Ashes to Ashes

by Tami Hoag

  Kate frowned as she watched him retreat to the men's room. “And I ask yet again: Why do I always have to be the one in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

  4

  CHAPTER

  SUPERVISORY SPECIAL AGENT John Quinn walked out of the jetway and into the Minneapolis–St. Paul airport. It looked like nearly every other airport he'd ever seen: gray and cheerless, the only sign of emotion rising above the grim and travel-weary being the celebration of a family welcoming home a boy with a buzz cut and a blue air force uniform.

  He felt a flicker of envy, a feeling that seemed as old as he was—forty-four. His own family had been geared for contention, not celebration. He hadn't seen them in years. Too busy, too distant, too detached. Too ashamed of them, his old man would have said . . . and he would have been right.

  He spotted the field agent standing at the edge of the gate area. Vince Walsh. According to the file, he was fifty-two with a solid record. He would retire in June. He looked an unhealthy sixty-two. His complexion was the color of modeling clay, and gravity had pulled the flesh of his face down, leaving deep crevices in his cheeks and across his forehead. He had the look of a man with too much stress in his life and no way out but a heart attack. He had the look of a man who would rather have been doing something other than picking up some hotshot mind hunter from Quantico.

  Quinn forced his energy level up along with the corners of his mouth. React accordingly: look apologetic, nonaggressive, nonthreatening; just a touch of friendliness, but not overly familiar. His shoulders were drooping naturally with fatigue; he didn't bother to square them up. “You're Walsh?”

  “You're Quinn,” Walsh declared flatly as Quinn started to pull his ID from the interior pocket of his suit coat. “Got luggage?”

  “Just what you see.” A bulging garment bag that exceeded regulation carry-on dimensions and a briefcase weighed down with a laptop computer and a ream of paperwork. Walsh made no offer to take either.

  “I appreciate the ride,” Quinn said as they started down the concourse. “It's the quickest way for me to get right in the game. Eliminates me driving around lost for an hour.”

  “Fine.”

  Fine. Not a great start, but there it was. He'd work the guy around as they went. The important thing here was to hit the ground running. The case was the priority. Always the case. One after another, on top of another, with another and another around the bend . . . The fatigue shuddered down through him, giving his stomach a kick as it went.

  They walked in silence to the main terminal, took the elevator up one floor, and crossed over the street to the parking ramp where Walsh had left his Taurus parked illegally in a handicapped slot. Quinn dumped his stuff in the trunk and sat back for the ride out to the highway. Cigarette smoke had permeated the car's interior and gave the beige upholstery the same gray cast as the car's driver.

  Walsh reached for a pack of Chesterfields as they hit state highway five. He hooked his lip over the cigarette and pulled it out of the pack. “You mind?”

  He flicked a lighter without waiting for a reply.

  Quinn cracked the window a slit. “It's your car.”

  “For seven more months.” He lit up, sucked in a lungful of tar and nicotine, and stifled a cough. “Christ, I can't shake this damn cold.”

  “Filthy weather,” Quinn offered. Or lung cancer.

  The sky seemed to press down over Minneapolis like an anvil. Rain and forty-three degrees. All vegetation had gone dormant or had died and would stay that way until spring—which he suspected was a depressingly long way off in this place. At least in Virginia there were signs of life by March.

  “Could be worse,” Walsh said. “Could be a goddamn blizzard. Had one here on Halloween a few years back. What a mess. Must have been ten feet of snow that winter and it wasn't gone till May. I hate this place.”

  Quinn didn't ask why he stayed. He didn't want to hear the common litany against the Bureau or the common complaints of the unhappily married man with in-laws in the vicinity, or any other reason a man like Walsh hated his life. He had his own problems—which Vince Walsh would not want to hear about either. “There's no such place as Utopia, Vince.”

  “Yeah, well, Scottsdale comes close enough. I never want to be cold again as long as I live. Come June, I'm out of here. Out of this place. Out of this thankless job.”

  He glanced at Quinn with suspicion, as if he figured him for some Bureau stoolie who would be on the phone to the special agent in charge the second he was left alone.

  “The job can wear on a man,” Quinn commiserated. “The politics is what gets to me,” he said, picking the hot nerve with unerring accuracy. “Working in the field, you get it from both ends—the locals and the Bureau.”

  “That's a fact. I wish to hell I could have blown out of here for good yesterday. This case is gonna be nothing but one kick in the ass after another.”

  “Has that started already?”

  “You're here, aren't you?”

  Walsh picked up a file folder from the seat between them and handed it over. “The crime scene photos. Knock yourself out.”

  Quinn took the file without taking his dark eyes off Walsh. “You have a problem with me being here, Vince?” he asked bluntly, softening the question with an expression that was part I'm-your-buddy smile, part confusion that he didn't feel. He'd been in this situation so many times, he knew every possible reaction to his arrival on the scene: genuine welcome, hypocritical welcome, cloaked annoyance, open hostility. Walsh was a number three who would have claimed he said exactly what he thought.

  “Hell no,” he said at last. “If we don't nail this scumbag ASAP, we're all gonna be running around with targets on our backs. I got no problem with you having a bigger one than me.”

  “It's still your case. I'm here as support.”

  “Funny. I said the same thing to the homicide lieutenant.”

  Quinn said nothing, already starting to lay out a team strategy in his mind. It looked like he might have to work around Walsh, although it seemed unlikely that the ASAC (assistant special agent in charge) here would have assigned a less than stellar agent to this case. If Peter Bondurant could make top dogs in Washington bark, the locals weren't apt to antagonize the man. According to the faxes, Walsh had a solid rep that spanned a lot of years. Maybe a few too many years, a few too many cases, a few too many political games.

  Quinn already had a picture of the political situation here. The body count was three—just meeting the official standard to be considered serial murders. Ordinarily he would have been consulted by phone at this stage—if he was consulted at all. In his experience, locals usually tried to handle this kind of thing themselves until they were slightly deeper in dead bodies. And with a caseload of eighty-five, he had to prioritize worst to least. A three-murder case rarely made his travel schedule. His physical presence here seemed unnecessary—which aggravated his frustration and his exhaustion. He closed his eyes for two seconds, reining the feelings back into their corral.

  “Your Mr. Bondurant has friends in very high places,” he said. “What's the story with him?”

  “He's your basic nine-hundred-pound gorilla. Owns a computer outfit that has a lot of defense contracts—Paragon. He's been making noises about moving it out of state, which has the governor and every other politician in the state lining up to kiss his ass. They say he's worth a billion dollars or more.”

  “Have you met him?”

  “No. He didn't bother to go through our office to get to you. I hear he went straight to the top.”

  And in a matter of hours the FBI had Quinn on a plane to Minneapolis. No consideration to the normal assignment of cases by region. No consideration to the cases he had ongoing. None of the usual bureaucratic bullshit entanglements over travel authorizations.

  He wondered sourly if Bondurant had asked for him by name. He'd been in the spotlight a hell of a lot in the last year. Not by his own choosing. The press liked his image. He fit their profile of
what a special agent from the Investigative Support Unit should look like: athletic, square-jawed, dark, intense. He took a good picture, looked good on television, George Clooney would play him in the movies. Some days the image was useful. Some days he found it amusing. More and more it was just a pain in the ass.

  “He didn't waste any time,” Walsh went on. “The girl's not even cold yet. They don't even know for a fact it's his kid—what with the head gone and all. But you know, people with money don't screw around. They don't have to.”

  “Where are we at with the ID on the victim?”

  “They've got her DL. They're going to try to get her fingerprints, but the hands were pretty badly burned, I'm told. The ME has requested Jillian Bondurant's medical history regarding any distinguishing marks or broken bones to see if anything matches up. We know the body is the right size and build. We know Jillian Bondurant had dinner with her father Friday night. She left his house around midnight and hasn't been seen since.”

  “What about her car?”

  “No one's found it yet. Autopsy's scheduled for tonight. Maybe they'll get lucky and be able to match the body's stomach contents with the meal Bondurant and her father had that night, but I doubt it. She'd have had to have been killed almost right away. That's not how this sicko operates.

  “The press conference is at five—not that the press is waiting for it,” he went on. “They've been all over the air with the story. They've already given this scumbag a nickname. They're calling him the Cremator. Catchy, huh?”

  “I'm told they're drawing correlations to some murders from a couple of years ago. Is there any connection?”

  “The Wirth Park murders. No connection, but a couple of similarities. Those victims were black women—and one Asian transvestite he got by mistake. Prostitutes or supposed prostitutes—and this guy's first two vics were prostitutes. But there's always someone killing prostitutes. They're easy targets. Those vics were mostly black and these are white. That right there points to a different killer—right?”

  “Sexual serial killers generally stay within their own ethnic group, yes.”

  “Anyway, they got a conviction on one of those Wirth Park murders and closed the books on the others. They got their killer, there just wasn't enough physical evidence to go to trial on all the cases. Besides, how many life sentences can a guy serve?

  “I talked to one of the homicide dicks this morning,” Walsh said, crushing out the stub of his cigarette in the filthy ashtray. “He says there's no doubt about it, this is definitely a different scumbag. But to tell you the truth, I don't know much more about these murders than you. Until this morning all they had were two dead hookers. I read about them in the paper just like everyone else. I sure as hell know the other guy never cut anybody's head off. That's a new twist for this neck of the woods.”

  The dark play on words struck him belatedly, and he made a little huffing sound and shook his head at the bad joke.

  Quinn looked out the window at the gray and the rain, the winter-dead trees as black and bleak as if they'd been charred, and observed a moment of sympathy for the nameless, faceless victims not important enough to warrant anything but a label. In their lives they had known joy and sorrow. On the way to their deaths they had likely known terror and pain. They had families and friends who would mourn them and miss them. But the press and society at large whittled their lives and their deaths down to the lowest, lowliest common denominator: two dead hookers. Quinn had seen a hundred . . . and he remembered every one.

  Sighing, he rubbed at the dull headache that had taken up semipermanent residence in his frontal lobes. He was too tired for the kind of diplomacy needed at the start of a case. This was the kind of tired that went to the marrow of his bones and weighed him down like lead. There had been too many bodies in the last few years. Their names scrolled through his mind at night when he tried to sleep. Counting corpses, he called it. Not the kind of thing that inspired sweet dreams.

  “You want to go to your hotel first or to the office?” Walsh asked.

  As if what he wanted had anything to do with it. What he wanted in life had gone out of sight for him long ago.

  “I have to go to the crime scene,” he said, the unopened folder of photographs as heavy as a steel plate on his lap. “I need to see where he left her.”

  THE PARK LOOKED like a campsite the day after a Cub Scout jamboree. The charred ground where the fire had been, the yellow tape strung from tree to tree like bunting to fence off the area; the dead grass trampled down, leaves pressed into the ground like wet paper cutouts. Crumpled paper coffee cups had blown out of the trash can that sat just off the blacktop trail on the hillside and skittered across the ground.

  Walsh parked the car and they got out and stood on the blacktop, Quinn scanning the entire area from north to south. The crime scene was slightly below them in a shallow bowl of ground that had afforded excellent cover. The park was studded with trees, both deciduous and evergreen. By dead of night this would be a small world all its own. The nearest residences—neat middle-class single-family homes—were well away from the crime scene, the skyscrapers of downtown Minneapolis several miles to the north. Even the small service lot where they were parked was obscured from view by trees and what was likely a beautiful row of lilacs in the spring—camouflage to hide a small locked utility shed and the park maintenance vehicles that came and went as needed.

  Their UNSUB (unknown subject) had likely parked here and carried the body down the hill for his little ceremony. Quinn looked up at the sodium vapor security light that topped a dark pole near the utility shed. The glass had been shattered, but there were no visible fragments of it on the ground.

  “We know how long that light's been out?”

  Walsh looked up, blinking and grimacing as the rain hit him in the face. “You'll have to ask the cops.”

  A couple of days, Quinn bet. Not long enough that the park service would have gotten around to fixing it. If the damage was the work of their man in preparation for his midnight call . . . If he had come here in advance, knocked out the light, cleaned up the glass to help avoid detection of the vandalism and thereby improve his odds that the security light would not be replaced quickly . . . if all of that was true, they were dealing with a strong degree of planning and premeditation. And experience. MO was learned behavior. A criminal learned by trial and error what to do and what not to do in the commission of his crimes. He improved his methods with time and repetition.

  Ignoring the rain that pelted down on his bare head, Quinn hunched his shoulders inside his trench coat and started down the hill, conscious that the killer would have taken this route with a body in his arms. It was a fair distance—fifty or sixty yards. The crime scene unit would have the exact measurements. It took strength to carry a dead weight that far. The time of death would have determined how he had carried her. Over the shoulder would have been easiest—if rigor had not yet set in, or if it had come and gone already. If he had been able to carry her over his shoulder, then his size could vary more; a smaller man could accomplish the task. If he had to carry her in his arms, he would had to have been larger. Quinn hoped they would know more after the autopsy.

  “What did the crime scene unit cover?” he asked, the words coming out of his mouth on a cloud of steam.

  Walsh hustled along three paces behind him, coughing. “Everything. This whole section of park, including the parking area and the utility shed. The homicide guys called in their own Bureau of Investigation crime scene people and the mobile lab from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension as well. They were very thorough.”

  “When did this rain start?”

  “This morning.”

  “Shit,” Quinn grumbled. “Last night—would the ground have been hard or soft?”

  “Like a rock. They didn't get any shoe prints. They picked up some garbage—scraps of paper, cigarette butts, like that. But hell, it's a public park. The stuff could have come from anyone.”

 
“Anything distinguishing left at the first two scenes?”

  “The victims' driver's licenses. Other than that, nothing to my knowledge.”

  “Who's doing the lab work?”

  “BCA. Their facilities are excellent.”

  “I've heard that.”

  “They're aware they can contact the FBI lab if they need help or clarification on anything.”

  Quinn pulled up just short of the charred ground where the body had been left, a thick, dark sense of oppression closing tight around his chest as it always did at a crime scene. He had never tried to discern whether the feeling was anything as mystical or romantic as the notion of a malingering sense of evil or something as psychologically profound as displaced guilt. The feeling was just a part of him. He supposed he should have welcomed it as some proof of his humanity. After all the bodies he'd seen, he had yet to become totally hardened.

  Then again, he might have been better off if he had.

  For the first time, he opened the folder Walsh had given him and looked at the photographs someone had had the foresight to slip into plastic protectors. The tableau presented might have made the average person recoil. Portable halogen lights had been set up near the body to illuminate both the night and the corpse, giving the photo a weirdly artistic quality. As did the charring of the flesh, and the melted fabric of the woman's clothing. Color against the absence of color; the fanciful vibrance of a triangle of undamaged red skirt against the grim reality of its wearer's violent death.

  “Were the others wearing clothes?”

  “I don't know.”

  “I'll want to see those photos too. I'll want to see everything they've got. You have my list?”

  “I faxed a copy to the homicide detectives. They'll try to have it all together for the task force meeting. Hell of a sight, isn't it?” Walsh nodded to the photograph. “Enough to put a person off barbecue.”

  Quinn made no comment as he further studied the photo. Because of the heat of the fire, the muscles and tendons of the limbs had contracted, pulling the victim's arms and legs into what was technically known as a pugilistic attitude—a position that suggested animation. A suggestion made macabre by the absence of the head.