9
CHAPTER
“IF THE NEWSIES find us here, I'll eat my shorts,” Kovac declared, turning around in a circle in the middle of the floor.
One wall was papered in a montage of naked women engaged in various erotic pursuits, the other three in cheap red flocked paper that best resembled moth-eaten velvet.
“Something tells me you could have gotten that done here for you,” Quinn remarked dryly. He sniffed the air, identifying the smells of mice, cheap perfume, and damp underwear. “For a bargain price.”
“The newsies find us here, our careers are toast,” Elwood Knutson said. The big homicide sergeant pulled a giant ceramic penis out of a drawer behind the counter and held it up for all to see.
Liska made a face. “Jesus, Sam. You sure know how to pick 'em.”
“Don't look at me! You think I hang out in massage parlors?”
“Yeah.”
“Very funny. These lovely accommodations are courtesy of Detective Adler, Hennepin County Sheriff's Office. Chunk, take a bow.”
Adler, a chunk of muscle with ebony skin and a tight cap of steel-gray curls, gave a sheepish grin and a wave to the rest of the task force. “My sister works for Norwest Banks. They foreclosed on the building after sex crimes shut the place down last summer. The location is perfect, the price is right—meaning free—and the press lost interest in the place after the hookers moved out. No one's going to suspect this is where we're meeting.”
Which was the main point, Quinn thought as he followed Kovac down the narrow hall, the detective turning on lights in the succession of four smaller rooms—two on either side of the hall. It was essential that the task force be allowed to do their jobs without interruption or distraction, without having to run a gauntlet of reporters. A place where the case could be contained and leaks kept to a minimum.
And if the leaks continued, Elwood was right. The press would roast their careers on a public bonfire.
“I love it!” Kovac declared, striding back down the hall to the front room. “Let's set up.”
Liska wrinkled her nose. “Can we hose it down with Lysol first?”
“Sure, Tinks. You can redecorate the place while the rest of us are solving these murders.”
“Oh, fuck you, Kojak. I hope you're the first to catch the cooties from the toilet seat.”
“Naw, that'll be Bear Butt in there with the Reader's Digest. Cooties see his hairy ass and come running. He's probably got a whole civilization living in that pelt.”
Elwood, who was roughly the size and shape of a small grizzly, raised his head with dignity. “On behalf of hairy people everywhere, I take umbrage.”
“Yeah?” Kovac said. “Well, take your umbrage outside and grab some stuff. We're burning daylight.”
Two unmarked utility vans from the PD fleet were parked in the alley, loaded with the necessary office furniture and equipment. All of it was carried into the former Loving Touch Massage Parlor, along with boxes of office supplies, a coffeemaker, and, most important, the boxes containing the files on all three murders attributed to the killer the detectives privately called Smokey Joe.
Quinn worked alongside the others. Just one of the guys. Trying to blend into another team like a free agent cleanup hitter drifting from one baseball park to another. Brought in by management to hit a dinger in the big game, then cut loose and sent on to the next crucial moment. The jokes felt forced, the attempts at camaraderie false. Some of these people would feel they knew him by the time all this was over. They wouldn't really know him at all.
Still, he went through the motions as he always did, knowing none of the people around him could tell the difference—the same way people working side by side with this serial killer wouldn't know or suspect. People in general had a myopic view of their own small worlds. They focused on what was important to them. The rotting soul of the guy in the next cubicle didn't matter to them—until his disease touched their lives.
In short order, the Loving Touch had been transformed from a brothel to a tactical war room. By nine o'clock the entire task force had assembled: six detectives from the Minneapolis PD, three from the Sheriff's Office, two from the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, Quinn, and Walsh.
Walsh looked like he had malaria.
Kovac briefed them on all three murders, finishing with the autopsy of the Jane Doe victim, complete with photographs that had been rushed through the lab for processing and enlarging.
“We'll have some of the preliminary lab results today,” he said as he passed the gruesome pictures around the table. “We've got a blood type—O positive—which happens to be Jillian Bondurant's—and a gazillion other people's.
“I want you to note the photographs of wounds where sections of flesh have been cut from the body. We had similar wounds on the first two vics. We're speculating the killer may be cutting away bite marks. But with this latest, he might have cut away any identifying marks that could prove or disprove the victim's identity: scars, moles, et cetera.”
“Tattoos,” someone said.
“Bondurant's father is unaware of Jillian having any tattoos. According to his lawyer, he couldn't come up with any distinguishing marks at all. Jillian had been out of his life for about half of hers, so I guess it's not surprising. We're trying to come up with photographs of her in a bathing suit or something, but no luck so far.
“We're proceeding on the assumption that Jillian Bondurant is the vic,” he said, “but staying open to other possibilities. There've been a few calls to the hotline, people claiming they've seen her since Friday, but none of them have panned out yet.”
“Are you going to bring up the K word?” asked Mary Moss from the BCA. She looked like a soccer mom from the suburbs in a turtleneck and tweed blazer. Oversize glasses dominated her oval face. Her thick gray-blond pageboy seemed in need of a serious thinning.
“There haven't been any ransom demands that we know of,” Kovac said, “but it's not beyond the realm.”
“Big Daddy Bondurant sure never jumped to the kidnapping conclusion,” Adler said. “Anyone find that strange besides me?”
“He heard about the driver's license found with the body and accepted the probability the body was hers,” Hamill concluded.
Adler spread hands the size of catcher's mitts. “I say again: Anyone find that strange besides me? Who wants to believe their child is the decapitated victim of a homicidal maniac? Man as rich as Bondurant, isn't he gonna think kidnapping before murder?”
“Is he talking yet?” Elwood asked, chowing down a bran muffin as he perused the autopsy photos.
“Not to me,” Kovac said.
“I don't like the smell of that either.”
“His attorney called me last night and left a message,” Quinn said. “Bondurant wants to see me this morning.”
Kovac stepped back, nonplussed. “No shit? What'd you tell him?”
“Nothing. I let him hang overnight. I don't particularly want to meet him at this stage of the game, but if it helps you get a foot in his door . . .”
Kovac smiled like a shark. “You need a lift over to the Bondurant house, don't you, John?”
Quinn tipped his head, wincing. “Do I have time to call and up my life insurance?”
Laughter erupted around the table. Kovac made a face.
“He gave me a lift from the morgue last night,” Quinn explained. “I thought I'd be going back in a black bag.”
“Hey,” Kovac barked with false annoyance. “I got you there in one piece.”