Ashes to Ashes by Tami Hoag Read Free Book Online

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