Ashes to Ashes

The housekeeper looked worried that she'd screwed up. Quinn watched Bondurant as the woman started back toward the kitchen. The stress of the last few days was telling on him. He looked as if he hadn't eaten or slept. All dark circles and sunken cheeks and a pallor that was unique to people under tremendous pressure.

“I don't have anything useful to say to you,” he declared, impatient. “My daughter is dead. I can't do anything to change that. I can't even bury her. I can't even make funeral arrangements. The medical examiner's office won't release the body.”

“They can't release the body without a positive ID, Mr. Bondurant,” Quinn said. “You don't want to bury a stranger by mistake, do you?”

“My daughter was a stranger to me,” he said enigmatically, wearily.

“Really?” Kovac said, moving slowly around the foyer, like a shark circling. “Here I thought she might have been telling you all about who she really was when she called you that night—after she left here. After you said you never heard from her again.”

Bondurant stared at him. No denial. No apology.

“What'd you think?” Kovac demanded. “Did you think I wouldn't find that out? Do you think I'm a moron? Do you think I've gotta have a fucking FBI shield in order to have a brain?”

“I didn't think it was relevant.”

Kovac looked astounded. “Not relevant? Maybe she gave a clue where she was when she made the call. That would give us an area to canvass for witnesses. Maybe there was a voice in the background, or a distinguishing sound. Maybe the call was interrupted.”

“No on all counts.”

“Why did she call?”

“To say good night.”

“And is that the same reason she'd call her shrink in the middle of the night?”

No reaction. No surprise, no anger. “I wouldn't know why she called Lucas. Their relationship as doctor and patient was none of my business.”

“She was your daughter,” Kovac said, pacing fast, the frustration building. “Did you think it wasn't any of your business when her stepfather was fucking her?”

Direct hit. At last, Quinn thought, watching anger fill Peter Bondurant's thin face. “I've had all I want of you, Sergeant.”

“Yeah? Do you suppose that's what LeBlanc said to Jillian that drove her to try to kill herself back in France?” Kovac taunted, reckless, skating on a thin edge.

“You bastard.” Bondurant made no move toward him, but held himself rigid. Quinn could see him trembling.

“I'm a bastard?” Kovac laughed. “Your daughter's maybe dead and you don't bother to tell us jack shit about her, and I'm the bastard? That's rich. John, do you fucking believe this guy?”

Quinn gave the big sigh of disappointment. “We don't ask these questions lightly, Mr. Bondurant. We don't ask them to hurt you or your daughter's memory. We ask because we need the whole picture.”

“I've told you,” Bondurant said in a low, tight voice, the fury cold and hard in his eyes. “Jillian's past has nothing to do with this.”

“I'm afraid it does. One way or another. Your daughter's past was a part of who she was—or who she is.”

“Lucas told me you'd insist on that. It's ludicrous to think Jillian somehow brought this on herself. She was doing so well—”

“It's not your job to try to dissect this, Peter,” Quinn said, shifting to the personal. I'm your friend. You can tell me. Giving him permission to let go of the control slowly and voluntarily. Quinn could see the logical part of Bondurant's mind arguing with the emotions he kept so firmly boxed. He was wound so tight that if Kovac pushed him hard enough and he snapped, it would be like suddenly loosing a high-tension wire— no control at all. Bondurant was smart enough to realize that and anal enough to dread the possibility.

“We're not saying it was Jillian's fault, Peter. She didn't ask for this to happen. She didn't deserve to have this happen.”

A sheen of tears glazed Bondurant's eyes.

“I realize this is difficult for you,” Quinn said softly. “When your wife left, she took your daughter to a man who abused her. I can imagine the kind of anger you must have felt when you found out.”

“No, you can't.” Bondurant turned away, looking for some kind of escape but not willing to leave the hall.

“Jillian was an ocean away, in trouble, in pain. But everything was over by the time you found out, so what could you do? Nothing. I can imagine the frustration, the anger, the feeling of impotence. The guilt.”

“I couldn't do anything,” he murmured. He stood beside a marble-topped table, staring at a sculpture of ragged bronze lilies, seeing a past he would rather have kept locked away. “I didn't know. She didn't tell me until after she'd moved back here. I didn't know until it was too late.”

With a trembling hand he touched one of the lilies and closed his eyes.

Quinn stood beside him, just encroaching on Bondurant's personal space. Near enough to invite confidence, to suggest support rather than intimidation. “It's not too late, Peter. You can still help. We have the same goal— finding and stopping Jillian's killer. What happened that night?”

He shook his head. Denying what? There was a sense of something—guilt? shame?—emanating from him almost like an odor. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing.”

“You had dinner. She stayed till midnight. What happened that made her call Brandt? She must have been upset about something.”

Still shaking his head. Denying what? Her emotional state, or just refusing to answer? Shaking off the questions as unacceptable because the answers would open a door he didn't want to go through? The daughter who had come back to him after all those years had not come back the innocent child she had been. She had come back different, damaged. How would a father feel? Hurt, disappointed, ashamed. Guilty because he hadn't been there to prevent what had driven his daughter to try to end her own life. Guilty because of the shame he felt when he thought of her as damaged, as less than perfect. Emotions tangled and dark, tied in a knot that would take the skill of a surgeon to unravel. He thought of the photograph in Bondurant's office: Jillian, so unhappy in a dress meant for another kind of girl.

Kovac came up on Bondurant's right. “We're not out to hurt Jillian. Or you, Mr. Bondurant. We just want the truth.”

Quinn held his breath, never taking his eyes off Bondurant. A moment passed. A decision was made. The scales tipped away from them. He could see it in Peter Bondurant's face as his hand slipped from the ragged bronze lily and he pulled everything inside him tight, and closed that inner door that had slipped ajar.

“No,” Bondurant said, his face a vacant, bony mask as he reached for the receiver of the sleek black telephone that sat beside the sculpture. “You won't get the chance. I won't have my daughter's memory dragged through the mud. If I see one word in one paper about what happened to Jillian in France, I'll ruin you both.”

Kovac blew out a breath and moved away from the table. “I'm just trying to solve these murders, Mr. Bondurant. That's my only agenda here. I'm a simple guy with simple needs—like the truth. You could ruin me in a heartbeat. Hell, anything I ever had that was worth anything at all went to one ex-wife or the other. You can squash me like a bug. And you know what? I'll still want that truth, 'cause that's the way I am. It'll be easier on all of us if you give it to me sooner rather than later.”

Bondurant just stared at him, stone-faced, and Kovac just shook his head and walked away.

Quinn didn't move for a moment, watching Bondurant, trying to measure, trying to read. They had been so close to drawing him out. . . . “You brought me here for a reason,” he said softly, one-on-one, man-to-man. He pulled a business card from his pocket and laid it on the table. “Call me when you're ready.”

Bondurant hit a direct dial button on the phone and waited.

“One last question,” Quinn said. “Jillian liked to write music. Did you ever hear her perform? Ever see any of her stuff?”

“No. She didn't share that with me.”

He looked away as someone answered on the other end of the line.