A petulant voice whined from the machine, “Kate, it's David Willis. I need to speak with you. Call me tonight. You know I'm not home during the day. I feel like you're deliberately avoiding me. Now—when my confidence level is so low. I need you—”
Kate hit the button to forward to the next message. “If they were all like him, I'd get a job at Wal-Mart.”
The next message was from the leader of a businesswoman's group, asking her to speak at a meeting.
Then next a long silence.
Kate met Quinn's sober stare with one of her own. “I had a couple of those last night. I thought they might be Angie. I wanted to believe it might be.”
Or it might be whoever had Angie, Quinn thought. Smokey Joe. “We need to put a trap on your phone, Kate. If he's got Angie, he's got your number.”
He could see that hadn't occurred to her. He saw the flash of surprise followed by annoyance with herself for having missed it. But of course Kate wouldn't think of herself as a possible victim. She was strong, in control, in charge. But not invulnerable.
Quinn got up from the couch and went to her, still naked, and put his arms around her.
“God, what a nightmare,” she whispered. “Do you think she could still be alive?”
“She could be,” he said, because he knew Kate needed to hear it. But he also knew that she was as aware of the odds and the horrible possibilities as he was. She knew as well as he did Angie DiMarco might still be alive, and that they might have been kinder hoping she was not.
I am dead
My need alive
Keeps me going
Keeps me hoping
Will he want me?
Will he take me?
Will he hurt me?
Will he love me?
The words cut at him. The music clawed at his senses. He played the tape anyway. Letting it hurt, needing to feel.
Peter sat in his office, the only light coming in through the window, just enough to turn black to charcoal, gray to ash. The anxiety, the guilt, the longing, the pain, the need, the emotions he could seldom grasp and never express, were trapped inside him, the pressure building until he thought his body would simply explode and there would be nothing left of him except fragments of tissue and hair stuck to the walls and the ceiling and the glass of the photographs of him with the people he had deemed important in his life in the last decade.
He wondered if any part of him would touch the pictures of Jillie crowded down into one small corner of the display. Out of the way, not calling any attention. Subtle shame—of her, of his failure, his mistakes.
“. . . We need to know the truth, Peter, and I think you're holding back pieces of the puzzle. . . . We need to see the whole picture.”
Dark pieces of a disturbing picture he didn't want anyone to see.
The surge of shame and rage was like acid in his veins.
I am dead
My need alive
Keeps me going
Keeps me hoping
Will he want me?
Will he take me?
Will he hurt me?
Will he love me?
The sound of the phone was like a razor slicing along his nerves. He grabbed the receiver with a trembling hand.
“Hello?”
“Da-ddy, Da-ddy, Da-ddy,” the voice sang like a siren. “Come see me. Come give me what I want. You know what I want. I want it now.”
He swallowed hard at the bile in his throat. “If I do, will you leave me alone?”
“Daddy, don't you love me?”
“Please,” he whispered. “I'll give you what you want.”
“Then you won't want me anymore. You won't like what I have in store. But you'll come anyway. You'll come for me. Say you'll come.”
“Yes,” he breathed.
He was crying as he hung up, tears scalding his eyelids, burning his cheeks, blurring his vision. He opened the lower right-hand drawer of his desk, took out a matte black Glock nine-millimeter semiautomatic, and slipped it gently into the black duffel bag at his feet. He left the room, the duffel bag hanging heavy in his hand. Then he left the house and drove out into the night.
31
CHAPTER
“WHAT'S YOUR DREAM job?” Elwood asked.
“Technical consultant to a cop movie, set in Hawaii and starring Mel Gibson,” Liska said without hesitation. “Turn the motor on. I'm cold.” She shivered and burrowed her hands down into her coat pockets.
They sat in an employee lot near the Target Center, watching Gil Vanlees's truck by the white glow of the security light. Like the vultures they were often compared to, reporters circled the block around the building and sat in the many small parking lots scattered around it, waiting. They had been on Vanlees like ticks as soon as his name had been leaked in connection with Jillian Bondurant's murder.
Vanlees had yet to leave the building. Groupies lingering after the Dave Matthews Band concert required his full attention. Word from detectives inside the Target Center was that management had kept him behind the scenes—afraid of a lawsuit from Vanlees if they dismissed him based on suspicion alone, afraid of lawsuits from the public if they let him work as usual and something went awry. Press passes had been handed from music critics to crime reporters, who had roamed the halls, looking for him.
The radio crackled. “Coming your way, Elwood.”
“Roger.” Elwood hung up the handset and chewed thoughtfully on his snack. The whole car smelled of peanut butter. “Mel Gibson is married and has six children.”
“Not in my fantasy he doesn't. Here he comes.”
Vanlees came lumbering through the gate. Half a dozen reporters swarmed after him like a cloud of gnats. Elwood ran the window down to catch their voices.
“Mr. Vanlees, John Quinn has pegged you as a suspect in the Cremator murders. What do you have to say about that?”
“Did you murder Jillian Bondurant?”
“What did you do with her head? Did you have sex with it?”
Elwood sighed heavily. “It's enough to put you off the First Amendment.”
“Assholes,” Liska complained. “They're worse than assholes. They're the bacteria that gather in assholes.”
Vanlees had no comment for the reporters. He kept moving, having quickly learned that rule of survival. When he was directly in front of their car, Elwood cranked the key and started the engine. Vanlees bolted sideways and hurried on toward his truck.
“A nervous, antisocial individual,” Elwood said, putting the last of his sandwich in a plastic evidence bag as Vanlees fumbled with his keys at the door of his truck.
“The guy's a twitch,” Nikki said. “My twitch. Do you think I'll get anything out of it if we nail him for these murders?”
“No.”
“Be brutally honest, why don't you? I don't want to hold any false expectations.”
Vanlees gunned his engine and pulled out of his slot, scattering the reporters. Elwood eased in behind him, then turned the headlights on bright for an instant.