you'll agree with me. You've studied this stuff. You know what we look for. You know some of your pieces fit the puzzle. But that doesn't mean I believe you killed her. I don't necessarily believe Jillian is dead.”
“What?” Vanlees looked at him as if he thought Quinn might have lost his mind.
“I think there's a lot more to Jillian than first meets the eye. And I think you may have something to say about that. Do you, Gil?”
Vanlees looked at the floor again. Quinn could feel the pressure building in him as he weighed the pros and cons of answering truthfully.
“If you were watching her, Gil,” Quinn said very softly, “you're not going to get in trouble for that. That's not the focus here. The police will gladly let that go in trade for something they can use.”
Vanlees seemed to consider that, never thinking, Quinn was sure, that the “something” they were looking for could in turn be used against him. He was thinking of Jillian, of how he might cast some odd light on her and away from himself, because that was what people tended to do when they found themselves in big trouble—blame the other guy. Criminals regularly blamed their victims for the crimes committed against them.
“You were attracted to her, right?” Quinn said. “That's not a crime. She was a pretty girl. Why shouldn't you look?”
“I'm married,” he mumbled.
“You're married, you're not dead. Looking is free. So you looked. I don't have a problem with that.”
“She was . . . different,” Vanlees said, still staring at the floor but seeing Jillian Bondurant, Quinn thought. “Kind of . . . exotic.”
“You told Kovac she didn't come on to you, but that's not exactly true, is it?” Quinn ventured, still speaking softly, an intimate chat between acquaintances. “She was aware of you, wasn't she, Gil?”
“She never said anything, but she'd look at me in a certain way,” he admitted.
“Like she wanted you.” A statement, not a question, as if it came as no surprise.
Vanlees shied away from that. “I don't know. Like she wanted me to know she was looking, that's all.”
“Kind of mixed signals.”
“Yeah. Mixed signals.”
“Did anything come of it?”
Vanlees hesitated, struggled. Quinn waited, held his breath.
“I just want the truth, Gil. If you're innocent, it won't hurt you. It's just between us. Man to man.”
The silence stretched.
“I—I know it was wrong,” Vanlees murmured at last. “I didn't really mean to do it. But I was checking the yards one night, making the rounds—”
“When was this?”
“This summer. And . . . I was there . . .”
“At Jillian's house.”
He nodded. “She was playing the piano, wearing a silky robe that wanted to fall off her shoulder. I could see her bra strap.”
“So you watched her for a while,” Quinn said, as if it was only natural, any man would do it, no harm.
“Then she slipped the robe off and stood up and stretched.”
Vanlees was seeing it all in his mind. His respiration rate had picked up, and a fine sheen of sweat misted his face. “She started moving her body, like a dance. Slow and very . . . erotic.”
“Did she know you were there?”
“I didn't think so. But then she came to the window and pulled the cups of her bra down so I could see her tits, and she pressed them right to the glass and rubbed against it,” he said in a near whisper, ashamed, thrilled. “She—she licked the window with her tongue.”
“Jesus, that must have been very arousing for you.”
Vanlees blinked, embarrassed, looked away. This would be where parts of the story would go missing. He wouldn't tell about getting an erection or taking his penis out and masturbating while he watched her. Then again, he didn't have to. Quinn knew his history, knew the patterns of behavior, had seen it over and over in the years of studying criminal sexual behavior. He wasn't learning anything new here about Gil Vanlees. But if the story was true, he was learning something very significant about Jillian Bondurant.
“What'd she do then?” he asked softly.
Vanlees shifted on his chair, physically uncomfortable. “She—she pulled her panties down and she . . . touched herself between her legs.”
“She masturbated in front of you?”
His face flushed. “Then she opened the window and I got scared and ran. But later I went back, and she had dropped her panties out the window.”
“And those are the panties the police found in your truck. They
He nodded, bringing one hand up to his forehead as if to try to hide his face. Quinn watched him, trying to gauge him. Truth or a tale to cover his ass for having the underwear of a possible murder victim in his possession?
“When was this?” he asked again.
“Back this summer. July.”
“Did anything like that ever happen again?”
“No.”
“Did she ever say anything about it to you?”
“No. She almost never talked to me at all.”
“Mixed signals,” Quinn said again. “Did that make you mad, Gil? That she would strip in front of you, masturbate in front of you, then pretend like nothing happened. Pretend like she hardly knew you, like you weren't good enough for her. Did that piss you off?”
“I didn't do anything to her,” he whispered.
“She was a tease. If a woman did that to me—got me hard and hot for her, then turned it off—I'd be pissed. I'd want to fuck her good, make her pay attention. Didn't you want to do that, Gil?”
“But I never did.”
“But you wanted to have sex with her, didn't you? Didn't some part of you want to teach her a lesson? That dark side we all have, where we hold grudges and plan revenge. Don't you have a dark side, Gil? I do.”
He waited again, the tension coiled tight inside him.
Vanlees looked bleak, defeated, as if the full import of all that had happened tonight had finally sunk in.
“Kovac is going to try to hang that murder on me,” he said. “Because those panties are Jillian's. Because of what I just told you. Even when she was the bad one, not me. That's what's going to happen, isn't it?”
“You make a good suspect, Gil. You see that, don't you?”
He nodded slowly, thinking.
“Her father was there, at the town house,” he mumbled. “Sunday morning. Early. Before dawn. I saw him coming out. Monday his lawyer gave me five hundred dollars not to say anything.”
Quinn absorbed the information in silence, weighing it, gauging it. Gil Vanlees was ass deep in alligators. He might say anything. He might say he'd seen a stranger, a vagrant, a one-armed man near Jillian's apartment. He chose to say he'd seen Peter Bondurant, and that Peter Bondurant had paid him to shut up.
“Early Sunday morning,” Quinn said.
Vanlees nodded. No eye contact.
“Before dawn.”
“Yes.”
“What were you doing around there at that hour, Gil? Where were you that you saw him—and that he saw you?”
Vanlees shook his head this time—at the question or at something playing through his own mind. He seemed to have aged ten years in the last ten minutes. There was something pathetic about him sitting there in his security guard's uniform, the wanna-be cop playing pretend. The best he could do.
He spoke in a small, soft voice. “I want to call a lawyer now.”
