Ashes to Ashes (59 page)

“That made you angry.”

“It made me sick. I got up and turned to tell her so, and she was standing in front of me naked. ‘Don’t you want me, Daddy?’ she said. ‘Don’t you love me?’”

Even the memory astonished him, sickened him. He bent over the wastebasket that had been set beside his chair and retched, but there was nothing left in his stomach. Quinn waited, calm, unemotional, purposely detached.

“Did you have sex with her?” Yurek asked.

Quinn glared at him.

“No! My God!” Peter said, outraged at the suggestion.

“What happened?” Quinn asked. “You fought. She ended up running out.”

“Yes,” he said, calming. “We fought. I said some things I shouldn’t have. She was so fragile. But I was so shocked, so angry. She ran and put her clothes on and left. I never saw her alive again.”

Yurek looked confused and disappointed. “But you said you killed her.”

“Don’t you see? I could have saved her, but I didn’t. I let her go the first time to save myself, my business, my fortune. It’s my fault she became who she did. I let her go Friday night because I didn’t want to deal with that, and now she’s dead. I killed her, Detective, just as surely as if I had stabbed her in the heart.”

Yurek skidded his chair back and got up to pace, looking like a man who’d just realized he’d been cheated in a shell game. “Come on, Mr. Bondurant. You expect us to believe that?” He didn’t have the voice or the edge to play bad cop—even when he meant it. “You were carrying your daughter’s head in a bag. What is that about? A little memento the
real
killer sent you?”

Bondurant said nothing. The mention of Jillian’s head upset him, and he began focusing inward again. Quinn could see him slipping away, allowing his mind to be lured to a place other than this ugly reality. He might go there and not come back for a long time.

“Peter, what were you doing in Jillian’s town house Sunday morning?”

“I went to see her. To see if she was all right.”

“In the middle of the night?” Yurek said doubtfully.

“She wouldn’t return my calls. I left her alone Saturday on Lucas Brandt’s advice. By Sunday morning … I had to do something.”

“So you went there and let yourself in,” Quinn said.

Bondurant looked down at a stain on his sweater and scratched at it absently with his thumbnail. “I thought she would be in bed … then I wondered whose bed she
was
in. I waited for her.”

“What did you do while you were waiting?”

“Cleaned,” he said, as if that made perfect sense and wasn’t in any way odd. “The apartment looked like—like—a sty,” he said, lip curling with disgust. “Filthy, dirty, full of garbage and mess.”

“Like Jillian’s life?” Quinn asked gently.

Tears swelled in Bondurant’s eyes. The cleaning had been more symbolic than for sanitary purposes. He hadn’t been able to change his daughter’s life, but he could clean up her environment. An act of control, and perhaps of affection, Quinn thought.

“You erased the messages on her machine?” he asked.

Bondurant nodded. The tears came harder. Elbows on the table, he cupped his hands around his eyes.

“There was something from LeBlanc?” Quinn ventured.

“That son of a bitch! He killed her as much as I did!”

He curled down toward the tabletop, sobbing hard, a terrible braying sound tearing from the center of his chest up his throat. Quinn waited him out, thinking of Peter coming across Jillian’s music as he straightened and tidied. The music may even have been his primary reason for going there, after the incident in his study Friday night, but Peter, out of guilt, would now claim Jillian’s welfare had been the priority.

Quinn leaned forward and laid his hand on Bondurant’s wrist across the table, establishing a physical link, trying to draw him back into the moment. “Peter? Do you know who really killed Jillian?”

“Her friend,” he said in a thin, weary voice, his mouth twisting at the irony. “Her one friend. Michele Fine.”

“What makes you believe that?”

“She was trying to blackmail me.”

“Was?”

“Until last night.”

“What happened last night?” Quinn asked.

“I killed her.”

EDWYN NOBLE WAS on Quinn the second he stepped out the door of the interview room.

“Not one word of that will be admissible in court, Quinn,” he promised.

“He waived his rights, Mr. Noble.”

“He’s clearly not competent to make those decisions.”

“Take it up with a judge,” Sabin said.

The lawyers turned on each other like a pair of cobras. Yurek pulled aside the assistant prosecutor, Logan, to talk about a warrant for Michele Fine’s home. Kovak stood ten feet down the hall, leaning against the wall, not smoking a cigarette. The lone coyote.

“Need a ride, GQ?” he said with a hopeful look.

Quinn made a very Kovac-like face. “I am definitely now a confirmed masochist. I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but, let’s go.”

THEY RAN THE media gauntlet out of the building, Quinn offering a stone-faced “No comment” to every query hurled at him. Kovac had left his car on the Fourth Avenue side of the building. Half a dozen reporters followed them the whole way. Quinn didn’t speak until Kovac put the car in gear and roared away from the curb.

“Bondurant says he shot Michele Fine and left her body in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. She’d been trying to blackmail him with some of Jillian’s more revealing pieces of music, and with the things Jillian had allegedly confessed to her. Last night was supposed to be the big payoff. He’d bring the money, she’d hand over the music, the tapes she had, et cetera.

“At that point, he didn’t know she’d been involved in Jillian’s murder. He said he was willing to pay to keep the story under wraps, but he took a gun with him.”

“Sounds like premeditation to me,” Kovac said, slapping the dash-mount light on the bracket.

“Right. Then Michele shows up with the stuff in a duffel bag. She shows him some sheet music, a couple of cassettes, zips the bag shut. They make the trade. She starts to go, not thinking he’ll look in the bag again.”

“Never assume.”

Quinn braced himself and held on to the door as the Caprice made a hard right on a red light. Horns blared.

“He looked. He shot her in the back and left her where she fell.”

“What the hell was she thinking, giving him the head?”

“She was thinking she’d be long gone before he called the cops,” Quinn speculated. “I noticed travel magazines at her apartment when Liska and I were there the other day. I’ll bet she would have gone straight to the airport and got on a plane.”

“What about Vanlees? Did he say anything about Vanlees?”

Quinn held his breath as Kovac cut between an MTC bus and a Snap-on tool van. “Nothing.”

“You don’t think she was working alone?”

“No. We know she didn’t kill on her own. She wouldn’t have tried the blackmail on her own either. Willing victims of a sexual sadist are virtual puppets. Their partner holds the power, he controls them through physical abuse, psychological abuse, sexual abuse. No way she did this on her own.”

“And Vanlees was in custody by the time this went down.”

“They probably had the plan in place and she followed through without knowing where he was. She would have been afraid not to.
If
he’s the guy.”

“They knew each other.”

“You and I know each other. We haven’t killed anyone. I have a hard time seeing Vanlees manipulating anyone at that level. He fits the wrong profile.”

“Who, then?”

“I don’t know,” Quinn said, scowling at himself rather than at Kovac gunning the accelerator and nearly sideswiping a minivan. “But if we’ve got Fine, then we’ve got a thread to follow.”

FOUR RADIO CARS had arrived ahead of them. The Minneapolis Sculpture Garden was an eleven-acre park dotted with more than forty works by prominent artists, the feature piece being a fifty-two-foot-long spoon holding a nine-and-a-half-foot-tall red cherry. The place had to be a bit surreal in the best of times, Quinn thought. As a crime scene it was something out of
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
.

“Report from the local ERs,” Yurek called as he climbed out of his car. “No gunshot wounds meeting Michele Fine’s description.”

“He said they met at the spoon,” Quinn said as they walked quickly in that direction.

“He’s sure he hit her?” Kovac asked. “It was dark.”

“He says he hit her, she cried out, she went down.”

“Over here!” one of the uniforms called, waving from near the bridge of the spoon. His breath was like a smoke signal in the cold gray air.

Quinn broke into a jog with the others. The news crews wouldn’t be far behind.

“Is she dead?” Yurek demanded as he ran up.

“Dead? Hell,” the uniform said, pointing to a large cherry-red bloodstain in the snow. “She’s gone.”

ROB CAUGHT KATE by the hair and began to pull her up. Kate’s fingers closed around the metal nail file in her pocket. She waited. This might be the best weapon she would get her hands on. But she had to use it accurately, and she had to use it at the perfect moment. Strategies ran through her head like rats in a maze, each desperate for a way out.

Rob slapped her face, and the taste of blood bloomed in her mouth like a rose.

“I know you’re not dead. You keep underestimating me, Kate,” he said. “Even now you taunt me. That’s very stupid.”

Kate hung her head, curling her legs beneath her. He wanted her frightened. He wanted to see it in her eyes. He wanted to smell it on her skin. He wanted to hear it in her voice. That was his thing. That was what he soaked up listening to the tapes of victims—his own victims and the victims of others. It sickened her to think how many victims had poured their hearts out to him, him feeding his sick compulsions on their suffering and their fear.

Now he wanted her afraid, and he wanted her submissive. He wanted her sorry for every time she’d ever mouthed off to him, for every time she’d defied him. And if she gave him what he wanted, his sense of victory would only further fuel his cruelty.

“I will be your master today, Kate,” he said dramatically.

Kate raised her head and gave him a long, level, venomous stare, screwing up her courage as she sucked at the cut in her mouth. He would make her pay for this, but it seemed the way to go.

Very deliberately, she spit the blood in his face. “The hell you will, you miserable little shit.”

Instantly furious, he swung at her with the sap. Kate ducked the punch and launched herself upward, bringing her right elbow up under his chin, knocking his teeth together. She pulled the nail file and stabbed it into his neck to the hilt just above his collarbone.

Rob screamed and grabbed at the file, falling back, crashing into the hall table. Kate ran for the kitchen.

If she could just get out of the house, get to the street. Surely he would have disabled her car somehow, or blocked it in. To get help, she had to get to the street.

She dashed through the dining room, knocking chairs over as she ran past. Rob came behind her, grunting as he hit something, swearing, spitting the words out between his teeth like bullets.

He couldn’t outrun her on his stubby legs. He seemed not to have a gun. Through the kitchen and she was home free. She’d run to the neighbor across the street. The graphic designer who had his office in his attic. He was always home.

She burst into the kitchen, faltered, then pulled up, her heart plummeting.

Angie stood just inside the back door, tears streaming down her face, a butcher’s knife in her hand—pointed directly at Kate’s chest.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she sobbed, shaking badly.

Suddenly, the conversation that had taken place between Angie and Rob in the den took on a whole new dimension. Pieces of the truth began to click into place. The picture they made was distorted and surreal.

If Rob was the Cremator, then it was Rob Angie had seen in the park. Yet the man in the sketch Oscar had drawn at her instruction looked no more like Rob Marshall than he looked like Ted Sabin. She had sat across from him in the interview room, giving no indication …

In the next second Rob Marshall was through the door behind her and six ounces of steel packed in sand and bound in leather connected with the back of her skull. Her legs folded beneath her and she dropped to her knees on the kitchen floor, her last sight: Angie DiMarco.

This is why I don’t do kids. You never know what they’re thinking.

Then everything went dark.

THE TRAVEL MAGAZINES were still scattered on Michele Fine’s coffee table with pages folded and destinations circled with notations in the margins.
Get a tan! Too $$$. Nightlife!

The murderer as a tourist, Quinn thought, turning the pages.

When the police checked with the airlines, they might find she had booked flights to one or more of those locations. If they were very lucky, they would also find matching flights booked in the name of her partner. Whoever he was.

With the amount of blood at the scene in the sculpture garden, it seemed highly unlikely Fine had taken herself out of the park. Gil Vanlees had been in custody. Both Fine and the money Peter Bondurant had brought to the scene and subsequently walked away from were gone.

The cops swarmed over the apartment like ants, invading every cupboard, crack, and crevice, looking for anything that might give them a clue as to who Fine’s partner in murder was. A scribbled note, a doodled phone number, an envelope, a photograph, something, anything. Adler and Yurek were canvassing the neighbors for information. Did they know her? Had they seen her? What about a boyfriend?

The main living areas of the apartment looked exactly as they had the day before. Same dust, same filthy ashtray. Tippen found a crack pipe in an end table drawer.

Quinn went down the hall, glancing into a bathroom worthy of a speedtrap gas station, and on to Michele Fine’s bedroom. The bed was unmade. Clothes lay strewn around the room like outlines where dead bodies had fallen. Just as in the rest of the apartment, there were no personal touches, nothing decorative—except in the window that faced south and the back side of another building.