Quinn shook his head.
“Divorced?”
“Once. A long time ago.”
So long ago, the brief attempt at marriage seemed more like a half-remembered bad dream than a memory. Bringing it up was like kicking a pile of ashes, stirring old flecks of emotional debris inside him—feelings of frustration and failure and regret that had long since gone cold. Feelings that came stronger when he thought of Kate.
“Everybody's got one,” Kovac said. “It's the job.”
He held the cigarettes out, Quinn declined.
“God, I gotta get that smell out of my mouth.” Kovac filled his lungs and absorbed the maximum amount of tar and nicotine before exhaling, letting the smoke roll over his tongue. It drifted away to blend into the fog. “So, you think that's Jillian Bondurant in there?”
“Could be, but I think there's a chance it's not. The UNSUB went to a hell of a lot of trouble to make sure we couldn't get prints.”
“But he leaves Bondurant's DL at the scene. So maybe he nabbed Bondurant, then figured out who she was and decided to hang on to her, hold her for ransom,” Kovac speculated. “Meanwhile, he picks up another woman and offs her, leaves Bondurant's DL with the body to show what might happen if Daddy doesn't cough up.”
Kovac narrowed his eyes as if he were playing the theory through again for review. “No ransom demand we know of, and she's been missing since Friday. Still, maybe . . . But you don't think so.”
“I've never seen it happen that way, that's all,” Quinn said. “As a rule, with this type of murder you get a killer with one thing on his mind: playing out his fantasy. It's got nothing to do with money—usually.”
Quinn turned a little more toward Kovac, knowing this was the member of the task force he most needed to win over. Kovac was the investigative lead. His knowledge of these cases, of this town, and of the kind of criminals who lived in its underbelly would be invaluable. Trouble was, Quinn didn't think he had the energy left to pull out the old I'm-just-a-cop-like-you routine. He settled for some truth, instead.
“The thing about profiling is that it's a proactive tool based on the reactive use of knowledge gained from past events. Not a perfect science. Every case could potentially present something we've never seen before.”
“I hear you're pretty good though,” the detective conceded. “You nailed that child-killer out in Colorado right down to his stutter.”
Quinn shrugged. “Sometimes all the pieces fit. How long before you can get your hands on Bondurant's medical records for comparison with the body?”
Kovac rolled his eyes. “I oughta change my name to Murphy. Murphy's Law: Nothing's ever easy. Turns out, most of her medical records are in France,” he said as if France were an obscure planet in another galaxy. “Her mom divorced Peter Bondurant eleven years ago and married a guy with an international construction firm. They lived in France. The mother's dead, stepfather still lives there. Jillian came back here a couple of years ago. She was enrolled at the U—University of Minnesota.”
“The Bureau can help get the records via our legal attaché offices in Paris.”
“I know. Walsh is already on it. Meantime, we'll try to talk to anyone who was close to Jillian. Find out if she had any moles, scars, birthmarks, tattoos. We'll get pictures. We haven't turned up any close friends yet. No boyfriend anyone knows of. I gather she wasn't exactly a social butterfly.”
“What about her father?”
“He's too distraught to talk to us.” Kovac's mouth twisted. “‘Too distraught'—that's what his lawyer says. If I thought somebody whacked my kid, I'd be fucking distraught, all right. I'd be climbing all over the cops. I'd be living in their back pockets, doing anything I could to nail the son of a bitch.” He cocked an eyebrow at Quinn. “Wouldn't you?”
“I'd turn the world upside down and shake it by its heels.”
“Damn right. I go over to Bondurant's house to break the news this might be Jillian. He gets a look like I'd hit him in the head with a ball bat. ‘Oh, my God. Oh, my God,' he says, and I think he's gonna puke. So I don't think much of it when he excuses himself. The son of a bitch goes and calls his lawyer and he never comes out of his study again. I spend the next hour talking to Bondurant via Edwyn Noble.”
“And what did he tell you?”
“That Jillian had been to the house Friday night for dinner and he hadn't seen her since. She left around midnight. A neighbor corroborates. The couple across the street were just getting home from a party. Jillian's Saab pulled onto the street just as they turned onto the block at eleven-fifty.
“Peter Filthy Fucking Rich Bondurant,” he grumbled. “My luck. I'll be writing parking tickets by the time this thing is through.”
He finished his cigarette, dropped it on the tarmac, and ground out the butt with the toe of his shoe.
“Too bad DNA tests take so damn long,” he said, jumping back to the matter of identification. “Six weeks, eight weeks. Too damn long.”
“You're checking missing persons reports?”
“Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, the Dakotas. We've even called Canada. Nothing fits yet. Maybe the head'll turn up,” he said with optimism the way he might hope for the return of a pair of eyeglasses or a wallet.
“Maybe.”
“Well, enough of this shit for tonight. I'm starving,” he said abruptly, pulling his suit coat shut as if he had confused hunger for cold. “I know a place with great Mexican takeout. So hot it burns the corpse taste out of your mouth. We'll swing by on the way to your hotel.”
They walked away from the delivery bay as an ambulance pulled up. No lights, no siren. Another customer. Kovac fished his keys out of his pocket, looking at Quinn from the corner of his eye. “So, you knew our Kate?”
“Yeah.” Quinn stared into the fog, wondering where she was tonight. Wondering if she was thinking about him. “In another lifetime.”
8
CHAPTER
KATE EASED HER aching body down into the old claw-foot tub and tried to exhale the tension she had stored up during the day. It worked its way from the core of her through her muscles in the form of pain. She envisioned it rising from the water with steam and the scent of lavender. The brass wire tray that spanned the tub before her held a Bad Monday–size glass of Bombay Sapphire and tonic. She took a deep drink, lay back, and closed her eyes.
The stress management people frowned on alcohol as an answer to tension and preached that it would set a person on the road to alcoholism and doom. Kate had been up and down the road to doom. She figured if she was ever to become an alcoholic, it would have happened years before. Five years before. It hadn't, and so tonight she drank gin and waited for the pleasant numbness it would bring.
For just the briefest of moments the montage of faces from that bleak period of her life flashed through her mind's eye: Steven's changing face over the passing of that terrible year—distant, cold, angry, bitter; the doctor's regret, worn tired and bland by too many tragedies; her daughter's sweet face, there and gone in a single painful heartbeat. Quinn's face—intense, compassionate, passionate . . . angry, dispassionate, indifferent, a memory.
It never failed to amaze her, the sudden sharpness of that pain as it stabbed through the cotton batting of time. A part of her wished fervently it would dull, and another part of her hoped that it never would. The endless cycle of guilt: the need to escape it and the equally desperate need to cling to it.
She opened her eyes and stared at the window beyond the foot of the tub. A rectangle of night peered in above the half-curtain, blackness beyond the steamed glass.