The notes on Melanie Hessler were in his own hand, sketchy, too brief. Kovac had set Moss to the task of gathering the information on the latest of the Cremator's victims, but she had yet to bring him anything. He knew she'd worked in an adult bookstore—which, in the killer's mind, likely put her into the same category as the two hookers. She'd been attacked in the alley behind the store just months before, but the two men who had raped her had solid alibis and were not considered suspects in her death.
It was sad to think how each of these women had been victimized repeatedly in their brief lives. Lila White and Fawn Pierce in a profession and a lifestyle that specialized in abuse and degradation. White had been assaulted by her drug dealer just last summer. Pierce had been hospitalized three times in two years, the victim of her pimp once, once a mugging victim, and once a rape victim.
Jillian Bondurant's victimization had taken place behind the closed doors of her home. If Jillian was a victim.
He turned back to the photographs of victim number three once again and stared at the stab wounds to her chest. The signature. Long wound, short wound, long wound, short wound, like the arms of a star or the petals of a gruesome flower. I love you, I love you not. Cross my heart, hope to die.
He thought of the faint voices on the tape.
“. . . Turn . . . do it . . .”
“. . . Want to . . . of me . . .”
Too easily he could picture the killers standing on either side of their victim's warm, lifeless body, each with a knife, taking turns punching their signature into the woman's chest, sealing the pact of their partnership.
It should have horrified him to think it, but it wasn't the worst thing he'd ever seen. Not by a long way. Mostly it left him numb.
That made him shudder.
A man and a woman. He scrolled through the possibilities, considering people known to be attached to the victims in some way. Gil Vanlees, Bondurant, Lucas Brandt. The Urskines—possibilities there. The hooker who had been at the Phoenix last night when the DiMarco girl had disappeared—and claimed not to have seen or heard a thing, who had also known the second victim. Michele Fine, Jillian's only friend. Strange and shaky. Scarred—physically and emotionally. A woman with a long, dark story behind her, no doubt—and no good alibi for the night Jillian went missing.
He reached for the sheet music Fine had handed over to him and wondered about Jillian's compositions she'd kept to herself.
Outsider
Outside
On the dark side
Alone
Looking in
On a whim
Want a home
Outsider
In my blood
In my bones
Can't have
What I want
Doomed to roam
All alone
On the outside
Let me in
Want a friend
Need a lover
Be with me
Be my boy
Be my father
Outsider
In my blood
In my bones
Can't have
What I want
Doomed to roam
All alone
On the outside
Knuckles cracked against the door, and Kovac stuck his head in without waiting for an invitation.
“Can you smell it?” he asked, letting himself in. He leaned back against Quinn's wall of notes, suit rumpled, lip swollen where Peter Bondurant had popped him, tie askew. “Cooked goose, burned ass, toast.”
“You're out,” Quinn said.
“Give the man a cigar. I'm off the task force. They'll name my successor at a press conference sometime tomorrow.”
“At least Bondurant didn't get you thrown off the force altogether,” Quinn said. “You played bad cop a little too hard this time, Sam.”
“Bad cop,” Kovac said with disgust. “That was me, and I meant every word of it. I'm fed up to my back teeth with Peter Bondurant, and his money and his power and his people. What Cheryl Thorton told me pushed me over the edge. I just kept thinking about the dead women nobody cared about, and Bondurant playing with the case like it was his own personal live game of Clue. I kept thinking about his daughter and how she should have had such a great life, but instead—dead or alive—she's fucked up forever, thanks to him.”
“If he molested her. We don't know what Cheryl Thorton said is true.”
“Bondurant pays her husband's medical bills. Why would she say something that rotten against the man if it wasn't true?”
“Did she give any indication she thinks Peter killed Jillian?”
“She wouldn't go that far.”
Quinn held out the sheet of music. “Make what you want of that. It could say you're on a hot trail.”
Kovac scowled as he read the lyrics of the song. “Jesus.”
Quinn spread his hands. “Could be sexual or not. Might refer to her father or her stepfather or not mean anything at all. I want to talk more with her friend Michele. See if she has an interpretation—if she'll give it to me.”
Kovac turned and looked at the photographs Quinn had taped up. The victims when they were alive and smiling. “There's nothing I hate more than a child-molester. That's why I don't work sex crimes—even if they do get better hours. If I ever worked sex crimes, I'd be in the tank so fast, I'd get whiplash. I'd get my hands on some son of a bitch who raped his own kid, and I'd just fucking kill him. Get 'em out of the gene pool, you know what I'm saying?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“I don't know how a man can look at his own daughter and think, ‘Hey, I gotta have me some of that.'”
He shook his head and dug a cigarette out of the pack in the breast pocket of his limp white shirt. The FBI offices were nonsmoking, but Quinn said nothing.
“I've got a daughter, you know,” Kovac said, exhaling his first lungful. “Well, you don't know. Hardly anyone knows. From my first marriage, which lasted about a minute and a half after I joined the force. Gina. She's sixteen now. I never see her. Her mother remarried with embarrassing haste and moved to Seattle. Some other guy got to be her dad.”
He moved his shoulders and looked at the pictures again. “Not so different from Bondurant, huh?” he said, his mouth twisting. The shoulders sagged on a long sigh. “Christ, I hate irony.”
Quinn could see the regret in his eyes. He'd seen it many times in many faces across the country. The job took a toll, and the people who were willing to pay it didn't get nearly enough in return.
“What're you going to do about the case?” he asked.
Kovac looked surprised by the question. “Work the damn task force, that's what. I don't care what Little Dick says. It's my case, I'm lead. They can name whoever they want.”