by Tami Hoag
“Everything all right, Mr. Vanlees?” Quinn asked without real concern as he dried his hands on a paper towel.
“You're harassing me,” he accused.
Quinn raised his brows. “I'm drying my hands.”
“You followed me in here.”
“Just making sure you're all right, Gil.” My buddy, my pal. “I know you're upset. I don't blame you. But I want you to realize this isn't personal. I'm not after you personally. I'm after a killer. I have to do what I have to do to make that happen. You understand that, don't you? What I'm after is the truth, justice, nothing more, nothing less.”
“I didn't hurt Jillian,” Vanlees said defensively. “I wouldn't.”
Quinn weighed the statements carefully. He never expected a serial killer to admit to anything. Many of them spoke of their crimes in the third person, even after they had been proven guilty beyond any doubt. And many referred to the side of themselves that was capable of committing murder as a separate entity. The evil twin syndrome, he called it. It enabled those with some small scrap of conscience to rationalize, to push the guilt away from themselves and onto their dark side.
The Gil Vanlees standing before him wouldn't kill anyone. But what about his dark side?
“Do you know someone who would hurt Jillian, Gil?” he asked.
Vanlees frowned at his feet. “No.”
“Well, in case you think of someone.” Quinn held out a business card.
Vanlees took it reluctantly and looked at the front and the back, as if searching for some tiny homing device embedded in the paper.
“We need to stop this killer, Gil,” Quinn said, giving him a long, level stare. “He's a bad, bad guy, and I'll do whatever I have to do to put him away. Whoever he is.”
“Good,” Vanlees murmured. “I hope you do.”
He slipped the card into his breast pocket and left the men's room without washing his hands. Quinn frowned and turned back to the sink, staring at himself hard in the mirror, as if he might be able to see some sign in his own visage, some secret sure knowledge that Gil Vanlees was the one.
The pieces were there. If they all fit together right . . . If the cops could come up with just one piece of evidence . . .
Kovac came in a moment later and reeled backward at the lingering smell. “Jeez! What'd that guy eat for breakfast—roadkill?”
“Nerves,” Quinn said.
“Wait'll he figures out there's a cop on his tail every time he turns around.”
“Let's hope he bolts. If you can get in his truck, you might hit pay dirt. Or maybe he's just another pathetic loser who's a couple of clicks to the right of killing anybody. And the real Smokey Joe is sitting home right now, jerking off as he listens to one of his torture tapes.”
“Speaking of, the techno-geek at the BCA called,” Kovac said. “He thinks we'll want to come listen to that tape from last night now that he's played with it.”
“Could he pull out the killer's voice?”
“Killers, plural,” Kovac said soberly. “He thinks there's two of them. And get this. He thinks one is a woman.”
KATE WALKED INTO Sabin's office, thinking it had been just a matter of days since the meeting that had brought her into this case. In some ways it seemed like a year. In that span of days, her life had changed. And it wasn't over yet. Not by a long shot.
Sabin and Rob rose from their chairs. Sabin looking tired and dour. Rob sprang up. His small eyes seemed too bright in his pumpkin head, and he looked as if he had a temperature. The fever of self-righteous indignation.
“So where's the guy with the black hood and the ax?” Kate asked, stopping behind the chair intended for her.
Sabin frowned as if she'd just spoiled his opening line.
Rob looked to him. “See? That's exactly what I'm talking about!”
“Kate, this is hardly the time for cracking jokes,” Sabin said.
“Was I joking? I've managed to lose the only witness in the biggest murder investigation the Cities have seen in years. You're not giving me the ax? After last night, I'm surprised Rob isn't holding it himself.”
“Don't think I wouldn't like to be,” Rob said. “You're entirely too flip, Kate. I've had it with your attitude toward me. You have no respect.”
She turned to Sabin, discounting her boss without saying a word. “But . . . ?”
“But I'm intervening, Kate,” Sabin said, taking his seat. “This is a highly charged situation. Tempers are running high all around.”
“But she always treats me like this!”
“Stop whining, Rob,” Sabin ordered. “She's also the best advocate you've got. You know it. You suggested her for this assignment for very specific reasons.”
“Need I remind you, we no longer have a witness?”
Sabin glared at him. “No, you don't need to remind me.”
“Angie was my responsibility,” Kate said. “No one is more sorry about this than I am. If I could do anything— If I could go back to yesterday and do something differently—”
“You delivered the girl to the Phoenix last night yourself. Isn't that right?” Sabin said in his prosecutor's voice.
“Yes.”
“And the house was supposedly under surveillance by the police. Isn't that right?”
“Yes.”
“Then I blame this nightmare on them. Whatever became of the girl—whether she was taken or left on her own—is their fault, not yours.”
Kate glanced at her watch, thinking the autopsy was long over by now. If there had been any definitive proof the body in the car last night was Angie's, Sabin would know.
“I want you to remain available to the case, Kate—”
“Do we know—” she began, her heart rate picking up as she struggled to phrase the question, as if the answer would depend on how she put it. “The victim in the car—have you heard one way or the other?”
Rob gave her a nasty look. “Oh, didn't one of your police buddies call you from the morgue?”
“I'm sure they're a little busy today.”
“The victim's driver's license was found during the autopsy.” He drew a breath to deliver the news fast and hard, then seemed to think better of it. At that hesitation, Kate felt her nerves tighten. “Maybe you should sit down, Kate,” he said, overly solicitous.
“No.” Already chills were racing up and down her body, raising goose bumps in the wake. Her fingers tightened on the back of the chair. “Why?”
Rob no longer looked smug or angry. His expression had gone carefully blank. “The victim was Melanie Hessler. Your client.”
27
CHAPTER
“I'M SORRY,” Rob said.
His voice sounded far away. Kate felt all the blood drain from her head. Her legs gave way beneath her. She went down on one knee, still holding on to the back of the chair, and scrambled to stand again just as quickly. Emotions swirled through her like a cyclone—shock, horror, embarrassment, confusion. Sabin came around from behind his desk to take her arm as Rob stood staring, flatfooted and awkward, four feet away.
“Are you all right?” Sabin asked.
Kate sank down on the chair, for once not minding when he put his hand on her knee. He knelt beside her, looking at her with concern.
“Kate?”
“Um—no,” she said. She felt dizzy and weak and ill, and suddenly nothing seemed quite real. “I—ah—I don't understand.”
“I'm sorry, Kate,” Rob said again, coming forward suddenly, looking as if it had just occurred to him that he should do something now that it was too late. “I know you were very protective of her.”
“I just tried to call her,” Kate said weakly. “I should have called her Monday, but suddenly there was Angie, and everything just got away from me.”
Images of Melanie Hessler played through her mind in a montage. An ordinary, almost shy woman with a slight build and a bad home perm. Working in an adult bookstore embarrassed her, but she needed the job until she could scrape together enough
money to go back to school. A divorce had left her with no cash and no skills. The attack she had suffered months ago had left her fragile—damaged emotionally, psychologically, physically. She had become chronically fearful, skittish, waiting for her attackers to come after her again—a common fear among rape victims. Only it wasn't the men who had raped her Melanie had to fear, as it turned out.
“Oh, Jesus,” Kate said, putting her head in her hands.
She closed her eyes and saw the body, charred and horrible, disfigured, twisted, shrunken, stinking, violated, mutilated. Kate had held Melanie's hand and comforted her as she had related the awful details of her rape, the deep sense of shame and embarrassment she had felt, the confusion that such a terrible thing should have happened to her.
Melanie Hessler, who had been so frightened of being hurt again. Tortured, brutalized, burned beyond recognition.
And in the back of her mind, Kate could hear the store manager's voice: “I haven't heard boo from her all week.”
When had the son of a bitch taken her? How long had he kept her alive? How long had she begged for death, all the while wondering what kind of God could make her suffer that way?
“Dammit.” Kate let the anger well up, trying to draw strength from it. “Goddammit.”
Rob's voice came to her again through the maze of her thoughts. “Kate, you know it would help you to talk about what you're feeling now. Let it out. You knew Melanie. You'd helped her through so much. To think of her the way you saw her last night—”
“Why?” she demanded of no one in particular. “Why would he choose her? I don't understand how this happened.”
“It probably had to do with her working in that adult bookstore,” Rob offered.
Rob knew the case as well as she did. He had sat in on several meetings with Melanie, had gone over the tapes of those meetings with Kate, and suggested a support group for Melanie.
Tapes.
“Oh, God,” Kate whispered, her strength draining again in a rush. “That tape. Oh, my God.” She doubled over, putting her head in her hands.
“What tape?” Rob asked.
The screams of pain, of fear, of torment and anguish. The screams of a woman she had known, a woman who had trusted her and looked to her for support and protection within the justice system.
“Kate?”
“Excuse me,” she mumbled, pushing unsteadily to her feet. “I have to go be sick.”
The dizziness tilted her one way and then another, and she grabbed what solid objects she could as she went. The ladies' room seemed a mile away. The faces she encountered en route were blurred and distorted, the voices warped and muted and slurred.
One of her clients was dead. One was missing. She was the only common link between them.
Crouching beside a toilet, holding her hair back with one hand, she lost what little she'd eaten, her stomach trying to reject not only the food, but the images and ideas she had just been force-fed in Ted Sabin's office, and the thoughts that were now seeping like poison through her brain. Her client, her responsibility. She was the only link . . .
When the spasms stopped, she sank down on the floor of the stall, feeling weak and clammy, not caring where she was, not feeling the cold of the floor through her slacks. The tremors that shook her body came not from the cold, but from shock and from a heavy black sense of foreboding that swept over her soul like a storm cloud.
One of her clients was dead. Tortured, murdered, burned. One was missing, a hastily wiped trail of blood left behind.
She was the only common link between them.
She had to be logical, think straight. It was coincidence, certainly. How could it be anything else? Rob was right: Smokey Joe had chosen Melanie because of her connection to the adult bookstore that happened to be in the same part of town frequented by hookers like the first two victims. And Angie had already been connected to the killer when Kate had been assigned the case.
Still that black cloud hovered, pressing down on her. A strange instinctive reaction she couldn't shake.
Too much stress. Too little sleep. Too much bad luck. She leaned her head back against the wall and tried to force her brain to move past the images from the crime scenes last night.
Do something.
The directive that had gotten her through every crisis she'd ever faced. Don't just sit there. Do something. Action countered helplessness, regardless of outcome. She had to move, go, think, do something.
The first thing she wanted to do was call Quinn, an instinctive urge she immediately defied. Just because they'd spent a night together didn't mean she could lean on him. There had been no guarantee of a future in those few hours. She didn't know that she even wanted to hope for a future with him. They had too much of a past.
At any rate, this wasn't the time to think about it. Now that she knew Angie hadn't been the victim in the car, there was still some hope the girl was alive. There had to be something she could do to help find her.
She hauled herself up off the floor, flushed the john, and left the stall. A woman in a prissy, snot-green suit stood at one of the sinks, redoing her already perfect makeup, tubes and jars spread out on the counter. Kate gave her a wan smile and moved two sinks down to wash her hands and face.
Making a cup of her hand, she rinsed her mouth out. She looked at herself in the mirror, the makeup woman just in the fringe of her peripheral vision. She looked like hell—bruised up, beat up, dragged down, pale. She looked exactly the way she felt.
“This job will be the death of you, Kate,” she muttered to her reflection.
Brandishing a mascara wand, Makeup Woman paused to frown at her.
Kate flashed her a lunatic smile. “Well, I guess they can't start that competency hearing without me,” she said brightly, and walked out.
Rob waited for her in the hall, looking embarrassed to be within proximity of a women's toilet. He pulled a handkerchief out of his hip pocket and dabbed at his forehead. Kate scowled at him.
“What?” she demanded. “Now that Sabin's out of earshot, you're going to tell me how Melanie Hessler's death is somehow my fault? If I'd turned her case over to you on Monday, that would have somehow prevented her from falling into the hands of this sick son of a bitch?”
He faked a look of affront. “No! Why would you say such a thing?”
“Because maybe that's what I'm thinking,” she admitted, going to the railing overlooking the atrium. “I think nobody can do my job as well as I can. But I didn't do my job, and now Melanie's dead.”
“Why would you think you could have prevented what happened?” He stared at her with a mix of bemusement and resentment. “You think you're Wonder Woman or something? You think everything is about you?”
“No. I just know that I should have called her and I neglected to do so. If I had, at least someone would have known and cared she was missing. She didn't have anyone else.”
“And so she was your responsibility,” he said. “Like Angie.”
“The buck has to stop somewhere.”
“With you. Kathryn the Great,” he said with a hint of bitter sarcasm.
Kate lifted her chin and gave him the imperious glare. “You were quick enough to dump the blame on me last night,” she pointed out. “I don't get you, Rob. You tell me I'm just the person you want for this case, then you turn around and whine about the way I work it. You want to blame me for what's gone wrong, but you don't want me to accept that blame.
“What's your problem?” she asked. “Does my taking responsibility somehow screw up your strategy with Sabin? If I'm willing to take the blame, you can't be contrite and obsequious on my behalf. Is that it?”
The muscles of his wide jaw worked and something nasty flashed in his small eyes. “You'll live to regret the way you treat me, Kate. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But one day—”
“You can't fire me today, Rob,” she said. “Sabin won't let you. And I'm in no mood to play your little posturing games. If you have a point for being
here right now, please get to it. I have a job to do—at least for the next few hours.”
His eyes narrowed to slits and he moved his weight from foot to foot. His face grew darker. She'd pushed too hard, crossed a line she might not be able to get back over with a simple apology and a promise to behave, but she wasn't about to back down from him now.
“The police want you to go over Melanie's interview tapes to see if she mentioned something that might be pertinent to this case,” he said stiffly. “I thought it would be too much for you, considering,” he went on with the affected tone of the wounded martyr. “I was going to offer to help.”
“Was? Does that mean the offer has been rescinded because you've decided I'm an ungrateful bitch after all?”
He gave her an unpleasant smile, his eyes disappearing behind the lenses of his glasses. “No. I won't let your attitude interfere with my job. We'll listen to the tapes together. You listen for things that seem out of place to you because you knew her. I'll listen objectively from a linguistics angle. Meet me in my office in five minutes.”
Kate watched him waddle off, thinking that she hated him almost as much as she was going to hate doing this job.
“Why can't I just stick an ice pick in my forehead?” she muttered to herself, and fell in step after him.
“THIS TAPE IS a copy,” the BCA tech explained.
Kovac, Quinn, Liska, and a skinny guy Kovac called Ears—crowded together around a bank of black-faced electronics equipment studded with an amazing array of knobs and levers and lights and gauges.
“The quality of the sound is much better than you'd ever get off a microcassette recorder,” Ears said. “In fact, I'd say the killer actually had a mike clipped to the victim, or stationed very close to her. That would account for the distortion in the screams. It would also explain why the other voices are so indistinct.”
“You're sure there are two voices?” Quinn asked, the ramifications of that possibility filling his brain.