“What'd she do then?” he asked softly.
Vanlees shifted on his chair, physically uncomfortable. “She—she pulled her panties down and she . . . touched herself between her legs.”
“She masturbated in front of you?”
His face flushed. “Then she opened the window and I got scared and ran. But later I went back, and she had dropped her panties out the window.”
“And those are the panties the police found in your truck. They are Jillian's.”
He nodded, bringing one hand up to his forehead as if to try to hide his face. Quinn watched him, trying to gauge him. Truth or a tale to cover his ass for having the underwear of a possible murder victim in his possession?
“When was this?” he asked again.
“Back this summer. July.”
“Did anything like that ever happen again?”
“No.”
“Did she ever say anything about it to you?”
“No. She almost never talked to me at all.”
“Mixed signals,” Quinn said again. “Did that make you mad, Gil? That she would strip in front of you, masturbate in front of you, then pretend like nothing happened. Pretend like she hardly knew you, like you weren't good enough for her. Did that piss you off?”
“I didn't do anything to her,” he whispered.
“She was a tease. If a woman did that to me—got me hard and hot for her, then turned it off—I'd be pissed. I'd want to fuck her good, make her pay attention. Didn't you want to do that, Gil?”
“But I never did.”
“But you wanted to have sex with her, didn't you? Didn't some part of you want to teach her a lesson? That dark side we all have, where we hold grudges and plan revenge. Don't you have a dark side, Gil? I do.”
He waited again, the tension coiled tight inside him.
Vanlees looked bleak, defeated, as if the full import of all that had happened tonight had finally sunk in.
“Kovac is going to try to hang that murder on me,” he said. “Because those panties are Jillian's. Because of what I just told you. Even when she was the bad one, not me. That's what's going to happen, isn't it?”
“You make a good suspect, Gil. You see that, don't you?”
He nodded slowly, thinking.
“Her father was there, at the town house,” he mumbled. “Sunday morning. Early. Before dawn. I saw him coming out. Monday his lawyer gave me five hundred dollars not to say anything.”
Quinn absorbed the information in silence, weighing it, gauging it. Gil Vanlees was ass deep in alligators. He might say anything. He might say he'd seen a stranger, a vagrant, a one-armed man near Jillian's apartment. He chose to say he'd seen Peter Bondurant, and that Peter Bondurant had paid him to shut up.
“Early Sunday morning,” Quinn said.
Vanlees nodded. No eye contact.
“Before dawn.”
“Yes.”
“What were you doing around there at that hour, Gil? Where were you that you saw him—and that he saw you?”
Vanlees shook his head this time—at the question or at something playing through his own mind. He seemed to have aged ten years in the last ten minutes. There was something pathetic about him sitting there in his security guard's uniform, the wanna-be cop playing pretend. The best he could do.
He spoke in a small, soft voice. “I want to call a lawyer now.”
32
CHAPTER
KATE SAT ON the old leather couch in her study, curled into one corner, warding off the old house's morning chill with black leggings, thick wool socks, and a baggy old sweatshirt she hadn't worn in years. Quinn had given it to her back when. The name of the gym he frequented was stitched across the front. That she'd kept it all this time should have told her something, but then, she'd always been selectively deaf.
She had pulled it out of her closet after Quinn had gone to meet with the task force, freshening it in the clothes drier for a few minutes, and putting it on while it was still warm, pretending it was his warmth. A poor substitute for the feel of his arms around her. Still, it made her feel closer to him somehow. And after a night in his arms, the need for that was strong.
God, what an inconvenient time to rediscover love. But given their professions and their lives, what choice did they have? They were both too aware that life held no guarantees. Too aware that they had already given up too much time they could never get back because of fear and pride and pain.
Kate imagined she could look down from the height of another dimension and see the two of them as that time had passed. Her time spent focusing myopically on the minutiae of building a “normal” life for herself with a job and hobbies and people she saw socially at the requisite functions and holidays. Nothing deeper. Going through the motions, pretending not to mind the numbness in her soul. Figuring it was preferable to the alternative. Quinn's time poured into the job, the job, the job. Taking on more responsibility to fill the void, until the weight of it threatened to crush him. Crowding his brain with cases and facts until he couldn't keep them straight. Giving away pieces of himself and masking others until he couldn't remember what was genuine. Exhausting the well of strength that had once seemed almost bottomless. Wearing his confidence in his abilities and his judgment as threadbare as the lining of his stomach.
Both of them denying themselves the one thing they had needed most to heal after all that had happened: each other.
Sad, what people could do to themselves, and to each other, Kate thought, her gaze skimming across the pages of the victimologies she had spread out on the coffee table. Four more lives fucked up and ruined before they had ever met the Cremator. Five with Angie. Ruined because they needed love and couldn't find anything but a twisted, cheap replica. Because they wanted things out of their reach. Because it seemed easier to settle for less than work for more. Because they believed they didn't deserve anything better. Because the people around them who should have, didn't believe they deserved better either. Because they were women, and women are automatic targets in American society.
All of those reasons made a victim.
Everyone was a victim of something. The difference in people was what they did about it—succumb or rise above and move beyond. The women whose pictures lay before her would not be given that choice again.
Kate leaned over the coffee table, skimming her gaze across the reports. She had called the office to say she was taking some personal time. She'd been told Rob was out as well, and that office speculation was that they had beaten each other up and didn't want anyone to see the bruises. Kate said it was more likely Rob was still working on his written complaint to put in her personnel file.
At least she was free of him for the day. Which would have been a sweet deal if not for the photographs she had to look at of burned and mutilated women, and if not for all the emotions and depressing realities that those photographs evoked.
Everyone was a victim of something.
This group presented a depressing laundry list. Prostitution, drugs, alcohol, assault, rape, incest—if what Kovac had been told about Jillian Bondurant was true. Victims of crime, victims of their upbringing.
From a distance, Jillian Bondurant would have seemed to have been the anomaly because she wasn't a prostitute or in any sex-associated profession, but from the standpoint of her psychological profile, she wasn't all that far removed from Lila White or Fawn Pierce. Confused and conflicted feelings about sex and about men. Low self-esteem. Emotionally needy. Outwardly, she would seem not to have had as hard a life as a streetwalking prostitute because she wasn't as vulnerable to the same kind of crime and open violence. But there was nothing easy about suffering in silence, covering up pain and damage to save face for the family.