Ashes to Ashes (26 page)

Liska scribbled the news in a personal shorthand no one but she could read, excitement making it all the more illegible. She’d hit the mother lode of dirt here. Kovac would love it. “Did her stepfather ever come here to see her?”

“No. The suicide thing freaked him out, I guess. Jillie said he never even came to see her in the loony bin.” She sighed a cloud of smoke and stared off past the blond guy. “It’s sad what passes for love, isn’t it?”

“What kind of mood was she in Friday?”

The bony shoulders lifted and fell. “I don’t know. Kind of wired, I guess. It was busy in here. We didn’t have time to talk. I told her I’d call her Saturday.”

“And did you?”

“Yeah. Got the machine. I left a message, but she never called back.”

She stared out the window again, but without seeing anything in the street. Looking back to the weekend. Wondering if anything she could have done differently might have prevented a tragedy. Nikki had seen the expression many times. Tears washed across Michele Fine’s mean eyes and she pressed her wide, scarred mouth into a line.

“I just figured she stayed over at her dad’s,” she said, her throat tightening on the words. “I thought about trying to catch her Sunday, but then … I just didn’t… .”

“What’d you do Sunday?”

She wagged her head a little. “Nothing. Slept late. Walked around the lakes. Nothing.”

She pressed her free hand over her mouth and squeezed her eyes shut, fighting for composure. Color flooded her pale face as she held her breath against the need to cry. Liska waited a moment.

The old guys were arguing now about performance art.

“How is pissing in a bottle full of crucifixes art?” Beret Man demanded.

The goatee spread his hands. “It makes a statement! Art makes a statement!”

The blond guy turned his paper over to the want ads and snuck a look at Michele. Liska gave him the cop glare and he went back to his reading.

“What about the rest of the weekend?” she asked, coming back to Fine. “What’d you do after work Friday night?”

“Why?” The suspicion was instantaneous, edged with affront and a little bit of panic.

“It’s just routine. We need to establish where Jillian’s family and friends were in case she might have tried to contact them.”

“She didn’t.”

“You were home, then?”

“I went to a late movie, but I have a machine. She would have left a message.”

“Did you ever stay over at Jillian’s apartment?”

Fine sniffed, wiped her eyes and nose with her hand, and took another ragged puff on her cigarette. Her hand was shaking. “Yeah, sometimes. We wrote music together. Jillie won’t perform, but she’s good.”

In and out of present tense when she talked about her friend. That was always a difficult transition for people to make after a death.

“We found some clothes in the dresser of the second bedroom that didn’t look to be hers.”

“That’s my stuff. She’s way the hell over by the river. Sometimes we’d sit up late working on a song and I’d just stay over.”

“Do you have a key to her place?”

“No. Why would I? I didn’t live there.”

“What kind of housekeeper is she?”

“What difference does that make?”

“Neat? Sloppy?”

Fine fussed, impatient with what she didn’t understand. “Sloppy. She left stuff everywhere—clothes, dishes, ashtrays. What difference does it make? She’s dead.”

She ducked her head then, and reddened and struggled as another wave of emotion hit on the heels of that final statement. “She’s dead. He burned her. Oh, God.” A pair of tears squeezed through her lashes and splashed on the paper place mat.

“We don’t know for a fact that anything’s happened to her, Michele.”

Fine abandoned her cigarette in the ashtray and put her face in her hands. Not sobbing, but still struggling to choke the emotions back.

“Maybe she left town for a few days,” Liska said. “We don’t know. Do you?”

“No.”

“Do you know of anyone who would want to hurt Jillian?”

She shook her head.

“She have a boyfriend? Ex-boyfriend? A guy who was interested in her?”

“No.”

“How about yourself? Got a boyfriend?”

“No,” she answered, looking down at the smoldering butt in the ashtray. “Why would I want one?”

“Jillian ever say anything about a man bothering her? Watching her, maybe? Hitting on her?”

Her laugh this time was bitter. “You know how men are. They all look. They all think they have a shot. Who pays any attention to the losers?”

She sniffed and pulled in a deep breath, then let it go slowly and reached for another cigarette. Her nails were bitten to the quick.

“What about her relationship with her father? They get along?”

Fine’s mouth twisted. “She adores him. I don’t know why.”

“You don’t like him?”

“Never met him. But he controls her, doesn’t he? He owns the town house, pays for school, picks the therapist, pays for the therapist. Dinner every Friday. A car.”

It sounded like a sweet deal to Liska. Maybe she could get Bondurant to adopt her. She let the subject drop. It was beginning to sound like if it had a penis, Michele didn’t like it.

“Michele, do you know if Jillian had any distinguishing marks on her body: moles, scars, tattoos?”

Fine gave her a cross look. “How would I know that? We weren’t lovers.”

“Nothing obvious, then. No scar on her arm. No snake tattooed around her wrist.”

“Not that I ever noticed.”

“If you were to look around Jillian’s apartment, would you know if things were missing? Like if she’d packed some clothes and gone somewhere?”

She shrugged. “I guess.”

“Good. Let’s see if we can take a ride.”

WHILE MICHELE FINE squared an hour’s absence with her boss, the Italian stallion, Liska stepped out of the coffeehouse, pulled her cell phone out of her pocket, and dialed Kovac.

The air was crisp, a stiff breeze blowing, as was common for November. Not a bad day. A paler imitation of the glorious weather of late September and early October that made Minnesota rival any state in the union for perfection. Her boys would be out on their bikes after school, trying to squeeze in every last wheelie they could before the snow flew and the sleds came out of storage. They were lucky that hadn’t happened already.

“Moose Lodge,” the gruff voice barked in her ear.

“Can I speak to Bullwinkle? I hear he’s got a dick as long as my arm.”

“Christ, Liska. Is that all you ever think about?”

“That and my bank balance. I can’t get enough either way.”

“You’re preaching to the choir. What have you got for me?”

“Besides the hots? A question. When you went through Jillian’s town house Monday, did you take a tape out of the answering machine?”

“It was digital. No messages.”

“This friend of hers says she called Saturday and left a message. So who erased it?”

“Ooo, a mystery. I hate a mystery. Get anything else?”

“Oh, yeah.” She looked through the window back into the coffee shop. “A tale to rival Shakespeare.”

“SHE WAS PUTTING her life back together,” Lila White’s mother insisted. Her expression had the hard look of someone grown stubborn in the telling and retelling of a lie. A lie she wanted too badly to believe in and couldn’t deep down in her heart.

Mary Moss felt a deep sadness for the woman.

The White family lived in the small farming community of Glencoe, the kind of place where gossip was a common hobby and rumors cut like broken glass. Mr. White was a mechanic at a farm implement dealership. They lived on the edge of town in a neat rambler with a family of concrete deer in the front yard and a swingset out back. The swingset was for the grandchild they were raising: Lila’s daughter, Kylie, a tow-headed four-year-old blessedly immune to the facts of her mother’s death. For now.

“She called us that Thursday night. She’d kicked the drugs, you know. It was the drugs that dragged her down.” The features of Mrs. White’s lumpy face puckered, as if the bitterness of her feelings left a taste in her mouth. “It’s all the fault of that Ostertag boy. He’s the one got her started on the drugs.”

“Now, Jeannie,” Mr. White said with the weariness of pointless repetition. He was a tall, rawboned man with eyes the color of washed-out denim. He had farmer’s creases in his face from too many years of squinting under a bright sun.

“Don’t Jeannie me,” his wife snapped. “Everyone in town knows he peddles drugs, and his parents walk around pretending their shit don’t stink. It makes me sick.”

“Allan Ostertag?” Moss said, referring to her notes. “Your daughter went to high school with him?”

Mr. White sighed and nodded, enduring the process, waiting for it to be over so they could start the healing again and hope this was the last time the wounds would have to be reopened. His wife went on about the Ostertags. Moss waited patiently, knowing that Allan Ostertag was not and had never been a viable suspect in Lila White’s murder, and was, therefore, irrelevant to her. He was not irrelevant to the Whites.

“Had she mentioned seeing anyone in particular last summer?” she asked when the rant ended. “A steady boyfriend? Someone who might have been a problem to her?”

“We’ve answered all these questions before,” Jeannie White said impatiently. “It’s like you people don’t bother to write anything down. ’Course it didn’t matter when it was just our girl dead,” she said, the sarcasm as pointed as a needle. “We didn’t see no task force on the news when it was just our Lila murdered. The police never cared—”

“That’s not true, Mrs. White.”

“They never cared when that drug dealer beat her up last fall neither. They never even bothered to have a trial. It’s like our girl didn’t count.” The woman’s eyes and throat filled with tears. “She wasn’t important enough to anyone but us.”

Moss offered apologies, knowing they wouldn’t be accepted. No explanation could penetrate the hurt, the imagined insult, the anger, the pain. It didn’t matter to the Whites that an individual murder was, by necessity, handled differently from a string of related murders. It mattered to them that the child they had loved had fallen down one of life’s darker paths. It mattered to them she had died a prostitute. That was how she would be remembered by the world, when she was remembered at all. Victim number one, convicted prostitute and drug addict.

The Whites probably saw the headlines in their sleep. The hopes they had held for their daughter to turn her life around had died unfulfilled, and no one else in the world cared that Lila had wanted to become a counselor or that she had been a B student in high school or that she had often cried her heart out over not being able to raise her own child.

In the file folder on the passenger seat of Moss’s car were snapshots of Lila and Kylie in the Whites’ backyard. Smiling and laughing, and wearing party hats for Kylie’s fourth birthday. Photos of mother and daughter splashing in a green plastic wading pool. Three weeks later someone had tortured the life from Lila White, desecrated her body and set it on fire like a pile of garbage.

Victim number one, convicted prostitute and drug addict.

Moss went through the reassurances in her own mind. The police couldn’t form a task force for every homicide in the city. Lila White’s murder had been investigated fully. Sam Kovac had caught the case, and Kovac’s reputation was that he did his best for every victim, regardless of who or what they had been in life.

Still, she couldn’t help but wonder—as Jeannie White had wondered aloud—how differently things might have turned out if Jillian Bondurant had been victim number one.

THE LOCKS HAD been changed on Jillian Bondurant’s town house at Edgewater and a new key delivered to the PD. Liska worked the shiny new key into the dead bolt and opened the door. She went to the bedrooms with Michele Fine and watched as Fine looked through the closets, pausing now and again to linger briefly over something that struck a memory for her.

“Jesus, it’s eerie,” she said, looking around. “Seeing the place so clean.”

“Jillian didn’t have a cleaning service?”

“No. Her old man tried to give her maid service as a present once. He’s the most anal man on the planet. Jillie said no. She didn’t want people going through her stuff.

“I don’t see anything missing,” she said finally.

As she stood at Jillian’s dresser, her gaze drifted across the few objects there: a mahogany jewelry box, some scented candles in mismatched holders, a small porcelain figurine of an elegant woman in a flowing blue dress. She touched the figurine carefully, her expression wistful.

As Fine gathered her few clothing items from the guest bedroom, Liska walked down the steps and took in the main rooms at a glance, seeing the place differently from before she’d met Jillian’s friend. It should have been a mess, but it wasn’t. She’d never known a killer to offer maid services as part of the package, but someone had cleaned the place up. Not just wiped it down to get rid of prints. Cleaned it, folded and put away clothes, washed the dishes.

Her thoughts turned back to Michele Fine and Jillian as friends. They must have seemed an unlikely pair: a billionaire’s daughter and a coffeehouse waitress. If there had been a ransom demand to Peter Bondurant, the relationship would have automatically fallen under scrutiny. Even without it, the suspicions flashed through Liska’s mind out of habit.

Considered and dismissed. Michele Fine was cooperating fully. Nothing she had said or done seemed out of place. Her grief appeared genuine, and was colored with the shades of anger and relief and guilt Liska had encountered time and again in the people a murder victim left behind.

Still, she would run Michele Fine’s name through the computer and see if anything kicked up.

She crossed the living room to the electronic piano. Jillian Bondurant had written music but was too shy to perform. That was the kind of detail that made her a real person in a way that knowing she was Peter Bondurant’s daughter did not. The sheet music stacked neatly on the stand was classical. Another contradiction in Jillian’s image. Liska lifted the padded seat and glanced through the collection there: folk, rock, alternative, new age—