“I just figured she stayed over at her dad's,” she said, her throat tightening on the words. “I thought about trying to catch her Sunday, but then . . . I just didn't. . . .”
“What'd you do Sunday?”
She wagged her head a little. “Nothing. Slept late. Walked around the lakes. Nothing.”
She pressed her free hand over her mouth and squeezed her eyes shut, fighting for composure. Color flooded her pale face as she held her breath against the need to cry. Liska waited a moment.
The old guys were arguing now about performance art.
“How is pissing in a bottle full of crucifixes art?” Beret Man demanded.
The goatee spread his hands. “It makes a statement! Art makes a statement!”
The blond guy turned his paper over to the want ads and snuck a look at Michele. Liska gave him the cop glare and he went back to his reading.
“What about the rest of the weekend?” she asked, coming back to Fine. “What'd you do after work Friday night?”
“Why?” The suspicion was instantaneous, edged with affront and a little bit of panic.
“It's just routine. We need to establish where Jillian's family and friends were in case she might have tried to contact them.”
“She didn't.”
“You were home, then?”
“I went to a late movie, but I have a machine. She would have left a message.”
“Did you ever stay over at Jillian's apartment?”
Fine sniffed, wiped her eyes and nose with her hand, and took another ragged puff on her cigarette. Her hand was shaking. “Yeah, sometimes. We wrote music together. Jillie won't perform, but she's good.”
In and out of present tense when she talked about her friend. That was always a difficult transition for people to make after a death.
“We found some clothes in the dresser of the second bedroom that didn't look to be hers.”
“That's my stuff. She's way the hell over by the river. Sometimes we'd sit up late working on a song and I'd just stay over.”
“Do you have a key to her place?”
“No. Why would I? I didn't live there.”
“What kind of housekeeper is she?”
“What difference does that make?”
“Neat? Sloppy?”
Fine fussed, impatient with what she didn't understand. “Sloppy. She left stuff everywhere—clothes, dishes, ashtrays. What difference does it make? She's dead.”
She ducked her head then, and reddened and struggled as another wave of emotion hit on the heels of that final statement. “She's dead. He burned her. Oh, God.” A pair of tears squeezed through her lashes and splashed on the paper place mat.
“We don't know for a fact that anything's happened to her, Michele.”
Fine abandoned her cigarette in the ashtray and put her face in her hands. Not sobbing, but still struggling to choke the emotions back.
“Maybe she left town for a few days,” Liska said. “We don't know. Do you?”
“No.”
“Do you know of anyone who would want to hurt Jillian?”
She shook her head.
“She have a boyfriend? Ex-boyfriend? A guy who was interested in her?”
“No.”
“How about yourself? Got a boyfriend?”
“No,” she answered, looking down at the smoldering butt in the ashtray. “Why would I want one?”
“Jillian ever say anything about a man bothering her? Watching her, maybe? Hitting on her?”
Her laugh this time was bitter. “You know how men are. They all look. They all think they have a shot. Who pays any attention to the losers?”
She sniffed and pulled in a deep breath, then let it go slowly and reached for another cigarette. Her nails were bitten to the quick.
“What about her relationship with her father? They get along?”
Fine's mouth twisted. “She adores him. I don't know why.”
“You don't like him?”
“Never met him. But he controls her, doesn't he? He owns the town house, pays for school, picks the therapist, pays for the therapist. Dinner every Friday. A car.”
It sounded like a sweet deal to Liska. Maybe she could get Bondurant to adopt her. She let the subject drop. It was beginning to sound like if it had a penis, Michele didn't like it.
“Michele, do you know if Jillian had any distinguishing marks on her body: moles, scars, tattoos?”
Fine gave her a cross look. “How would I know that? We weren't lovers.”
“Nothing obvious, then. No scar on her arm. No snake tattooed around her wrist.”
“Not that I ever noticed.”
“If you were to look around Jillian's apartment, would you know if things were missing? Like if she'd packed some clothes and gone somewhere?”
She shrugged. “I guess.”
“Good. Let's see if we can take a ride.”
WHILE MICHELE FINE squared an hour's absence with her boss, the Italian stallion, Liska stepped out of the coffeehouse, pulled her cell phone out of her pocket, and dialed Kovac.
The air was crisp, a stiff breeze blowing, as was common for November. Not a bad day. A paler imitation of the glorious weather of late September and early October that made Minnesota rival any state in the union for perfection. Her boys would be out on their bikes after school, trying to squeeze in every last wheelie they could before the snow flew and the sleds came out of storage. They were lucky that hadn't happened already.
“Moose Lodge,” the gruff voice barked in her ear.
“Can I speak to Bullwinkle? I hear he's got a dick as long as my arm.”
“Christ, Liska. Is that all you ever think about?”
“That and my bank balance. I can't get enough either way.”
“You're preaching to the choir. What have you got for me?”
“Besides the hots? A question. When you went through Jillian's town house Monday, did you take a tape out of the answering machine?”
“It was digital. No messages.”
“This friend of hers says she called Saturday and left a message. So who erased it?”
“Ooo, a mystery. I hate a mystery. Get anything else?”
“Oh, yeah.” She looked through the window back into the coffee shop. “A tale to rival Shakespeare.”
“SHE WAS PUTTING her life back together,” Lila White's mother insisted. Her expression had the hard look of someone grown stubborn in the telling and retelling of a lie. A lie she wanted too badly to believe in and couldn't deep down in her heart.
Mary Moss felt a deep sadness for the woman.
The White family lived in the small farming community of Glencoe, the kind of place where gossip was a common hobby and rumors cut like broken glass. Mr. White was a mechanic at a farm implement dealership. They lived on the edge of town in a neat rambler with a family of concrete deer in the front yard and a swingset out back. The swingset was for the grandchild they were raising: Lila's daughter, Kylie, a tow-headed four-year-old blessedly immune to the facts of her mother's death. For now.
“She called us that Thursday night. She'd kicked the drugs, you know. It was the drugs that dragged her down.” The features of Mrs. White's lumpy face puckered, as if the bitterness of her feelings left a taste in her mouth. “It's all the fault of that Ostertag boy. He's the one got her started on the drugs.”
“Now, Jeannie,” Mr. White said with the weariness of pointless repetition. He was a tall, rawboned man with eyes the color of washed-out denim. He had farmer's creases in his face from too many years of squinting under a bright sun.
“Don't Jeannie me,” his wife snapped. “Everyone in town knows he peddles drugs, and his parents walk around pretending their shit don't stink. It makes me sick.”
“Allan Ostertag?” Moss said, referring to her notes. “Your daughter went to high school with him?”