Ashes to Ashes

by Tami Hoag

  Disgust crossed Rob's face in a spasm. He squeezed his eyes nearly shut, looking as if he'd just caught wind of an open sewer. “No, you're not. You're not sorry about the way you've treated me. You're sorry I'm going to kill you for it.”

  “Angie, run!” Kate shouted. She grabbed the fax machine off the desk, jerking the power cord out the back, and flung the machine at Rob. It hit him in the chest and knocked him off balance.

  She bolted for the door, slipping on one of the victimology reports—a mistake that cost her a precious fraction of a second. Rob grabbed at her, caught hold of a coat sleeve with one hand, and swung wildly with the sap.

  Even through the thick wool of her coat collar, Kate felt the weight of it as it struck her shoulder. Heavy, deadly, serious. If he caught her in the head, she would go down like a rock.

  She shied sideways, eluding his grasp, then used his own momentum to shove him into the hall. Grabbing his left arm and twisting it up behind him as he came past, she ran him into the hall table and bolted away before the crash was over, running for the front door that suddenly seemed a mile away.

  Rob let out a roar and tackled her from behind. They hit the floor hard, Kate crying out as her right arm twisted unnaturally beneath her and she felt the sickening tear of muscles in her shoulder.

  Pain swept through her like a fire. She ignored it as best she could as she tried to kick free and scramble to the door. Rob wrapped a fist in her hair and jerked her head back, hitting her with his fist on the right side of her head. Her vision blurred, her ear rang like a bell and burned like a son of a bitch. Knife-sharp pain shot out across her face and down her jaw.

  “You bitch! You bitch!” he screamed over and over.

  And then his hands were around her throat and he was choking her, and his screams faded from her head. She fought automatically, frantically, clawing at his hands, but his fingers were short and thick and strong.

  She couldn't breathe, felt like her eyes were going to burst, felt like her brain was swelling.

  With the last bit of sense she could grab, Kate forced herself to go limp. Rob continued to squeeze for seconds that seemed like an eternity, then slammed her head down on the floor. She knew he was ranting but couldn't make out the words as the blood roared back up to her brain. She tried not to suck in the great gulps of oxygen she wanted and needed so desperately. She tried not to let her mind stall out. She had to keep thinking—and not of the crime scene she had visited, not of the charred body of her client, not of the autopsy photos of four women this man had tortured and mutilated.

  “You think I can't do anything right!” Rob raved, pushing himself up off her. “You think I'm an idiot! You think you're better than everyone and I'm just a nothing!”

  Not able to see him, Kate inched her left hand toward her coat pocket.

  “You're such a fucking bitch!” he screamed, and kicked her, too immersed in his ranting to hear her grunt of pain as his boot connected with her hip.

  Kate ground her teeth together and concentrated on moving the hand, half an inch at a time, into her coat pocket.

  “You don't know me,” Rob declared. He grabbed something from her hall table and threw it. Whatever it was, it crashed somewhere in the vicinity of the kitchen. “You don't know anything about me, about my True Self.”

  And she would never have suspected. God in heaven, she'd worked beside this man for a year and a half. Never once would she have thought he was capable of this. Never once had she questioned his motives for choosing his profession. On the contrary, his being an advocate for victims—so ready to listen to them, so ready to spend time with them—had been his one redeeming quality. Or so she had believed.

  “You think I'm nobody,” he yelled. “I AM SOMEBODY! I AM EVIL'S ANGEL! I AM THE FUCKING CREMATOR! Now what do you think of me, Ms. Bitch?”

  He crouched down beside her and rolled her onto her back. Kate kept her eyes nearly shut, barely seeing more than a blur of colors between her lashes. Her hand was in her pocket, fingers sliding around the shaft of the metal nail file.

  “I saved you for last,” he said. “You're going to beg me to kill you. And I'm going to love doing it.”

  36

  CHAPTER

  “WHAT HAPPENED THAT night, Peter?” Quinn asked.

  They sat in a small, dingy white room in the bowels of the city hall building, near the booking area of the adult detention center. Bondurant had waived his rights and refused to go to the hospital. A paramedic had cleaned the bullet wound to his scalp right there on the stairs where he had tried to end it all.

  Edwyn Noble had thrown a holy fit, insisting to be present during questioning, insisting on sending Peter directly to a hospital whether he wanted to go or not. But Peter had won out, swearing in front of a dozen news cameras he wanted to confess.

  Present in the room were Bondurant, Quinn, and Yurek. Peter had wanted only Quinn, but the police had insisted on having a representative present. Sam Kovac's name was not mentioned.

  “Jillian came to dinner,” Peter said. He looked small and shrunken, like a longtime heroin junkie. Pale, red-eyed, vacant. “She was in one of her moods. Up, down, laughing one minute, snapping the next. She was just like that—volatile. Like her mother. Even as a baby.”

  “What did you fight about?”

  He stared across the room at a rosy stain on the wall that might have been blood before someone tried to scrub it away. “School, her music, her therapy, her stepfather, us.”

  “She wanted to resume her relationship with LeBlanc?”

  “She'd been speaking with him. She said she was thinking of going back to France.”

  “You were angry.”

  “Angry,” he said, and sighed. “That's not really the right word. I was upset. I felt tremendous guilt.”

  “Why guilt?”

  He took a long time formulating his answer, as if he were pre-choosing each word he would use. “Because that was my fault—what happened with Jillian and LeBlanc. I could have prevented it. I could have fought Sophie for custody, but I just let go.”

  “She threatened to expose you for molesting Jillian,” Quinn reminded him.

  “She threatened to claim I had molested Jillian,” Peter corrected him. “She had actually coached Jillie on what to say, how to behave in order to convince people it was true.”

  “But it wasn't?”

  “She was my child. I could never have done anything to hurt her.”

  He thought about that answer, his composure cracking and crumbling. He covered his mouth with a trembling hand and cried silently for a moment. “How could I have known?”

  “You knew Sophie's mental state,” Quinn pointed out.

  “I was in the process of buying out Don Thorton. I had several huge government contracts pending. She could have ruined me.”

  Quinn said nothing, letting Bondurant sort through it himself, as he had undoubtedly done a thousand times in the last week alone.

  Bondurant heaved a defeated sigh and looked at the table. “I gave my daughter to a madwoman and a child-molester. I would have been kinder to kill her then.”

  “What happened Friday night?” Quinn asked again, drawing him back to the present.

  “We argued about LeBlanc. She accused me of not loving her. She locked herself in the music room for a time. I let her alone. I went into the library, sat in front of the fire, drank some cognac.

  “About eleven-thirty she came into the room behind me, singing. She had a beautiful voice—haunting, ethereal. The song was obscene, disgusting, perverse. It was everything Sophie had coached her to say about me all those years ago: the things I had supposedly done to her.”

  “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 lo
cal 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.”

  37

  CHAPTER

  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.