“Why are you doing this to me?” Bondurant whispered in a tortured voice. His prim, tight-lipped mouth was quivering.
“Because we need to know the truth, Peter, and I think you're holding back pieces of the puzzle. If you want the truth—as you say you do—then you have to give those pieces to me. Do you understand? We need to see the whole picture.”
Quinn held his breath. Bondurant was on the edge. He could feel it, see it. He tried to will him over it.
Bondurant stared out the window at the snow, still now, looking numb. “All I wanted was for us to be father and daughter—”
“That's enough, Peter.” Noble stepped in front of Quinn and took his client by the arm. “We're leaving.”
He glared at Quinn. “I thought we understood each other.”
“Oh, I understand you perfectly, Mr. Noble,” Quinn said. “That doesn't mean I'm interested in playing on your team. I'm interested in two things only: the truth, and justice. I don't know that you want either.”
Noble said nothing. He led Bondurant from the room like a caretaker with a sedated patient.
Quinn looked to the mayor, who had finally taken a seat herself. She looked partly stunned and partly reflective, as if trying to sort through old memories for any that might have implicated Peter Bondurant in something she would never have suspected. Chief Greer looked like a man in the early stages of diverticulitis.
“That's the thing about digging holes,” Quinn said. “There are no assurances you'll find what you want—or want what you find.”
BY FIVE O'CLOCK every news agency native to and camped in the Twin Cities had the name of Gil Vanlees. The same media that would plaster that name in print and fill television screens with bad photographs of the man would point fingers at the police department for leaking information.
Quinn had no doubt where the leak had sprung, and it pissed him off. Bondurant's people having the kind of access they had tainted the case. And in the light of Kovac's revelation that afternoon, Bondurant's meddling took on an even darker quality.
No one had leaked that story to the press. Not even the allegedly bitter, vindictive Cheryl Thorton, whose brain-damaged husband was supported by Peter Bondurant. He wondered exactly how much money it took to hold a grudge like that at bay for a decade.
What had gone on in the lives of Jillian and her mother and father in that pivotal time of the divorce? he wondered in his windowless room at the FBI offices. From the start, Bondurant had struck him as a man with secrets. Secrets about the present. Secrets about the past. Secrets as dark as incest?
How else would Sophie Bondurant have gotten custody of Jillian? Unstable as she was. Powerful as Peter was.
He flipped through the casebook to the crime scene photos of the third murder. Certain aspects of the murder gave the impression the killer and victim may have known each other. The decapitation when none of the other victims had been decapitated, the extreme depersonalization. Both suggested a kind of rage that was personal. But what of the latest theory that the killer worked with a partner, a woman? That didn't fit Peter Bondurant. And what of the thought that perhaps the woman involved was Jillian Bondurant herself?
A history of sexual abuse would fit the profile of a woman involved in this type of crime. She would have a skewed view of male-female relationships, of sexual relationships. Her partner was likely older, some twisted suggestion of a father figure, the dominant partner.
Quinn thought of Jillian, of the photograph in Bondurant's office. Emotionally troubled, with low self-esteem, a girl unhappily pretending to be something she wasn't in order to please. To what lengths might she go to find the approval she craved?
He thought of her involvement with her stepfather—supposedly consensual, but these things never really are. Children need love and can be easily manipulated by that need. And if Jillian had escaped an abusive relationship with her father, only to be coerced into another by her stepfather, that would have reinforced every warped idea she had of relationships with men.
If Peter had abused her.
If Jillian wasn't a dead victim, but a willing victim.
If Gil Vanlees was her partner in this sickness.
If Gil Vanlees was a killer at all.
If if if if . . .
Vanlees seemed a perfect fit—except he didn't strike Quinn as having the brainpower to outsmart the cops for this long, or the balls to play the kind of taunting game this killer played. Not the Gil Vanlees he'd seen in that interview room today. But he knew from experience people could have more than one side, and that a dark side that was capable of killing the way the Cremator killed was capable of anything, including disguising itself very, very well.
He pictured Gil Vanlees in his mind and waited for that twist in his gut that told him this was the guy. But the feeling didn't come. He couldn't remember the last time it had. Not even after the fact, after a killer had been caught and fit his profile point by point. That sense of knowing didn't come anymore. The arrogance of certainty had abandoned him. Dread had taken its place.
He flipped farther into the murder book, to the fresh photographs from Melanie Hessler's autopsy. As with the third victim, the wounds inflicted both before and after death had been brutal, unspeakably cruel, worse than with the first two victims. As he looked at the photographs he could hear the echo of the tape recording in his head. Scream after scream after scream.
The screams ran into one another and into the cacophony that filled his nightmares, growing louder and louder. The sound swelled and expanded in his brain until he felt as if his head would burst and the contents run out in a sickly gray ooze. And all the while he stared at the autopsy photographs, at the charred, mutilated thing that had once been a woman, and he thought of the kind of rage it took to do that to another person. The kind of poisonous, black emotions kept under tight control until the pressure became too much. And he thought of Peter Bondurant and Gil Vanlees and a thousand nameless faces walking the streets of these cities just waiting for that main line of hate to blow and push them over the edge.
Any of them could have been this killer. The necessary components resided in a great many people, and needed only the proper catalyst to set them off. The task force was putting its money on Vanlees, based on circumstance and the profile. But all they had was logic and a hunch. No physical evidence. Could Gil Vanlees have been that careful, that clever? They had no witness to put him with any of the victims. Their witness was gone. They had no obvious connection between all four victims or anything tying Vanlees to any victim other than Jillian—if Jillian was a victim.
If this. If that.
Quinn dug a Tagamet out of his pants pocket and washed it down with diet Coke. The case was crowding in on him; he couldn't get perspective. The players were too close around him, their ideas, their emotions, bleeding into the cold facts that were all he needed for his analysis.
The professional in him still wished for the distance of his office in Quantico. But if he had stayed in Quantico, then he and Kate would have remained in the past tense.
On impulse, he grabbed up the telephone receiver and dialed her office number. On the fourth ring her machine picked up. He left his number again, hung up, picked up again, and dialed her home line with the same result. It was seven now. Where the hell was she?
Instantly he flashed on the decrepit garage in the dark alley behind her house and muttered a curse. Then he reminded himself—as Kate herself would surely do—that she had gotten along just fine without him for the past five years.
He could have used her expertise tonight, to say nothing of a long, slow kiss and a warm embrace. He turned back to the casebook and flipped to the victimologies, looking for the one thing he felt he'd missed that would tie it all together and point the finger.