Ashes to Ashes (48 page)

“Lieutenant Fowler tells me someone was questioned earlier today.”

“Who? A legitimate suspect?”

Greer frowned. “I’m not at liberty—”

“She was
my daughter
!” Peter shouted, the rage in his voice reverberating off the walls. He turned away from the stares of the others and put his hands over his face.

The mayor pressed a hand to her ample bosom, as if the sight was causing her chest pains.

“If someone has been brought in,” Noble said, the voice of reason, “then it will be only a matter of hours before the press reveals that information. That isn’t a comment on the security of your force, per se, Chief. It’s simply impossible to eliminate all leaks in a case of this magnitude.”

Greer looked from Bondurant’s lawyer to Bondurant’s lawyer’s wife—his boss. Unhappy and unable to see any escape routes, he sighed heavily. “The caretaker from Ms. Bondurant’s town house complex.”

The intercom buzzed, and Grace Noble answered it from the phone on the side table. “Mayor Noble, Sergeant Kovac and Special Agent Quinn are here to see you.”

“Send them in, Cynthia.”

Kovac was through the door almost before the mayor finished her sentence, his eyes finding Peter Bondurant like a pair of heat-seeking missiles. Bondurant looked thinner than he had the day before, his color worse. He met Kovac’s gaze with an expression of stony dislike.

“Sergeant Kovac, Agent Quinn, thank you for joining us,” the mayor said. “Let’s all have seats and talk.”

“I’m not going into particulars of the case,” Kovac stated stubbornly. Neither would he sit down and be a still target for Bondurant or Edwyn Noble.

No one sat.

“We understand you have a suspect,” Edwyn Noble said.

Kovac gave him the eagle eye, then turned it on Dick Greer and thought
cocksucker
.

“No arrests have been made,” Kovac said. “We’re still pursuing all avenues. I’ve just been down an interesting one myself.”

“Does Mr. Vanlees have an alibi for the night my daughter went missing?” Bondurant asked sharply. He looked at Kovac as he paced back and forth along the table, passing within a foot of him.

“Do
you
have an alibi for the night your daughter went missing, Mr. Bondurant?”

“Kovac!” the chief barked.

“With all due respect, Chief, I’m not in the habit of giving up my cases to anybody.”

“Mr. Bondurant is the father of a victim. There are extenuating circumstances.”

“Yeah, a few billion of them,” Kovac muttered.

“Sergeant!”

“Sergeant Kovac believes I should be punished for my wealth, Chief,” Bondurant said, still pacing, staring at the floor now. “He perhaps believes I deserved to lose my daughter so I could know what real suffering is.”

“After what I heard today, I believe you never deserved to have a daughter at all,” Kovac said, eliciting a gasp from the mayor. “You sure as hell deserved to lose her, but not in the way she’s lost now. That is to say if she’s dead at all—and we’re nowhere near ready to say that she is.”

“Sergeant Kovac, I hope you have a very good explanation for this behavior.” Greer moved toward him aggressively, drawing his weight lifter’s shoulders up.

Kovac stepped away from him. His full attention was on Peter Bondurant. And Peter Bondurant’s attention was on him. He stopped his pacing, an instinctive wariness in the narrowed eyes, like an animal sensing danger.

“I had a long talk today with Cheryl Thorton,” Kovac said, and watched what color Peter Bondurant had leech away. “She had some very interesting things to say about your divorce from Jillian’s mother.”

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 sort 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.