Ashes to Ashes (25 page)

The reminder struck a spark, and old frustration came alive in his dark eyes. “You threw away a solid career. You had what? Fourteen, fifteen years in? You were a tremendous asset to the BSU. You were a good agent, Kate, and—”

“And I’m a better advocate. I get to deal with people while they’re still alive. I get to make a difference for them one-on-one, help them through a hard time, help them empower themselves, help them take steps to make a difference in their own lives. How is that not valuable?”

“I’m not against you being an advocate,” Quinn argued. “I was against you leaving the Bureau. Those are two separate issues. You let Steven push you out—”

“I did not!”

“The hell you didn’t! He wanted to punish you—”

“And I didn’t let him.”

“You cut and ran. You let him win.”

“He didn’t win,” Kate returned. “His victory would have been in crushing the life out of my career one drop of blood at a time. I was supposed to stick around for that just to show him how tough I was? What was I supposed to do? Transfer and transfer until he ran out of cronies in his ol’ boy network? Until I ended up at the resident agency in Gallup, New Mexico, with nothing to do but count the snakes and tarantulas crossing the road?”

“You could have fought him, Kate,” he insisted. “I would have helped you.”

She crossed her arms and arched a brow. “Oh, really? As I remember it, you didn’t want much to do with me after your little run-in with the Office of Professional Responsibility.”

“That had nothing to do with it,” he said angrily. “The OPR never scared me. Steven and his petty little bureaucratic bullshit games didn’t scare me. I was tied up. I was juggling maybe seventy-five cases including the Cleveland Cannibal—”

“Oh, I know all about it, John,” she said caustically. “The Mighty Quinn, bearing the weight of the criminal world on your shoulders.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he demanded. “I’ve got a job and I do it.”

And to hell with the rest of the world
, thought Kate,
including me
. But she didn’t say it. What good would it do now? It wouldn’t change history as she remembered it. And it wouldn’t help to argue that he surely did give a damn what the OPR put in his file. There was no sense arguing that to Quinn the job was everything.

Long story short: She’d had an affair that had delivered the death blows to a marriage already battered beyond recognition. Her husband’s retaliation had forced her out of her career. And Quinn had walked away from the wreck and lost himself in his first love—his work. When push had come to shove, he stepped back and let her fall. When she turned to go, he hadn’t asked her not to.

In five years he hadn’t called her once.

Not that she’d wanted him to.

The argument had drawn them closer together one step at a time. He was near enough now that she could smell the faint hint of a subtle aftershave. She could sense the tension in his body. And fragments of a thousand memories she’d locked away came rushing to the surface. The strength of his arms, the warmth of his body, the comfort he had offered that she had soaked up like a dry sponge.

Her mistake had been in needing. She didn’t need him now.

She turned away from him and sat back on the desk, trying to convince herself that it wasn’t a sign of anything that they’d fallen so readily into this argument.

“I’ve got a job to do too,” she said, looking pointedly at her watch. “I suppose that’s why you showed up. Sabin called you?”

Quinn let out the air he’d held in his lungs. His shoulders dropped three inches. He hadn’t expected the emotions to erupt so easily. It wasn’t like him to let that happen. Nor was it like him to abandon a fight until he won. The relief he felt in doing so was strong enough to induce embarrassment.

He retreated a step. “He wants me to sit in with you and your witness when she comes back to work on the sketch.”

“I don’t care what he wants,” Kate said stubbornly. “I won’t have you there. This girl is hanging with me by a thread. Somebody whispers the letters
FBI
and she’ll bolt.”

“Then we won’t mention those letters.”

“She can smell a lie a mile off.”

“She’ll never have to know I’m there. I’ll be a mouse in the corner.”

Kate almost laughed. Yeah, who would notice Quinn? Six feet of dark, handsome masculinity in an Italian suit. Naw, a girl like Angie wouldn’t notice him at all.

“I’d like to get a sense of this girl,” he said. “What’s your take on her? Is she a credible witness?”

“She’s a foul-mouthed, lying, scheming little bitch,” Kate said bluntly. “She’s probably a runaway. She’s maybe sixteen going on forty-two. She’s had some hard knocks, she’s alone, and she’s scared spitless.”

“The well-rounded American child,” Quinn said dryly. “So, did she see Smokey Joe?”

Kate considered for a moment, weighing all that Angie was and was not. Whatever the girl hoped to gain in terms of a reward, whatever lies she may have told, seeing the face of evil was for real. Kate could feel the truth in that. The tension in the girl every time she had to retell the story was something virtually impossible to fake convincingly. “Yes. I believe she did.”

Quinn nodded. “But she’s holding back?”

“She’s afraid of retaliation by the killer—and maybe by the cops too. She won’t tell us what she was doing in that park at midnight.”

“Guesses?”

“Maybe scoring drugs. Or she might have turned a trick somewhere nearby and was cutting across the park to get back to whatever alley she’d been sleeping in.”

“But she doesn’t have a record?”

“None that anyone’s been able to find. We’re flashing her picture around sex crimes, narcotics, and the juvie division. No bites yet.”

“A woman of mystery.”

“Pollyanna she ain’t.”

“Too bad you can’t get her prints.”

Kate made a face. “We’d have them now if I’d let Sabin get his way. He wanted Kovac to arrest her Monday and let her sit in jail overnight to put the fear of God in her.”

“Might have worked.”

“Over my dead body.”

Quinn couldn’t help but smile at the steel in her voice, the fire in her eyes. Clearly, she felt protective of her client, lying, scheming little bitch or not. Kovac had commented to him that while Kate was the consummate professional, she protected her victims and witnesses as if they were family. An interesting choice of words.

In five years she hadn’t remarried. There was no snapshot of a boyfriend on the shelves above her desk. But inside a delicate silver filigree frame was a tiny photo of the daughter she had lost. Tucked back in the corner, away from the paperwork, away from the casual glance of visitors, almost hidden even from her own gaze, the cherubic face of the child whose death she carried on her conscience like a stone.

The pain of Emily’s death had nearly crushed her. No-nonsense, unflappable Kate Conlan. Grief and guilt had struck her with the force of a Mack truck, shattering her, stunning her. She’d had no idea how to cope. Turning to her husband hadn’t been an option because Steven Waterston had readily shoveled his own sense of guilt and blame onto Kate. And so she had turned to a friend… .

“And if you tell Sabin it might have worked,” she continued, “the dead body in question will be yours. I told him you’d back me up on this, John, and you’d damn well better. You owe me one.”

“Yeah,” he said softly, the old memories still too close to the surface. “At least.”

LOCATED IN THE Lowry Hill area, just south of the tangle of interstate highways that corralled downtown Minneapolis, D’Cup was the kind of coffeehouse funky enough for the artsy crowd and just clean enough for the patrons of the nearby Guthrie Theater and Walker Art Center. Liska walked in and breathed deep the rich aroma of exotic imported beans.

She and Moss had split the duties for the day, needing to cover as much ground as they could. Mother Mary, with her twenty-some years of maternal experience, had taken the unenviable task of talking with the families of the first two victims. She would open the old wounds as gently as possible. Liska had gladly taken the job of meeting with one of Jillian Bondurant’s only known friends: Michele Fine.

Fine worked at D’Cup as a waitress and sometimes sang and played guitar on the small stage wedged into a corner near the front window. The three customers in the place sat at small tables near the window, absorbing the weak sunlight filtering in after three days of November gloom. Two older men—one tall and slender with a silver goatee, one shorter and wider with a black beret—sipped their espressos and argued the merits of the National Endowment for the Arts. A younger blond man with bug-eye gargoyle sunglasses and a black turtleneck nursed a
grande
something-or-other and worked a newspaper crossword puzzle. A cigarette smoldered in the ashtray beside his drink. He had the thin, vaguely seedy look of a struggling actor.

Liska went to the counter, where a hunky Italian-looking guy with a wavy black ponytail was pressing grounds into the fine cone-shaped basket of an espresso machine. He glanced up at her with eyes the color of dark Godiva chocolate. She resisted the urge to swoon. Barely. She wasn’t as successful in resisting the automatic counting of the weeks since she’d had sex. Moss would have told her mothers of nine- and eleven-year-old boys weren’t supposed to have sex.

“I’m looking for Michele.”

He nodded, shoved the basket into place on the machine, and cranked the handle around. “Chell!”

Fine came through the archway that led into a back room carrying a tray of clean Fiestaware coffee cups the size of soup bowls. She was tall and thin with a narrow, bony face bearing several old scars that made Liska think she must have been in a car accident a long time ago. One curled down at one corner of her wide mouth. Another rode the crest of a high cheekbone like a short, flat worm. Her dark hair had an unnatural maroon sheen, and she had slicked it back against her head and bound it at the nape of her neck. The length of it bushed out in a kinky mass fatter than a fox tail.

Liska flashed her ID discreetly. “Thanks for agreeing to meet with me, Michele. Can we sit down?”

Fine set the tray aside and pulled her purse out from under the counter. “You mind if I smoke?”

“No.”

“I can’t seem to stop,” she said, her voice as rusty as an old gate hinge. She led the way to a table in the smoking section, as far away from the blond man as possible. “This whole business with Jillie … my nerves are raw.”

Her hand was trembling slightly as she extracted a long, thin cigarette from a cheap green vinyl case. Puckered, discolored flesh warped the back of her right hand. Tattooed around the scar, an elegant, intricately drawn snake coiled around Fine’s wrist, its head resting on the back of her hand, a small red apple in its mouth.

“Looks like that was a nasty burn,” Liska said, pointing to the scar with her pen as she flipped open her pocket notebook.

Fine held her hand out, as if to admire it. “Grease fire,” she said dispassionately. “When I was a kid.”

She flicked her lighter and stared at the flame, frowning for a second. “It hurt like hell.”

“I’ll bet.”

“So,” she said, snapping out of the old memories. “What’s the deal? No one will say for sure that Jillie’s dead, but she is, isn’t she? All the news reports talk about ‘speculation’ and ‘likelihood,’ but Peter Bondurant is involved and giving a reward. Why would he do that if it wasn’t Jillie? Why won’t anyone just
say
it’s her?”

“I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to comment. How long have you known Jillian?”

“About a year. She comes in here every Friday, either before or after her session with her shrink. We got to know each other.”

She took a deep pull on her cigarette and exhaled through teeth set wide apart. Her eyes were hazel, too narrow and too heavily lined with black, the lashes stubby and crusty with mascara. A mean look, Vanlees had called it. Nikki thought
tough
was a better word.

“And when was the last time you saw Jillian?”

“Friday. She stopped in on her way to see the psychic vampire.”

“You don’t approve of Dr. Brandt? Do you know him?”

She squinted through the haze of smoke. “I know he’s a money-sucking leech who doesn’t give a damn about helping anyone but himself. I kept telling her to dump him and get a woman therapist. He was the last thing she needed. All he was interested in was keeping his hand in Daddy’s pocket.”

“Do you know why she was seeing him?”

She looked just over Liska’s shoulder and out the window. “Depression. Unresolved stuff with her parents’ divorce and her mom and her stepfather. The usual family shit, right?”

“Glad to say I wouldn’t know. Did she tell you specifics?”

“No.”

Lie
, Nikki thought. “Did she ever do drugs that you know of?”

“Nothing serious.”

“What’s that mean?”

“A little weed once in a while when she was wired.”

“Who’d she buy it from?”

Fine’s expression tightened, the scars on her face seeming darker and shinier. “A friend.”

Meaning herself, Liska figured. She spread her hands. “Hey, I’m not interested in busting anybody’s ass over a little weed. I just want to know if Jillian could have had an enemy in that line.”

“No. She hardly ever did it anyway. Not like when she lived in Europe. She was into everything there—sex, drugs, booze. But she kicked all that when she came here.”

“Just like that? She comes over here and lives like a nun?”

Fine shrugged, tapping off her cigarette. “She tried to kill herself. I guess that changes a person.”

“In France? She tried to kill herself?”

“That’s what she told me. Her stepfather locked her up in a mental hospital for a while. Ironic, seeing as how she was going crazy because of him.”

“How’s that?”

“He was fucking her. She actually believed he was in love with her for a while. She wanted him to divorce her mother and marry her.” She related the information in an almost offhand manner, as if that kind of behavior were the norm in her world. “She ended up taking a bunch of pills. Stepdaddy had her put away. When she got out, she came back here.”