Ashes to Ashes

16

CHAPTER

“YOU CAN'T BELIEVE some of the stuff coming in over the hotline,” Gary Yurek said, carrying a thick file and a pad of paper to the table in the Loving Touch of Death war room. “They actually had a woman call in to say she thinks her neighbor is the Cremator because her dog doesn't like him!”

“What kind of dog?” Tippen called.

“American scumbag spaniel,” Elwood said, pulling out a chair. “A hearty, cheerful breed known for digging up corpses and cavorting merrily with cadaver parts.”

“Sounds like you, Elwood.” Liska punched him in the arm as she passed.

“Hey, my hobbies are my own business.”

“Any more sightings of Jillian Bondurant?” Hamill asked.

Yurek looked disgusted. “Yeah, a Jiffy Lube mechanic in Brooklyn Park whose every third word was reward.”

Quinn took a seat at the table, his head throbbing, his mind trying to go in too many directions at once. Kate, Kate's witness. Bondurant. The profile he was struggling with. The Atlanta case. The Blacksburg case. The calls backing up on his voice mail about a dozen others. Kate. Kate . . .

His brain wanted a cup of coffee, but his stomach was saying no in strong and painful language. He fished a Tagamet out of his pocket and washed it down with diet Coke. Mary Moss handed him a packet of photographs.

“Lila White's parents gave them to me. I don't see how they'll help, but it was important to them. The pictures were taken just a few days before her murder.”

“Progress reports!” Kovac called, shrugging out of his topcoat and juggling three files as he came to the head of the table. “Anything on the parks employees?”

“Found a convicted child-molester who lied about his record on his application,” Tippen said. “Other than that, no red flags on the permanent staff. However, the parks department also gets work crews of misdemeanor offenders doing community service time. We're getting a list.”

“Jillian's phone records don't show anything out of the ordinary,” Elwood said. “Calls to her father, to her shrink, to this friend Tinks went to see. Nothing unusual in the last couple of weeks. I've requested the records from her cell phone service, but their computers were screwed up, so I don't have that yet.”

“We've got a list of employees fired from Paragon in the last eighteen months,” Adler said. “None of them stood out as being particularly vindictive toward Peter Bondurant. We ran their names through the system and came up with petty shit.”

“One guy convicted of soliciting a prostitute,” Hamill said. “But that was a one-time, bachelor-party situation. He's married now. Spent last weekend at his in-laws'.”

“That could drive me to murder,” Tippen quipped.

“One guy with a third-degree-assault charge. He attacked his manager when he got the news Paragon was giving him the ax,” Adler said. “That was nine months ago. He's moved out of town. Lives in Cannon Falls now and works in Rochester.”

“How far is that?” Quinn asked.

“Cannon Falls? Half an hour, forty-five minutes.”

“An easy drive. He's not off the hook.”

“Our Rochester field agent is checking him out,” Hamill said.

“In general,” Adler went on, “no one who works for Bondurant seems particularly fond of him, but no one had anything bad to say about him either—with one notable exception. Bondurant started Paragon back in the late seventies with a partner—Donald Thorton. He bought Thorton out in 'eighty-six.”

“About the time of his divorce,” Kovac said.

“Exactly the time of the divorce. He paid Thorton top dollar—more than, according to some. Thorton developed serious problems with booze and gambling, and ran his Caddie into Lake Minnetonka in 'eighty-nine. Lake patrol fished him out before he drowned, but not before he sustained serious brain damage and a spinal cord injury. His wife blames Bondurant.”

“How so?”

“She wouldn't say over the phone. She wants a face-to-face.”

“I'll take it,” Kovac said. “Anyone has something bad to say about Mr. Billionaire can be my friend.”

Walsh raised one hand, covering his mouth with the other while he tried to cough up part of a lung. When he finally drew breath to speak, his face was purple. “I've been on the phone with the legal attaché's office in Paris,” he said in a thin, strained voice. “They're checking out the stepfather—Serge LeBlanc—with Interpol and with the French authorities. But I'd say he's a dead end. Come all the way over here to off two hookers and then his stepdaughter? I don't think so.”

“He could have hired it done,” Tippen offered.

“No,” Quinn said. “This is classic sadistic sexual homicide. The killer had his own agenda. He doesn't do it for money. He does it because he gets off on it.”

Walsh pulled a nasty-looking handkerchief out of his pocket and stared into it, contemplating a sneeze. “LeBlanc is plenty pissed off about the inquiries, and not being too cooperative. He says he'll release Jillian's dental records—which will do us no good. He'll release any X rays she's ever had taken, but that's it. He won't let the whole file go.”

Kovac's face lit up. “Why is that? What's he trying to hide?”

“Maybe the fact that he had sex with her, drove her to a suicide attempt, then had her committed,” Liska offered, looking pleased to have scooped the boys. She filled them in on what she had learned from Michele Fine.

“I also asked Fine to stop in and get fingerprinted so we can eliminate her prints from the ones found in Jillian's apartment. And, by the way, somebody definitely cleaned the place up over the weekend. Fine says Jillian was a slob. The place is way too clean and the friend says there was no maid service.”

“Maybe the killer was in her house that night,” Adler speculated. “Didn't want to leave any trace.”

“I can see he'd wipe the place for prints,” Elwood said. “But tidy up? That doesn't make sense.”

Quinn shook his head. “No. If he was there, he wouldn't have cleaned up. If anything, he would have made it worse as a sign of disrespect to his victim. He would have trashed the place, maybe urinated or defecated somewhere obvious.”

“So, we got us another mystery,” Kovac said. He turned to Liska again. “You ran Fine through the system?”

“No wants, no warrants, no record. No boyfriend, she says, and I'd believe that. She says she and Jillian weren't lovers. There's a dope connection there somewhere. Small-time, I'd say.”

“But it might be worth digging on,” Moss said. “Lila White had connections too. One of them beat the snot out of her last fall.”

“Willy Parrish,” Kovac said. “He was a guest of the county at the time of White's murder. Had no connection to Fawn Pierce.”

“I also checked the guy White's parents blame for hooking her on drugs in the first place,” Moss said. “A Glencoe local named Allan Ostertag. No convictions. Strictly small-time. Works as a salesman at his father's car dealership. He can be accounted for all this last weekend.”

“Jillian and Fine wrote music together,” Quinn said, jotting himself a note. “What kind of music?”

“Folky alternative stuff,” Liska said. “Man-hating female angst bullshit, I'd guess from my impression of Fine. She's a real trip. Alanis Morissette with PMS.”

“So where's the music?” Quinn asked. “I'd like to see it.”

“Super G-man and talent scout on the side,” Tippen remarked snidely.

Quinn cut him a look. “Music is personal, intimate. It reveals a lot about the person who wrote it.”

Liska's brow knitted as she thought. “I saw sheet music, like you'd buy in a store. I didn't see anything handwritten.”

“See if the friend has copies,” Kovac suggested.

“I will, but I think Vanlees is the direction we should be sniffing. The guy's got a screw loose, and he fits John's preliminary profile pretty well.”

“Criminal background?” Quinn asked.

“Nothing serious. A slew of parking tickets and a couple of misdemeanors three or four years ago. Trespass charges and a DUI—all spread out over a period of eighteen months or so.”

“Trespass?” The word raised a flag in Quinn's mind. “Was that the original charge or did he plead down from something else?”

“Final outcome.”

“Dig deeper. A lot of Peeping Toms bargain down their first couple of offenses. They seem too pathetic to be worth charging out on a low-end sex crime. Check out the tickets too. Check the locations the tickets were issued in relation to the address of the trespass charges.”

Tippen leaned toward Adler. “Yeah, we might have a serial weenie wagger on our hands.”

“They all start somewhere, Tippen,” Quinn said. “The Boston Strangler started out looking in windows, jerking off, and some asshole cop shrugged that off too.”

The detective started to come up out of his chair. “Hey, fu—”

“Put 'em back in your pants, guys,” Kovac ordered. “We got no time to get out the yardstick. Tinks, find out if this mutt did his community service in the parks.”

“And find out what kind of car he's driving,” Quinn added.

“Will do. I made a point of telling him about the meeting tonight. I'm betting he shows.”

“Speaking of,” Kovac said. “I want everyone there by seven-thirty. We'll have surveillance units from the BCA and from narcotics pulling plate numbers off the cars in the parking lot. Yurek will be our master of ceremonies. I want the rest of you in the crowd, and for God's sake, try not to look like cops.”

“Except the cover boy,” Tippen said, holding up a copy of the day's Star Tribune with the headline FBI's Top Profiler on the Case. “You might get two headlines in a row, Slick.”

Quinn frowned, reining in his temper, fighting the urge to put his fist in Tippen's mouth. Christ, he knew better than to let jerks like Tippen yank his chain. He'd dealt with a hundred of them in the last year alone. “I don't want a headline. I'll say a few words, but I'll keep it brief and I'll keep it vague.”

“Just like you have with us?”

“What do you want me to tell you, Tippen? That the killer will be wearing one red shoe?”

“It'd be something. What the hell have you given us so far for our tax dollars? An age range, the possible description of two vehicles the guy may or may not drive. That he slept with his mother and jacked off with porno magazines? Big deal.”

“It will be if you get a suspect. And I don't believe I ever said anything about him sleeping with his mother.”

“Tip reliving his childhood.”

“Fuck you, Chunk.”

“Maybe,” Quinn said, watching the homely sheriff's detective just to see him twitch. “The UNSUB, that is. It's likely there was inappropriate sexual behavior both in the home in general and toward this man specifically when he was a child. His mother was probably promiscuous, possibly a prostitute. His father was a weak or absent figure. Discipline was inconsistent, swinging from nonexistent to extreme.

“He was a bright kid, but in trouble a lot at school. He couldn't relate to other kids. His mind was full of thoughts of domination and control of his peers. He was cruel to animals and to other children. He started fires, he stole things. He was a pathological liar at an early age.

“In high school he had trouble concentrating because of his addiction to his sexual fantasies, which were already becoming violent. He got into trouble with authority figures, maybe had run-ins with the police. His mother smoothed over the problems, rationalized for him, got him off the hook, thereby reinforcing a pattern where he was never held accountable for his destructive actions toward others. This empowered him and encouraged him to try even more extreme behavior. It also reinforced a lack of respect for his mother.”

Tippen raised his hands. “And unless the guy sitting next to me tonight turns and says, ‘Hi, my name is Harry. My mother had sex with me when I was a kid,' it's all just so much crap.”

“I think you're full of crap, Tippen,” Liska said. “When I'm digging up stuff on Vanlees, if I see any of these red flags, I can use them.”

“The analysis is a tool,” Quinn said. “You can make it work for you or you can leave it in the toolbox.

“When you're in the crowd tonight, watch for anyone who seems overstimulated—excited or nervous or too conscious of the people around them. Listen for anyone who seems to have too great a command of the facts of the case, anyone who seems unusually familiar with police work. Or you can take Detective Tippen's approach and wait for someone to tell you he fucked his mother.”

“G, you know what you can do with that smart mouth?” Tippen said, rising again.

Kovac stepped between them. “Take yours over to Patrick's and stick a sandwich in it, Tippen. Go now, before you piss me off and I tell you not to come back.”

A sour look twisted Tippen's face. “Oh, fuck this,” he muttered, grabbing his coat and walking away.

Kovac looked askance at Quinn. A phone was ringing in one of the rooms down the hall. The rest of the task force began to disperse, everyone wanting to grab a bite or a drink before the big event.

“Being a good cop and being an asshole are not exclusive,” Liska said, pulling on her coat.

“You talking about him or me?” Quinn said with chagrin.

“Hey, Sam!” Elwood called. “Come take a look at this.”

“Tippen's a jerk, but he's a good detective,” Liska said.

“It's all right.” Quinn gave an absent smile as he slipped his trench coat on. “Skepticism makes for a good investigator.”

“You think so?” She narrowed her eyes and looked at him sideways, then laughed and popped him on the arm. “Just a little cop humor. So, we've got some more background on Jillian and the two hookers. You want to sit down over dinner and go over it? Or maybe after the meeting tonight we could get a drink somewhere. . . .”

“Hey, Tinks,” Kovac barked as he strode back into the room with a fistful of fax paper. “No hitting on the fed.”

Liska reddened. “Go bite yourself, Kojak.”

“You'd pay money to see that.”

“I'd throw pennies at your ugly butt.”

He hooked a thumb in her direction as she walked away and gave Quinn a wry look. “She's crazy about me.”

Liska flipped him off over her shoulder.

Kovac shrugged and turned to business. “You up for a ride, GQ? I need an extra hammer in my toolbox.”

“What's the occasion?”

His eyes were as bright as a zealot's as he held up the fax. “Jillian Bondurant's cell phone records. She made two phone calls after midnight Saturday morning—after she left the old homestead. One to the headshrinker and one to Daddy Dearest.”

HE SAW THEM coming. Standing in the immaculate music room beside the baby grand piano that held a small gallery of framed photos of Jillian as a small child, he saw the car pull up at the gate. A dirt-brown domestic piece of junk. Kovac.

The intercom buzzed. Helen hadn't left yet. She was in the kitchen preparing his dinner. She would get the buzzer and she would let Kovac in because he was with the police, and like every older middle-class American woman in the country, she would not defy the police.

Not for the first time he thought he should have brought his personal assistant in from Paragon to guard his gates both figuratively and literally, but he didn't want another person that close to him now. Bad enough to have Edwyn Noble at his heels every time he turned around. He had purposely sent his media relations coordinator away from him to deal with the news and sensation seekers, who insisted on crowding his gate nevertheless.

Car doors. Quinn walked around from the passenger's side, an elegant figure, head up, shoulders square. Kovac, disheveled, hair sticking up in back, finished a cigarette and dropped it on the driveway. His trench coat flapped open in the wind.

Peter stared at the photographs for another minute. Jillian, too serious at the keyboard. Always something dark and turbulent and sad in her eyes. Her first recital. And her second, and third. Dressed up in frilly frocks that had never suited her—too innocent and prim, representative of the kind of carefree girlishness his daughter had never possessed.

He left the room as the doorbell sounded, shutting the door on that segment of his regret as voices sounded in the front hall.

“Is he in?” Quinn.

Helen: “I'll see if he's available. Have you had any new developments in the case?”

“We're working on some things.” Kovac.

“Did you know Jillian very well?” Quinn.

“Oh, well—”

“You've been given instructions to reach me through my attorney,” Peter said by way of greeting.

“Sorry about that, Mr. Bondurant,” Kovac said, blatantly unrepentant. “John and I were just on our way over to the community meeting we've set up to try to help catch your daughter's killer, and we decided to swing by kinda spur-of-the-moment like to run some things by you. Hope it's not a bad time.”

Bondurant leveled a heavy look at him, then turned to his housekeeper. “Thank you, Helen. If you're finished in the kitchen, why don't you head home?”

The housekeeper looked worried that she'd screwed up. Quinn watched Bondurant as the woman started back toward the kitchen. The stress of the last few days was telling on him. He looked as if he hadn't eaten or slept. All dark circles and sunken cheeks and a pallor that was unique to people under tremendous pressure.

“I don't have anything useful to say to you,” he declared, impatient. “My daughter is dead. I can't do anything to change that. I can't even bury her. I can't even make funeral arrangements. The medical examiner's office won't release the body.”

“They can't release the body without a positive ID, Mr. Bondurant,” Quinn said. “You don't want to bury a stranger by mistake, do you?”

“My daughter was a stranger to me,” he said enigmatically, wearily.

“Really?” Kovac said, moving slowly around the foyer, like a shark circling. “Here I thought she might have been telling you all about who she really was when she called you that night—after she left here. After you said you never heard from her again.”

Bondurant stared at him. No denial. No apology.

“What'd you think?” Kovac demanded. “Did you think I wouldn't find that out? Do you think I'm a moron? Do you think I've gotta have a fucking FBI shield in order to have a brain?”

“I didn't think it was relevant.”

Kovac looked astounded. “Not relevant? Maybe she gave a clue where she was when she made the call. That would give us an area to canvass for witnesses. Maybe there was a voice in the background, or a distinguishing sound. Maybe the call was interrupted.”

“No on all counts.”

“Why did she call?”

“To say good night.”

“And is that the same reason she'd call her shrink in the middle of the night?”

No reaction. No surprise, no anger. “I wouldn't know why she called Lucas. Their relationship as doctor and patient was none of my business.”

“She was your daughter,” Kovac said, pacing fast, the frustration building. “Did you think it wasn't any of your business when her stepfather was fucking her?”

Direct hit. At last, Quinn thought, watching anger fill Peter Bondurant's thin face. “I've had all I want of you, Sergeant.”

“Yeah? Do you suppose that's what LeBlanc said to Jillian that drove her to try to kill herself back in France?” Kovac taunted, reckless, skating on a thin edge.

“You bastard.” Bondurant made no move toward him, but held himself rigid. Quinn could see him trembling.

“I'm a bastard?” Kovac laughed. “Your daughter's maybe dead and you don't bother to tell us jack shit about her, and I'm the bastard? That's rich. John, do you fucking believe this guy?”

Quinn gave the big sigh of disappointment. “We don't ask these questions lightly, Mr. Bondurant. We don't ask them to hurt you or your daughter's memory. We ask because we need the whole picture.”

“I've told you,” Bondurant said in a low, tight voice, the fury cold and hard in his eyes. “Jillian's past has nothing to do with this.”

“I'm afraid it does. One way or another. Your daughter's past was a part of who she was—or who she is.”

“Lucas told me you'd insist on that. It's ludicrous to think Jillian somehow brought this on herself. She was doing so well—”

“It's not your job to try to dissect this, Peter,” Quinn said, shifting to the personal. I'm your friend. You can tell me. Giving him permission to let go of the control slowly and voluntarily. Quinn could see the logical part of Bondurant's mind arguing with the emotions he kept so firmly boxed. He was wound so tight that if Kovac pushed him hard enough and he snapped, it would be like suddenly loosing a high-tension wire—no control at all. Bondurant was smart enough to realize that and anal enough to dread the possibility.

“We're not saying it was Jillian's fault, Peter. She didn't ask for this to happen. She didn't deserve to have this happen.”

A sheen of tears glazed Bondurant's eyes.

“I realize this is difficult for you,” Quinn said softly. “When your wife left, she took your daughter to a man who abused her. I can imagine the kind of anger you must have felt when you found out.”

“No, you can't.” Bondurant turned away, looking for some kind of escape but not willing to leave the hall.

“Jillian was an ocean away, in trouble, in pain. But everything was over by the time you found out, so what could you do? Nothing. I can imagine the frustration, the anger, the feeling of impotence. The guilt.”

“I couldn't do anything,” he murmured. He stood beside a marble-topped table, staring at a sculpture of ragged bronze lilies, seeing a past he would rather have kept locked away. “I didn't know. She didn't tell me until after she'd moved back here. I didn't know until it was too late.”

With a trembling hand he touched one of the lilies and closed his eyes.

Quinn stood beside him, just encroaching on Bondurant's personal space. Near enough to invite confidence, to suggest support rather than intimidation. “It's not too late, Peter. You can still help. We have the same goal—finding and stopping Jillian's killer. What happened that night?”

He shook his head. Denying what? There was a sense of something—guilt? shame?—emanating from him almost like an odor. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing.”

“You had dinner. She stayed till midnight. What happened that made her call Brandt? She must have been upset about something.”

Still shaking his head. Denying what? Her emotional state, or just refusing to answer? Shaking off the questions as unacceptable because the answers would open a door he didn't want to go through? The daughter who had come back to him after all those years had not come back the innocent child she had been. She had come back different, damaged. How would a father feel? Hurt, disappointed, ashamed. Guilty because he hadn't been there to prevent what had driven his daughter to try to end her own life. Guilty because of the shame he felt when he thought of her as damaged, as less than perfect. Emotions tangled and dark, tied in a knot that would take the skill of a surgeon to unravel. He thought of the photograph in Bondurant's office: Jillian, so unhappy in a dress meant for another kind of girl.

Kovac came up on Bondurant's right. “We're not out to hurt Jillian. Or you, Mr. Bondurant. We just want the truth.”

Quinn held his breath, never taking his eyes off Bondurant. A moment passed. A decision was made. The scales tipped away from them. He could see it in Peter Bondurant's face as his hand slipped from the ragged bronze lily and he pulled everything inside him tight, and closed that inner door that had slipped ajar.

“No,” Bondurant said, his face a vacant, bony mask as he reached for the receiver of the sleek black telephone that sat beside the sculpture. “You won't get the chance. I won't have my daughter's memory dragged through the mud. If I see one word in one paper about what happened to Jillian in France, I'll ruin you both.”

Kovac blew out a breath and moved away from the table. “I'm just trying to solve these murders, Mr. Bondurant. That's my only agenda here. I'm a simple guy with simple needs—like the truth. You could ruin me in a heartbeat. Hell, anything I ever had that was worth anything at all went to one ex-wife or the other. You can squash me like a bug. And you know what? I'll still want that truth, 'cause that's the way I am. It'll be easier on all of us if you give it to me sooner rather than later.”

Bondurant just stared at him, stone-faced, and Kovac just shook his head and walked away.

Quinn didn't move for a moment, watching Bondurant, trying to measure, trying to read. They had been so close to drawing him out. . . . “You brought me here for a reason,” he said softly, one-on-one, man-to-man. He pulled a business card from his pocket and laid it on the table. “Call me when you're ready.”

Bondurant hit a direct dial button on the phone and waited.

“One last question,” Quinn said. “Jillian liked to write music. Did you ever hear her perform? Ever see any of her stuff?”

“No. She didn't share that with me.”

He looked away as someone answered on the other end of the line.

“This is Peter Bondurant. Put me through to Edwyn Noble.”

HE STOOD IN the hall and waited for a long time after the rude rumble of Kovac's car had died away. Just stood there in the silence, in the gloom. Time passed. He didn't know how much. And then he was walking down the hall to his office, his body and mind seemingly working independent of each other.

One floor lamp burned low in a corner of the room. He didn't turn on more. Night had crept up into the late afternoon and stolen the clear light that had fallen in through the French doors earlier in the day. The room had a gloomy cast to it that suited his mood.

He unlocked his desk, took a sheet of music from it, and went to stand by the window to read, as if the farther the words were away from the light, the less harsh their reality.

Love Child

I'm your love child

Little girl

Want you more than all the world

Take me to that place I know

Take me where you want to go

Got to make you love me

Only one way how

Daddy, won't you love me

Love me now

Daddy, I'm your love child

Take me now

—JB