Ashes to Ashes (11 page)

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.”

KATE EASED HER aching body down into the old claw-foot tub and tried to exhale the tension she had stored up during the day. It worked its way from the core of her through her muscles in the form of pain. She envisioned it rising from the water with steam and the scent of lavender. The brass wire tray that spanned the tub before her held a Bad Monday–size glass of Bombay Sapphire and tonic. She took a deep drink, lay back, and closed her eyes.

The stress management people frowned on alcohol as an answer to tension and preached that it would set a person on the road to alcoholism and doom. Kate had been up and down the road to doom. She figured if she was ever to become an alcoholic, it would have happened years before. Five years before. It hadn’t, and so tonight she drank gin and waited for the pleasant numbness it would bring.

For just the briefest of moments the montage of faces from that bleak period of her life flashed through her mind’s eye: Steven’s changing face over the passing of that terrible year—distant, cold, angry, bitter; the doctor’s regret, worn tired and bland by too many tragedies; her daughter’s sweet face, there and gone in a single painful heartbeat. Quinn’s face—intense, compassionate, passionate … angry, dispassionate, indifferent, a memory.

It never failed to amaze her, the sudden sharpness of that pain as it stabbed through the cotton batting of time. A part of her wished fervently it would dull, and another part of her hoped that it never would. The endless cycle of guilt: the need to escape it and the equally desperate need to cling to it.

She opened her eyes and stared at the window beyond the foot of the tub. A rectangle of night peered in above the half-curtain, blackness beyond the steamed glass.

She had at least healed over the surface of the old wounds and moved on with her life, which was as much as anyone could ever honestly hope to do. But how easily torn, that old scar tissue. How humbling the reality that she hadn’t really grown past that pain attached to the memory of John Quinn. She felt like a fool and a child, and blamed the element of surprise.

She would do better tomorrow. She would have a clear head and keep her focus. She would allow no surprises. There was no sense in dredging up the past when the present demanded all her attention. And Kate Conlan had never been anything if not sensible … with the exception of a few brief months during the worst year of her life.

She and Steven had grown apart. A tolerable situation, had all things remained equal. Then Emily had contracted a virulent strain of influenza, and in a matter of days their sweet, sunny child was gone. Steven had blamed Kate, feeling she should have recognized the seriousness of the illness sooner. Kate had blamed herself despite the doctors’ assurances that it wasn’t her fault, that she couldn’t have known. She had been so in need of someone to hold her, someone to offer comfort and support and absolution… .

Pulling the end of the towel over her shoulder from the towel bar behind her, she dabbed at her eyes, wiped her nose, then took another drink. The past was out of her control. She could at least delude herself into believing she had some control of the present.

She steered her thoughts to her client. Idiotic word—
client
. It implied the person had chosen her, hired her. Angie DiMarco would have done neither. What a piece of work that kid was. And Kate was far too experienced in the ways of the real world to believe there was a heart of gold under all that. There was more likely something warped and mutated by a life less kind than that of the average stray cat. How people could bring a child into the world and let her come to this … The notion brought indignation and an unwelcome stab of jealousy.

It wasn’t her job, really, finding out who Angie DiMarco was or why she was that sadly screwed-up person. But the more she knew about a client, the better able she was to understand that client, to act and react accordingly. To manipulate. To get what Sabin wanted out of the witness.

Draining the tub, she dried off, wrapped herself in a fat terry robe, and took the last of her drink to the small antique writing desk in her bedroom. Her feminine sanctuary. Peach tones and rich deep green gave the room a sense of warmth and welcome. Nanci Griffith’s quirky sweet voice drifted from the speakers of the small stereo system on the bookshelf. Thor, the Norwegian forest cat who held dominion over the house, had claimed Kate’s bed as his rightful throne and lay in all his regal, hairy splendor dead center on the down comforter. He gazed at her with the bored supremacy of a crown prince.

Kate curled a leg beneath her on the chair, pulled a sheet of paper from a cubbyhole in the desk, and began to write.

Angie DiMarco
Name? Probably phony. Belongs to some woman in Wisconsin. Get someone to run it through Wisconsin
DMV.
Family dead—figuratively or literally?
Abuse? Likely. Sexual? Strong probability.
Tattoos: multiple—professional and amateur.
Significance?
Significance of individual designs?
Body piercing: fashion or something more?
Compulsive behaviors: Nail biting. Smokes.
Drinks: How much? How often?
Drugs? Possibly. Thin, pale, unkempt. But seems too
focused in behavior.

She could make only a thumbnail sketch of Angie’s personality. Their time together had been too brief and too strongly influenced by the stress of the situation. Kate hated to think what conclusions some stranger would draw of
her
if she were thrust in a similar position. Stress triggered those old fight-or-flight instincts in everyone. But understanding didn’t make the kid any more pleasant to deal with.

Luckily, the woman who ran the Phoenix House was accustomed to a wide range of bad attitudes. Residents at the house were women who had chosen or been forced down some of life’s rougher roads and now wanted out.

Angie had been less than appreciative for the roof over her head. She had lashed out at Kate in a way that struck Kate as being way out of proportion.

“So what if I don’t want to stay here?”

“Angie, you’ve got no place else to go.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Don’t make me go through this again,” Kate said with an impatient sigh.

Toni Urskine, director of the Phoenix, lingered in the doorway for that much of the exchange, watching with a frown. Then she left them to have it out in the otherwise deserted den, a small room with cheap paneling and cast-off furnishings. Mismatched rummage sale “art” on the walls gave the place the ambiance of a fleabag hotel.

“You have no permanent address,” Kate said. “You tell me your family is dead. You haven’t managed to come up with a single real-live person who would take you in. You need a place to stay. This is a place to stay. Three squares, bed, and bath. What’s the problem?”

Angie swatted at a stained throw pillow on a worn plaid love seat. “It’s a fucking sty, that’s the problem.”

“Oh, excuse me, you’ve been living at the Hilton? Your fake address wasn’t in this good a house?”

“You like it so much, then you stay here.”

“I don’t have to stay here. I’m not the homeless witness to a murder.”

“Well, I don’t fucking want to be!” the girl cried, her eyes shining like crystal, sudden tears poised to spill down her cheeks. She turned away from Kate and jammed the heels of her hands against her eyes. Her thin body curled in on itself like a comma.

“No, no, no,” she mewed softly to herself. “Not now …”

The swift break in emotions caught Kate flat-footed. This was what she had wanted, wasn’t it? To have the hard shell crack. Now that it had, she wasn’t quite sure what to do about it. She hadn’t been expecting the break to come now, over this.

Hesitantly, she stepped toward the girl, feeling awkward and guilty. “Angie …”

“No,” the girl whispered more to herself than to Kate. “Not now. Please, please …”

“You don’t have to be embarrassed, Angie,” Kate said softly, standing close, though she made no attempt to touch the girl. “You’ve had a hell of a day. I’d cry too. I’ll cry later. I’m no good at it—my nose runs, it’s gross.”

“Why c-c-can’t I j-j-just stay with you?”

The question came from way out in left field, hit Kate square in the temple, and stunned her to her toes. As if this girl had never been away from home. As if she had never stayed among strangers. She’d likely been living on the street for God only knew how long, doing God only knew what to survive, and suddenly this dependence. It didn’t make sense.

Before Kate could respond, Angie shook her head a little, rubbed the tears from her face with the sleeve of her jacket, and sucked in a ragged breath. That fast the window of opportunity shut and the steel mask was back in place.

“Never mind. Like you fucking care what happens to me.”

“Angie, I care what happens to you or I wouldn’t have this job.”

“Yeah, right. Your job.”

“Look,” Kate said, out of energy for the argument, “it beats sleeping in a box. Give it a couple of days. If you hate it here, I’ll see about making some other arrangements. You’ve got my cell phone number: Call me if you need me or if you just need to talk. Anytime. I meant what I said—I’m on your side. I’ll pick you up in the morning.”

Angie said nothing, just stood there looking sullen and small inside her too-big denim jacket that belonged to someone else.

“Try to get some sleep, kiddo,” Kate said softly.