Ashes to Ashes

“Give the man a cigar. I'm off the task force. They'll name my successor at a press conference sometime tomorrow.”

“At least Bondurant didn't get you thrown off the force altogether,” Quinn said. “You played bad cop a little too hard this time, Sam.”

“Bad cop,” Kovac said with disgust. “That was me, and I meant every word of it. I'm fed up to my back teeth with Peter Bondurant, and his money and his power and his people. What Cheryl Thorton told me pushed me over the edge. I just kept thinking about the dead women nobody cared about, and Bondurant playing with the case like it was his own personal live game of Clue. I kept thinking about his daughter and how she should have had such a great life, but instead—dead or alive—she's fucked up forever, thanks to him.”

“If he molested her. We don't know what Cheryl Thorton said is true.”

“Bondurant pays her husband's medical bills. Why would she say something that rotten against the man if it wasn't true?”

“Did she give any indication she thinks Peter killed Jillian?”

“She wouldn't go that far.”

Quinn held out the sheet of music. “Make what you want of that. It could say you're on a hot trail.”

Kovac scowled as he read the lyrics of the song. “Jesus.”

Quinn spread his hands. “Could be sexual or not. Might refer to her father or her stepfather or not mean anything at all. I want to talk more with her friend Michele. See if she has an interpretation—if she'll give it to me.”

Kovac turned and looked at the photographs Quinn had taped up. The victims when they were alive and smiling. “There's nothing I hate more than a child-molester. That's why I don't work sex crimes—even if they do get better hours. If I ever worked sex crimes, I'd be in the tank so fast, I'd get whiplash. I'd get my hands on some son of a bitch who raped his own kid, and I'd just fucking kill him. Get 'em out of the gene pool, you know what I'm saying?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“I don't know how a man can look at his own daughter and think, ‘Hey, I gotta have me some of that.'”

He shook his head and dug a cigarette out of the pack in the breast pocket of his limp white shirt. The FBI offices were nonsmoking, but Quinn said nothing.

“I've got a daughter, you know,” Kovac said, exhaling his first lungful. “Well, you don't know. Hardly anyone knows. From my first marriage, which lasted about a minute and a half after I joined the force. Gina. She's sixteen now. I never see her. Her mother remarried with embarrassing haste and moved to Seattle. Some other guy got to be her dad.”

He moved his shoulders and looked at the pictures again. “Not so different from Bondurant, huh?” he said, his mouth twisting. The shoulders sagged on a long sigh. “Christ, I hate irony.”

Quinn could see the regret in his eyes. He'd seen it many times in many faces across the country. The job took a toll, and the people who were willing to pay it didn't get nearly enough in return.

“What're you going to do about the case?” he asked.

Kovac looked surprised by the question. “Work the damn task force, that's what. I don't care what Little Dick says. It's my case, I'm lead. They can name whoever they want.”

“Your lieutenant won't reassign you?”

“Fowler's on my side. He put me on the support team on the QT. I'm supposed to keep my head down and my mouth shut.”

“How long has he known you?”

“Long enough to know better.”

Quinn found a weary laugh. “Sam, you're something.”

“Yeah, I am. Just don't ask too many people what.” Kovac grinned, then it faded away. He dropped the last of his cigarette into an empty diet Coke can. “It's no ego trip, you know. I don't need my name in the paper. I don't care what goes in my jacket. I've never looked for a promotion, and I sure as hell don't expect to ever see another.

“I want this scumbag,” he said with steel in his voice. “I should've wanted him this bad when Lila White was killed, but I didn't. Not that I didn't care about her, but you were right: I went through the motions. I didn't hang in, didn't dig hard enough. When it didn't wrap up fast, I let it slide 'cause the brass was on my case and she was a hooker and hookers get whacked every once in a while. Hazard of the profession. Now we're up to four. I want Smokey Joe's ass on a platter before the body count goes up again.”

Quinn listened as Kovac said his piece, and nodded at the end of it. This was a good cop standing in front of him. A good man. And this case would break his career more easily than it would make it—even if he solved the mystery. But especially if the answer to the question turned out to be Peter Bondurant.

“What's the latest on Vanlees?” he asked.

“Tippen's riding his tail like a cat on a mouse. They pulled him over on Hennepin to ask about his buddy, the electronics dealer. Tip says the guy about shit his pants.”

“What about the electronics?”

“Adler checked out the guy's Web page. He specializes in computers and related gizmos, but if it plugs into a wall, he can get it for you. So there's nothing to say that he isn't up to his ears in recording equipment. I wish we could get a search warrant for his house, but there isn't a judge in the state who'd give us one based on what we've got on this mutt—which is nothing.”

“That bothers me,” Quinn admitted, tapping a pen against the file on Vanlees. “I don't think Gil's the brightest bulb in the chandelier. He's a good fit to the profile on a lot of points, but Smokey Joe is smart and he's bold, and Vanlees seems to be neither—which also makes him a perfect fall guy.”

Kovac fell into a chair as if the weight of this latest concern made the burden all suddenly too much for him. “Vanlees is connected to Jillian, and to Peter. I don't like that. I keep having this nightmare that Bondurant is Smokey Joe, and that no one will listen to me and no one else will look at him, and the son of a bitch will get away with it.

“I try to dig on him a little and he damn near gets me fired. I don't like it.” He pulled out another cigarette and just ran his fingers over it, as if he hoped that alone might calm him. “And then I think, ‘Sam, you're an idiot. Bondurant brought in Quinn.' Why would he do that if he was the killer?”

“For the challenge,” Quinn said without hesitation. “Or to get himself caught. I'd go with the first in this case. He'd get off on knowing I'm here and unable to spot him. Outsmarting the cops is big with this killer. But if Bondurant is Smokey Joe, then who's his accomplice?”

“Jillian,” Kovac offered. “And this whole thing with her murder is a sham.”

Quinn shook his head. “I don't think so. Bondurant believes his daughter is dead. Believes it more strongly than we do. That's no act.”

“So we're back to Vanlees.”

“Or the Urskines. Or someone we haven't even considered.”

Kovac scowled at him. “Some help you are.”

“That's why they pay me the big bucks.”

“My tax dollars at work,” he said with disgust. He hung the cigarette on his lip for a second, then took it away. “The Urskines. How twisted would that be? They whack two of their hookers, then do a couple of citizens in order to make a political point.”

“And to push suspicion away from themselves,” Quinn said. “No one considers the person trying to draw attention.”

“But to snatch the witness staying in their house? That's titanium balls.” Kovac tipped his head, considering. “I bet Toni Urskine can grow hair on hers.”

Quinn went to his wall of notes and scanned them, not really reading the words, just seeing a jumble of letters and facts that tangled in his mind with the theories and the faces and the names.

“Any word on Angie DiMarco?” he asked.

Kovac shook his head. “No one's seen her. No one's heard from her. We're flashing her picture on television, asking people to call the hotline if they've seen her. Personally, I'm afraid finding someone else in that car last night was just postponing the inevitable. But, hey,” he said, dragging himself up out of his chair, “I am, as my second wife used to call me, the infernal pessimist.”