Ashes to Ashes (14 page)

Tippen dropped his gaze to his notepad, a nonbeliever still.

Kovac huffed a little sigh. “You know, we got no time for fence pissing. I’m sure no one in the general public gives a rip which one of us has the biggest dick.”

“I have,” Liska chirped, snatching the giant ceramic penis away from Elwood, who had set it on the table as a centerpiece. She held it up as proof of her claim.

Laughter broke the tension.

“Anyway,” Quinn went on, sliding his hands into his pants pockets and cocking a leg, settling in, subtly letting Tippen know he wasn’t going anywhere and wasn’t bothered by his opinions. “We have to be careful about how we draw him in. I’d suggest starting with a heavily publicized community meeting held in a location central between the dumping sites. You’re asking for help, for community participation. It’s nonaggressive, nonthreatening. He can come into that scenario feeling anonymous and safe.

“It won’t be easy to trick him unless his arrogance gets out of hand. He’s organized. He’s of above-average intelligence. He’s got a job, but it may be beneath his capabilities. He knows the city parks system, so if you haven’t done so already, you’ll want to get a parks service employee roster, see if anyone has a criminal record.”

“Already happening,” Kovac said.

“How do you know he has a job at all?” Tippen challenged. “How do you know he’s not some drifter, familiar with the parks because that’s where he hangs out?”

“He’s no drifter,” Quinn said with certainty. “He’s got a house. The crime scenes are not the death scenes. The women were abducted, taken someplace, and held there. He needs privacy, a place where he can torture his victims without having to worry about anyone hearing.

“Also, he may have more than one vehicle. He probably has access to a Suburban-type truck or a pickup. A basic package, older, dark in color, fairly well kept. Something to transport the bodies in, a vehicle that wouldn’t seem out of place pulling into the service lot of a city park. But this may not be what he’s picking them up in, because a big vehicle would be conspicuous and memorable to witnesses.”

“How do you know he’s an underachiever?” Frank Hamill asked.

“Because that’s the norm for this type of killer. He has a job because it’s necessary. But his energies, his
talents
, are applied to his hobby. He spends a lot of his time fantasizing. He lives for the next kill. A corporate CEO wouldn’t have that kind of free time.”

“Even though they’re mostly psychopaths,” someone joked.

Quinn flashed a shark smile. “Be glad some of them like their day jobs.”

“What else?” Liska asked. “Any guesses on appearance?”

“I’ve got mixed feelings on this because of the conflicting victimology.”

“Hookers go for cash, not flash,” Elwood said.

“And if all three victims were hookers, I’d say we’re looking for a guy who’s unattractive, maybe has some kind of problem like a stutter or a scar, something that would make it difficult for him to approach women. But if our third vic is the daughter of a billionaire?” Quinn arched a brow.

“Who knows what she might have been into.”

“Is there any reason to think she was involved in prostitution?” Quinn asked. “On the surface she wouldn’t seem to have much in common with the first two victims.”

“She doesn’t have a record,” Liska said. “But then, her father is Peter Bondurant.”

“I need more extensive victimology on all three women,” Quinn said. “If there’s any kind of common link between them, that’s a prime spot for you to start developing a suspect.”

“Two hookers and a billionaire’s daughter—what could they possibly have in common?” Yurek asked.

“Drugs,” Liska said.

“A man,” Mary Moss offered.

Kovac nodded. “You two want to work that angle?”

The women nodded.

“But maybe the guy just nabbed these women from behind,” Tippen suggested. “Maybe he didn’t need to finesse them. Maybe he picked them because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“It’s possible. It just doesn’t feel that way to me,” Quinn said. “He’s too smooth. These women just vanished. No one saw a struggle. No one heard a scream. Logic tells me they went with him willingly.”

“So where’s Bondurant’s car?” Adler asked. Jillian’s red Saab had yet to be located.

“Maybe
she
picked
him
up,” Liska said. “It’s the nineties. Maybe he’s still got her car.”

“So we’re looking for a killer with a three-car garage?” Adler said. “Hell, I am in the wrong line of work.”

“You want to start whacking ex-wives for a living, you could fill the damn garage with Porsches,” Kovac joked.

Liska punched him in the arm. “Hey!
I’m
an ex-wife.”

“Present company excluded.”

Quinn took a long drink of his coffee while the jokes ran through the group. Humor was a safety valve for cops, releasing measured bursts of pressure the job built up inside them. The members of this team were standing at the start of what would undoubtedly be a long, unpleasant gauntlet. They would need to squeeze a joke in wherever they could. The better their rapport as a unit, the better for the investigation. He usually tossed in a few jokes himself to bend the image of the straitlaced G-man.

“Sizewise,” he went on, “he’ll probably be medium height, medium build—strong enough to tote a dead body around but not so big as to seem a physical threat when he’s approaching his victims. That’s about as much as I can give you for now.”

“What? Can’t you just close your eyes and conjure up a psychic photograph or something?” Adler said, only half joking.

“Sorry, Detective,” Quinn said with a grin and a shrug. “If I were psychic, I’d be making my living at the racetrack. Not a psychic cell in my body.”

“You would have if you was on TV.”

“If we were on TV, we’d have solved these crimes in an hour,” Elwood said. “TV is why the public gets impatient with an investigation that lasts more than two days. The whole damn country lives on TV time.”

“Speaking of TV,” Hamill said, holding up a videocassette. “I’ve got the tape from the press conference.”

A television with a built-in VCR sat atop a wheeled metal cart near the head of the table. Hamill loaded the cassette and they all sat back to watch. At Quinn’s request, a videographer from the BCA special operations unit had been stationed discreetly among the cameramen from the local stations with instructions to capture not the event, but the people gathered to take it in.

The voices of the mayor, Chief Greer, and the county attorney droned in the background as the camera scanned the faces of reporters and cops and news photographers. Quinn stared at the screen, tuned to pick up the slightest nuances of expression, the glint of something knowing in a pair of eyes, the hint of something smug playing at the corners of a mouth. His attention was on the people at the periphery of the crowd, people who seemed to be there by accident or coincidence.

He looked for that intangible, almost imperceptible something that set a detective’s instincts on point. The knowledge that their killer might have been standing there among the unsuspecting, that he could have been looking at the face of a murderer without knowing, stirred a deep sense of frustration within. This killer wouldn’t stand out. He wouldn’t appear to be nervous. He wouldn’t have the wild-eyed edginess that would give him away as disorganized offenders often did. He’d killed at least three women and gotten away with it. The police had no viable leads. He had nothing to worry about. And he knew it.

“Well,” Tippen said dryly. “I don’t see anyone carrying an extra head with them.”

“We could be looking right at him and not know it,” Kovac said, hitting the power button on the remote control. “But if we come up with a possible suspect, we can go back and look again.”

“We gonna get that composite from the wit today, Sam?” Adler asked.

Kovac’s mouth twisted a little. “I sure as hell hope so. I’ve already had calls from the chief and Sabin about it.” And they would ride his ass until they got it. He was the primary. He ran the investigation and took the heat. “In the meantime, let’s make assignments and hit the bricks before Smokey Joe decides to light up another one.”

PETER BONDURANT’S HOME was a sprawling old Tudor with an expensive view of Lake of the Isles beyond its tall iron bar fence. Tall bare-branched trees studded the lawn. One broad wall of the stucco home was crazed with a network of vines, dry and brown this time of year. Just a few miles from the heart of Minneapolis, it discreetly displayed signs of city life paranoia along the fence and on the closed driveway gate in the form of blue-and-white security company signs.

Quinn tried to take it all in visually and still pay attention to the call on his cell phone. A suspect had been apprehended in the child abduction in Blacksburg, Virginia. The CASKU agent on site wanted to confirm a strategy for the interrogation. Quinn was sounding board and guru. He listened, agreed, made a suggestion, and signed off as quickly as he could, wanting his focus on the matter at hand.

“The man in demand,” Kovac remarked as he swung the car into the drive too fast and hit the brakes, rocking to a stop beside the intercom panel. His gaze moved past Quinn to the news vans parked on either side of the street. The occupants of the vans stared back. “Lousy vultures.”

A voice crackled from the intercom speaker. “Yes?”

“John Quinn, FBI,” Kovac said with drama, flashing a comic look at Quinn.

The gate rolled open, then closed behind them. The reporters made no move to rush in. Midwestern manners, Quinn thought, knowing full well there were places in this country where the press would have stormed the place and demanded answers as if they had a right to tear apart the grief that belonged to the victim’s family. He’d seen it happen. He’d seen promotion-hungry reporters dig through people’s garbage for scraps of information that could be turned into speculative headlines. He’d seen them crash funerals.

A black Lincoln Continental polished to a hard shine sat in the driveway near the house. Kovac pulled his dirt-brown Caprice alongside the luxury car and turned the key. The engine rattled on pathetically for half a minute.

“Cheap piece of crap,” he muttered. “Twenty-two years on the job and I get the worst fucking car in the fleet. You know why?”

“Because you won’t kiss the right ass?” Quinn ventured.

Kovac huffed a laugh. “I’m not kissing anything that’s got a dick on the flip side.” He chuckled to himself as he dug through a pile of junk on the seat, finally coming up with a mini-cassette recorder, which he offered to Quinn.

“In case he still won’t talk to me … By Minnesota law, only one party to a conversation needs to grant permission to tape that conversation.”

“Hell of a law for a state full of Democrats.”

“We’re practical. We’ve got a killer to catch. Maybe Bondurant knows something he doesn’t realize. Or maybe he’ll say something that won’t ring a bell with you because you’re not from here.”

Quinn slipped the recorder into the inside breast pocket of his suit coat. “The end justifies the means.”

“You know it.”

“Better than most.”

“Does it ever get to you?” Kovac asked as they got out of the car. “Working serial murders and child abductions twenty-four/seven. I gotta think that’d get to me. At least some of the stiffs I get deserved to get whacked. How do you cope?”

I don’t
. The response was automatic—and just as automatically unspoken. He didn’t cope. He never had. He just shoveled it all into the big dark pit inside him and hoped to hell the pit didn’t overflow.

“Focus on the win column,” he said.

The wind cut across the lake, kicking up whitecaps on water that looked like mercury, and chasing dead leaves across the dead lawn. It flirted with the tails of Quinn’s and Kovac’s trench coats. The sky looked like dirty cotton batting sinking down on the city.

“I drink,” Kovac confessed amiably. “I smoke and I drink.”

A grin tugged at Quinn’s mouth. “And chase women?”

“Naw, I gave that up. It’s a bad habit.”

Edwyn Noble answered the door. Lurch with a law degree. His expression froze at the sight of Kovac.

“Special Agent Quinn,” he began as they moved past him into an entry hall of carved mahogany paneling. A massive wrought iron chandelier hung from the second-story ceiling. “I don’t remember you mentioning Ser-geant Kovac when you called.”

Quinn flashed him innocence. “Didn’t I? Well, Sam offered to drive me, and I don’t know my way around the city, so …”

“I’ve been wanting to talk to Mr. Bondurant myself anyway,” Kovac said casually, browsing the artwork on display in the hall, his hands stuffed into his pockets as if he were afraid of breaking something.

The lawyer’s ears turned red around the rim. “Sergeant, Peter’s just lost his only child. He’d like to have a little time to collect himself before he has to be subjected to any kind of questioning.”

“Questioning?” Kovac’s brows arched as he glanced up from a sculpture of a racehorse. He exchanged a look with Quinn. “Like a suspect? Does Mr. Bondurant think we consider him a suspect? Because I don’t know where he would have gotten that idea. Do you, Mr. Noble?”

Color streaked across Noble’s cheekbones. “Interview. Statement. Whatever you’d like to call it.”

“I’d like to call it a conversation, but, hey, whatever you want.”

“What I want,” came a quiet voice from beyond an arched doorway, “is to have my daughter back.”

The man who emerged from the dimly lit interior hall was half a foot shy of six feet, with a slight build and an air of neatness and precision even in casual slacks and a sweater. His dark hair was cropped so close to his skull it looked like a fine coating of metal shavings. He stared at Quinn with serious eyes through the small oval lenses of wire-framed glasses.

“That’s what we all want, Mr. Bondurant,” Quinn said. “There may still be a chance of making that happen, but we’ll need all the help we can get.”

The straight brows drew together in confusion. “You think Jillian might still be alive?”

“We haven’t been able to conclusively determine otherwise,” Kovac said. “Until we can positively identify the victim, there’s a chance it’s not your daughter. We’ve had some unsubstantiated sightings—”