently from before she'd met Jillian's friend. It should have been a mess, but it wasn't. She'd never known a killer to offer maid services as part of the package, but someone had cleaned the place up. Not just wiped it down to get rid of prints. Cleaned it, folded and put away clothes, washed the dishes.

Her thoughts turned back to Michele Fine and Jillian as friends. They must have seemed an unlikely pair: a billionaire's daughter and a coffeehouse waitress. If there had been a ransom demand to Peter Bondurant, the relationship would have automatically fallen under scrutiny. Even without it, the suspicions flashed through Liska's mind out of habit.

Considered and dismissed. Michele Fine was cooperating fully. Nothing she had said or done seemed out of place. Her grief appeared genuine, and was colored with the shades of anger and relief and guilt Liska had encountered time and again in the people a murder victim left behind.

Still, she would run Michele Fine's name through the computer and see if anything kicked up.

She crossed the living room to the electronic piano. Jillian Bondurant had written music but was too shy to perform. That was the kind of detail that made her a real person in a way that knowing she was Peter Bondurant's daughter did not. The sheet music stacked neatly on the stand was classical. Another contradiction in Jillian's image. Liska lifted the padded seat and glanced through the collection there: folk, rock, alternative, new age—

“Hold it right there!”

Her first impulse was to go for her gun, but she held herself bent over at the piano stool, breathing through her mouth. Slowly, she turned her head and relief swept through her, her temper hot on its heels.

“It's me, Mr. Vanlees. Detective Liska,” she said, straightening. “Put the gun down, please.”

Vanlees stood just inside the doorway in his security guard's uniform, a Colt Python clutched in his hands. Liska wanted to pull the gun away from him and smack him in the head with it.

He blinked at her and lowered the weapon, a barely sheepish grin pulling at his mouth. “Oh, jeez, Detective, I'm sorry. I didn't know you were coming over. When I saw there was someone moving around over here, I thought the worst. You know, tabloid reporters have been coming around. I hear they'll steal anything that's not nailed down.”

“You didn't recognize my car, then?” Liska said with a little too much edge.

“Uh, I guess I didn't. Sorry.”

Like hell, she thought. Wanna-bes like Vanlees took note of everything about the cops they encountered in the real world. She would have bet he had her tag number written down somewhere. He sure as hell recognized the make and model. This little show had been about impressing her. Gil Vanlees: Man of Action. On his toes. On the job. Ever diligent. God help us all.

Liska shook her head. “That's quite the gun you've got there, Gil,” she said, moving toward him. “Don't suppose I've got to ask if you've got a permit for it?”

The eyes went a little cold and the smile sagged out of his face. He didn't like having her reprimand him. He didn't want to be reminded his uniform wasn't the real deal. He stuck the nose of the Python under his belt and eased the gun into place alongside his gut. “Yeah, I got a permit.”

Liska forced a smile. “That's some piece of hardware. Not really a good idea to come up behind people with it, Gil. You never know what might happen. Reflexes a little too sharp that day and you blow somebody away. That'd be a bad deal all the way around, you know.”

He wouldn't meet her eyes now, like a kid being scolded for getting into his father's tools.

“You say reporters have been nosing around here? No one's been in the house though, right?”

His attention shifted further away, and he frowned harder. Liska glanced over her shoulder. Michele Fine stood at the bottom of the steps with her messy pile of black clothing clutched to her. She looked offended by Vanlees's presence.

“Mr. Vanlees?” Liska prompted, turning back to him as Michele went into the kitchen. “No one's been in the house that you know of, right?”

“Right.” He moved back a step toward the door, his hand resting on the butt of the Python. He kept his gaze on Michele, watching her as she dumped her clothes on the counter that divided kitchen and eating area. “I gotta go,” he said glumly. “I was just keeping an eye out, that's all.”

Liska followed him out onto the stoop. “Hey, Gil, I'm sorry if I snapped at you back there. You got the drop on me. Shook me up, you know.”

He didn't bite this time. She had questioned his honor, impugned his status as a peer, bruised his ego. The rapport she had built two days ago teetered on its foundation. She had expected it to hold up better, and found its fragility telling. Another point to bring up with Quinn: Vanlees's self-image.

He barely looked at her, pouting. “Sure. No problem.”

“I'm glad you're keeping an eye out,” she said. “You heard about the community meeting tonight, right? You might want to drop by that if you get a chance.”

Liska watched him walk away, wondering. From a distance Vanlees looked like a city cop in his blue-over-black uniform. It would be an easy thing for a guy in a uniform to get a woman to stop for him, talk to him. All three of Smokey Joe's victims had vanished with no report of a scream, no suspicious activity in the area. On the other hand, no one had mentioned seeing a uniform in the vicinity either.

“I'm ready.”

She started a little at Michele Fine's announcement, and turned to find her standing in the doorway, her clothes crammed into a plastic bag from Rainbow Foods.

“Right. Great. I'll drive you back.”

She locked up the house, Fine waiting for her at the bottom of the steps. Vanlees had disappeared down the winding path, but not from Liska's mind.

“You know that guy?” she asked as they settled into the car.

“Not personally,” Fine said, hugging her Rainbow bag as if it were an infant. “Like I said before, who pays any attention to the losers?”

No one, Liska thought as she put the car in gear. And while no one was paying any attention to them, the losers were allowed to brood and fantasize and imagine getting back at all the women who didn't want them and would never love them.