Mr. White sighed and nodded, enduring the process, waiting for it to be over so they could start the healing again and hope this was the last time the wounds would have to be reopened. His wife went on about the Ostertags. Moss waited patiently, knowing that Allan Ostertag was not and had never been a viable suspect in Lila White's murder, and was, therefore, irrelevant to her. He was not irrelevant to the Whites.
“Had she mentioned seeing anyone in particular last summer?” she asked when the rant ended. “A steady boyfriend? Someone who might have been a problem to her?”
“We've answered all these questions before,” Jeannie White said impatiently. “It's like you people don't bother to write anything down. 'Course it didn't matter when it was just our girl dead,” she said, the sarcasm as pointed as a needle. “We didn't see no task force on the news when it was just our Lila murdered. The police never cared—”
“That's not true, Mrs. White.”
“They never cared when that drug dealer beat her up last fall neither. They never even bothered to have a trial. It's like our girl didn't count.” The woman's eyes and throat filled with tears. “She wasn't important enough to anyone but us.”
Moss offered apologies, knowing they wouldn't be accepted. No explanation could penetrate the hurt, the imagined insult, the anger, the pain. It didn't matter to the Whites that an individual murder was, by necessity, handled differently from a string of related murders. It mattered to them that the child they had loved had fallen down one of life's darker paths. It mattered to them she had died a prostitute. That was how she would be remembered by the world, when she was remembered at all. Victim number one, convicted prostitute and drug addict.
The Whites probably saw the headlines in their sleep. The hopes they had held for their daughter to turn her life around had died unfulfilled, and no one else in the world cared that Lila had wanted to become a counselor or that she had been a B student in high school or that she had often cried her heart out over not being able to raise her own child.
In the file folder on the passenger seat of Moss's car were snapshots of Lila and Kylie in the Whites' backyard. Smiling and laughing, and wearing party hats for Kylie's fourth birthday. Photos of mother and daughter splashing in a green plastic wading pool. Three weeks later someone had tortured the life from Lila White, desecrated her body and set it on fire like a pile of garbage.
Victim number one, convicted prostitute and drug addict.
Moss went through the reassurances in her own mind. The police couldn't form a task force for every homicide in the city. Lila White's murder had been investigated fully. Sam Kovac had caught the case, and Kovac's reputation was that he did his best for every victim, regardless of who or what they had been in life.
Still, she couldn't help but wonder—as Jeannie White had wondered aloud—how differently things might have turned out if Jillian Bondurant had been victim number one.
THE LOCKS HAD been changed on Jillian Bondurant's town house at Edgewater and a new key delivered to the PD. Liska worked the shiny new key into the dead bolt and opened the door. She went to the bedrooms with Michele Fine and watched as Fine looked through the closets, pausing now and again to linger briefly over something that struck a memory for her.
“Jesus, it's eerie,” she said, looking around. “Seeing the place so clean.”
“Jillian didn't have a cleaning service?”
“No. Her old man tried to give her maid service as a present once. He's the most anal man on the planet. Jillie said no. She didn't want people going through her stuff.
“I don't see anything missing,” she said finally.
As she stood at Jillian's dresser, her gaze drifted across the few objects there: a mahogany jewelry box, some scented candles in mismatched holders, a small porcelain figurine of an elegant woman in a flowing blue dress. She touched the figurine carefully, her expression wistful.
As Fine gathered her few clothing items from the guest bedroom, Liska walked down the steps and took in the main rooms at a glance, seeing the place differently from before she'd met Jillian's friend. It should have been a mess, but it wasn't. She'd never known a killer to offer maid services as part of the package, but someone had cleaned the place up. Not just wiped it down to get rid of prints. Cleaned it, folded and put away clothes, washed the dishes.
Her thoughts turned back to Michele Fine and Jillian as friends. They must have seemed an unlikely pair: a billionaire's daughter and a coffeehouse waitress. If there had been a ransom demand to Peter Bondurant, the relationship would have automatically fallen under scrutiny. Even without it, the suspicions flashed through Liska's mind out of habit.
Considered and dismissed. Michele Fine was cooperating fully. Nothing she had said or done seemed out of place. Her grief appeared genuine, and was colored with the shades of anger and relief and guilt Liska had encountered time and again in the people a murder victim left behind.
Still, she would run Michele Fine's name through the computer and see if anything kicked up.
She crossed the living room to the electronic piano. Jillian Bondurant had written music but was too shy to perform. That was the kind of detail that made her a real person in a way that knowing she was Peter Bondurant's daughter did not. The sheet music stacked neatly on the stand was classical. Another contradiction in Jillian's image. Liska lifted the padded seat and glanced through the collection there: folk, rock, alternative, new age—
“Hold it right there!”
Her first impulse was to go for her gun, but she held herself bent over at the piano stool, breathing through her mouth. Slowly, she turned her head and relief swept through her, her temper hot on its heels.
“It's me, Mr. Vanlees. Detective Liska,” she said, straightening. “Put the gun down, please.”
Vanlees stood just inside the doorway in his security guard's uniform, a Colt Python clutched in his hands. Liska wanted to pull the gun away from him and smack him in the head with it.
He blinked at her and lowered the weapon, a barely sheepish grin pulling at his mouth. “Oh, jeez, Detective, I'm sorry. I didn't know you were coming over. When I saw there was someone moving around over here, I thought the worst. You know, tabloid reporters have been coming around. I hear they'll steal anything that's not nailed down.”
“You didn't recognize my car, then?” Liska said with a little too much edge.
“Uh, I guess I didn't. Sorry.”
Like hell, she thought. Wanna-bes like Vanlees took note of everything about the cops they encountered in the real world. She would have bet he had her tag number written down somewhere. He sure as hell recognized the make and model. This little show had been about impressing her. Gil Vanlees: Man of Action. On his toes. On the job. Ever diligent. God help us all.
Liska shook her head. “That's quite the gun you've got there, Gil,” she said, moving toward him. “Don't suppose I've got to ask if you've got a permit for it?”
The eyes went a little cold and the smile sagged out of his face. He didn't like having her reprimand him. He didn't want to be reminded his uniform wasn't the real deal. He stuck the nose of the Python under his belt and eased the gun into place alongside his gut. “Yeah, I got a permit.”
Liska forced a smile. “That's some piece of hardware. Not really a good idea to come up behind people with it, Gil. You never know what might happen. Reflexes a little too sharp that day and you blow somebody away. That'd be a bad deal all the way around, you know.”
He wouldn't meet her eyes now, like a kid being scolded for getting into his father's tools.
“You say reporters have been nosing around here? No one's been in the house though, right?”