Ashes to Ashes

by Tami Hoag

  Kovac had offered him space at what the task force had unofficially dubbed the Loving Touch of Death offices. He had declined. He needed separation, isolation. He couldn't be there when a dozen cops were tossing theories and suspect names like a chopped salad. He already felt tainted as it was.

  Now word was out that John Quinn had been brought on board the Cremator case. Kovac had called with the bad news after the press briefing. It was only a matter of hours before he would have to deal with the media himself.

  Damn, he'd wanted more time. He had these next few hours. He should have settled in and lost himself, but he couldn't seem to. Exhaustion pulled at him. His ulcer was burning. He was hungry and knew he needed fuel to keep his brain running, but he didn't want to waste the time going out. There was too much information and the buzz of too much caffeine swarming in his head. And there was a familiar sense of restlessness vibrating deep within—the urgency that came with every on-site case, compounded this time by extenuating circumstances and intrusive, fragmented memories from the past. Compounded again by a feeling that had been creeping up on him more and more and more lately—fear. The fear that he wouldn't make a difference in the case fast enough. The fear that he would screw up. The fear that the fatigue pressing down on him would suddenly be too much. The fear that what he really wanted was to just walk away from it all.

  Needing to move to escape the emotions, he began to pace back and forth in front of the wall of notes, taking in snatches of them at a glance. The faces of Bondurant and Brandt blew around inside his head like leaves.

  Peter Bondurant was holding back more than he was giving them.

  Lucas Brandt had a license to keep secrets.

  Quinn wished he'd never met either of them. He should have argued harder against coming here so early in the investigation, he thought, rubbing at a knot in his right shoulder. The issue was control. If he walked onstage with his strategy mapped out, he had the upper hand.

  That methodology applied to more than just this case. It was how he ran his whole life—from dealing with the bureaucracy on the job, to dealing with the Chinese people who ran the mailbox place where he kept a box, to buying his groceries. In any and all situations and relationships, control was key.

  Kate slipped into the back of his mind, as if to taunt him. How many times over the years had he replayed what had happened between them, adjusting his own actions and reactions to get a different outcome? More times than he would admit. Control and strategy were his watchwords. He'd had neither where Kate was concerned. One minute they'd been acquaintances, then friends, then in over their heads. No time to think, too tangled up in the moment to have any perspective, drawn together by a need and a passion that was stronger than either of them. And then it was over, and she was gone, and . . . nothing. Nothing but regrets that he had let lie, sure that they both would eventually see it was for the best.

  It was for the best. For Kate anyway. She had a life here. She had a new career, friends, a home. He should have had sense enough to back away from all that, leave well enough alone, but the temptation of opportunity lured him like a crooked finger and a seductive smile. And the force of all those regrets pushed him from behind.

  He supposed five years was a long time to carry regrets, but he'd carried others longer. Cases not solved, trials lost, a child-killer who had slipped away. His marriage, his mother's death, his father's alcoholism. Maybe he never let anything go. Maybe that was why he felt so hollow inside: There was no room left for anything but the dried detritus of his past.

  He swore under his breath, disgusted with himself. He was supposed to be delving into the mind of a criminal, not his own.

  He didn't remember sitting back against the desk, had no idea how many minutes he'd lost. He rubbed his big hands over his face, licked his lips, and caught the phantom taste of scotch. An odd psychological quirk, and a need that would go unfulfilled. He didn't allow himself to drink. He didn't allow himself to smoke. He didn't allow himself much. If he added regret to that list, what would he have left?

  He walked to the section of wall where he had taped up brief notes on the Cremator's victims, scrawled in his own hand in colored markers. All caps. Tight, with a hard right-hand slant. The kind of handwriting that made graphologists raise their brows and give him a wide berth.

  Photographs of all three women were taped above his notes. A three-ring binder lay open on the desk, filled with page after page of neatly typed reports, maps, scale drawings of the crime scenes, crime scene photographs, autopsy protocols—his portable bible of the case. But he found it helpful to lay out some of the basic information in a more linear way, and thus the notes on the wall and the photographs of three smiling women—gone now from this world, their lives snuffed out like candles, their dignity torn violently from them.

  Three white women. All between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-three. Height varied from five five to five nine. Body types ranged from large-boned Lila White to petite Fawn Pierce to average Jane Doe/Jillian Bondurant.

  Two prostitutes and a college student. They had lived in different parts of town. The hookers worked two different neighborhoods as a rule, neither of which was frequented by Jillian Bondurant. Lila and Fawn may have crossed paths occasionally, but it was highly unlikely Jillian would have frequented any of the same bars or restaurants or stores.

  He had considered the drug connection, but they had nothing to support it so far. Lila White had gotten straight after entering a county program more than a year ago. Fawn Pierce had never been known to use, although she'd had a reputation for the occasional days-long bender on cheap vodka. And Jillian? No drugs had been found in her home, none in her system. She had no criminal record relating to drug use. As yet, no anecdotal stories of drug use.

  “You think they'd like people to know why their daughters became whores and drug addicts?”

  He could still hear the bitterness in Peter Bondurant's voice. Where had it come from?

  Jillian was the piece that didn't fit in the puzzle of these crimes. She was the one that skewed the profile. There was a common type of killer who preyed on prostitutes. Prostitutes were high-risk victims, easy pickings. Their killers tended to be socially inadequate, underemployed white males who had a history of humiliating experiences with women and sought to get back at the gender by punishing what they considered to be the worst of the lot.

  Unless Jillian had led a secret life as a hooker . . . Not beyond the realm, he supposed, but so far there were no indications Jillian had had a single boyfriend, let alone a list of johns.

  “Boys didn't interest her. She didn't want temporary relationships. She'd been through so much. . . .”

  What had she been through? Her parents' divorce. Her mother's illness. A stepfather in a new country. What else? Something deeper? Darker? Something that pushed her into therapy with Lucas Brandt.

  “. . . You should consider that the problems Jillian brought to me may have had nothing whatsoever to do with her death. Her killer may not have known anything at all about her.”

  “But I'll bet you a dollar he did, Dr. Brandt,” he said softly, staring at the snapshot of the girl. He could feel it in his gut. Jillian was the key. Something in her life had put her in the crosshairs of this killer. And if they could find out what that something was, then they might have a hope in hell of catching the son of a bitch.

  He went back to the desk and flipped through the binder pages to the section of photographs: eight-by-ten color prints, neatly labeled as to subject matter. The crime scenes: general shots, lay-of-the-land shots, body position from various angles, close-ups of the burned, defiled women. And from the ME's office: general and close-up shots of the victims before and after clean-up at the morgue, autopsy photographs, close-up shots of wounds. Wounds inflicted before death—indicative of a sexual sadist. Wounds inflicted after death—which were more fetishistic than sadistic, intrinsic to the killer's fantasies.

  Sophisticated fantasies. Fantasies he'd been deve
loping for a long, long time.

  He paged slowly through the close-ups of the wounds, examining every mark the killer had left, lingering on the stab wounds to the victims' chests. Eight stab wounds clustered in a group, longer wounds alternating with shorter in a specific pattern.

  Of all the gruesome aspects of the murders, this bothered him most. More than the burning. The burning seemed more for show, making a public statement. Ashes to ashes. A symbolic funeral, the end of his connection to the victim. These stab wounds meant something more personal, intimate. What?

  A cacophony of voices filled Quinn's head: Bondurant's, Brandt's, the medical examiner's, Kovac's; cops and coroners and experts and agents from hundreds of past cases. All of them with an opinion or a question or an ax to grind. All of them so loud he couldn't hear himself think anymore. And the fatigue only seemed to magnify the noise until he wanted to beg someone to turn it off.

  The Mighty Quinn. That was what they called him back in Quantico. If they could see him now . . . Feeling as if he might choke on the fear of missing something or turning the investigation in the wrong way.

  The system was on overload, and he was the one at the switch—and there was the most frightening thought: that only he could make things change, and he wouldn't make things change because as awful as this was, the alternative scared him even more. Without the job, there was no John Quinn.

  A fine trembling started deep within him and subtly worked its way out into his arms. He fought against it, hating it, tightening his biceps and triceps, trying to force the weakness back down inside him. Eyes squeezed shut, he dropped to the floor and began push-ups. Ten, twenty, thirty, more, until his arms felt as if the skin would burst open, unable to contain the straining muscle mass, until the pain burned the noise out of his mind and all he could hear was the pounding of his own pulse. And then he forced himself to his feet, breathing hard, warm and damp with sweat.

  He focused on the photograph before him, seeing not the torn flesh or the blood or the corpse; seeing only the pattern of the wound. X over X.

  “Cross my heart,” he murmured, tracing a fingertip over the lines. “Hope to die.”

  “A SERIAL KILLER stalks the streets of Minneapolis. Today, Minneapolis police released a composite sketch of the man who may have brutally slain three women, and that is our top story tonight . . .”

  The women of the Phoenix House sat in, on, and around the mismatched assortment of chairs and couches in the living room, their attention on the broad-shouldered, square-jawed anchor of the Channel Eleven news. The camera cut to film footage of the afternoon press briefing, the chief of police holding up the sketch of the Cremator, then the screen was filled with the sketch itself.

  Angie watched from the doorway, her attention on the women. A couple of them weren't much older than she was. Four were in their twenties. One was older, fat, and ugly. The fat one wore a sleeveless top because the furnace had gone haywire and the house was as hot and dry as a desert. Her upper arms were flabby and fish-belly white. Her stomach rested on her thighs when she sat down.

  Angie knew the woman had been a hooker, but she couldn't imagine a man ever being hard up enough to pay to have sex with her. Men liked pretty girls, young girls. Didn't matter how old or ugly the man was, they all wanted pretty girls. That was Angie's experience. Maybe that was why Fat Arlene was there. Maybe she couldn't get a man to pay her, and the Phoenix was her retirement home.

  A redhead who had the thin, pale, bruised look of an addict started to cry when photographs of the three murder victims came onscreen. The other women pretended not to notice. Toni Urskine, who ran the Phoenix, perched on the arm of the redhead's chair, leaned down, and touched her shoulder.

  “It's okay,” she said softly. “It's okay to cry. Fawn was your friend, Rita.”

  The redhead pulled her bony bare feet up onto the seat of her chair and buried her head against her knees, sobbing. “Why'd he have to kill her that way? She didn't hurt nobody!”

  “There's no making sense of it,” another one said. “It could have been any of us.”

  A fact that was clear to all of them, even the ones who tried to deny it.

  Fat Arlene said, “You gotta be smart about who you go with. You gotta have a sense about it.”

  A black woman with ratty dreadlocks shot her a mean glare. “Like you got to pick and choose. Who wanna tie your fat ass down? See all that fat jiggling like Jell-O while he cut you up.”

  Arlene's face went red and squeezed tight, eyes disappearing in the round mounds of cheeks and puffy brows. She looked like a chow chow Angie had seen once. “You can just shut your hole, you bony bitch!”

  Looking angry, Toni Urskine left the crying redhead and moved toward the middle of the room, holding her hands up like a referee. “Hey! None of that! We've got to learn to respect and care for one another. Remember: group esteem, gender esteem, self-esteem.”

  Easy for her to say, Angie thought, slipping back from the door. Toni Urskine had never had to go down on some old pervert to get enough money for a meal. She was little miss do-gooder, in her casual-chic outfits from Dayton's and a hundred-dollar hairdo by Horst. She drove up to this crappy house in her Ford Explorer from some beautiful home out in Edina or Minnetonka. She didn't know what it did to a person inside to find out she was worth only twenty-five bucks.

  “We all care about these murder victims,” Urskine said passionately, dark eyes shining, her sharp-featured face aglow. “We all are angry that the police have done virtually nothing until now. It's an outrage. It's a slap in the face. It's the city of Minneapolis telling us the lives of women in desperate circumstances mean nothing. We need to be angry about that, not angry with each other.”

  The women listened, some intent, some halfheartedly, some pretending not to.

  “I think what we need here is involvement. We need to be proactive,” Urskine said. “We'll go down to city hall tomorrow. The press can hear our side of it. We'll get copies of the composite sketch and canvass . . .”

  Angie backed away from the door and moved silently down the hall. She didn't like it when people started talking about the Cremator cases. The Phoenix women weren't supposed to know who she was or that she was involved in the case, but Angie always got the tense feeling that the other women would look at her and somehow figure out she was the mystery witness. She didn't want anyone to know.

  She didn't want it to be true.

  Sudden tears filled her eyes and she rubbed her hands against them. No show of emotion. If she showed what she felt, then someone would see a weakness in her, or a need, or the madness that sucked her into the Zone and made her cut herself. No one would understand that the blade severed the connection to insanity.

  “Is everything all right?”

  Startled, Angie jerked around and stared at the man standing in the open doorway to the basement. Late thirties, good-looking, dressed in tan chinos and a Ralph Lauren Polo shirt to work on the furnace: He had to be some relation to Toni Urskine. Sweat and dirt streaked his face. He worked a gray rag between hands dark with grime and something the color of blood.

  He glanced down as Angie did and looked back up with a crooked smile. “The old furnace in this place,” he said by way of explanation. “I keep it running with willpower and rubber bands.

  “Greggory Urskine,” he said, sticking out his hand.

  “You cut yourself,” Angie said, not accepting the gesture, her gaze still on the smear of blood that crossed his palm.

  Urskine looked at it and rubbed the rag over it, chuckling in that nervous way people sometimes have when they are trying to make a good impression. Angie just stared at him. He looked a little like Kurt Russell, she thought: a wide jaw and small nose, tousled sandy hair. He wore glasses with silver wire rims. He had cut himself that morning shaving his upper lip.

  “Aren't you hot in that jacket?” he asked.

  Angie said nothing. She was sweating like a horse, but the sleeves of her sweater were too short and
didn't cover all the scars on her arms. The jacket was a necessity. If she got any money out of Kate, she was going to buy herself some clothes. Maybe something brand new and not from the Goodwill or a thrift shop.

  “I'm Toni's husband—and handyman,” Urskine said. He narrowed his eyes. “I'm guessing you're Angie.”

  Angie just stared at him.

  “I won't tell anyone,” Urskine said in a confidential tone. “Your secret's safe with me.”

  It seemed like he was making fun of her somehow. Angie decided she didn't like him, handsome or not. There was something about the eyes behind the expensive designer glasses that bothered her. Like he was looking down at her, like she was a bug or something. She wondered idly if he had ever paid a woman for sex. His wife seemed like the kind of woman who thought sex was dirty. Saving women from having to do it was Toni Urskine's mission in life.

  “We're all very concerned about this case,” he went on, looking serious. “The first victim—Lila White—was a resident here for a while. Toni took it hard. She loves this place. Loves the women. Works like a trooper for the cause.”

  Angie crossed her arms. “And what do you do?”

  Again with the flashing smile, the nervous chuckle. “I'm an engineer at Honeywell. Currently on leave so I can help fix this place up before winter—and finally finish my master's thesis.”

  He laughed like that was some kind of big joke. He didn't ask Angie what she did, even though not all of the women in this place were hookers. He was looking at her stomach, at the navel ring and tattoos revealed as her too-small sweater crept up. She cocked a hip, flashing a little more skin, and wondered if he was thinking he might want her.

  He glanced back up at her. “So, they've got a good chance of catching this guy, thanks to you,” he said as a half-statement, half-question. “You actually saw him.”

  “No one's supposed to know that,” Angie said bluntly. “I'm not supposed to talk about it.”