Ashes to Ashes (52 page)

He could see that hadn’t occurred to her. He saw the flash of surprise followed by annoyance with herself for having missed it. But of course Kate wouldn’t think of herself as a possible victim. She was strong, in control, in charge. But not invulnerable.

Quinn got up from the couch and went to her, still naked, and put his arms around her.

“God, what a nightmare,” she whispered. “Do you think she could still be alive?”

“She could be,” he said, because he knew Kate needed to hear it. But he also knew that she was as aware of the odds and the horrible possibilities as he was. She knew as well as he did Angie DiMarco might still be alive, and that they might have been kinder hoping she was not.

I am dead
My need alive
Keeps me going
Keeps me hoping
Will he want me?
Will he take me?
Will he hurt me?
Will he love me?

The words cut at him. The music clawed at his senses. He played the tape anyway. Letting it hurt, needing to feel.

Peter sat in his office, the only light coming in through the window, just enough to turn black to charcoal, gray to ash. The anxiety, the guilt, the longing, the pain, the need, the emotions he could seldom grasp and never express, were trapped inside him, the pressure building until he thought his body would simply explode and there would be nothing left of him except fragments of tissue and hair stuck to the walls and the ceiling and the glass of the photographs of him with the people he had deemed important in his life in the last decade.

He wondered if any part of him would touch the pictures of Jillie crowded down into one small corner of the display. Out of the way, not calling any attention. Subtle shame—of her, of his failure, his mistakes.

“… We need to know the truth, Peter, and I think you’re holding back pieces of the puzzle… . We need to see the whole picture.”

Dark pieces of a disturbing picture he didn’t want anyone to see.

The surge of shame and rage was like acid in his veins.

I am dead
My need alive
Keeps me going
Keeps me hoping
Will he want me?
Will he take me?
Will he hurt me?
Will he love me?

The sound of the phone was like a razor slicing along his nerves. He grabbed the receiver with a trembling hand.

“Hello?”

“Da-ddy, Da-ddy, Da-ddy,” the voice sang like a siren. “Come see me. Come give me what I want. You know what I want. I want it now.”

He swallowed hard at the bile in his throat. “If I do, will you leave me alone?”

“Daddy, don’t you love me?”

“Please,” he whispered. “I’ll give you what you want.”

“Then you won’t want me anymore. You won’t like what I have in store. But you’ll come anyway. You’ll come for me. Say you’ll come.”

“Yes,” he breathed.

He was crying as he hung up, tears scalding his eyelids, burning his cheeks, blurring his vision. He opened the lower right-hand drawer of his desk, took out a matte black Glock nine-millimeter semiautomatic, and slipped it gently into the black duffel bag at his feet. He left the room, the duffel bag hanging heavy in his hand. Then he left the house and drove out into the night.

“WHAT’S YOUR DREAM job?” Elwood asked.

“Technical consultant to a cop movie, set in Hawaii and starring Mel Gibson,” Liska said without hesitation. “Turn the motor on. I’m cold.” She shivered and burrowed her hands down into her coat pockets.

They sat in an employee lot near the Target Center, watching Gil Vanlees’s truck by the white glow of the security light. Like the vultures they were often compared to, reporters circled the block around the building and sat in the many small parking lots scattered around it, waiting. They had been on Vanlees like ticks as soon as his name had been leaked in connection with Jillian Bondurant’s murder.

Vanlees had yet to leave the building. Groupies lingering after the Dave Matthews Band concert required his full attention. Word from detectives inside the Target Center was that management had kept him behind the scenes—afraid of a lawsuit from Vanlees if they dismissed him based on suspicion alone, afraid of lawsuits from the public if they let him work as usual and something went awry. Press passes had been handed from music critics to crime reporters, who had roamed the halls, looking for him.

The radio crackled. “Coming your way, Elwood.”

“Roger.” Elwood hung up the handset and chewed thoughtfully on his snack. The whole car smelled of peanut butter. “Mel Gibson is married and has six children.”

“Not in my fantasy he doesn’t. Here he comes.”

Vanlees came lumbering through the gate. Half a dozen reporters swarmed after him like a cloud of gnats. Elwood ran the window down to catch their voices.

“Mr. Vanlees, John Quinn has pegged you as a suspect in the Cremator murders. What do you have to say about that?”

“Did you murder Jillian Bondurant?”

“What did you do with her head? Did you have sex with it?”

Elwood sighed heavily. “It’s enough to put you off the First Amendment.”

“Assholes,” Liska complained. “They’re worse than assholes. They’re the bacteria that gather in assholes.”

Vanlees had no comment for the reporters. He kept moving, having quickly learned that rule of survival. When he was directly in front of their car, Elwood cranked the key and started the engine. Vanlees bolted sideways and hurried on toward his truck.

“A nervous, antisocial individual,” Elwood said, putting the last of his sandwich in a plastic evidence bag as Vanlees fumbled with his keys at the door of his truck.

“The guy’s a twitch,” Nikki said. “
My
twitch. Do you think I’ll get anything out of it if we nail him for these murders?”

“No.”

“Be brutally honest, why don’t you? I don’t want to hold any false expectations.”

Vanlees gunned his engine and pulled out of his slot, scattering the reporters. Elwood eased in behind him, then turned the headlights on bright for an instant.

“A commendation would look good on my résumé when I send it off to Mel Gibson’s people.”

“The credit will go to Quinn,” Elwood said. “The media is enamored of mind hunters.”

“And he looks great on television.”

“He could be the next Mel Gibson.”

“Better—he’s not losing his hair.”

They sat behind Vanlees as he waited to pull onto First Avenue, and rolled out right behind him, causing an oncoming car to hit the brakes and the horn.

“Think Quinn would hire me as a technical adviser when he goes Hollywood?” Liska asked.

“It seems to me advising isn’t your true goal,” Elwood observed.

“True. I’d rather have a participatory role, but I don’t think that’ll happen. I think he’s haunted. Doesn’t he seem haunted to you?”

“Driven.”

“Driven
and
haunted. Double whammy.”

“Very romantic.”

“If you’re Jane Eyre.” Liska shook her head. “I don’t have time for driven
or
haunted. I’m thirty-two. I’ve got kids. I need Ward Cleaver.”

“He’s dead.”

“My luck.”

They stayed on the truck’s tail, negotiating the maze of streets going toward Lyndale. Elwood checked the rearview, grumbling.

“We look like a funeral procession. There must be nine loads of newsies behind us.”

“They’ll get everything on videotape. Put away the nightsticks and saps.”

“Police work just isn’t the fun it used to be.”

“Watch him in here,” Liska said as they came to the worst of the confusing tangle of streets. “We might get him on a traffic violation. I break nine laws every time I drive through here.”

Gil Vanlees didn’t break any. He kept his speed a fraction under the limit, driving as if he were carrying a payload of eggs in crystal cups. Elwood stayed on the truck’s tail, riding Vanlees’s bumper a little too close, violating his space, goading him.

“What do you think, Tinks? Is he the guy, or is this the Olympic Park bombing all over again?”

“He fits the profile. He’s hiding
something
.”

“Doesn’t make him a killer. Everybody’s hiding something.”

“I would have liked a chance to find out what, without a pack of reporters at our heels. He’d be an idiot to try anything now.”

“They might not be at our heels long,” Elwood said, checking the rearview again. “Look at this son of a bitch.”

An older Mustang hatchback came up alongside them on the left, two men in the front seat, their focus on Vanlees’s pickup.

“That’s balls,” Liska said.

“They probably think we’re the competition.”

The Mustang sped up, passing them, coming even with Vanlees, the passenger’s window rolling down.

“Son of a bitch!” Elwood yelled.

Vanlees sped up. The car stayed with him.

Liska grabbed the handset and radioed their position, calling for backup and reporting the tag number on the Mustang. Elwood grabbed the dash light off the seat, slapped it onto the bracket, and turned it on. Ahead of them, the passenger in the car was leaning out the window with a telephoto lens.

Vanlees gunned ahead. The car raced even with him.

The flash was brilliant, blinding.

Vanlees’s truck swerved into the Mustang, knocking it ass end into the next lane, directly into the path of an oncoming cab. There was no time for even the screech of tires, no time for brakes, just the horrific sound of tons of metal colliding. The photographer was thrown as the cars hit. He tumbled across the street like a rag doll that had been flung out a window. A ball of flame rolled through the Mustang.

Liska saw it all in slow motion—the crash, the fire, Vanlees’s truck ahead of them swerving to the curb, one wheel jumping up, the front bumper taking out a parking meter. And then time snapped back to real speed, and Elwood swung the Lumina past the truck and dove into the curb at an angle, cutting off the escape route. He slammed the car into park and was out the door. Liska clutched the handset in a trembling fist and called for ambulances and a fire truck.

Some of the cars that had been tailing them pulled to the side. Several raced past, making Elwood dodge them as he ran for the burning wreck. Liska shoved her door open and went for Vanlees as he tumbled out of his pickup. She could smell the whiskey on him two feet away.

“I didn’t do it!” he shouted, sobbing.

Camera flashes went off like strobes, illuminating his face in stark white light. Blood ran from his nose and his mouth where his face had evidently met with the steering wheel. He threw his arms up to block the glare and spoil the shots. “Goddammit, leave me alone!”

“I don’t think so, Gil,” Liska said, reaching for his arm. “Up against the truck. You’re under arrest.”

“NOW I KNOW how they break spies with sleep deprivation,” Kovac said, striding toward Gil Vanlees’s truck, which was still hung up on the curb. “I’m ready to transfer to records so I can get some sleep.”

Liska scowled at him. “Come crying to me when you have a nine-year-old look up at you with big teary blue eyes and ask why you didn’t come to his Thanksgiving pageant at school when he was playing a Pilgrim and everything.”

“Jesus, Tinks,” he growled, hanging a cigarette on his lip. The apology was in his eyes. “We shouldn’t be allowed to breed.”

“Tell it to my ovaries. What the hell are you doing here anyway?” she asked, turning him away from the reporters. “Trying to get yourself fired altogether? You’re supposed to lie low.”

“I’m bringing you coffee.” The picture of innocence, he handed her a steaming foam cup. “Just trying to support the first team.”

Even as he said it, his gaze was roaming to Vanlees’s truck.

The truck was surrounded by uniformed cops and the crime scene team setting up to do their thing. Portable lights illuminated it from all angles, giving the scene the feel of a photo shoot for a Chevy ad. The totaled cars sitting in the middle of the street were being dealt with by tow trucks.

Reporters hung around the perimeter of the scene, backed off by the uniforms, their interest in the accident made all the more keen by their own involvement in the drama.

“Any word on your replacement?” Liska asked.

Kovac lit a cigarette and shook his head. “I put in a word for you with Fowler.”

She looked surprised. “Wow, thanks, Sam. You think they’ll listen?”

“Not a chance. My money’s on Yurek because they can scare him. So what’s the latest here?”

“Vanlees is at HCMC getting looked at before we haul his sorry ass downtown. I think he broke his nose. Other than him, we’ve got one dead, one critical, one in good condition.” Liska leaned back against the car she and Elwood had been riding in. “The driver of the Mustang is toast. The cabbie broke both ankles and cracked his head, but he’ll be okay. The photographer is in surgery. They think his brain is bleeding. I wouldn’t be too optimistic. Then again, I wouldn’t have said he had a brain, doing what he was doing.”

“Do we know who these guys are—were?”

“Kevin Pardee and Michael Morin. Freelancers looking to score with an exclusive photo. Life and death in the age of tabloid news. Now they’re the headline.”

“How’d Vanlees get behind the wheel if he was drunk enough you could smell it on him?”

“You’d have to ask the reporters that. They were the ones crowded around him as he left the building. All our people had to watch him from a distance or spark a lawsuit for harassment.”

“Ask the reporters,” Sam grumbled. “They’ll be the first ones to raise questions about
our
negligence. Scumsuckers. How’s Elwood?”

“Burned his hands pretty bad trying to get Morin out of the car. He’s at the hospital. Singed his eyebrows off too. Looks pretty damn goofy.”

“He looked goofy to start with.”

“Vanlees registered .08 on the Breathalyzer. Lucky for us. I was able to impound the truck. Gotta inventory everything in it,” she said with a shrug, blinking false innocence. “Can’t know what we might find.”