Ashes to Ashes

29

CHAPTER

“OH, GOD,” YUREK groaned with dread.

Kovac wheeled on him. “What now? You want me to pretend I don't know Bondurant was molesting his daughter?”

“Allegedly molesting—”

“You think I don't know I've just stepped in it up to my ass?”

“I think you'd better hear what the mayor wants.”

“I could give a rat's—”

“She wants you in her office to give Mr. Bondurant a personal briefing on the status of the case. They're up there waiting for you now.”

The room fell silent for a heartbeat, then Elwood's calm voice came over the speaker again from the interview room next door. “Have you ever paid for sex, Mr. Urskine?”

“No!”

“No offense intended. It's just that working around all those women who've sold their bodies professionally might give rise to a certain curiosity. So to speak.”

Urskine shoved his chair back from the table. “That's it. I'm leaving. If you want to speak to me again, you can do it through my attorney.”

“All right,” Kovac said to Quinn, nerves and anticipation knotting in his stomach. “Let's go give the mayor and Mr. Bondurant the big update. I'll fill you in on the way.”

“I'M SURE YOU can understand Peter's need for closure in this matter,” Edwyn Noble said to Chief Greer. “Do we have any kind of time frame as to when the body may be released?”

“Not specifically.” Greer stood near the head of the mayor's conference table, feet slightly spread, hands clasped before him, like a soldier at ease, or a bouncer with an attitude. “I have a call in to Sergeant Kovac. I understand he's waiting to hear from the FBI lab on some tests. Possibly after those are completed, which could be any day—”

“I want to bury my daughter, Chief Greer.” Bondurant's voice was tight. He didn't look at the chief, but seemed to be staring into a dimension only he could see. He had ignored the offer of a seat, and moved restlessly around the conference room. “The thought of her body sitting in some refrigerated locker like so much meat . . . I want her back.”

“Peter darling, we understand,” Grace Noble said. “We feel your pain. And I can assure you, the task force is doing everything possible to solve this—”

“Really? Your lead detective has spent more time harassing me than he's spent pursuing any suspects.”

“Sergeant Kovac can be a bit gruff,” Greer said. “But his record in homicide speaks for itself.”

“At the risk of sounding glib, Chief Greer,” Edwyn Noble said, “Sergeant Kovac's record notwithstanding, what has he done for us lately? We have another victim. The killer seems to be thumbing his nose, not only at the task force, but at the city. Does Sergeant Kovac even have a viable suspect at this point?”

“Lieutenant Fowler tells me someone was questioned earlier today.”

“Who? A legitimate suspect?”

Greer frowned. “I'm not at liberty—”

“She was my daughter!” Peter shouted, the rage in his voice reverberating off the walls. He turned away from the stares of the others and put his hands over his face.

The mayor pressed a hand to her ample bosom, as if the sight was causing her chest pains.

“If someone has been brought in,” Noble said, the voice of reason, “then it will be only a matter of hours before the press reveals that information. That isn't a comment on the security of your force, per se, Chief. It's simply impossible to eliminate all leaks in a case of this magnitude.”

Greer looked from Bondurant's lawyer to Bondurant's lawyer's wife—his boss. Unhappy and unable to see any escape routes, he sighed heavily. “The caretaker from Ms. Bondurant's town house complex.”

The intercom buzzed, and Grace Noble answered it from the phone on the side table. “Mayor Noble, Sergeant Kovac and Special Agent Quinn are here to see you.”

“Send them in, Cynthia.”

Kovac was through the door almost before the mayor finished her sentence, his eyes finding Peter Bondurant like a pair of heat-seeking missiles. Bondurant looked thinner than he had the day before, his color worse. He met Kovac's gaze with an expression of stony dislike.

“Sergeant Kovac, Agent Quinn, thank you for joining us,” the mayor said. “Let's all have seats and talk.”

“I'm not going into particulars of the case,” Kovac stated stubbornly. Neither would he sit down and be a still target for Bondurant or Edwyn Noble.

No one sat.

“We understand you have a suspect,” Edwyn Noble said.

Kovac gave him the eagle eye, then turned it on Dick Greer and thought cocksucker.

“No arrests have been made,” Kovac said. “We're still pursuing all avenues. I've just been down an interesting one myself.”

“Does Mr. Vanlees have an alibi for the night my daughter went missing?” Bondurant asked sharply. He looked at Kovac as he paced back and forth along the table, passing within a foot of him.

“Do you have an alibi for the night your daughter went missing, Mr. Bondurant?”

“Kovac!” the chief barked.

“With all due respect, Chief, I'm not in the habit of giving up my cases to anybody.”

“Mr. Bondurant is the father of a victim. There are extenuating circumstances.”

“Yeah, a few billion of them,” Kovac muttered.

“Sergeant!”

“Sergeant Kovac believes I should be punished for my wealth, Chief,” Bondurant said, still pacing, staring at the floor now. “He perhaps believes I deserved to lose my daughter so I could know what real suffering is.”

“After what I heard today, I believe you never deserved to have a daughter at all,” Kovac said, eliciting a gasp from the mayor. “You sure as hell deserved to lose her, but not in the way she's lost now. That is to say if she's dead at all—and we're nowhere near ready to say that she is.”

“Sergeant Kovac, I hope you have a very good explanation for this behavior.” Greer moved toward him aggressively, drawing his weight lifter's shoulders up.

Kovac stepped away from him. His full attention was on Peter Bondurant. And Peter Bondurant's attention was on him. He stopped his pacing, an instinctive wariness in the narrowed eyes, like an animal sensing danger.

“I had a long talk today with Cheryl Thorton,” Kovac said, and watched what color Peter Bondurant had leech away. “She had some very interesting things to say about your divorce from Jillian's mother.”

Edwyn Noble looked startled. “I fail to see what relevance—”

“Oh, I think it could be very relevant.” Kovac still stared hard at Bondurant.

Bondurant said, “Cheryl is a bitter, vindictive woman.”

“You think so? After she's kept her mouth shut all this time? I'd say you're an ungrateful son of a bitch—”

“Kovac, that's enough!” Greer shouted.

“Hardly,” Kovac said. “You want to kiss the ass of a child-molester, Chief, that's your business. I won't do it. I don't give a shit how rich he is.”

“Oh!” Grace Noble exclaimed, pressing her hand to her chest again.

“Maybe we should take this downstairs,” Quinn suggested mildly.

“Fine by me,” Kovac said. “We've got an interview room all warmed up.”

Bondurant had begun to tremble visibly. “I never abused Jillian.”

“Maybe you think you didn't.” Kovac circled slowly around him, moving away from Greer, keeping Bondurant's eyes on him and putting his back to his lawyer. “A lot of pedophiles convince themselves they're doing the kid a favor. Some even confuse fucking little kids with love. Is that what you made yourself believe?”

“You son of a bitch!”

Bondurant launched himself, grabbing Kovac by the lapels and running him backward across the room. They crashed into a side table and sent a pair of brass candlesticks flying like bowling pins.

Kovac held back the urge to roll Bondurant over and pound the shit out of him. After what he'd heard today, he dearly wanted to, and maybe he could have if they'd crossed paths in a dark alley. But men like Peter Bondurant didn't frequent dark alleys, and rough justice never touched them.

Bondurant got in one good swing, glancing his knuckles off the corner of Kovac's mouth. Then Quinn grabbed him by the back of the collar and pulled him away. Greer rushed in between them like a referee, arms spread wide, eyes rolling white in his dark face.

“Sergeant Kovac, I think you should step outside,” he said loudly.

Kovac straightened his tie and jacket. He wiped a smear of blood away from the corner of his mouth, and a smirk twisted his lips as he looked at Peter Bondurant.

“Ask him where he was last night at two o'clock in the morning,” he said. “While someone was setting his daughter's car on fire with a mutilated dead woman inside it.”

“I won't even dignify that with a comment,” Bondurant said, fussing with his glasses.

“Jesus, you're just the cat's ass, aren't you?” Kovac said. “You get away with child abuse. You get away with assaulting an officer. You're into this case like a bad infection. You think you might get away with murder if you want to?”

“Kovac!” Greer screamed.

Kovac looked to Quinn, shook his head, and walked out.

Bondurant jerked out of Quinn's hold. “I want him off the case! I want him off the force!”

“Because he's doing his job?” Quinn asked calmly. “It's his job to investigate. He can't help what he finds, Peter. You're killing the messenger.”

“He's not investigating the case!” he shouted, pacing again, gesturing wildly. “He's investigating me. He's harassing me. I've lost my daughter, for God's sake!”

Edwyn Noble tried to take hold of his arm as he passed. Bondurant twisted away. “Peter, calm down. Kovac will be dealt with.”

“I think we should deal with what Sergeant Kovac found, don't you?” Quinn said to the lawyer.

“It's nonsense,” Noble snapped. “There's nothing to the allegation whatsoever.”

“Really? Sophie Bondurant was an emotionally unstable woman. Why would the courts award her custody of Jillian? More to the point, why wouldn't you fight her, Peter?” Quinn asked, trying to establish eye contact with Bondurant.

Bondurant kept moving, highly agitated, sweating now, pale in the way that made Quinn think he might be ill.

“Cheryl Thorton says the reason you didn't fight was that Sophie threatened to expose you for molesting Jillian.”

“I never hurt Jillian. I wouldn't.”

“Cheryl has always blamed Peter for her husband's accident,” Noble said bitterly. “She didn't want Donald to sell out of Paragon. She punished him for it too. Drove him to drink. She's the one who caused the accident—indirectly—but she blames Peter.”

“And this bitter, vindictive woman never said anything until now about this alleged abuse?” Quinn said. “That would be hard to imagine if not for the generous monthly payments Peter sends to the convalescent home where Donald Thorton is spending the last of his life.”

“Some people would call that generosity,” Noble said.

“And some people would call it blackmail. Some people would say Peter was buying Cheryl Thorton's silence.”

“They'd be wrong,” Noble stated unequivocally. “Donald and Peter were friends, partners. Why shouldn't he see to it the man's needs are taken care of?”

“He took very good care of him in the buyout of Paragon—which, coincidentally, went on about the same time as the divorce,” Quinn continued. “The deal might have been considered overly generous on Peter's part.”

“What was he supposed to do?” Noble demanded. “Try to steal the company from the man who'd helped him build it?”

Bondurant, Quinn noticed, had stopped talking, and now confined his pacing to the corner by the window. Retreating. His head was down and he kept touching his hand to his forehead as if feeling for a fever. Quinn moved casually toward him, neatly cutting his pacing area in half. Subtly crowding his space.

“Why didn't you fight Sophie for custody, Peter?” he asked softly, an intimate question between friends. He kept his own head down, his hands in his pants pockets.

“I was taking over the business. I couldn't handle a child too.”

“And so you left her to Sophie? A woman in and out of mental institutions.”

“It wasn't like that. It wasn't as if she was insane. Sophie had problems. We all have problems.”

“Not the kind that make us kill ourselves.”

Tears filled the man's eyes. He raised a hand as if to shade his eyes from Quinn's scrutiny.

“What did you and Jillian argue about that night, Peter?”

He shook his head a little, moving now in a tight, short line. Pacing three steps, turning, pacing three steps, turning . . .

“She'd gotten a call from her stepfather,” Quinn said. “You were angry.”

“We've been over this,” Edwyn Noble said impatiently, clearly wanting to get between Quinn and his client. Quinn turned a shoulder, blocking him out.

“Why do you keep insisting Jillian is dead, Peter? I don't know that she is. I think she may not be. Why would you say that she is? What did you fight about that night?”

“Why are you doing this to me?” Bondurant whispered in a tortured voice. His prim, tight-lipped mouth was quivering.

“Because we need to know the truth, Peter, and I think you're holding back pieces of the puzzle. If you want the truth—as you say you do—then you have to give those pieces to me. Do you understand? We need to see the whole picture.”

Quinn held his breath. Bondurant was on the edge. He could feel it, see it. He tried to will him over it.

Bondurant stared out the window at the snow, still now, looking numb. “All I wanted was for us to be father and daughter—”

“That's enough, Peter.” Noble stepped in front of Quinn and took his client by the arm. “We're leaving.”

He glared at Quinn. “I thought we understood each other.”

“Oh, I understand you perfectly, Mr. Noble,” Quinn said. “That doesn't mean I'm interested in playing on your team. I'm interested in two things only: the truth, and justice. I don't know that you want either.”

Noble said nothing. He led Bondurant from the room like a caretaker with a sedated patient.

Quinn looked to the mayor, who had finally taken a seat herself. She looked partly stunned and partly reflective, as if trying to sort through old memories for any that might have implicated Peter Bondurant in something she would never have suspected. Chief Greer looked like a man in the early stages of diverticulitis.

“That's the thing about digging holes,” Quinn said. “There are no assurances you'll find what you want—or want what you find.”

BY FIVE O'CLOCK every news agency native to and camped in the Twin Cities had the name of Gil Vanlees. The same media that would plaster that name in print and fill television screens with bad photographs of the man would point fingers at the police department for leaking information.

Quinn had no doubt where the leak had sprung, and it pissed him off. Bondurant's people having the kind of access they had tainted the case. And in the light of Kovac's revelation that afternoon, Bondurant's meddling took on an even darker quality.

No one had leaked that story to the press. Not even the allegedly bitter, vindictive Cheryl Thorton, whose brain-damaged husband was supported by Peter Bondurant. He wondered exactly how much money it took to hold a grudge like that at bay for a decade.

What had gone on in the lives of Jillian and her mother and father in that pivotal time of the divorce? he wondered in his windowless room at the FBI offices. From the start, Bondurant had struck him as a man with secrets. Secrets about the present. Secrets about the past. Secrets as dark as incest?

How else would Sophie Bondurant have gotten custody of Jillian? Unstable as she was. Powerful as Peter was.

He flipped through the casebook to the crime scene photos of the third murder. Certain aspects of the murder gave the impression the killer and victim may have known each other. The decapitation when none of the other victims had been decapitated, the extreme depersonalization. Both suggested a kind of rage that was personal. But what of the latest theory that the killer worked with a partner, a woman? That didn't fit Peter Bondurant. And what of the thought that perhaps the woman involved was Jillian Bondurant herself?

A history of sexual abuse would fit the profile of a woman involved in this type of crime. She would have a skewed view of male-female relationships, of sexual relationships. Her partner was likely older, some twisted suggestion of a father figure, the dominant partner.

Quinn thought of Jillian, of the photograph in Bondurant's office. Emotionally troubled, with low self-esteem, a girl unhappily pretending to be something she wasn't in order to please. To what lengths might she go to find the approval she craved?

He thought of her involvement with her stepfather—supposedly consensual, but these things never really are. Children need love and can be easily manipulated by that need. And if Jillian had escaped an abusive relationship with her father, only to be coerced into another by her stepfather, that would have reinforced every warped idea she had of relationships with men.

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.”

“So we're back to Vanlees.”

“Or the Urskines. Or someone we haven't even considered.”

Kovac scowled at him. “Some help you are.”

“That's why they pay me the big bucks.”

“My tax dollars at work,” he said with disgust. He hung the cigarette on his lip for a second, then took it away. “The Urskines. How twisted would that be? They whack two of their hookers, then do a couple of citizens in order to make a political point.”

“And to push suspicion away from themselves,” Quinn said. “No one considers the person trying to draw attention.”

“But to snatch the witness staying in their house? That's titanium balls.” Kovac tipped his head, considering. “I bet Toni Urskine can grow hair on hers.”

Quinn went to his wall of notes and scanned them, not really reading the words, just seeing a jumble of letters and facts that tangled in his mind with the theories and the faces and the names.

“Any word on Angie DiMarco?” he asked.

Kovac shook his head. “No one's seen her. No one's heard from her. We're flashing her picture on television, asking people to call the hotline if they've seen her. Personally, I'm afraid finding someone else in that car last night was just postponing the inevitable. But, hey,” he said, dragging himself up out of his chair, “I am, as my second wife used to call me, the infernal pessimist.”

He yawned hugely and consulted his watch.

“Well, GQ, I'm calling it. I can't remember the last time I slept in a bed. That's my goal for the night—if I don't pass out in the shower. How about you? I can give you a ride back to your hotel.”

“What for? Sleep? I gave that up. It was cutting into my anxiety attacks,” Quinn said, ducking his gaze. “Thanks anyway, Sam, but I think I'll stick to it awhile yet. There's something here I'm just not seeing.” He gestured to the open casebook. “Maybe if I stare at it all a little longer . . .”

Kovac watched him for a few moments without saying anything, then nodded. “Suit yourself. See you in the morning. You want me to pick you up?”

“No. Thanks.”

“Uh-huh. Well, good night.” He started through the door, then looked back in. “Say hello to Kate for me. If you happen to talk to her.”

Quinn said nothing. He did nothing for a full five minutes after Kovac left, just stood there thinking Kovac had a hell of an eye. Then he went to the phone and dialed Kate's number.