Ashes to Ashes (16 page)

“And what about anything she related to you as her father?”

His temper came in another quick flash, boiling up and over the rigid control. “If I knew anything,
anything
that could lead you to my daughter’s murderer, don’t you think I would tell you?”

Quinn was silent, his unblinking gaze steady on Peter Bondurant’s face, on the vein that slashed down across his high forehead like a bolt of lightning. He pulled the Rolodex card from Bondurant’s fingers.

“I hope so, Mr. Bondurant,” he said at last. “Some other young woman’s life may depend on it.”

“WHAT’D YOU GET?” Kovac asked as they walked away from the house. He lit a cigarette and went to work sucking in as much of it as he could before they reached the car.

Quinn stared down the driveway and past the gate where two cameramen stood with eyes pressed to view-finders. There was no long-range audio equipment in sight, but the lenses on the cameras were fat and long. His period of anonymity was going into countdown.

“Yeah,” he said. “A bad feeling.”

“Jeez, I’ve had that from the start of this deal. You know what a man like Bondurant could do to a career?”

“My question is: Why would he want to?”

“’Cause he’s rich and he’s hurting. He’s like that guy with the gun in the government center yesterday. He wants someone else to hurt. He wants someone to pay. Maybe if he can make someone else miserable, he won’t feel his own pain so much. You know,” he said in that offhand way he had, “people are nuts. So what’d he say? Why won’t he talk to us locals?”

“He doesn’t trust you.”

Kovac straightened with affront and tossed his cigarette on the driveway. “Well, fuck him!”

“He’s paranoid about details leaking to the media.”

“Like what details? What’s he got to hide?”

Quinn shrugged. “That’s your job, Sherlock. But I got you a place to start.”

They climbed into the Caprice. Quinn pulled the cassette recorder from his coat pocket and laid it on the seat between them with the Rolodex card on top of it.

Kovac picked up the card and frowned at it. “A shrink. What’d I tell you? People are nuts.
Especially
rich people—they’re the only ones who can afford to do anything about it. It’s like a hobby with them.”

Quinn stared up at the house, half expecting to see a face at one of the windows, but there was no one. All the windows were blank and black on this dreary morning.

“Was there ever any mention in the press about either of the first two victims being drug users?” he asked.

“No,” Kovac said. “The one used to be, but we held it back. Lila White. ‘Lily’ White. The first vic. She was a basehead for a while, but she got herself straightened out. Went through a country program, lived at one of the hooker halfway houses for a while—only that part didn’t take, I guess. Anyway, the drug angle didn’t develop. Why?”

“Bondurant made a reference. Might have just been an assumption on his part, but I don’t think so. I think either he knew something about the other victims or he knew something about Jillian.”

“If she was using anything around the time of her death, it’ll show up in the tox screen. I went through her town house. I didn’t see anything stronger than Tylenol.”

“If she was using, you might have a connection to the other victims.” And thereby a possible connection to a dealer or another user they could develop into a suspect.

The feral smile of the hunter on a fresh scent lifted the corners of Kovac’s mustache. “Networking. I love it. Corporate America thinks they’re on to something new. Crooks have been networking since Judas sold Jesus Christ down the river. I’ll call Liska, have her and Moss nose around. Then let’s go see what Sigmund Fraud here has to say about the price of loose marbles.” He tapped the Rolodex card against the steering wheel. “His office is on the other side of this lake.”

“SO WHAT DO you think of Quinn?” Liska asked.

Mary Moss rode shotgun, looking out the window at the Mississippi. Barge traffic had given up for the year. Along this stretch, the river was a deserted strip of brown between ratty, half-abandoned industrial and warehouse blocks. “They say he’s hot stuff. A legend in the making.”

“You’ve never worked with him?”

“No. Roger Emerson usually works this territory out of Quantico. But then, the vic isn’t usually the daughter of a billionaire captain of industry with contacts in Washington.

“I liked the way he handled Tippen,” Moss went on. “No bully-boy, I’m-the-fed-and-you’re-a-hick nonsense. I think he’s a quick study of people. Probably frighteningly intelligent. What’d you think?”

Liska sent her a lascivious grin. “Nice pants.”

“God! Here I was being serious and professional, and you were looking at his ass!”

“Well, not when he was talking. But, come on, Mar, the guy’s a total babe. Wouldn’t you like a piece of that if you could get it?”

Moss looked flustered. “Don’t ask me things like that. I’m an old married woman! I’m an old married
Catholic
woman!”

“As long as the word
dead
doesn’t figure into that description, you’re allowed to look.”

“Nice pants,” Moss muttered, fighting chuckles.

“Those big brown eyes, that granite jaw, that sexy mouth. I think I could have an orgasm watching him talk about proactive strategies.”

“Nikki!”

“Oh, that’s right, you’re a married woman,” Liska teased. “You’re not allowed to have orgasms.”

“Do you talk this way when you’re riding around with Kovac?”

“Only if I want to get him crazy. He twitches like a gigged frog. Tells me he doesn’t want to know anything about my orgasms, that a woman’s G spot should just remain a mystery. I tell him that’s why he’s been divorced twice. You should see how red he gets. I love Kovac—he’s such a guy.”

Moss pointed through the windshield. “Here it is—Edgewater.”

The Edgewater town homes were a collection of impeccably styled buildings designed to call to mind a tidy New England fishing village—gray clapboard trimmed in white, cedar shake roofs, six-over-six paned windows. The units were arranged like a crop of wild mushrooms connected by meandering, landscaped paths. All of them faced the river.

“I’ve got the key to Bondurant’s unit,” Liska said, piloting the car into the entrance of the town house complex, “but I called the caretaker anyway. He says he saw Jillian leaving Friday afternoon. I figure it won’t hurt to talk to him again.”

She parked near the first unit and she and Moss showed their badges to the man waiting for them on the stoop. Liska pegged Gil Vanlees for mid-thirties. He was blond with a thin, weedy mustache, six feet tall, and soft-looking. His Timberwolves starter jacket hung open over a blue security guard’s uniform. He had that look of a marginal high school jock who had let himself go. Too many hours spent watching professional sports with a can in his hand and a sack of chips beside him.

“So, you’re a detective?” His small eyes gleamed at Liska with an almost sexual excitement. One was blue and one the odd, murky color of smoky topaz.

Liska smiled at him. “That’s right.”

“I think it’s great to see women on the job. I work security down at the Target Center, you know,” he said importantly. “Timeberwolves, concerts, truck pulls, and all. We’ve got a couple gals on, you know. I just think it’s great. More power to you.”

She was willing to bet money that when he was sitting around drinking with the boys, he called those women names even she wouldn’t use. She knew Vanlees’s type firsthand. “So you work security there and look after this complex too?”

“Yeah, well, you know my wife—we’re separated—she works for the management company, and that’s how we got the town house, ’cause I’m telling you, for what they charge for these places … It’s unreal.

“So I’m kind of like the super, you know, even though I’m not living here now. The owners here count on me, so I’m hanging in until the wife decides what to do. People have problems—plumbing, electrical, whatnot—I see it gets taken care of. I’ve got the locksmith coming to change the locks on Miss Bondurant’s place this afternoon. And I keep an eye out, you know. Unofficial security. The residents appreciate it. They know I’m on the job, that I’ve got the training.”

“Is Miss Bondurant’s unit this way?” Moss inquired, gesturing toward the river, leaning, hinting.

Vanlees frowned at her, the small eyes going smaller still. “I talked to some detectives yesterday.” As if he thought she might be an impostor with her mousy-mom looks, not the real deal like Liska.

“Yeah, well, we’re following up,” Liska said casually. “You know how it is.” Though he clearly didn’t have a clue other than what he’d picked up watching
NYPD Blue
and reading cheesy detective magazines. Some people would cooperate better when they felt included. Others wanted all kinds of assurances neither the crime nor the investigation would taint their lives in any way.

Vanlees dug a ring of keys out of his jacket pocket and led the way down the sidewalk. “I applied to the police department once,” he confided. “They had a hiring freeze on. You know, budgets and all.”

“Jeez, that’s tough,” Liska said, doing her best Frances McDormand in
Fargo
impersonation. “You know, it seems like we always need good people, but that budget hang-up, that’s a kicker… .”

Vanlees nodded, the man in the know. “Political BS—but I don’t need to tell you, right?”

“You got that right. Who knows how many potential great cops like yourself are working other jobs. It’s a shame.”

“I could have done the job.” Years-old bitterness colored his tone like an old stain that wouldn’t quite wash out.

“So, did you know this Bondurant girl, Gil?”

“Oh, sure, I saw her around. She never had much to say. Unfriendly type. She’s dead, huh? They wouldn’t say it for sure on the news, but it’s her, right?”

“We’ve got some questions unanswered.”

“I heard there was a witness. To what—that’s what I’m wondering. I mean, did they see him kill her or what? That’d be something, huh? Awful.”

“I can’t really get into it, you know?” Liska said, apologetic. “I’d like to—you being in a related field and all—but you know how it is.”

Vanlees nodded with false wisdom.

“You saw her Friday?” Moss asked. “Jillian Bondurant?”

“Yeah. About three. I was here working on my garbage disposal. The wife tried to run celery through it. What a mess. Little Miss College Graduate. You’d think she’d have more brains than to do that.”

“Jillian Bondurant …” Moss prompted.

He narrowed his mismatched eyes again. “I was looking out the kitchen window. Saw her drive out.”

“Alone?”

“Yep.”

“And that was the last time you saw her?”

“Yeah.” He turned back to Liska. “That nutcase burned her up, didn’t he? The Cremator. Jeez, that’s sick,” he said, though morbid fascination sparked bright in his expression. “What’s this town coming to?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

“I think it’s the millennium. That’s what I think,” he ventured. “World’s just gonna get crazier and crazier. The thousand years is over and all that.”

“
Millennium
,” Moss muttered, squinting down at a terra-cotta pot of dead chrysanthemums on the deck of Jillian Bondurant’s small front porch.

“Could be,” Liska said. “God help us all, eh?”

“God help us,” Moss echoed sarcastically.

“Too late for Miss Bondurant,” Vanlees said soberly, turning the key in the brass lock. “You need any help here, Detective?”

“No, thanks, Gil. Regulations and all …” Liska turned to face him, blocking his entrance to the house. “Did you ever see Miss Bondurant with anyone in particular? Friends? A boyfriend?”

“I saw her dad here every once in a while. He actually owns the unit. No boyfriend. A girlfriend every once in a while. A friend, I mean. Not
girlfriend
—at least I don’t think so.”

“One particular girl? You know her name?”

“No. She wasn’t too friendly either. Had a mean look to her. Almost like a biker chick, but not. Anyway, I never had anything to do with her. She—Miss Bondurant—was usually alone, never said much. She didn’t really fit in here. Not too many of the residents are students, and then she dressed kind of strange. Army boots and black clothes and all.”

“Did she ever seem out of it to you?”

“Like on drugs, you mean? No. Was she into drugs?”

“I’m just covering my bases, you know, or else my lieutenant …”

She let the suggestion hang, the impression being that Vanlees could empathize, blood brother that he was. She thanked him for his help and gave him her business card with instructions to call if he thought of anything that might be helpful to the case. He backed away from the door, reluctant, craning his neck to see what Moss was doing deeper into the apartment. Liska waved good-bye and closed the door.

“Eew, Christ, let me go take a shower,” she whispered, shuddering as she came into the living room.

“Jeez, you didn’t like him, then, Margie?” Moss said with an exaggerated north country accent.

Liska made a face at her and at the odd combination of aromas that hung in the air—sweet air freshener over stale cigarette smoke. “Hey, I got him talking, didn’t I?”

“You’re shameless.”

“In the line of duty.”

“Makes me glad I’m menopausal.”

Liska sobered, her gaze on the door. “Seriously, those cop wanna-bes creep me out. They always have an authority thing. A need for power and control, and a deep-seated poor self-image. More often than not, they’ve got a thing against women. Hey!” She brightened again suddenly. “I’ll have to bring this theory to the attention of Special Agent Quite Good-looking.”

“Hussy.”

“I prefer
opportunist
.”

Jillian Bondurant’s living room had a view of the river. The furnishings looked new. Overstuffed nubby sofa and chairs the color of oatmeal. Glass-topped rattan coffee table and end tables dirty with the fine soot of fingerprint dust left behind by the Bureau of Investigation team. An entertainment center with a large television and a top-line stereo system. In one corner a desk and matching bookshelves held textbooks, notebooks, everything pertaining to Jillian’s studies at the U, all of it ridiculously neat. Along another wall sat the latest in shiny black electronic pianos. The kitchen, easily seen from the living room, was immaculate.