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.”