Ashes to Ashes

7

CHAPTER

“WHAT THE HELL did you do with my witness, Red?” Kovac leaned against the wall of the autopsy suite, the receiver of the phone jammed between his shoulder and his ear. He slipped a hand inside the surgical gown he wore over his clothes, pulled a little jar of Mentholatum from his jacket pocket, and smeared a gob around each nostril.

“I thought it'd be nice to treat her like a human being and feed her a real meal as opposed to the crap you give people at the cop shop,” Kate said.

“You don't like doughnuts? What kind of American are you?”

“The kind who has at least a partial grasp of the concept of civil liberties.”

“Yeah, fine, all right, I get it.” He plugged his free ear with a finger as the blade of a bone saw whined against a whetstone in the background. “Sabin asks, I'm gonna tell him you nabbed her before I could throw her in the slammer—which is true. Better your lovely tit in a wringer than my johnson.”

“Don't worry about Sabin. I've got his okay on a memo.”

“Do you have a picture of him signing it? Is it notarized?”

“God, you're a raving paranoid.”

“How do you think I've lived this long on the job?”

“It wasn't from kissing ass and following orders. That's for damn sure.”

He had to laugh. Kate called a spade a spade. And she was right. He handled his cases as he thought best, not with an eye to publicity or promotion. “So where are you taking the angel after this grand feast?”

“The Phoenix House, I'm told. She belongs in a juvie facility, but there you go. I've got to put her somewhere, and her ID says she's an adult. Did you get a Polaroid of her?”

“Yeah. I'll show it around juvenile division. See if anyone knows her. I'll give a copy to Vice too.”

“I'll do the same on my end of things if you get me a copy.”

“Will do. Keep me posted. I want a short leash on that chick.” He raised his voice briefly as water pounded into a stainless steel sink. “I gotta go. Dr. Death is about to crack open our crispy critter.”

“Jesus, Sam, you're so sensitive.”

“Hey, I gotta cope. You know what I'm saying.”

“Yeah, I know. Just don't let the wrong people hear you doing it. Is the task force set up?”

“Yeah. As soon as we get the brass out of our hair, we'll be good to go.” He looked across the room to where Quinn stood in discussion with the ME and Hamill, the agent from the BCA, all of them in surgical gowns and booties. “So what's the story with you and the Quantico hotshot?”

There was the briefest of hesitations on the other end of the line. “What do you mean?”

“What do you mean, what do I mean? What's the deal? What's the story? What's the history?”

Another pause, just a heartbeat. “I knew him, that's all. I was working on the research side in Behavioral Sciences. The people in BSU and Investigative Support regularly cross paths. And he used to be a friend of Steven's—my ex.”

This tossed in at the end, as if he might believe it was an afterthought. Kovac filed it all away for future rumination. Used to be a friend of Steven's. There was more to that story, he thought as Liska came toward him from the crowd around the corpse, looking impatient and nauseated. He gave Kate his pager number and instructions to call, and hung up.

“They're ready to rock and roll,” Liska said, pulling a travel-size jar of Vicks VapoRub from the pocket of her boxy blazer. She stuck her nose over the rim and breathed deep.

“God, the smell!” she whispered as she turned and fell in step with him, heading back toward the table. “I've had floaters. I've had drunks in Dumpsters. I once had a guy left in the trunk of a Chrysler over the Fourth of July weekend. I never smelled anything like this.”

The stench was an entity, a presence. It was an invisible fist that forced its way into the mouths of all present, rolled over their tongues, and jammed at the backs of their throats. The room was cold, but not even the constant blast of clean, frigid air from the ventilation system or the cloying perfume of chemical air fresheners could kill the smell of roasted human flesh and organs.

“Nothing like posting Toasties,” Kovac said.

Liska pointed a finger at him and narrowed her eyes. “No internal-organ jokes or I puke on your shoes.”

“Wimp.”

“And I'll kick your ass later for calling me that.”

There were three tables in the room, the ones at either end occupied. They walked past one as an assistant eased a plastic bag full of organs back into the body cavity of a man with thick yellow toenails. A scale hung over each table, like the kind for weighing grapes and sweet peppers in the supermarket. These were for weighing hearts and brains.

“Did you want me to start the party without you?” the ME queried with an arch of her brow.

Maggie Stone was generally considered by her staff to have a few nuts rattling loose in the mental machine. She suspected everyone of everything, rode a Harley Hog in good weather, and had been known to carry weapons. But when it came to the job, she was the best.

People who had known her in her tamer years claimed her hair was naturally mouse brown. Sam had never been good at remembering such details for long, which was one of many reasons he had two ex-wives. He did notice Dr. Stone, on the far side of forty, had recently gone from flame-red to platinum. Her hair was chopped short and she wore it in a style that looked as if she'd just rolled out of bed and gotten a bad scare.

She stared at him as she adjusted the tiny clip-on microphone at the neck of her scrub suit. Her eyes were a spooky translucent green.

“Get this bastard,” she ordered, pointing a scalpel at him, the implication in her tone being that if he didn't, she would. She then turned her attention to the charred body that lay on the stainless steel table, curled up like a praying mantis. A deep calm settled over her.

“Okay, Lars, let's see if we can't straighten her out a bit.”

Moving to one end of the table, she took hold of the corpse firmly but gently while her assistant, a hulking Swede, took hold of the ankles and they began to pull slowly. The resulting sound was like snapping fried chicken wings.

Liska turned away with a hand over her mouth. Kovac stood his ground. On the other side of the table, Quinn's expression was granite, his eyes on the body that had yet to give up its secrets. Hamill, one of two agents from the BCA assigned to the task force, cast his gaze up at the ceiling. He was a small, tidy man with a runner's wire-thin body and a hairline that was rapidly falling back from a towering forehead.

Stone stood back from the table and picked up a chart.

“Dr. Maggie Stone,” she said quietly for the benefit of the tape, though she appeared to be addressing the deceased. “Case number 11–7820, Jane Doe. Caucasian female. The head has been severed from her body and is currently missing. The body measures 55 inches in length and weighs 122 pounds.”

The measurement and weight had been obtained earlier. A thorough set of X rays and photographs had been taken, and Stone had gone over the body carefully with a laser to illuminate and collect trace evidence. She now went over every inch of the body visually, describing in detail everything she saw, every wound, every mark.

The burned clothing remained on the corpse. Melted to the body by the heat of the fire. A cautionary tale against wearing synthetic fabrics.

Stone made note of the “severe trauma” to the victim's neck, speculating the damage had been done by a blade with a serrated edge.

“Postmortem?” Quinn asked.

Stone stared at the gaping wound as if she were trying to see down into the dead woman's heart. “Yes,” she said at last.

Lower down on the throat were several telltale ligature marks—not a single red furrow, but stripes that indicated the cord had been loosened and tightened over the course of the victim's ordeal. This was likely the manner of death—asphyxiation due to ligature strangulation—though it would be difficult to prove because of the decapitation. The most consistent indicator of a strangulation death was a crushed hyoid bone at the base of the tongue in the upper part of the trachea—above the point of decapitation. Nor was there any opportunity to check the eyes for petechial hemorrhaging, another sure sign of strangulation.

“He played with the others this way?” Quinn asked, referring to the multiple ligature marks on the throat.

Stone nodded and moved down the body.

“Is this roughly the same amount of fire damage as the other bodies?”

“Yes.”

“And the others were clothed.”

“Yes. After he killed them, we believe. There were wounds on the bodies with no corresponding damage to the clothing—what clothing wasn't destroyed by the fire.”

“And not in their own clothes,” Kovac said. “Stuff the killer picked out for them. Always synthetic fabrics. Fire melts the fabric. Screws trace evidence on the body.”

Undoubtedly it meant more to the mind hunter, he thought with a twinge of impatience. As valuable as he knew profiles of murderers could be, the flatfoot cop in him held the reservation that the brainiacs sometimes gave these monsters a little too much credit. Sometimes killers did things just for the hell of it. Sometimes they did things out of curiosity or pure evil or because they knew it would jam up the investigation.

“We gonna get any fingerprints?” he asked.

“Nope,” Stone said as she examined the back of the left hand. The top layer of skin had turned a dirty ivory color and was sloughing off. The underlayer was red. Knuckle bones gleamed white where the skin had seared away entirely.

“Not good ones anyway,” she said. “My guess is he positioned the body with the hands crossed over the chest or stomach. The fire instantly melted the blouse and the resulting goo melted into the fingertips before the tendons in the arms began to constrict and pull the hands away from the body.”

“Is there any chance of separating the fabric residue from the fingertips?” Quinn asked. “The fabric itself might bear an impression of the friction ridges.”

“We don't have the capability here,” she said. “Your people back in Washington might be game to try. We can detach the hands, bag them, and send them in.”

“I'll have Walsh call ahead.”

Coughing like he had tuberculosis, Walsh had begged off from the autopsy. There was no need for the whole task force to attend. They would all be briefed in the morning and would all have access to the reports and photographs.

Stone moved methodically down the length of the body. The victim's legs were bare, the skin seared and blistered in an irregular pattern where the accelerant had burned away in a flash.

“Ligature marks at the right and left ankles,” she said, her small, gloved hands moving tenderly, almost lovingly, over the tops of the victim's feet—as much emotion as she would show during the process.

Kovac took in the appearance of the wounds the bindings had made around the victim's ankles, trying hard not to picture this woman tied to a bed in some maniac's chamber of horrors, struggling so frantically to get free that the ligatures had cut grooves into her flesh.

“The fibers have already gone to the BCA lab,” Stone said. “They seemed consistent with the others—a white polypropylene twine,” she specified for the benefit of Quinn and Hamill. “Tough as hell. You can buy it in any office supply store. The county buys enough every month to wrap around the moon. It's impossible to trace.

“Deep lacerations in a double-X pattern to the bottoms of both feet.” She went on with the exam. She measured and catalogued each cut, then described what appeared to be cigarette burns to the pad of each toe.

“Torture or disfigurement to conceal her identity?” Hamill wondered aloud.

“Or both,” Liska said.

“Looks like all of this was done while she was alive,” Stone said.

“Sick bastard,” Kovac muttered.

“If she got free, she couldn't have run,” Quinn said. “There was a case in Canada a few years ago where the victim's Achilles tendons were severed for the same reason. Did the other victims have similar wounds?”

“They had each been tortured in a variety of ways,” Stone answered. “Neither exactly the same. I can get you copies of the reports.”

“That's already being taken care of, thank you.”

There was no hope of removing the victim's clothing without taking skin with it. Stone and her assistant snipped and peeled, coaxing the melted fibers gently away with forceps, Stone swearing under her breath every few minutes.

Anticipation tightened in Kovac's gut as the destroyed blouse and a layer of flesh were worked away from the left side of the chest.

Stone looked across the body at him. “Here it is.”

“What?” Quinn asked, moving to the head of the table.

Kovac stepped in close and surveyed the killer's handiwork. “The detail we've managed to keep away from the stinking reporters. This pattern of stab wounds—see?”

A tight cluster of eight marks, half an inch to an inch in length, perforated the dead woman's chest roughly in the vicinity of the heart.

“The first two had this,” Kovac said, glancing at Quinn. “They were each strangled and the stabbing was done after the fact.”

“In that exact pattern?”

“Yep. Like a star. See?” Holding his hand three inches above the corpse, he traced the pattern in the air with his index finger. “The longer marks form one X. The shorter marks form another. Smokey Joe strikes again.”

“Other similarities too,” Stone said. “See here: amputation of the nipples and areola.”

“Postmortem?” Quinn asked.

“No.”

Stone looked to her assistant. “Lars, let's turn her over. See what we find on the other side.”

The body had been positioned on its back before being set ablaze. Consequently, the fire damage was contained to the front side. Stone removed the undamaged pieces of clothing and bagged them for the lab. A piece of red spandex skirt. A scrap of chartreuse blouse. No underwear.

“Uh-huh,” Stone murmured to herself, then glanced up at Kovac. “A section of flesh missing from the right buttock.”

“He did this with the others too?” Quinn asked.

“Yes. With the first victim he took a chunk from the right breast. With the second, it was also the right buttock.”

“Eliminating a bite mark?” Hamill speculated aloud.

“Could be,” Quinn said. “Biting certainly isn't unusual with this kind of killer. Any indication of bruising in the tissue? When these guys sink their teeth in, it isn't any love nip.”

Stone took up her little ruler to measure the wounds precisely. “If there was any bruising, he's cut it out. There's considerable muscle gone.”

“Jesus,” Kovac muttered with disgust as he stared at the shiny dark red square on the victim's body, the flesh cut out precisely with a small sharp knife. “Who does this guy think he is? Hannibal Fucking Lecter?”

Quinn gave him a look from the headless end of the body. “Everybody's got a hero.”

CASE NUMBER 11–7820, Jane Doe, Caucasian female, had no organic reason to die. She had been healthy in all respects. Well fed, carrying the extra ten or fifteen pounds most people did. Although what her last meal had been, Dr. Stone had not been able to determine. If this was Jillian, she had digested the dinner she'd eaten with her father before her death. Her body was free of disease and natural defect. Stone had judged her to be between the ages of twenty and twenty-five. A young woman with most of her life ahead of her—until she crossed the path of the wrong man.

This type of killer rarely chose a victim who was ready to die.

Quinn reviewed this fact as he stood on the wet tarmac of the morgue's delivery bay. The damp cold of the night seeped into his clothes, into his muscles. Fog hung like a fine white shroud over the city.

There were too damn many victims who were young women: pretty young women, ordinary young women, women with everything going for them, and women with nothing in their lives but a sliver of hope for something better. All of them broken and wasted like dolls, abused and thrown away as if their lives had meant nothing at all.

“Hope you're not attached to that suit,” Kovac said as he walked up, fishing a cigarette out of a pack of Salem Menthols.

Quinn looked down at himself, knowing the stench of violent death had permeated every fiber of his clothing. “Professional hazard. I didn't have time to change.”

“Me neither. Used to drive my wives crazy.”

“Wives—plural?”

“Consecutive, not concurrent. Two. You know how it is—the job and all. . . . Anyway, my second wife used to call them corpse clothes—whatever I had to wear to a really putrid death scene or an autopsy or something. She made me undress in the garage, and then you'd think she'd maybe burn the clothes or stick 'em in the trash or something, 'cause she sure as hell wouldn't let me wear them again. But no. She'd box the stuff up and take it to the Goodwill—on account of it still had wear in it, she'd say.” He shook his head in amazement. “Underprivi-leged people all over Minneapolis were walking around smelling like dead bodies, thanks to her. You married?”

Quinn shook his head.

“Divorced?”

“Once. A long time ago.”

So long ago, the brief attempt at marriage seemed more like a half-remembered bad dream than a memory. Bringing it up was like kicking a pile of ashes, stirring old flecks of emotional debris inside him—feelings of frustration and failure and regret that had long since gone cold. Feelings that came stronger when he thought of Kate.

“Everybody's got one,” Kovac said. “It's the job.”

He held the cigarettes out, Quinn declined.

“God, I gotta get that smell out of my mouth.” Kovac filled his lungs and absorbed the maximum amount of tar and nicotine before exhaling, letting the smoke roll over his tongue. It drifted away to blend into the fog. “So, you think that's Jillian Bondurant in there?”

“Could be, but I think there's a chance it's not. The UNSUB went to a hell of a lot of trouble to make sure we couldn't get prints.”

“But he leaves Bondurant's DL at the scene. So maybe he nabbed Bondurant, then figured out who she was and decided to hang on to her, hold her for ransom,” Kovac speculated. “Meanwhile, he picks up another woman and offs her, leaves Bondurant's DL with the body to show what might happen if Daddy doesn't cough up.”

Kovac narrowed his eyes as if he were playing the theory through again for review. “No ransom demand we know of, and she's been missing since Friday. Still, maybe . . . But you don't think so.”

“I've never seen it happen that way, that's all,” Quinn said. “As a rule, with this type of murder you get a killer with one thing on his mind: playing out his fantasy. It's got nothing to do with money—usually.”

Quinn turned a little more toward Kovac, knowing this was the member of the task force he most needed to win over. Kovac was the investigative lead. His knowledge of these cases, of this town, and of the kind of criminals who lived in its underbelly would be invaluable. Trouble was, Quinn didn't think he had the energy left to pull out the old I'm-just-a-cop-like-you routine. He settled for some truth, instead.

“The thing about profiling is that it's a proactive tool based on the reactive use of knowledge gained from past events. Not a perfect science. Every case could potentially present something we've never seen before.”

“I hear you're pretty good though,” the detective conceded. “You nailed that child-killer out in Colorado right down to his stutter.”

Quinn shrugged. “Sometimes all the pieces fit. How long before you can get your hands on Bondurant's medical records for comparison with the body?”

Kovac rolled his eyes. “I oughta change my name to Murphy. Murphy's Law: Nothing's ever easy. Turns out, most of her medical records are in France,” he said as if France were an obscure planet in another galaxy. “Her mom divorced Peter Bondurant eleven years ago and married a guy with an international construction firm. They lived in France. The mother's dead, stepfather still lives there. Jillian came back here a couple of years ago. She was enrolled at the U—University of Minnesota.”

“The Bureau can help get the records via our legal attaché offices in Paris.”

“I know. Walsh is already on it. Meantime, we'll try to talk to anyone who was close to Jillian. Find out if she had any moles, scars, birthmarks, tattoos. We'll get pictures. We haven't turned up any close friends yet. No boyfriend anyone knows of. I gather she wasn't exactly a social butterfly.”

“What about her father?”

“He's too distraught to talk to us.” Kovac's mouth twisted. “‘Too distraught'—that's what his lawyer says. If I thought somebody whacked my kid, I'd be fucking distraught, all right. I'd be climbing all over the cops. I'd be living in their back pockets, doing anything I could to nail the son of a bitch.” He cocked an eyebrow at Quinn. “Wouldn't you?”

“I'd turn the world upside down and shake it by its heels.”

“Damn right. I go over to Bondurant's house to break the news this might be Jillian. He gets a look like I'd hit him in the head with a ball bat. ‘Oh, my God. Oh, my God,' he says, and I think he's gonna puke. So I don't think much of it when he excuses himself. The son of a bitch goes and calls his lawyer and he never comes out of his study again. I spend the next hour talking to Bondurant via Edwyn Noble.”

“And what did he tell you?”

“That Jillian had been to the house Friday night for dinner and he hadn't seen her since. She left around midnight. A neighbor corroborates. The couple across the street were just getting home from a party. Jillian's Saab pulled onto the street just as they turned onto the block at eleven-fifty.

“Peter Filthy Fucking Rich Bondurant,” he grumbled. “My luck. I'll be writing parking tickets by the time this thing is through.”

He finished his cigarette, dropped it on the tarmac, and ground out the butt with the toe of his shoe.

“Too bad DNA tests take so damn long,” he said, jumping back to the matter of identification. “Six weeks, eight weeks. Too damn long.”

“You're checking missing persons reports?”

“Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, the Dakotas. We've even called Canada. Nothing fits yet. Maybe the head'll turn up,” he said with optimism the way he might hope for the return of a pair of eyeglasses or a wallet.

“Maybe.”

“Well, enough of this shit for tonight. I'm starving,” he said abruptly, pulling his suit coat shut as if he had confused hunger for cold. “I know a place with great Mexican takeout. So hot it burns the corpse taste out of your mouth. We'll swing by on the way to your hotel.”

They walked away from the delivery bay as an ambulance pulled up. No lights, no siren. Another customer. Kovac fished his keys out of his pocket, looking at Quinn from the corner of his eye. “So, you knew our Kate?”

“Yeah.” Quinn stared into the fog, wondering where she was tonight. Wondering if she was thinking about him. “In another lifetime.”