Ashes to Ashes

28

CHAPTER

D'CUP WAS MOSTLY empty, with the same pair of old geezers in beret and goatee arguing about pornography today, and a different struggling artist contemplating his mediocrity by the window with a three-dollar latte at hand.

Michele Fine had called in sick. Liska gleaned this information from the Italian stallion behind the bar and made a mental note to start a daily cappuccino habit. Never mind D'Cup was miles out of the way to anything in her life. That was actually part of the allure.

“Did you know her friend at all?” Quinn asked. “Jillian Bondurant?”

The Roman god pursed his full lips and shook his head. “Not really. I mean, she came in here a lot, but she wasn't very sociable. Very internal, if you know what I mean. She and Chell were tight. That's about all I know besides what I've read in the papers.”

“Did you ever see her in here with anyone else?” Quinn tried.

“Michele or Jillian Bondurant?”

“Jillian.”

“Can't say that I did.”

“What about Michele? She have a boyfriend?”

He didn't seem to like that question, like maybe they were getting too personal and he was thinking he should take a stand for the Fourth Amendment. Liska pulled out the Polaroid of Vanlees and held it out.

“You ever see either one of them with this guy? Or the guy in here alone?”

Studly squinted at the photo the way people do in an effort to improve both their memory and their vision. “Nah. He doesn't look familiar.”

“What about their music?” Quinn asked. “Michele said they performed here sometimes.”

“Chell sings and plays the guitar on open-mike nights. I know they wrote some stuff together, but I couldn't tell you who contributed what. Jillian never performed. She was a spectator. She liked to watch other people.”

“What kind of music?” Quinn asked.

“The edgy feminist folk thing. Lots of anger, lots of angst, kind of dark.”

“Dark in what way?”

“Bad relationships, twisted relationships, lots of emotional pain.”

He said it as if he were saying “the usual,” with a certain air of boredom. A commentary on modern life.

Quinn thanked him. Liska ordered a mocha to go and tipped him a buck. Quinn smiled a little as he held the door.

“Hey,” Liska said. “It never hurts to be kind.”

“I didn't say anything.”

“You didn't have to.”

The snow was still coming down. The street in front of the coffeehouse was a mess. Lanes invisible, drivers had adopted a survival-of-the-fittest mentality. As they watched, a purple Neon nearly lost its life to an MTC bus.

“You're pretty good at this cop stuff,” Liska said, digging the car keys out of her coat pocket. “You should consider giving up the glamour of CASKU and the FBI for the relative ignominy of the Minneapolis homicide unit. You get to be hassled by the brass, abused by the press, and ride around in a piece-of-shit car like this one.”

“All that and I'd get to live in this weather too?” Quinn turned up his collar against the wind and snow. “How can I resist an offer like that?”

“Oh, all right,” Liska said with resignation as she climbed behind the wheel. “I'll throw in all the sex you want. But you have to promise to want a lot.”

Quinn chuckled and looked out the back window at the traffic. “Tinks, you're something.”

Michele Fine's apartment was less than a mile away, in a slightly seedy neighborhood full of sagging old duplexes and square, ugly apartment buildings that housed an inordinate number of parolees and petty criminals on probation, according to Liska.

“Vanlees's apartment on Lyndale is just a few blocks south of here,” she said as they picked their way up the sidewalk, stepping in the rut others had stomped into the wet snow. “Don't you just love a coincidence like that?”

“But they seemed not to know each other when you were at the apartment?”

She thought back to the scene, furrowing her brow. “Not more than in passing. They didn't speak. Do you really think she might have caught him looking in Jillian's windows?”

“That was a shot in the dark, but it sure got a rise out of your boy. The thing I'm wondering is, if she caught him doing something like that, why wouldn't she have told you about it?”

“Good question.” Liska tried the building's security door, finding it unlocked. “Let's go get an answer.”

The elevator smelled of bad Chinese takeout. They rode up to the fourth floor with an emaciated hype who huddled into one corner, trying to look inconspicuous and eye Quinn's expensive trench coat at the same time. Quinn gave him a flat stare and watched the sweat instantly bead on the man's pasty forehead. When the doors opened, the hype hung back in the elevator and rode it back down.

“You must be something at a poker table,” Liska said.

“No time for it.”

She arched a brow, blue eyes shining invitingly. “Better watch out. All work and no play makes John a dull boy.”

Quinn ducked her gaze, mustering a sheepish smile. “I'd put you to sleep, Tinks.”

“Well, I doubt that, but if you need to prove it scientifically . . .”

She stopped in front of Fine's door and looked at him. “I'm just giving you a hard time, you know. The sad truth is, you strike me as a man who has someone on his mind.”

Quinn rang the bell and stared at the door. “Yeah. A killer.” Though for the first time in a very long time, his thoughts were not entirely on his work.

As if Liska had given him permission, he flashed on Kate. Wondered how she was doing, what she was thinking. He wondered if she had yet gotten his message that the victim in the car had not been her witness. He hated the idea of her blaming herself for what had happened, and he hated even more the idea of her boss blaming her. It made his protective instincts rise up, made him want to do something more violent to Rob Marshall than knock him on his ass. He wondered if Kate would be amused or annoyed to know that.

He rang the bell again.

“Who is it?” a voice demanded from inside the apartment.

Liska stood in view of the peephole. “Sergeant Liska, Michele. I need to ask you a couple more questions about Jillian.”

“I'm sick.”

“It'll only take a minute. It's very important. There's been another murder, you know.”

The door opened a crack, and Fine peered out at them from the other side of the safety chain. The wedge of space framed the scarred portion of her narrow, angular face. “That's got nothing to do with me. I can't help you.”

She saw Quinn then, and her gaze hardened with suspicion. “Who's he?”

“John Quinn, FBI,” Quinn said. “I'd like to talk with you a little about Jillian, Ms. Fine. I'm trying to get a better idea of who she was. I understand you and she were close friends.”

The seconds ticked past as she stared at him, sizing him up in a way that seemed odd for a waitress in a trendy coffee bar. It was more the look of someone who had seen too much of the streets. As she raised her hand to undo the safety chain, he caught a glimpse of the snake tattooed around her wrist.

She opened the door and stepped back reluctantly.

“You haven't heard from her since Friday?” Quinn asked.

Fine gave him a look of suspicion and dislike. “How could I hear from her?” she asked bitterly, her eyes filling. “She's dead. Why would you ask me something like that?”

“Because I'm not as certain about it as you seem to be.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” she demanded, looking frustrated and confused. “It's all over the news. Her father is offering a reward. What kind of game are you trying to play?”

Quinn let her hang as he looked around the room. The apartment was vintage seventies—original, not retro—and he figured nothing had been changed or dusted since. The woven drapes looked ready to rot off their hooks. The couch and matching chair in the small living room were square, brown and orange plaid, and worn nubby. Dog-eared travel magazines lay on the cheap coffee table like abandoned dreams beside an ashtray brimming with butts. Everything had been permeated by the smell of cigarette and pot smoke.

“I don't need you trying to fuck with my mind,” Fine said. “I'm sick. I'm sick about Jillian. She was my friend—” Her voice broke and she looked away, her mouth tightening in a way that emphasized the scar hooking down from the one corner. “I'm—I'm just sick. So, whatever you want, ask for it and get the hell out of my life.”

She plucked up her smoke and sidestepped away, hugging her free arm across her middle. She was an unhealthy kind of thin, Quinn thought, pale and bony. Maybe she really was sick. She wore a huge, ratty black cardigan sweater, and beneath it a grimy white T-shirt, so small it looked as if it had been intended for a child. Her legs looked as skinny as pegs in worn black leggings. Her feet were bare on the filthy carpet.

“So, what have you got?” Liska asked.

“Huh?”

“You said you were sick. What have you got?”

“Uhhh . . . the flu,” she said absently, looking at the television, where a grotesquely obese woman appeared to be telling Jerry Springer all about her relationships with the pockmarked dwarf and the black transsexual sitting on either side of her. Fine picked a fleck of tobacco off her tongue and flicked it in the direction of the screen. “Stomach flu.”

“You know what I hear is good for nausea?” Liska said, deadpan. “Marijuana. They're using it for chemotherapy patients. Of course, it's otherwise illegal . . .”

The threat was subtle. Maybe just enough to weigh in their favor if Fine found herself struggling with the idea of cooperation.

Fine stared at her with flat eyes.

“The other day—when we ran into the caretaker at Jillian's place,” Liska said. “You didn't have much to say about him.”

“What's to say?”

“How well did Jillian know him? Were they friends?”

“No. She knew him enough to call him by name.” She went to the postage-stamp-sized dining table, sat down, and propped herself against it as if she didn't have enough strength to sit up on her own. “He had his eye on her.”

“In what way?”

Fine looked at Quinn. “In the way men do.”

“Did Jillian ever say he was hitting on her, watching her, anything like that?” Liska asked.

“You think he killed her.”

“What do you think, Michele?” Quinn asked. “What's your take on the guy?”

“He's a loser.”

“Did you ever have any kind of run-in with him?”

She lifted a shoulder as thin as a bird's wing. “Maybe I told him to fuck off once or twice.”

“Why?”

“Because he was staring at us. Like maybe he was picturing us naked together. Fat bastard.”

“And what did Jillian say about it?”

Another shrug. “She said once if that was the biggest thrill of his life, let him stare.”

“She never said anything to you about him bothering her.”

“No.”

“She ever mention anything to you about feeling like she was being watched or followed, anything like that?”

“No. Even though she was.”

Liska looked at her sharply. “How's that?”

“Her father and that Nazi shrink of hers watched her like hawks. Her father had a key to her apartment. Sometimes we'd get to her place and he'd be waiting for her inside. Talk about invasion of privacy.”

“Did it bother Jillian when he did that?”

Michele Fine's mouth twisted in a strange little bitter smile, and she looked at the ashtray as she stubbed out her cigarette. “No. She was Daddy's girl, after all.”

“What's that mean?”

“Nothing. She just let him pull her strings, that's all.”

“She told you about her relationship with her stepfather. Did she ever say anything to you about her relationship with her father?”

“We didn't talk about him. She knew what I thought about him trying to control her. The subject was out of bounds. Why?” she asked matter-of-factly. “Do you think he was trying to fuck her too?”

“I don't know,” Quinn said. “What do you think?”

“I think I never met a man who wouldn't take a piece of ass if he got the chance,” she said, deliberately brazen, her gaze sliding down Quinn's body to his groin. He let her look, waited her out. Finally her eyes returned to his. “If he was, she never said it in so many words.”

Quinn helped himself to the chair at the end of the small table, sitting down and settling in as if he meant to stay for supper. He looked again around the apartment, noting that there was very little in the way of ornamentation, nothing homey, nothing personal. No photos. The only thing that appeared to be well taken care of was the small stack of stereo and recording equipment in the far corner of the living room. A guitar was propped nearby.

“I understand you and Jillian wrote music together,” he said. “What was Jillian's part of that?”

Fine lit another cigarette and blew smoke at the cheap chandelier. Quinn's gaze caught again on the snake tattooed around her wrist, twisting around the scars that had been seared into the flesh there long ago. The serpent from the Garden of Eden, a small red apple in its mouth.

“Sometimes lyrics,” she said, smoke drifting through the gap between her front teeth. “Sometimes music. Whatever she felt like. Whatever I felt like.”

“Have you published anything?”

“Not yet.”

“What did she like to write about?”

“Life. People. Relationships.”

“Bad relationships?”

“Is there another kind?”

“Did she keep copies of the stuff you'd written?”

“Sure.”

“Where?” Liska asked.

“In her apartment. In the piano bench and the bookcase.”

“I didn't find anything there the other day.”

“Well, that's where it was,” Fine said defensively, blowing another stream of smoke.

“Do you have any copies I could look at?” Quinn asked. “I'd like to read her lyrics, see what they have to say about her.”

“Poetry is a window to the soul,” Fine said in an odd, dreamy tone. Her gaze drifted away again, and Quinn wondered just what she was on and why. Had the alleged murder of Jillian Bondurant pushed her over some mental edge? It seemed she had been Jillian's only friend. Perhaps Jillian had been hers. And now there was no one—no friend, no writing partner, nothing but this crappy apartment and a dead-end job.

“That's what I'm counting on,” he said.

She looked right at him then, homely and slightly exotic, greasy dark hair scraped back from her face, vaguely familiar—as every face in the world seemed to be to him after so many cases. Her small eyes seemed suddenly very clear as she said, “But does it reflect who we are or what we want?”

She got up and went across the room to a set of shelves made from cinder blocks and wood planks, and came back sorting through a file folder. Quinn rose and reached out for it, and Fine twisted away, giving him a look from beneath her lashes that was almost coquettish.

“It's the window to my soul too, Mr. Fed. Maybe I don't want you peeking.”

She held out half a dozen pieces of sheet music. Her fingernails had been bitten to the quick. Then she hugged the folder to her belly, an action that emphasized her small breasts beneath the tight T-shirt. She wasn't wearing a bra.

Liska put her briefcase on the table, popped it open, and produced a fingerprint kit. “We still need your prints, Michele. So we can eliminate them from all the prints taken in Jillian's town house. I knew you hadn't made it in to do that, busy as you are and all.”

Fine stared at the ink pad and print card, wary and unhappy.

“It'll take only a minute,” Liska said. “Have a seat.”

Fine fell down on her chair and offered her hand reluctantly.

“When was the last time you heard from Jillian?” Quinn asked.

“I saw her Friday before her session with the mind fucker,” Michele said as Liska rolled her thumb across the ink pad and pressed it to a card.

“She didn't call you Friday night?”

“No.”

“She didn't come to see you?”

“No.”

“Where were you around midnight, one o'clock?”

“In bed. Naked and alone.” She looked up at him from under her lashes. Sultry.

“Seems odd, don't you think?” Quinn asked. “She'd had a fight with her father. She was upset enough to run out of his house. But she didn't try to contact her best friend.”

“Well, Agent Quinn,” she said, the voice of sad experience. “I learned a long time ago, you can never really know what's in another person's heart. And sometimes that's just as well.”

KOVAC JAMMED THE Caprice into a Police Vehicles Only slot on the Fifth Street side of City Hall and abandoned it. Swearing a blue streak, he tried to run through the plow-made snowdrift covering the curb, sinking to his knee in one spot. Stumbling, staggering, he got over the hump and hurried up the steps and into the building. Breathing like a bellows. Heart working too hard to pump blood and adrenaline through arteries that probably looked like the inside of bad plumbing pipes.

Christ, he was going to have to get himself in shape if he wanted to survive another case like this one. Then again, his career wasn't likely to survive this one.

The hall was full of angry women who turned on him in a tide as he tried to negotiate his way to the criminal investigative division. It wasn't until he was swamped in the middle of them that he saw the protest signs bobbing above their heads: OUR LIVES MATTER TOO! JUSTICE: A PHOENIX RISING.

Their voices came at him in a barrage, like two dozen shotguns going off at once.

“Police harassment!”

“Only the Urskines want true justice!”

“Why don't you find the real killer!”

“That's what I'm trying to do, sister,” Kovac snapped at the woman blocking his path with a bitter scowl and a belly the size of a beer keg. “So why don't you move the wide load and let me get on with it?”

That was when he noticed the media. Flashes went off left and right. Shit.

Kovac kept moving. The only rule of survival in a situation like this: Shut your mouth and keep moving.

“Sergeant Kovac, is it true you ordered Gregg Urskine's arrest?”

“No one is under arrest!” he shouted, forging through the mob.

“Kovac, has he confessed?”

“Was Melanie Hessler your mystery witness?”

Leak in the ME's office, he thought, shaking his head. That was what was wrong with this country—people would sell their mothers for the right money, and never think twice about the consequences to anyone else.

“No comment,” he barked, and pushed his way past the last of them.

He negotiated the clutter of boxes and file cabinets into homicide, hanging a right at Lieutenant Fowler's makeshift office. Toni Urskine's voice raked over his nerve endings like a serrated knife on raw meat.

“. . . And you can rest assured every station, every paper, every reporter who will listen to me, will hear about it! This is an absolute outrage! We have been victimized by these crimes. We have lost friends. We have suffered. And this is how we're treated by the Minneapolis Police Department after we've bent over backward to cooperate!”

Kovac ducked through the door into the offices. Yurek jumped up from his desk, telephone receiver stuck to the side of his face, and made wild eye contact with Kovac, holding up a hand to keep him in the general vicinity. Kovac held up for five seconds, motor running, the excitement he had brought with him into the building like currents of energy humming through his arms, his legs, his veins and arteries. He bounced up and down on the balls of his feet like a boy who had to pee.

“I've got places to go and people to rake over the coals, Charm.”

Yurek nodded and said into the phone, “I'm sorry, ma'am. I have to go now. I have an emergency situation here. I'm sorry. Yes, someone will get back to you. I'm sorry, ma'am.”

He came around his desk, shaking his head. “These people are driving me batshit. There's a woman insisting her neighbor is the Cremator, and not only has he brutally murdered four women, she thinks he killed and ate her dog.”

“I got time for this shit like I got time for root canal,” Kovac snapped. “Is Quinn here?”

“He just got back. He's watching Urskine's interview,” Yurek said, falling in step beside Kovac, heading for the interview rooms. “I just got a call from upstairs—”

“And the woman with the dead poodle is the mayor? That's how frigging weird this case is.”

“No, before the dog lady. You're wanted in the mayor's office. They tried to get you on your cell phone.”

“Dead battery. And you didn't see me. The battle-ax can wait. I've got a big damn fish to fry. I've got Jonah's goddamn whale.”

Worry creased Yurek's perfect brow. “What do you mean, ‘big fish'? Where've you been?”

Kovac didn't answer, his mind already on the confrontation ahead. Quinn stood near the one-way glass, looking dead on his feet as he stared through to the next room, where Gregg Urskine sat across the table from Elwood.

“We paid cash. I couldn't find the receipt,” Urskine said, exasperated, fighting to keep that pleasant yuppie smile hanging on his face. “Do you keep all your receipts, Sergeant? Could you find a receipt for something you did months ago?”

“Yes, I could. I keep a simple but efficient home filing system,” Elwood said conversationally. “You never know when you might need a record of something. For tax purposes, for an alibi—”

“I don't need an alibi.”

“I know someone who does,” Kovac said, snagging Quinn's attention. “You want to take another ride?”

“What's up?”

“I just talked to Mrs. Donald Thorton, Peter Bondurant's ex-partner. You want to know how the emotionally unstable Sophie Bondurant got custody of Jillian in the divorce? You'll love this,” he promised sarcastically.

“I'm almost afraid to ask.”

“She threatened to expose him to the court and to the media. For molesting Jillian.”