Ashes to Ashes

27

CHAPTER

“I'M SORRY,” Rob said.

His voice sounded far away. Kate felt all the blood drain from her head. Her legs gave way beneath her. She went down on one knee, still holding on to the back of the chair, and scrambled to stand again just as quickly. Emotions swirled through her like a cyclone—shock, horror, embarrassment, confusion. Sabin came around from behind his desk to take her arm as Rob stood staring, flatfooted and awkward, four feet away.

“Are you all right?” Sabin asked.

Kate sank down on the chair, for once not minding when he put his hand on her knee. He knelt beside her, looking at her with concern.

“Kate?”

“Um—no,” she said. She felt dizzy and weak and ill, and suddenly nothing seemed quite real. “I—ah—I don't understand.”

“I'm sorry, Kate,” Rob said again, coming forward suddenly, looking as if it had just occurred to him that he should do something now that it was too late. “I know you were very protective of her.”

“I just tried to call her,” Kate said weakly. “I should have called her Monday, but suddenly there was Angie, and everything just got away from me.”

Images of Melanie Hessler played through her mind in a montage. An ordinary, almost shy woman with a slight build and a bad home perm. Working in an adult bookstore embarrassed her, but she needed the job until she could scrape together enough money to go back to school. A divorce had left her with no cash and no skills. The attack she had suffered months ago had left her fragile—damaged emotionally, psychologically, physically. She had become chronically fearful, skittish, waiting for her attackers to come after her again—a common fear among rape victims. Only it wasn't the men who had raped her Melanie had to fear, as it turned out.

“Oh, Jesus,” Kate said, putting her head in her hands.

She closed her eyes and saw the body, charred and horrible, disfigured, twisted, shrunken, stinking, violated, mutilated. Kate had held Melanie's hand and comforted her as she had related the awful details of her rape, the deep sense of shame and embarrassment she had felt, the confusion that such a terrible thing should have happened to her.

Melanie Hessler, who had been so frightened of being hurt again. Tortured, brutalized, burned beyond recognition.

And in the back of her mind, Kate could hear the store manager's voice: “I haven't heard boo from her all week.”

When had the son of a bitch taken her? How long had he kept her alive? How long had she begged for death, all the while wondering what kind of God could make her suffer that way?

“Dammit.” Kate let the anger well up, trying to draw strength from it. “Goddammit.”

Rob's voice came to her again through the maze of her thoughts. “Kate, you know it would help you to talk about what you're feeling now. Let it out. You knew Melanie. You'd helped her through so much. To think of her the way you saw her last night—”

“Why?” she demanded of no one in particular. “Why would he choose her? I don't understand how this happened.”

“It probably had to do with her working in that adult bookstore,” Rob offered.

Rob knew the case as well as she did. He had sat in on several meetings with Melanie, had gone over the tapes of those meetings with Kate, and suggested a support group for Melanie.

Tapes.

“Oh, God,” Kate whispered, her strength draining again in a rush. “That tape. Oh, my God.” She doubled over, putting her head in her hands.

“What tape?” Rob asked.

The screams of pain, of fear, of torment and anguish. The screams of a woman she had known, a woman who had trusted her and looked to her for support and protection within the justice system.

“Kate?”

“Excuse me,” she mumbled, pushing unsteadily to her feet. “I have to go be sick.”

The dizziness tilted her one way and then another, and she grabbed what solid objects she could as she went. The ladies' room seemed a mile away. The faces she encountered en route were blurred and distorted, the voices warped and muted and slurred.

One of her clients was dead. One was missing. She was the only common link between them.

Crouching beside a toilet, holding her hair back with one hand, she lost what little she'd eaten, her stomach trying to reject not only the food, but the images and ideas she had just been force-fed in Ted Sabin's office, and the thoughts that were now seeping like poison through her brain. Her client, her responsibility. She was the only link . . .

When the spasms stopped, she sank down on the floor of the stall, feeling weak and clammy, not caring where she was, not feeling the cold of the floor through her slacks. The tremors that shook her body came not from the cold, but from shock and from a heavy black sense of foreboding that swept over her soul like a storm cloud.

One of her clients was dead. Tortured, murdered, burned. One was missing, a hastily wiped trail of blood left behind.

She was the only common link between them.

She had to be logical, think straight. It was coincidence, certainly. How could it be anything else? Rob was right: Smokey Joe had chosen Melanie because of her connection to the adult bookstore that happened to be in the same part of town frequented by hookers like the first two victims. And Angie had already been connected to the killer when Kate had been assigned the case.

Still that black cloud hovered, pressing down on her. A strange instinctive reaction she couldn't shake.

Too much stress. Too little sleep. Too much bad luck. She leaned her head back against the wall and tried to force her brain to move past the images from the crime scenes last night.

Do something.

The directive that had gotten her through every crisis she'd ever faced. Don't just sit there. Do something. Action countered helplessness, regardless of outcome. She had to move, go, think, do something.

The first thing she wanted to do was call Quinn, an instinctive urge she immediately defied. Just because they'd spent a night together didn't mean she could lean on him. There had been no guarantee of a future in those few hours. She didn't know that she even wanted to hope for a future with him. They had too much of a past.

At any rate, this wasn't the time to think about it. Now that she knew Angie hadn't been the victim in the car, there was still some hope the girl was alive. There had to be something she could do to help find her.

She hauled herself up off the floor, flushed the john, and left the stall. A woman in a prissy, snot-green suit stood at one of the sinks, redoing her already perfect makeup, tubes and jars spread out on the counter. Kate gave her a wan smile and moved two sinks down to wash her hands and face.

Making a cup of her hand, she rinsed her mouth out. She looked at herself in the mirror, the makeup woman just in the fringe of her peripheral vision. She looked like hell—bruised up, beat up, dragged down, pale. She looked exactly the way she felt.

“This job will be the death of you, Kate,” she muttered to her reflection.

Brandishing a mascara wand, Makeup Woman paused to frown at her.

Kate flashed her a lunatic smile. “Well, I guess they can't start that competency hearing without me,” she said brightly, and walked out.

Rob waited for her in the hall, looking embarrassed to be within proximity of a women's toilet. He pulled a handkerchief out of his hip pocket and dabbed at his forehead. Kate scowled at him.

“What?” she demanded. “Now that Sabin's out of earshot, you're going to tell me how Melanie Hessler's death is somehow my fault? If I'd turned her case over to you on Monday, that would have somehow prevented her from falling into the hands of this sick son of a bitch?”

He faked a look of affront. “No! Why would you say such a thing?”

“Because maybe that's what I'm thinking,” she admitted, going to the railing overlooking the atrium. “I think nobody can do my job as well as I can. But I didn't do my job, and now Melanie's dead.”

“Why would you think you could have prevented what happened?” He stared at her with a mix of bemusement and resentment. “You think you're Wonder Woman or something? You think everything is about you?”

“No. I just know that I should have called her and I neglected to do so. If I had, at least someone would have known and cared she was missing. She didn't have anyone else.”

“And so she was your responsibility,” he said. “Like Angie.”

“The buck has to stop somewhere.”

“With you. Kathryn the Great,” he said with a hint of bitter sarcasm.

Kate lifted her chin and gave him the imperious glare. “You were quick enough to dump the blame on me last night,” she pointed out. “I don't get you, Rob. You tell me I'm just the person you want for this case, then you turn around and whine about the way I work it. You want to blame me for what's gone wrong, but you don't want me to accept that blame.

“What's your problem?” she asked. “Does my taking responsibility somehow screw up your strategy with Sabin? If I'm willing to take the blame, you can't be contrite and obsequious on my behalf. Is that it?”

The muscles of his wide jaw worked and something nasty flashed in his small eyes. “You'll live to regret the way you treat me, Kate. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But one day—”

“You can't fire me today, Rob,” she said. “Sabin won't let you. And I'm in no mood to play your little posturing games. If you have a point for being here right now, please get to it. I have a job to do—at least for the next few hours.”

His eyes narrowed to slits and he moved his weight from foot to foot. His face grew darker. She'd pushed too hard, crossed a line she might not be able to get back over with a simple apology and a promise to behave, but she wasn't about to back down from him now.

“The police want you to go over Melanie's interview tapes to see if she mentioned something that might be pertinent to this case,” he said stiffly. “I thought it would be too much for you, considering,” he went on with the affected tone of the wounded martyr. “I was going to offer to help.”

“Was? Does that mean the offer has been rescinded because you've decided I'm an ungrateful bitch after all?”

He gave her an unpleasant smile, his eyes disappearing behind the lenses of his glasses. “No. I won't let your attitude interfere with my job. We'll listen to the tapes together. You listen for things that seem out of place to you because you knew her. I'll listen objectively from a linguistics angle. Meet me in my office in five minutes.”

Kate watched him waddle off, thinking that she hated him almost as much as she was going to hate doing this job.

“Why can't I just stick an ice pick in my forehead?” she muttered to herself, and fell in step after him.

“THIS TAPE IS a copy,” the BCA tech explained.

Kovac, Quinn, Liska, and a skinny guy Kovac called Ears—crowded together around a bank of black-faced electronics equipment studded with an amazing array of knobs and levers and lights and gauges.

“The quality of the sound is much better than you'd ever get off a microcassette recorder,” Ears said. “In fact, I'd say the killer actually had a mike clipped to the victim, or stationed very close to her. That would account for the distortion in the screams. It would also explain why the other voices are so indistinct.”

“You're sure there are two voices?” Quinn asked, the ramifications of that possibility filling his brain.

“Yes. Here, listen.”

The tech punched a button and adjusted a knob. A scream filled the small room, all four people tensing against it as if it were a physical assault.

Quinn fought to focus not on the emotions within the scream, but on the individual components of sound, trying to eliminate the human factor and his own human reaction to it. Reliving their crimes was a crucial component of a serial killer's life cycle—fantasy, violent fantasy, facilitators to murder, murder, fantasy, violent fantasy, and on and on, around and around.

Cheap technology made it as easy as the flick of a switch and the focus of a lens for them to play back something more perfect than a memory. Cheap technology combined with the killer's egotistic need had also made for a lot of damning evidence in recent years. The trick for cops and prosecutors was to stomach hearing and seeing it. Bad enough to see the aftermath of crimes like these. Having to watch or listen to them in progress could take a horrible toll.

Quinn had watched or listened to one after another, after another, after another. . . .

Ears turned one knob down and pushed two small levers up. “Coming up here. I've isolated and muted the victim's voice and pulled out the others. Listen close.”

No one so much as took a breath. The screams faded into the background and a man's voice, soft and indistinct, said, “. . . Turn . . . do it . . .” followed by white noise, followed by an even less distinct voice that said, “. . . Want to . . . of me . . .”

“That's as good as it gets,” Ears said, punching buttons, running the tape back. “I can make it louder, but the voices won't be any more distinguishable. They were too far away from the mike. But by the readings I'm seeing, I'd say the first one is a man and the second one is a woman.”

Quinn thought of the stab wounds to each victim's chest, the distinct pattern: long wound, short wound, long wound, short wound . . . Cross my heart, hope to die . . . A pact, a pledge, a covenant. Two knives—the light flashing off one and then the other as they descended in a macabre rhythm.

Those wounds made sense now. He should have thought of it himself: two knives, two killers. It wasn't as if he hadn't seen it happen before. But he sure as hell didn't want to have to see it again, he realized as resistance rose like panic up through his chest.

Murder didn't get any darker or more twisted than when the killers were a couple. The dynamics of that kind of relationship epitomized the sickest extremes of human behavior. The obsessions and compulsions, the fears and sadistic fantasies of two equally disturbed people tangled like a pair of vipers trying to devour each other.

“Will you play with the tape some more, Ears?” Kovac asked. “See if you can't pull out a few more words from one or both of them? I'd like to know what they're talking about.”

The tech shrugged. “I'll try, but I'm not making any promises.”

“Do what you can. The career you save could be mine.”

“Then you'll owe me two cases of beer I'll never see in this lifetime.”

“Crack this for me, I'll send you a lifetime supply of Pig's Eye.”

Quinn led the way back into the hall, already trying to sort through the tangle in his head in order to take his attention away from the tight feeling in his throat. Concentrate on the problem at hand, not the problem inside. Try not to think that just when he was beginning to feel they were making some progress, the number of killers multiplied, like something in a nightmare.

Kovac brought up the rear, shutting the door behind him.

“There's a wrinkle we didn't need,” he complained. “Bad enough looking for one psycho. Now I get to tell the bosses we're looking for two of them.”

“Don't tell them,” Quinn said. “Not right away. I need to think about this.”

He put his back to the wall as if he intended to stand right there until the answer came to him.

“What's it do to the profile if he's got a partner?” Liska asked.

“What's it do to the profile if he's got a partner and his partner is a woman?” Quinn asked back.

“Complicates the hell out of my life,” Kovac said.

The hall was dark with a low ceiling and not much traffic this time of day. Two women in lab coats walked past, engrossed in a conversation about office politics. Quinn waited until they were out of earshot.

“Are they equal partners, or is the woman what we call a ‘willing victim'? Is she participating because she likes it, or because she feels she has to for one reason or another—she's afraid of him, he controls her, whatever.” He turned to Liska. “Does Gil Vanlees have a girlfriend?”

“Not that I've heard about. I asked his wife, his boss, coworkers. Nothing.”

“Did you ask the wife about Jillian Bondurant? Whether she knew Jillian, whether she thought her husband knew her a little too well?”

“She said he liked to look at anything with tits. She didn't single out Jillian.”

“What are you thinking?” Kovac asked.

“I'm thinking it's bothered me all along that we've never gotten a positive ID on the third victim. Why the decapitation? The extra mutilation of the feet? Now using Jillian's car to burn the fourth victim. Why so much emphasis on Jillian?” Quinn asked. “We know she was an unhappy, troubled girl. What more permanent escape from an unhappy life than death—real or symbolic.”

“You think that could be Jillian's voice on the tape,” Liska said. “You think she could be Vanlees's partner?”

“I've said all along the key to this thing is Jillian Bondurant. She's the piece that doesn't fit. It just never hit me until now that maybe she isn't just the key. Maybe she's a killer.”

“Jesus,” Kovac said. “Well, it was a decent career while it lasted. Maybe I can take over Vanlees's job, chasing groupies away from the stage door at the Target Center.”

He glanced at his watch and tapped its face. “I gotta go. I've got a date with the wife of Peter Bondurant's ex-partner. Maybe I'll find out something about Jillian there.”

“I want to talk to this friend of hers—Michele Fine. See if she has copies of the music she wrote with Jillian. We could get some insights to her state of mind, maybe even to her fantasy life through her lyrics. I also want to find out what Fine's take on Vanlees is.”

“She doesn't have one,” Liska said. “I asked her the day we were at the apartment and we saw him. She said, ‘Who ever notices the losers?'”

“But predators recognize their own kind,” Quinn said. He turned to Kovac. “Who's on Vanlees?”

“Tippen and Hamill.”

“Perfect. Have them go ask him if this friend whose house he's staying at imports recording equipment, video cameras, stuff like that.”

Kovac nodded. “Will do.”

“There are a couple of possibilities to consider other than Vanlees,” Quinn pointed out. “If the relationship between Smokey Joe and his partner is about control, domination, power, then we have to look at Jillian's life and ask ourselves what men have held that kind of sway over her. I can name two that we know of.”

“Lucas Brandt and Daddy Dearest,” Kovac said with a grim look. “Great. We may finally be on to something, and it's that the daughter of the most powerful man in the state is a sicko freak murderer—and maybe she gets it from Dad. I just get all the luck.”

Liska patted his arm as they started down the hall. “You know what they say, Sam: You can't pick your relatives or your serial killers.”

“I've got a better one,” Quinn said as the myriad ugly possibilities for the close of this case flashed through his head. “It ain't over till it's over.”