Ashes to Ashes by Tami Hoag

part of the fantasy.”
    “Or maybe he’s a big drinker.”
    “No. A drinker doesn’t waste good booze. And that’s exactly what he’d call this: a waste of good liquor. He may be drinking prior to the hunt. He may drink during the torture and murder phase. But he’s no drunk. A drunk would make mistakes. Sounds like this guy hasn’t made any so far.”
    None that anyone had noticed, at any rate. He thought again of the two hookers whose death had preceded this woman’s and wondered who had caught their cases: a good cop or a bad cop. Every department had its share of both. He’d seen cops shrug and sleepwalk through an investigation if they didn’t feel the victim was worth their time. And he’d seen veteran cops break down and cry over the violent death of someone most taxpaying citizens wouldn’t sit next to on the bus.
    He closed the file. Rain ran down his forehead and dripped off the end of his nose.
    “This isn’t where he left the others, is it?”
    “No. One was found in Minnehaha Park and one in Powderhorn Park. Different parts of the city.”
    He would need to see maps, to see where each dumping site was in relation to the others, where each abduction had taken place—to try to establish both a hunting territory and a killing and/or dumping territory. The task force would have maps in their command center, posted and flagged with little redheaded pins. Standard op. There was no need to ask. His mind was already full of maps bristling with pins. Manhunts that ran together like tag-team events, and command centers and war rooms that all looked alike and smelled alike, and cops who tended to look alike and sound alike, and smell like cigarettes and cheap cologne. He couldn’t separate the cities anymore, but he could remember every single one of the victims.
    The exhaustion poured through him again, and he wanted nothing more than to lie down right there on the ground.
    He glanced over at Walsh as the agent fell into another spasm of deep, phlegm-rattling coughing.
    “Let’s go,” Quinn said. “I’ve seen enough here for now.”
    He’d seen enough, period. And yet it took him another moment to move his feet and follow Vince Walsh back to the car.
     
     
     

Chapter

5
     
     
    THE TENSION IN the mayor’s conference room was high and electric. Grim excitement, anticipation, anxiety, latent power. There were always those who saw murder as tragedy and those who sensed career opportunity. The next hour would sort out one type from the other, and establish the power order of the personalities involved. In that time Quinn would have to read them, work them, decide how to play them, and slot them into place in his own scheme of things.
    He straightened his back, squared his aching shoulders, lifted his chin, and made his entrance. Show time. The heads turned immediately as he walked in the door. On the plane he had memorized the names of some of the principal players here, scouring the faxes that had come into the office before he’d left Virginia. He tried to recall them now, tried to sort them from the hundreds of others he’d known in hundreds of conference rooms across the country.
    The mayor of Minneapolis detached herself from the crowd when she spotted him, and came toward him with purpose, trailing lesser politicians in her wake. Grace Noble resembled nothing so much as an operatic Valkyrie. She was fifty-something and large, built like a tree trunk, with a helmet of starched blond hair. She had no upper lip to speak of, but had carefully drawn herself one and filled it in with red lipstick that matched her suit.
    “Special Agent Quinn,” she declared, holding out a broad, wrinkled hand tipped with red nails. “I’ve been reading all about you. As soon as we heard from the director, I sent Cynthia to the library for every article she could find.”
    He flashed what had been called his
Top Gun
smile—confident, winning, charming, but with the unmistakable glint of steel beneath it.