Ashes to Ashes by Tami Hoag Page A

pretty young women, ordinary young women, women with everything going for them, and women with nothing in their lives but a sliver of hope for something better. All of them broken and wasted like dolls, abused and thrown away as if their lives had meant nothing at all.
    “Hope you're not attached to that suit,” Kovac said as he walked up, fishing a cigarette out of a pack of Salem Menthols.
    Quinn looked down at himself, knowing the stench of violent death had permeated every fiber of his clothing. “Professional hazard. I didn't have time to change.”
    “Me neither. Used to drive my wives crazy.”
    “Wives—plural?”
    “Consecutive, not concurrent. Two. You know how it is—the job and all. . . . Anyway, my second wife used to call them corpse clothes—whatever I had to wear to a really putrid death scene or an autopsy or something. She made me undress in the garage, and then you'd think she'd maybe burn the clothes or stick 'em in the trash or something, 'cause she sure as hell wouldn't let me wear them again. But no. She'd box the stuff up and take it to the Goodwill—on account of it still had wear in it, she'd say.” He shook his head in amazement. “Underprivi-leged people all over Minneapolis were walking around smelling like dead bodies, thanks to her. You married?”
    Quinn shook his head.
    “Divorced?”
    “Once. A long time ago.”
    So long ago, the brief attempt at marriage seemed more like a half-remembered bad dream than a memory. Bringing it up was like kicking a pile of ashes, stirring old flecks of emotional debris inside him—feelings of frustration and failure and regret that had long since gone cold. Feelings that came stronger when he thought of Kate.
    “Everybody's got one,” Kovac said. “It's the job.”
    He held the cigarettes out, Quinn declined.
    “God, I gotta get that smell out of my mouth.” Kovac filled his lungs and absorbed the maximum amount of tar and nicotine before exhaling, letting the smoke roll over his tongue. It drifted away to blend into the fog. “So, you think that's Jillian Bondurant in there?”
    “Could be, but I think there's a chance it's not. The UNSUB went to a hell of a lot of trouble to make sure we couldn't get prints.”
    “But he leaves Bondurant's DL at the scene. So maybe he nabbed Bondurant, then figured out who she was and decided to hang on to her, hold her for ransom,” Kovac speculated. “Meanwhile, he picks up another woman and offs her, leaves Bondurant's DL with the body to show what might happen if Daddy doesn't cough up.”
    Kovac narrowed his eyes as if he were playing the theory through again for review. “No ransom demand we know of, and she's been missing since Friday. Still, maybe . . . But you don't think so.”
    “I've never seen it happen that way, that's all,” Quinn said. “As a rule, with this type of murder you get a killer with one thing on his mind: playing out his fantasy. It's got nothing to do with money—usually.”
    Quinn turned a little more toward Kovac, knowing this was the member of the task force he most needed to win over. Kovac was the investigative lead. His knowledge of these cases, of this town, and of the kind of criminals who lived in its underbelly would be invaluable. Trouble was, Quinn didn't think he had the energy left to pull out the old I'm-just-a-cop-like-you routine. He settled for some truth, instead.
    “The thing about profiling is that it's a proactive tool based on the reactive use of knowledge gained from past events. Not a perfect science. Every case could potentially present something we've never seen before.”
    “I hear you're pretty good though,” the detective conceded. “You nailed that child-killer out in Colorado right down to his stutter.”
    Quinn shrugged. “Sometimes all the pieces fit. How long before you can get your hands on Bondurant's medical records for comparison with the body?”
    Kovac rolled his eyes. “I oughta change my name to Murphy. Murphy's Law: