Ashes to Ashes

by Tami Hoag

  Angie had looked in at some of them watching TV in a big living room full of ratty furniture, and thought how stupid they must be. If there was one thing she had learned in life, it was that you could escape circumstance, but you could never escape who you were. Your personal truth was a shadow: There was no denying it, no changing it, and no getting rid of it.

  She felt the shadow sweep over her now, cold and black. Her body trembled and tears rose in her eyes. She had been fighting it off all day, all night. She had thought it was going to swallow her whole right in front of Kate—an idea that only added to the panic. She couldn't lose control in front of anyone. Then they'd know that she was crazy, that she was defective. They'd ship her off to the nuthouse. She'd be alone then.

  She was alone now.

  The tremor began at the very core of her, then opened up wider and wider into a weird, hollow feeling. At the same time, she felt her consciousness shrinking and shrinking until she felt as if her body was just a shell and she was a tiny being locked inside it, in danger of falling off a ledge into some dark chasm inside and never being able to climb out.

  She called this feeling the Zone. The Zone was an old enemy. But as well as she knew it, it never failed to terrify her. She knew if she didn't fight it off, she could lose control, and control was everything. If she didn't fight it off, she could lose whole blocks of time. She could lose herself, and what would happen then?

  It shook her now, and she started to cry. Silently. Always silently. She couldn't let anyone hear her, she couldn't let them know how afraid she was. Her mouth tore open, but she strangled the sobs until her throat ached. She pressed her face against her knees, closing her eyes tight. The tears burned, fell, slid down her bare thigh.

  In her mind, she could see the burning corpse. She ran from it. She ran and ran but didn't get anywhere. In her mind, the corpse became her, but she couldn't feel the flames. She would have welcomed the pain, but she couldn't conjure it up with just her mind. And all the while she felt herself growing smaller and smaller inside the shell of her body.

  Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! She pinched her thigh hard, digging the ragged edge of her fingernails into the skin. And still she felt herself being sucked deeper and deeper into the Zone.

  You know what you have to do. The voice unfurled in her mind like a black ribbon. She shivered in response to it. It twined itself through vital parts of her, a strange matrix of fear and need.

  You know what you have to do.

  Frantically, she pulled her backpack to her, fumbled with the zipper, and dug through an inner pocket for the thing she needed. Her fingers curled around the box cutter, which was disguised as a small plastic key.

  Shaking, choking back the sobs, she crawled to a wedge of light on the bed and shoved up the left sleeve of the flannel shirt, exposing a thin white arm that was striped with narrow scars, one beside another and another, lining her arms like bars in an iron fence. The razor emerged from the end of the box cutter like a serpent's tongue and she drew it across a patch of tender skin near her elbow.

  The pain was sharp and sweet, and seemed to short-circuit the panic that had electrified her brain. Blood blossomed from the cut, a shiny black bead in the moonlight. She stared at it, mesmerized as the calm flowed through her.

  Control. Life was all about control. Pain and control. She had learned that lesson long ago.

  “I'M THINKING OF changing my name,” he says. “What do you think of Elvis? Elvis Nagel.”

  His companion says nothing. He picks up a pair of panties from the pile in the box and presses them to his face, burying his nose in the crotch and sniffing deep the scent of pussy. Nice. Smell is not as good a stimulant as sound for him, but still . . .

  “Get it?” he says. “It's an anagram. Elvis Nagel—Evil's Angel.”

  In the background, three televisions are running videotapes of the local six o'clock newscasts. The voices blend together in a discordant cacophony he finds stimulating. The common thread that runs through them all is urgency. Urgency breeds fear. Fear excites him. He especially enjoys the sound of it. The tight, quivering tension underlying a controlled voice. The erratic changes in pitch and tone in the voice of someone openly afraid.

  The mayor appears on two screens. The ugly cow. He watches her speak, wondering what it might be like to cut her lips off while she is still alive. Maybe make her eat them. The fantasy excites, as his fantasies always have.

  He turns up the volume on the televisions, then crosses to the stereo system set into the bookcase, selects a cassette from the rack, and slips it into the machine. He stands in the center of the basement room, staring at the televisions, at the furrowed brows of anchormen and the faces of the people at the press conference shot from three different angles, and lets the sounds wash over him—the voices of the reporters, the background echo in the cavernous hall, the urgency. At the same time from the stereo speakers comes the voice of raw, unvarnished fear. Pleading. Crying for God. Begging for death. His triumph.

  He stands in the center of it. The conductor of this macabre opera. The excitement builds inside him, a huge, hot, swelling, sexual excitement that builds to a crescendo and demands release. He looks to his companion for the evening, considering, but he controls the need.

  Control is all. Control is power. He is the action. They are the reaction. He wants to see the fear in all their faces, to hear it in their voices—the police, the task force, John Quinn. Especially Quinn, who hadn't even bothered to speak at the press conference, as if he wanted the Cremator to think he didn't warrant his personal attention.

  He will have Quinn's attention. He will have their respect. He will have whatever he wants because he has control.

  He turns the televisions down to a dull mumble but leaves them on so he won't return to silence. Silence is something he abhots. He turns off the stereo system but pockets a microcassette recorder loaded with a tape.

  “I'm going out,” he says. “I've had enough of you. You're boring me.”

  He goes to the mannequin he has been playing with, trying different combinations of the clothes of his victims.

  “Not that I don't appreciate you,” he says quietly.

  He leans forward and kisses her, putting his tongue in her open mouth. Then he lifts the head of his last victim off the shoulders of the mannequin, puts it back into its plastic bag, takes it to the refrigerator in the laundry room, and sets it carefully on a shelf.

  The night is thick with fog and mist, the streets black and gleaming wet in the glow of the streetlights. A night reminiscent of the Ripper's London. A night for hunting.

  He smiles at the thought as he drives toward the lake. He smiles wider as he presses the play button on the microcassette recorder and holds the machine against his ear, the screams a twisted metamorphosis of a lover's whispered words. Affection and desire warped into hatred and fear. Two sides of the same emotions. The difference is control.

  9

  CHAPTER

  “IF THE NEWSIES find us here, I'll eat my shorts,” Kovac declared, turning around in a circle in the middle of the floor.

  One wall was papered in a montage of naked women engaged in various erotic pursuits, the other three in cheap red flocked paper that best resembled moth-eaten velvet.

  “Something tells me you could have gotten that done here for you,” Quinn remarked dryly. He sniffed the air, identifying the smells of mice, cheap perfume, and damp underwear. “For a bargain price.”

  “The newsies find us here, our careers are toast,” Elwood Knutson said. The big homicide sergeant pulled a giant ceramic penis out of a drawer behind the counter and held it up for all to see.

  Liska made a face. “Jesus, Sam. You sure know how to pick 'em.”

  “Don't look at me! You think I hang out in massage parlors?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Very funny. These lovely accommodations are courtesy of Detective Adler, Hennepin County Sheriff's Office. Chunk, take a bow.”

  Adler, a ch
unk of muscle with ebony skin and a tight cap of steel-gray curls, gave a sheepish grin and a wave to the rest of the task force. “My sister works for Norwest Banks. They foreclosed on the building after sex crimes shut the place down last summer. The location is perfect, the price is right—meaning free—and the press lost interest in the place after the hookers moved out. No one's going to suspect this is where we're meeting.”

  Which was the main point, Quinn thought as he followed Kovac down the narrow hall, the detective turning on lights in the succession of four smaller rooms—two on either side of the hall. It was essential that the task force be allowed to do their jobs without interruption or distraction, without having to run a gauntlet of reporters. A place where the case could be contained and leaks kept to a minimum.

  And if the leaks continued, Elwood was right. The press would roast their careers on a public bonfire.

  “I love it!” Kovac declared, striding back down the hall to the front room. “Let's set up.”

  Liska wrinkled her nose. “Can we hose it down with Lysol first?”

  “Sure, Tinks. You can redecorate the place while the rest of us are solving these murders.”

  “Oh, fuck you, Kojak. I hope you're the first to catch the cooties from the toilet seat.”

  “Naw, that'll be Bear Butt in there with the Reader's Digest. Cooties see his hairy ass and come running. He's probably got a whole civilization living in that pelt.”

  Elwood, who was roughly the size and shape of a small grizzly, raised his head with dignity. “On behalf of hairy people everywhere, I take umbrage.”

  “Yeah?” Kovac said. “Well, take your umbrage outside and grab some stuff. We're burning daylight.”

  Two unmarked utility vans from the PD fleet were parked in the alley, loaded with the necessary office furniture and equipment. All of it was carried into the former Loving Touch Massage Parlor, along with boxes of office supplies, a coffeemaker, and, most important, the boxes containing the files on all three murders attributed to the killer the detectives privately called Smokey Joe.

  Quinn worked alongside the others. Just one of the guys. Trying to blend into another team like a free agent cleanup hitter drifting from one baseball park to another. Brought in by management to hit a dinger in the big game, then cut loose and sent on to the next crucial moment. The jokes felt forced, the attempts at camaraderie false. Some of these people would feel they knew him by the time all this was over. They wouldn't really know him at all.

  Still, he went through the motions as he always did, knowing none of the people around him could tell the difference—the same way people working side by side with this serial killer wouldn't know or suspect. People in general had a myopic view of their own small worlds. They focused on what was important to them. The rotting soul of the guy in the next cubicle didn't matter to them—until his disease touched their lives.

  In short order, the Loving Touch had been transformed from a brothel to a tactical war room. By nine o'clock the entire task force had assembled: six detectives from the Minneapolis PD, three from the Sheriff's Office, two from the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, Quinn, and Walsh.

  Walsh looked like he had malaria.

  Kovac briefed them on all three murders, finishing with the autopsy of the Jane Doe victim, complete with photographs that had been rushed through the lab for processing and enlarging.

  “We'll have some of the preliminary lab results today,” he said as he passed the gruesome pictures around the table. “We've got a blood type—O positive—which happens to be Jillian Bondurant's—and a gazillion other people's.

  “I want you to note the photographs of wounds where sections of flesh have been cut from the body. We had similar wounds on the first two vics. We're speculating the killer may be cutting away bite marks. But with this latest, he might have cut away any identifying marks that could prove or disprove the victim's identity: scars, moles, et cetera.”

  “Tattoos,” someone said.

  “Bondurant's father is unaware of Jillian having any tattoos. According to his lawyer, he couldn't come up with any distinguishing marks at all. Jillian had been out of his life for about half of hers, so I guess it's not surprising. We're trying to come up with photographs of her in a bathing suit or something, but no luck so far.

  “We're proceeding on the assumption that Jillian Bondurant is the vic,” he said, “but staying open to other possibilities. There've been a few calls to the hotline, people claiming they've seen her since Friday, but none of them have panned out yet.”

  “Are you going to bring up the K word?” asked Mary Moss from the BCA. She looked like a soccer mom from the suburbs in a turtleneck and tweed blazer. Oversize glasses dominated her oval face. Her thick gray-blond pageboy seemed in need of a serious thinning.

  “There haven't been any ransom demands that we know of,” Kovac said, “but it's not beyond the realm.”

  “Big Daddy Bondurant sure never jumped to the kidnapping conclusion,” Adler said. “Anyone find that strange besides me?”

  “He heard about the driver's license found with the body and accepted the probability the body was hers,” Hamill concluded.

  Adler spread hands the size of catcher's mitts. “I say again: Anyone find that strange besides me? Who wants to believe their child is the decapitated victim of a homicidal maniac? Man as rich as Bondurant, isn't he gonna think kidnapping before murder?”

  “Is he talking yet?” Elwood asked, chowing down a bran muffin as he perused the autopsy photos.

  “Not to me,” Kovac said.

  “I don't like the smell of that either.”

  “His attorney called me last night and left a message,” Quinn said. “Bondurant wants to see me this morning.”

  Kovac stepped back, nonplussed. “No shit? What'd you tell him?”

  “Nothing. I let him hang overnight. I don't particularly want to meet him at this stage of the game, but if it helps you get a foot in his door . . .”

  Kovac smiled like a shark. “You need a lift over to the Bondurant house, don't you, John?”

  Quinn tipped his head, wincing. “Do I have time to call and up my life insurance?”

  Laughter erupted around the table. Kovac made a face.

  “He gave me a lift from the morgue last night,” Quinn explained. “I thought I'd be going back in a black bag.”

  “Hey,” Kovac barked with false annoyance. “I got you there in one piece.”

  “Actually, I think my spleen is over on Marquette somewhere. Maybe we can pick it up on the way.”

  “He's been here a day and already he's got your number, Sam,” Liska joked.

  “Yeah, like you should talk, Tinks,” someone else countered.

  “I drive like Kovac only when I've got PMS.”

  Kovac held up a hand. “Okay, okay, back to business. Back to the bite marks. We ran that feature through the database back when we were looking at the first murder, searching for any known offenders in the metro—murderers or sex offenders—who had bitten or cannibalized victims, and came up with a list. We also ran it through VICAP and came up with another list.” He lifted a sheaf of computer printouts.

  “How long before we can confirm or deny this body is Bondurant's?”

  Gary “Charm” Yurek of the PD had been designated media spokesman for the task force, giving the line of official bullshit to the press every day. He had a face worthy of a soap star. People tended to become distracted by the utter perfection of his smile and miss that he hadn't really told them anything.

  Kovac looked now to Walsh. “Vince, any word on the girl's health records?”

  Walsh hacked a phlegm-rattling cough, shaking his head. “The Paris office is tracking them down. They've been trying to contact the stepfather, but he's somewhere between construction sites in Hungary and Slovakia.”

  “Apparently, she's been the picture of health since her return to the States,” Liska said. “She's had no serious injuries or illness, nothing to warrant X r
ays—except her teeth.”

  “He screwed us up but good taking her head,” Elwood complained.

  “You come up with any ideas on that, John?” Kovac asked.

  “Could be he meant to jam up the investigation. Could be that the body isn't Jillian Bondurant and he's sending some kind of message or playing a game,” Quinn suggested. “Maybe he knew the victim—whoever she was—and decapitated her to depersonalize her. Or the decapitation could be the new step in the escalation of his violent fantasies and how he plays them out. He could be keeping the head as a trophy. He could be using it to further act out his sexual fantasies.”

  “Judas,” Chunk muttered.

  Tippen, another of the sheriff's detectives, scowled. “You're not exactly narrowing it down.”

  “I don't know enough about him yet,” Quinn said evenly.

  “What do you know?”

  “Basics.”

  “Such as?”

  He looked to Kovac, who motioned him to the head of the table.

  “This is not by any means the completed analysis. I want that made clear. I did a quick read-through of the reports last night, but it takes more than a couple of hours to build a solid, accurate profile.”

  “Okay, you've covered your ass,” Tippen said impatiently. “So who do you think we're looking for?”

  Quinn held his temper in check. It was nothing new to have a skeptic in the crowd. He had learned long ago how to play them, how to pull them around a little at a time with logic and practicality. He leveled his gaze on Tippen, a lean, homely man with a face like an Irish wolfhound—all nose and mustache and shaggy brows over sharp, dark eyes.

  “Your UNSUB is a white male, probably between the ages of thirty and thirty-five. Sadistic sexual serial killers hunt within their own ethnic group as a rule.” Pointing to the close-ups of wounds from the crime scene photos, he said, “You've got a very specific pattern of wounds, carefully repeated on each victim. He's spent a long time perfecting this fantasy. When you find him you'll find a collection of S&M pornography. He's been into it for a long while. The sophistication of the crimes, the care taken to leave no usable physical evidence, suggests maturity and experience. He may have an old record as a sex offender. But record or no, he's been on this course from when he was in his late teens or early twenties.