suspected? Or because—as Angie said—it was dark, he wore a hood, it happened so fast? Or did her motivation lie elsewhere?
The task force had a hot suspect, Kate knew. Quinn was probably interviewing him right now. The caretaker from Jillian's town house complex. He had no inside connection to the case, but she supposed he could have known Angie if she had ever trolled for johns in the area around the Target Center, where he worked as a security guard.
But it didn't make sense for Angie to have a connection to the killer. If she knew him and wanted him caught, she would have given him up. If she knew him and didn't want him caught, she would have given a clear description of a phantom for the cops to chase.
And if she hadn't seen anything at all in the park that night, why would she say she had? For three squares and a place to stay? For attention? Then it would have made more sense for her to be cooperative rather than difficult.
Everything about this kid was a mystery inside a puzzle wrapped in an enigma.
But this one was—had been—her responsibility, and she would find out the truth about her or die trying.
“Poor choice of words, Kate,” she muttered, heading upstairs to change clothes.
Twenty minutes later, she was out the back door. It had snowed another inch during the night, giving the landscape a clean dusting of fresh white powder, coating the back steps . . . where a pair of boots had left tracks.
Quinn had gone out the front this morning, to a waiting cab. The tracks were too small to be his, at any rate. They were more the size of Kate's feet, though that didn't necessarily establish gender.
Carefully staying to one side of them, Kate followed the tracks down the stairs to the yard. The trail led past the end of her garage and down the far side, down the narrow corridor between the building and the neighbor's weathered-gray privacy fence, to the side entrance of the garage. All the doors were closed.
A chill ran through her. She thought back to last night and someone defecating in the garage. She thought of the suddenly burned-out light, the feeling Wednesday night that someone had been watching her as she'd made her way from the garage to the house.
She looked around, down the deserted alley. Most of the neighbors had fences that hid the first stories of their homes from view. Second-story windows looked black and empty. The neighborhood was full of white-collar professionals, most of whom left for work by seven-thirty.
Kate backed away from the garage, heart pumping, hand digging in her bag for her cell phone. Moving toward the house, she pulled the phone out, flipped it open, and punched the power button. Nothing happened. The battery had died in the night. The inconvenience of modern convenience.
She kept her eyes on the garage, thought she saw a movement through the side window. Car thief? Burglar? Rapist? Disgruntled client? Cremator?
She stuffed the phone back in her bag and pulled out her house keys. She let herself in, locked herself in, and breathed again.
“I need this like I need the plague,” she muttered, going into the kitchen. She put her tote and her purse on the table and started to slip out of her coat, when the sound registered in her brain. The low, feral growl of a cat. Thor was under the table, snarling, ears flat.
The fine hair rose up on the back of Kate's neck, and with it the itchy feeling of being watched.
Options raced through her mind. She had no idea how close the person might be behind her, or how close they might be to the door. The phone was on the wall on the other end of the room—too far away.
Casually opening the tote, she looked inside with an eye for a weapon. She didn't carry a gun. The canister of pepper spray she had carried for a while had expired and she'd thrown it out. She had a plastic bottle of Aleve, a packet of Kleenex, the heel from the shoe she'd ruined Monday. She dug a little deeper and found a metal nail file, palmed that, and slipped it into her coat pocket. She knew her escape routes. She would turn, confront, break right or left. Plan set, she counted to five and turned around.
The kitchen was empty. But framed by the doorway to the dining room, sitting on one of Kate's straight- backed oak chairs, was Angie DiMarco.
“HE CONFESSES TO having Jillian Bondurant's underpants, and you don't think he's the guy?” Kovac said, incredulous.
His temper had a direct effect on his driving, Quinn noticed. The Caprice roared down 94, rocking like a clown car. Quinn braced his feet in the floor well, knowing his legs would snap like toothpicks in the crash. Of course, it probably wouldn't matter, because he would be dead. This piece-of-crap car would crumple like an empty beer can.
“I'm just saying there are some things I don't like,” he said. “Vanlees doesn't strike me as a team player. He lacks the arrogance to be the top dog, and the sadistic male is virtually always the dominant partner in a couple that kills. The woman is subservient to him, a victim who counts herself lucky not to be the one he's murdering.”
“So this time it's reversed,” Kovac insisted. “The woman runs the show. Why not? Moss and Liska say his wife had him pussy-whipped.”
“His mother probably did too. And yes, it's often a domineering or manipulative or otherwise influential woman in his past or present a sexual sadist is killing symbolically when he kills his victims. That all fits, but there are holes too. I wish I caould say I just look at him and like him for these murders, but I'm not feeling that bolt of lightning.”
But then, that feeling had more or less deserted him in recent years, he reminded himself. Doubt had become more the rule than the exception, so what the hell did he know anymore? Why should he trust his instincts now?
Kovac swerved the car across three lanes to the exit he wanted. “Well, I can tell you, the powers that be like this guy fine. You talk about lightning. They're all getting a goddamn thunderstorm in their pants over Vanlees. He's got a history, he fits the profile, he has a connection to Jillian, access to hookers, and he's not Peter Bondurant. If they can find a way to charge him, they will. If they can, they'll do it in time for the press conference today.”
And if Vanlees wasn't the guy, they ran the risk of pushing the real killer into proving himself again. The thought made Quinn ill.
“Vanlees says Peter was in Jillian's place predawn Sunday morning, and sent Noble on Monday to pay him to keep his mouth shut,” he said, drawing a frighteningly long stare from Kovac. The Caprice began to drift toward a rusted-out Escort in the next lane.
“Jesus, will you watch the road!” Quinn snapped. “How do they give out driver's licenses in this state? You save up bottle caps or something?”
“Beer-can tabs,” Kovac replied, returning his attention to the traffic. “So Bondurant was the one who cleaned up Jillian's house and erased the messages on the answering machine.”
“I'd say so—if Vanlees is telling the truth. And I think it's a safe bet then that Peter is the reason you didn't find any of Jillian's own musical compositions. He might have taken them because they revealed something about his relationship with Jillian.”
“The sexual abuse.”
“Possibly.”
“Son of a bitch,” Kovac muttered. “Sunday morning. Smokey Joe didn't light up the body until midnight. Why would Bondurant go to her place Sunday morning, wipe the place down, take the music, if he didn't already know she was dead?”
“Why would he wipe the place down at all?” Quinn asked. “He owns the town house. His daughter lived there. His fingerprints wouldn't be out of place.”
Kovac cut him a glance. “Unless they were bloody.”
Quinn braced a hand against the dash as a tow truck cut in front of them and Kovac hit the brakes. “Just drive, Kojak. Or we won't live long enough to find out.”
WITH RUMORS OF a suspect in custody, the media circus had begun anew on the street in front of Peter Bondurant's house. Videographers roamed the boulevard, taking exterior shots of the mansion while on-air talent did their sound checks. Quinn wondered if anyone had even bothered to call the families of Lila White or Fawn Pierce.
