Ashes to Ashes

me, about my True Self.”

And she would never have suspected. God in heaven, she'd worked beside this man for a year and a half. Never once would she have thought he was capable of this. Never once had she questioned his motives for choosing his profession. On the contrary, his being an advocate for victims—so ready to listen to them, so ready to spend time with them—had been his one redeeming quality. Or so she had believed.

“You think I'm nobody,” he yelled. “I AM SOMEBODY! I AM EVIL'S ANGEL! I AM THE FUCKING CREMATOR! Now what do you think of me, Ms. Bitch?”

He crouched down beside her and rolled her onto her back. Kate kept her eyes nearly shut, barely seeing more than a blur of colors between her lashes. Her hand was in her pocket, fingers sliding around the shaft of the metal nail file.

“I saved you for last,” he said. “You're going to beg me to kill you. And I'm going to love doing it.”

36

CHAPTER

“WHAT HAPPENED THAT night, Peter?” Quinn asked.

They sat in a small, dingy white room in the bowels of the city hall building, near the booking area of the adult detention center. Bondurant had waived his rights and refused to go to the hospital. A paramedic had cleaned the bullet wound to his scalp right there on the stairs where he had tried to end it all.

Edwyn Noble had thrown a holy fit, insisting to be present during questioning, insisting on sending Peter directly to a hospital whether he wanted to go or not. But Peter had won out, swearing in front of a dozen news cameras he wanted to confess.

Present in the room were Bondurant, Quinn, and Yurek. Peter had wanted only Quinn, but the police had insisted on having a representative present. Sam Kovac's name was not mentioned.

“Jillian came to dinner,” Peter said. He looked small and shrunken, like a longtime heroin junkie. Pale, red- eyed, vacant. “She was in one of her moods. Up, down, laughing one minute, snapping the next. She was just like that—volatile. Like her mother. Even as a baby.”

“What did you fight about?”

He stared across the room at a rosy stain on the wall that might have been blood before someone tried to scrub it away. “School, her music, her therapy, her stepfather, us.”

“She wanted to resume her relationship with LeBlanc?”

“She'd been speaking with him. She said she was thinking of going back to France.”

“You were angry.”

“Angry,” he said, and sighed. “That's not really the right word. I was upset. I felt tremendous guilt.”

“Why guilt?”

He took a long time formulating his answer, as if he were pre-choosing each word he would use. “Because that was my fault—what happened with Jillian and LeBlanc. I could have prevented it. I could have fought Sophie for custody, but I just let go.”

“She threatened to expose you for molesting Jillian,” Quinn reminded him.

“She threatened to claim I had molested Jillian,” Peter corrected him. “She had actually coached Jillie on what to say, how to behave in order to convince people it was true.”

“But it wasn't?”

“She was my child. I could never have done anything to hurt her.”

He thought about that answer, his composure cracking and crumbling. He covered his mouth with a trembling hand and cried silently for a moment. “How could I have known?”

“You knew Sophie's mental state,” Quinn pointed out.

“I was in the process of buying out Don Thorton. I had several huge government contracts pending. She could have ruined me.”

Quinn said nothing, letting Bondurant sort through it himself, as he had undoubtedly done a thousand times in the last week alone.

Bondurant heaved a defeated sigh and looked at the table. “I gave my daughter to a madwoman and a child-molester. I would have been kinder to kill her then.”

“What happened Friday night?” Quinn asked again, drawing him back to the present.

“We argued about LeBlanc. She accused me of not loving her. She locked herself in the music room for a time. I let her alone. I went into the library, sat in front of the fire, drank some cognac.

“About eleven-thirty she came into the room behind me, singing. She had a beautiful voice—haunting, ethereal. The song was obscene, disgusting, perverse. It was everything Sophie had coached her to say about me all those years ago: the things I had supposedly done to her.”

“That made you angry.”

“It made me sick. I got up and turned to tell her so, and she was standing in front of me naked. ‘Don't you want me, Daddy?' she said. ‘Don't you love me?'”

Even the memory astonished him, sickened him. He bent over the wastebasket that had been set beside his chair and retched, but there was nothing left in his stomach. Quinn waited, calm, unemotional, purposely detached.

“Did you have sex with her?” Yurek asked.

Quinn glared at him.

“No! My God!” Peter said, outraged at the suggestion.

“What happened?” Quinn asked. “You fought. She ended up running out.”

“Yes,” he said, calming. “We fought. I said some things I shouldn't have. She was so fragile. But I was so shocked, so angry. She ran and put her clothes on and left. I never saw her alive again.”

Yurek looked confused and disappointed. “But you said you killed her.”

“Don't you see? I could have saved her, but I didn't. I let her go the first time to save myself, my business, my fortune. It's my fault she became who she did. I let her go Friday night because I didn't want to deal with that, and now she's dead. I killed her, Detective, just as surely as if I had stabbed her in the heart.”

Yurek skidded his chair back and got up to pace, looking like a man who'd just realized he'd been cheated in a shell game. “Come on, Mr. Bondurant. You expect us to believe that?” He didn't have the voice or the edge to play bad cop—even when he meant it. “You were carrying your daughter's head in a bag. What is that about? A little memento the real killer sent you?”

Bondurant said nothing. The mention of Jillian's head upset him, and he began focusing inward again. Quinn could see him slipping away, allowing his mind to be lured to a place other than this ugly reality. He might go there and not come back for a long time.

“Peter, what were you doing in Jillian's town house Sunday morning?”

“I went to see her. To see if she was all right.”

“In the middle of the night?” Yurek said doubtfully.

“She wouldn't return my calls. I left her alone Saturday on Lucas Brandt's advice. By Sunday morning . . . I had to do something.”

“So you went there and let yourself in,” Quinn said.

Bondurant looked down at a stain on his sweater and scratched at it absently with his thumbnail. “I thought she would be in bed . . . then I wondered whose bed she was in. I waited for her.”

“What did you do while you were waiting?”

“Cleaned,” he said, as if that made perfect sense and wasn't in any way odd. “The apartment looked like— like—a sty,” he said, lip curling with disgust. “Filthy, dirty, full of garbage and mess.”

“Like Jillian's life?” Quinn asked gently.

Tears swelled in Bondurant's eyes. The cleaning had been more symbolic than for sanitary purposes. He hadn't been able to change his daughter's life, but he could clean up her environment. An act of control, and perhaps of affection, Quinn thought.

“You erased the messages on her machine?” he asked.

Bondurant nodded. The tears came harder. Elbows on the table, he cupped his hands around his eyes.