into the cold facts that were all he needed for his analysis.
The professional in him still wished for the distance of his office in Quantico. But if he had stayed in Quantico, then he and Kate would have remained in the past tense.
On impulse, he grabbed up the telephone receiver and dialed her office number. On the fourth ring her machine picked up. He left his number again, hung up, picked up again, and dialed her home line with the same result. It was seven now. Where the hell was she?
Instantly he flashed on the decrepit garage in the dark alley behind her house and muttered a curse. Then he reminded himself—as Kate herself would surely do—that she had gotten along just fine without him for the past five years.
He could have used her expertise tonight, to say nothing of a long, slow kiss and a warm embrace. He turned back to the casebook and flipped to the victimologies, looking for the one thing he felt he'd missed that would tie it all together and point the finger.
The notes on Melanie Hessler were in his own hand, sketchy, too brief. Kovac had set Moss to the task of gathering the information on the latest of the Cremator's victims, but she had yet to bring him anything. He knew she'd worked in an adult bookstore—which, in the killer's mind, likely put her into the same category as the two hookers. She'd been attacked in the alley behind the store just months before, but the two men who had raped her had solid alibis and were not considered suspects in her death.
It was sad to think how each of these women had been victimized repeatedly in their brief lives. Lila White and Fawn Pierce in a profession and a lifestyle that specialized in abuse and degradation. White had been assaulted by her drug dealer just last summer. Pierce had been hospitalized three times in two years, the victim of her pimp once, once a mugging victim, and once a rape victim.
Jillian Bondurant's victimization had taken place behind the closed doors of her home. If Jillian was a victim.
He turned back to the photographs of victim number three once again and stared at the stab wounds to her chest. The signature. Long wound, short wound, long wound, short wound, like the arms of a star or the petals of a gruesome flower.
He thought of the faint voices on the tape.
Too easily he could picture the killers standing on either side of their victim's warm, lifeless body, each with a knife, taking turns punching their signature into the woman's chest, sealing the pact of their partnership.
It should have horrified him to think it, but it wasn't the worst thing he'd ever seen. Not by a long way. Mostly it left him numb.
A man and a woman. He scrolled through the possibilities, considering people known to be attached to the victims in some way. Gil Vanlees, Bondurant, Lucas Brandt. The Urskines—possibilities there. The hooker who had been at the Phoenix last night when the DiMarco girl had disappeared—and claimed not to have seen or heard a thing, who had also known the second victim. Michele Fine, Jillian's only friend. Strange and shaky. Scarred— physically and emotionally. A woman with a long, dark story behind her, no doubt—and no good alibi for the night Jillian went missing.
He reached for the sheet music Fine had handed over to him and wondered about Jillian's compositions she'd kept to herself.
Knuckles cracked against the door, and Kovac stuck his head in without waiting for an invitation.
“Can you smell it?” he asked, letting himself in. He leaned back against Quinn's wall of notes, suit rumpled, lip swollen where Peter Bondurant had popped him, tie askew. “Cooked goose, burned ass, toast.”
“You're out,” Quinn said.
