“I know. Walsh is already on it. Meantime, we'll try to talk to anyone who was close to Jillian. Find out if she had any moles, scars, birthmarks, tattoos. We'll get pictures. We haven't turned up any close friends yet. No boyfriend anyone knows of. I gather she wasn't exactly a social butterfly.”
“What about her father?”
“He's too distraught to talk to us.” Kovac's mouth twisted. “‘Too distraught'—that's what his lawyer says. If I thought somebody whacked my kid, I'd be fucking distraught, all right. I'd be climbing all over the cops. I'd be living in their back pockets, doing anything I could to nail the son of a bitch.” He cocked an eyebrow at Quinn. “Wouldn't you?”
“I'd turn the world upside down and shake it by its heels.”
“Damn right. I go over to Bondurant's house to break the news this might be Jillian. He gets a look like I'd hit him in the head with a ball bat. ‘Oh, my God. Oh, my God,' he says, and I think he's gonna puke. So I don't think much of it when he excuses himself. The son of a bitch goes and calls his lawyer and he never comes out of his study again. I spend the next hour talking to Bondurant via Edwyn Noble.”
“And what did he tell you?”
“That Jillian had been to the house Friday night for dinner and he hadn't seen her since. She left around midnight. A neighbor corroborates. The couple across the street were just getting home from a party. Jillian's Saab pulled onto the street just as they turned onto the block at eleven-fifty.
“Peter Filthy Fucking Rich Bondurant,” he grumbled. “My luck. I'll be writing parking tickets by the time this thing is through.”
He finished his cigarette, dropped it on the tarmac, and ground out the butt with the toe of his shoe.
“Too bad DNA tests take so damn long,” he said, jumping back to the matter of identification. “Six weeks, eight weeks. Too damn long.”
“You're checking missing persons reports?”
“Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, the Dakotas. We've even called Canada. Nothing fits yet. Maybe the head'll turn up,” he said with optimism the way he might hope for the return of a pair of eyeglasses or a wallet.
“Maybe.”
“Well, enough of this shit for tonight. I'm starving,” he said abruptly, pulling his suit coat shut as if he had confused hunger for cold. “I know a place with great Mexican takeout. So hot it burns the corpse taste out of your mouth. We'll swing by on the way to your hotel.”
They walked away from the delivery bay as an ambulance pulled up. No lights, no siren. Another customer. Kovac fished his keys out of his pocket, looking at Quinn from the corner of his eye. “So, you knew our Kate?”
“Yeah.” Quinn stared into the fog, wondering where she was tonight. Wondering if she was thinking about him. “In another lifetime.”
8
CHAPTER
KATE EASED HER aching body down into the old claw-foot tub and tried to exhale the tension she had stored up during the day. It worked its way from the core of her through her muscles in the form of pain. She envisioned it rising from the water with steam and the scent of lavender. The brass wire tray that spanned the tub before her held a Bad Monday–size glass of Bombay Sapphire and tonic. She took a deep drink, lay back, and closed her eyes.
The stress management people frowned on alcohol as an answer to tension and preached that it would set a person on the road to alcoholism and doom. Kate had been up and down the road to doom. She figured if she was ever to become an alcoholic, it would have happened years before. Five years before. It hadn't, and so tonight she drank gin and waited for the pleasant numbness it would bring.
For just the briefest of moments the montage of faces from that bleak period of her life flashed through her mind's eye: Steven's changing face over the passing of that terrible year—distant, cold, angry, bitter; the doctor's regret, worn tired and bland by too many tragedies; her daughter's sweet face, there and gone in a single painful heartbeat. Quinn's face—intense, compassionate, passionate . . . angry, dispassionate, indifferent, a memory.
It never failed to amaze her, the sudden sharpness of that pain as it stabbed through the cotton batting of time. A part of her wished fervently it would dull, and another part of her hoped that it never would. The endless cycle of guilt: the need to escape it and the equally desperate need to cling to it.
She opened her eyes and stared at the window beyond the foot of the tub. A rectangle of night peered in above the half-curtain, blackness beyond the steamed glass.
She had at least healed over the surface of the old wounds and moved on with her life, which was as much as anyone could ever honestly hope to do. But how easily torn, that old scar tissue. How humbling the reality that she hadn't really grown past that pain attached to the memory of John Quinn. She felt like a fool and a child, and blamed the element of surprise.
She would do better tomorrow. She would have a clear head and keep her focus. She would allow no surprises. There was no sense in dredging up the past when the present demanded all her attention. And Kate Conlan had never been anything if not sensible . . . with the exception of a few brief months during the worst year of her life.
She and Steven had grown apart. A tolerable situation, had all things remained equal. Then Emily had contracted a virulent strain of influenza, and in a matter of days their sweet, sunny child was gone. Steven had blamed Kate, feeling she should have recognized the seriousness of the illness sooner. Kate had blamed herself despite the doctors' assurances that it wasn't her fault, that she couldn't have known. She had been so in need of someone to hold her, someone to offer comfort and support and absolution. . . .
Pulling the end of the towel over her shoulder from the towel bar behind her, she dabbed at her eyes, wiped her nose, then took another drink. The past was out of her control. She could at least delude herself into believing she had some control of the present.
She steered her thoughts to her client. Idiotic word—
It wasn't her job, really, finding out who Angie DiMarco was or why she was that sadly screwed-up person. But the more she knew about a client, the better able she was to understand that client, to act and react accordingly. To manipulate. To get what Sabin wanted out of the witness.
Draining the tub, she dried off, wrapped herself in a fat terry robe, and took the last of her drink to the small antique writing desk in her bedroom. Her feminine sanctuary. Peach tones and rich deep green gave the room a sense of warmth and welcome. Nanci Griffith's quirky sweet voice drifted from the speakers of the small stereo system on the bookshelf. Thor, the Norwegian forest cat who held dominion over the house, had claimed Kate's bed as his rightful throne and lay in all his regal, hairy splendor dead center on the down comforter. He gazed at her with the bored supremacy of a crown prince.
Kate curled a leg beneath her on the chair, pulled a sheet of paper from a cubbyhole in the desk, and began to write.
