Ashes to Ashes by Tami Hoag Page A

teeth in, it isn’t any love nip.”
    Stone took up her little ruler to measure the wounds precisely. “If there was any bruising, he’s cut it out. There’s considerable muscle gone.”
    “Jesus,” Kovac muttered with disgust as he stared at the shiny dark red square on the victim’s body, the flesh cut out precisely with a small sharp knife. “Who does this guy think he is? Hannibal Fucking Lecter?”
    Quinn gave him a look from the headless end of the body. “Everybody’s got a hero.”
     
     
    CASE NUMBER 11–7820, Jane Doe, Caucasian female, had no organic reason to die. She had been healthy in all respects. Well fed, carrying the extra ten or fifteen pounds most people did. Although what her last meal had been, Dr. Stone had not been able to determine. If this was Jillian, she had digested the dinner she’d eaten with her father before her death. Her body was free of disease and natural defect. Stone had judged her to be between the ages of twenty and twenty-five. A young woman with most of her life ahead of her—until she crossed the path of the wrong man.
    This type of killer rarely chose a victim who was ready to die.
    Quinn reviewed this fact as he stood on the wet tarmac of the morgue’s delivery bay. The damp cold of the night seeped into his clothes, into his muscles. Fog hung like a fine white shroud over the city.
    There were too damn many victims who were young women: 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