by Tami Hoag
Edwyn Noble looked startled. “I fail to see what relevance—”
“Oh, I think it could be very relevant.” Kovac still stared hard at Bondurant.
Bondurant said, “Cheryl is a bitter, vindictive woman.”
“You think so? After she's kept her mouth shut all this time? I'd say you're an ungrateful son of a bitch—”
“Kovac, that's enough!” Greer shouted.
“Hardly,” Kovac said. “You want to kiss the ass of a child-molester, Chief, that's your business. I won't do it. I don't give a shit how rich he is.”
“Oh!” Grace Noble exclaimed, pressing her hand to her chest again.
“Maybe we should take this downstairs,” Quinn suggested mildly.
“Fine by me,” Kovac said. “We've got an interview room all warmed up.”
Bondurant had begun to tremble visibly. “I never abused Jillian.”
“Maybe you think you didn't.” Kovac circled slowly around him, moving away from Greer, keeping Bondurant's eyes on him and putting his back to his lawyer. “A lot of pedophiles convince themselves they're doing the kid a favor. Some even confuse fucking little kids with love. Is that what you made yourself believe?”
“You son of a bitch!”
Bondurant launched himself, grabbing Kovac by the lapels and running him backward across the room. They crashed into a side table and sent a pair of brass candlesticks flying like bowling pins.
Kovac held back the urge to roll Bondurant over and pound the shit out of him. After what he'd heard today, he dearly wanted to, and maybe he could have if they'd crossed paths in a dark alley. But men like Peter Bondurant didn't frequent dark alleys, and rough justice never touched them.
Bondurant got in one good swing, glancing his knuckles off the corner of Kovac's mouth. Then Quinn grabbed him by the back of the collar and pulled him away. Greer rushed in between them like a referee, arms spread wide, eyes rolling white in his dark face.
“Sergeant Kovac, I think you should step outside,” he said loudly.
Kovac straightened his tie and jacket. He wiped a smear of blood away from the corner of his mouth, and a smirk twisted his lips as he looked at Peter Bondurant.
“Ask him where he was last night at two o'clock in the morning,” he said. “While someone was setting his daughter's car on fire with a mutilated dead woman inside it.”
“I won't even dignify that with a comment,” Bondurant said, fussing with his glasses.
“Jesus, you're just the cat's ass, aren't you?” Kovac said. “You get away with child abuse. You get away with assaulting an officer. You're into this case like a bad infection. You think you might get away with murder if you want to?”
“Kovac!” Greer screamed.
Kovac looked to Quinn, shook his head, and walked out.
Bondurant jerked out of Quinn's hold. “I want him off the case! I want him off the force!”
“Because he's doing his job?” Quinn asked calmly. “It's his job to investigate. He can't help what he finds, Peter. You're killing the messenger.”
“He's not investigating the case!” he shouted, pacing again, gesturing wildly. “He's investigating me. He's harassing me. I've lost my daughter, for God's sake!”
Edwyn Noble tried to take hold of his arm as he passed. Bondurant twisted away. “Peter, calm down. Kovac will be dealt with.”
“I think we should deal with what Sergeant Kovac found, don't you?” Quinn said to the lawyer.
“It's nonsense,” Noble snapped. “There's nothing to the allegation whatsoever.”
“Really? Sophie Bondurant was an emotionally unstable woman. Why would the courts award her custody of Jillian? More to the point, why wouldn't you fight her, Peter?” Quinn asked, trying to establish eye contact with Bondurant.
Bondurant kept moving, highly agitated, sweating now, pale in the way that made Quinn think he might be ill.
“Cheryl Thorton says the reason you didn't fight was that Sophie threatened to expose you for molesting Jillian.”
“I never hurt Jillian. I wouldn't.”
“Cheryl has always blamed Peter for her husband's accident,” Noble said bitterly. “She didn't want Donald to sell out of Paragon. She punished him for it too. Drove him to drink. She's the one who caused the accident—indirectly—but she blames Peter.”
“And this bitter, vindictive woman never said anything until now about this alleged abuse?” Quinn said. “That would be hard to imagine if not for the generous monthly payments Peter sends to the convalescent home where Donald Thorton is spending the last of his life.”
“Some people would call that generosity,” Noble said.
“And some people would call it blackmail. Some people would say Peter was buying Cheryl Thorton's silence.”
“They'd be wrong,” Noble stated unequivocally. “Donald and Peter were friends, partners. Why shouldn't he see to it the man's needs are taken care of?”
“He took very good care of him in the buyout of Paragon—which, coincidentally, went on about the same time as the divorce,” Quinn continued. “The deal might have been considered overly generous on Peter's part.”
“What was he supposed to do?” Noble demanded. “Try to steal the company from the man who'd helped him build it?”
Bondurant, Quinn noticed, had stopped talking, and now confined his pacing to the corner by the window. Retreating. His head was down and he kept touching his hand to his forehead as if feeling for a fever. Quinn moved casually toward him, neatly cutting his pacing area in half. Subtly crowding his space.
“Why didn't you fight Sophie for custody, Peter?” he asked softly, an intimate question between friends. He kept his own head down, his hands in his pants pockets.
“I was taking over the business. I couldn't handle a child too.”
“And so you left her to Sophie? A woman in and out of mental institutions.”
“It wasn't like that. It wasn't as if she was insane. Sophie had problems. We all have problems.”
“Not the kind that make us kill ourselves.”
Tears filled the man's eyes. He raised a hand as if to shade his eyes from Quinn's scrutiny.
“What did you and Jillian argue about that night, Peter?”
He shook his head a little, moving now in a tight, short line. Pacing three steps, turning, pacing three steps, turning . . .
“She'd gotten a call from her stepfather,” Quinn said. “You were angry.”
“We've been over this,” Edwyn Noble said impatiently, clearly wanting to get between Quinn and his client. Quinn turned a shoulder, blocking him out.
“Why do you keep insisting Jillian is dead, Peter? I don't know that she is. I think she may not be. Why would you say that she is? What did you fight about that night?”
“Why are you doing this to me?” Bondurant whispered in a tortured voice. His prim, tight-lipped mouth was quivering.
“Because we need to know the truth, Peter, and I think you're holding back pieces of the puzzle. If you want the truth—as you say you do—then you have to give those pieces to me. Do you understand? We need to see the whole picture.”
Quinn held his breath. Bondurant was on the edge. He could feel it, see it. He tried to will him over it.
Bondurant stared out the window at the snow, still now, looking numb. “All I wanted was for us to be father and daughter—”
“That's enough, Peter.” Noble stepped in front of Quinn and took his client by the arm. “We're leaving.”
He glared at Quinn. “I thought we understood each other.”
“Oh, I understand you perfectly, Mr. Noble,” Quinn said. “That doesn't mean I'm interested in playing on your team. I'm interested in two things only: the truth, and justice. I don't know that you want either.”
Noble said nothing. He led Bondurant from the room like a caretaker with a sedated patient.
Quinn looked to the mayor, who had finally taken a seat herself. She looked partly stunned and partly reflective, as if trying to so
rt through old memories for any that might have implicated Peter Bondurant in something she would never have suspected. Chief Greer looked like a man in the early stages of diverticulitis.
“That's the thing about digging holes,” Quinn said. “There are no assurances you'll find what you want—or want what you find.”
BY FIVE O'CLOCK every news agency native to and camped in the Twin Cities had the name of Gil Vanlees. The same media that would plaster that name in print and fill television screens with bad photographs of the man would point fingers at the police department for leaking information.
Quinn had no doubt where the leak had sprung, and it pissed him off. Bondurant's people having the kind of access they had tainted the case. And in the light of Kovac's revelation that afternoon, Bondurant's meddling took on an even darker quality.
No one had leaked that story to the press. Not even the allegedly bitter, vindictive Cheryl Thorton, whose brain-damaged husband was supported by Peter Bondurant. He wondered exactly how much money it took to hold a grudge like that at bay for a decade.
What had gone on in the lives of Jillian and her mother and father in that pivotal time of the divorce? he wondered in his windowless room at the FBI offices. From the start, Bondurant had struck him as a man with secrets. Secrets about the present. Secrets about the past. Secrets as dark as incest?
How else would Sophie Bondurant have gotten custody of Jillian? Unstable as she was. Powerful as Peter was.
He flipped through the casebook to the crime scene photos of the third murder. Certain aspects of the murder gave the impression the killer and victim may have known each other. The decapitation when none of the other victims had been decapitated, the extreme depersonalization. Both suggested a kind of rage that was personal. But what of the latest theory that the killer worked with a partner, a woman? That didn't fit Peter Bondurant. And what of the thought that perhaps the woman involved was Jillian Bondurant herself?
A history of sexual abuse would fit the profile of a woman involved in this type of crime. She would have a skewed view of male-female relationships, of sexual relationships. Her partner was likely older, some twisted suggestion of a father figure, the dominant partner.
Quinn thought of Jillian, of the photograph in Bondurant's office. Emotionally troubled, with low self-esteem, a girl unhappily pretending to be something she wasn't in order to please. To what lengths might she go to find the approval she craved?
He thought of her involvement with her stepfather—supposedly consensual, but these things never really are. Children need love and can be easily manipulated by that need. And if Jillian had escaped an abusive relationship with her father, only to be coerced into another by her stepfather, that would have reinforced every warped idea she had of relationships with men.
If Peter had abused her.
If Jillian wasn't a dead victim, but a willing victim.
If Gil Vanlees was her partner in this sickness.
If Gil Vanlees was a killer at all.
If if if if . . .
Vanlees seemed a perfect fit—except he didn't strike Quinn as having the brainpower to outsmart the cops for this long, or the balls to play the kind of taunting game this killer played. Not the Gil Vanlees he'd seen in that interview room today. But he knew from experience people could have more than one side, and that a dark side that was capable of killing the way the Cremator killed was capable of anything, including disguising itself very, very well.
He pictured Gil Vanlees in his mind and waited for that twist in his gut that told him this was the guy. But the feeling didn't come. He couldn't remember the last time it had. Not even after the fact, after a killer had been caught and fit his profile point by point. That sense of knowing didn't come anymore. The arrogance of certainty had abandoned him. Dread had taken its place.
He flipped farther into the murder book, to the fresh photographs from Melanie Hessler's autopsy. As with the third victim, the wounds inflicted both before and after death had been brutal, unspeakably cruel, worse than with the first two victims. As he looked at the photographs he could hear the echo of the tape recording in his head. Scream after scream after scream.
The screams ran into one another and into the cacophony that filled his nightmares, growing louder and louder. The sound swelled and expanded in his brain until he felt as if his head would burst and the contents run out in a sickly gray ooze. And all the while he stared at the autopsy photographs, at the charred, mutilated thing that had once been a woman, and he thought of the kind of rage it took to do that to another person. The kind of poisonous, black emotions kept under tight control until the pressure became too much. And he thought of Peter Bondurant and Gil Vanlees and a thousand nameless faces walking the streets of these cities just waiting for that main line of hate to blow and push them over the edge.
Any of them could have been this killer. The necessary components resided in a great many people, and needed only the proper catalyst to set them off. The task force was putting its money on Vanlees, based on circumstance and the profile. But all they had was logic and a hunch. No physical evidence. Could Gil Vanlees have been that careful, that clever? They had no witness to put him with any of the victims. Their witness was gone. They had no obvious connection between all four victims or anything tying Vanlees to any victim other than Jillian—if Jillian was a victim.
If this. If that.
Quinn dug a Tagamet out of his pants pocket and washed it down with diet Coke. The case was crowding in on him; he couldn't get perspective. The players were too close around him, their ideas, their emotions, bleeding into the cold facts that were all he needed for his analysis.
The professional in him still wished for the distance of his office in Quantico. But if he had stayed in Quantico, then he and Kate would have remained in the past tense.
On impulse, he grabbed up the telephone receiver and dialed her office number. On the fourth ring her machine picked up. He left his number again, hung up, picked up again, and dialed her home line with the same result. It was seven now. Where the hell was she?
Instantly he flashed on the decrepit garage in the dark alley behind her house and muttered a curse. Then he reminded himself—as Kate herself would surely do—that she had gotten along just fine without him for the past five years.
He could have used her expertise tonight, to say nothing of a long, slow kiss and a warm embrace. He turned back to the casebook and flipped to the victimologies, looking for the one thing he felt he'd missed that would tie it all together and point the finger.
The notes on Melanie Hessler were in his own hand, sketchy, too brief. Kovac had set Moss to the task of gathering the information on the latest of the Cremator's victims, but she had yet to bring him anything. He knew she'd worked in an adult bookstore—which, in the killer's mind, likely put her into the same category as the two hookers. She'd been attacked in the alley behind the store just months before, but the two men who had raped her had solid alibis and were not considered suspects in her death.
It was sad to think how each of these women had been victimized repeatedly in their brief lives. Lila White and Fawn Pierce in a profession and a lifestyle that specialized in abuse and degradation. White had been assaulted by her drug dealer just last summer. Pierce had been hospitalized three times in two years, the victim of her pimp once, once a mugging victim, and once a rape victim.
Jillian Bondurant's victimization had taken place behind the closed doors of her home. If Jillian was a victim.
He turned back to the photographs of victim number three once again and stared at the stab wounds to her chest. The signature. Long wound, short wound, long wound, short wound, like the arms of a star or the petals of a gruesome flower. I love you, I love you not. Cross my heart, hope to die.
He thought of the faint voices on the tape.
“. . . Turn . . . do it . . .”
“. . . Want to . . . of me . . .”
Too easily he could picture the killers standing on ei
ther side of their victim's warm, lifeless body, each with a knife, taking turns punching their signature into the woman's chest, sealing the pact of their partnership.
It should have horrified him to think it, but it wasn't the worst thing he'd ever seen. Not by a long way. Mostly it left him numb.
That made him shudder.
A man and a woman. He scrolled through the possibilities, considering people known to be attached to the victims in some way. Gil Vanlees, Bondurant, Lucas Brandt. The Urskines—possibilities there. The hooker who had been at the Phoenix last night when the DiMarco girl had disappeared—and claimed not to have seen or heard a thing, who had also known the second victim. Michele Fine, Jillian's only friend. Strange and shaky. Scarred—physically and emotionally. A woman with a long, dark story behind her, no doubt—and no good alibi for the night Jillian went missing.
He reached for the sheet music Fine had handed over to him and wondered about Jillian's compositions she'd kept to herself.
Outsider
Outside
On the dark side
Alone
Looking in
On a whim
Want a home
Outsider
In my blood
In my bones
Can't have
What I want
Doomed to roam
All alone
On the outside
Let me in
Want a friend
Need a lover
Be with me
Be my boy
Be my father
Outsider
In my blood
In my bones
Can't have
What I want
Doomed to roam
All alone
On the outside
Knuckles cracked against the door, and Kovac stuck his head in without waiting for an invitation.
“Can you smell it?” he asked, letting himself in. He leaned back against Quinn's wall of notes, suit rumpled, lip swollen where Peter Bondurant had popped him, tie askew. “Cooked goose, burned ass, toast.”
“You're out,” Quinn said.
“Give the man a cigar. I'm off the task force. They'll name my successor at a press conference sometime tomorrow.”