Prior Bad Acts

13

KOVAC HAD JUST PULLED up to the curb across the street from Carey Moore’s house when his cell phone rang.

“Kovac.”

“It’s Carey Moore.”

Her voice was quiet, composed, but he could hear an underlying tension.

“I just got a call. A man. He said, ‘I’m coming to get you, bitch.’”

“I’m right across the street from your house. I’ll be right there.”

“Come to the door, but don’t ring the bell. I don’t want to wake Anka and Lucy.”

She hung up. All business. Used to being queen of her domain, even in times of crisis.

Kovac crossed the street to the prowl car parked at the curb with two uniforms inside. The driver ran his window down.

“You guys see anything?” Kovac asked.

“Nope. All’s quiet.”

“You’ve been around the house?”

“Couple of times. The place is locked down.”

“Did the husband show up?”

“Nope.”

It was almost one-thirty in the morning. What the hell kind of business dinner ran until one-thirty in the morning?

Kovac patted a hand absently on the roof of the cruiser.

“You married, Benson?” he asked the officer behind the wheel.

“Twice.”

“What would your wife do if you stayed out until one-thirty in the morning without checking in with her?”

“She’d hang my balls from the chandelier, and I wouldn’t be attached to them.”

“Right.”

Kovac was willing to bet Carey Moore hadn’t even bothered to call her husband to find out where he was or when he was coming home or to tell him she’d been attacked, or anything else.

He went up to the gate and heard the lock release. The judge was looking out at him through one of the sidelights. She opened the front door as he came up onto the landing.

She was still wearing the pants and blouse she’d worn home from the hospital. The pants were torn. The silk blouse was bloodstained and missing a couple of strategically placed buttons. He caught a glimpse of blue lace and a curve most other judges he knew didn’t have. But if she gave a damn that he could see her bra, she didn’t show it.

“You need to sit down, Judge,” he said. “Looks to me like that door is the only thing holding you up.”

“I’m-”

Kovac held up a hand. “Don’t even.”

She closed the door and leaned back against it for a moment, white as paste. Gathering herself and all the strength she could scrape together, she eased away from the door and turned to lead him into a den off the hall.

A table lamp cast an amber glow over leather chairs and the hand-waxed pine paneling. The judge slowly lowered herself into one corner of a dark green leather love seat. Kovac sat in the chair adjacent, moving it closer to her until their knees were almost touching.

“What time did the call come?” he asked, pulling his small notebook and a pen out of his pocket.

“One-twenty-two. I looked at the clock.”

“Your house phone or your cell?”

“Cell.”

“Can I see the phone?”

She handed it to him. Her hand was trembling.

Kovac brought up the menu and found his way to the call list. “Same number as the call to the house-the call asking for Marlene.”

“Were you able to trace it?”

“Prepaid cell phone. The modern criminal’s best friend. We might be able to trace it to the manufacturer, maybe to a list of places in the Twin Cities area where that manufacturer distributes. But you know as well as I do, that’s a lot of territory, and the damn things are everywhere. Tracking down this one phone… you’ll die of old age before we find the mutt who bought it.”

She stared into the dark end of the room as if waiting for a sign from another dimension.

“Who are you looking at?” she asked.

“I shouldn’t get into that.”

The judge laughed without humor and shook her head. “Excuse me, Detective, but I’m not your average vic, am I? I’ve been a part of the criminal justice system since I clerked for my father when I was a student. Here’s who I think you’ll look at: Wayne Haas, Bobby Haas, Stan Dempsey-”

“No offense, Judge, but that’s not even the tip of the iceberg of people who hate you right now.”

“You should check on the relatives of the foster children who were murdered.”

“I know my job.”

“I know you do.”

She looked away again, wrestling with something. She rested her forehead in her hand and sighed. “I’m not very good at being a victim,” she admitted. “I don’t know how to do it. I don’t know what I should feel, what I should think, what I should just try to shut out. I still can’t believe this happened to me.”

A tear rolled over her lashes onto her cheek. She caught it with a scraped knuckle and swept it away. “I only know how to fight. Go on the offensive. Make something happen.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” Kovac said. He wondered if part of the reason she wasn’t able to accept she’d been victimized was that she had no one to fall back on, no one to take the offensive for her.

“There isn’t a good time to tell you this, so I’m just going to do it,” Kovac said. “Karl Dahl escaped custody tonight.”

Carey Moore stared at him for so long without saying anything that Kovac began to wonder if she’d understood a word he’d said. Head injuries could have some pretty weird effects on people.

Finally, she said, “Escaped? What do you mean he escaped? How could he escape?”

“There was some kind of fight at the jail. Things got out of hand. Prisoners and jailers had to be taken to the hospital. Someone fucked up royally. Didn’t cuff Dahl to the gurney. He basically just got up and left when nobody was looking.”

“Oh, my God,” she said with the same kind of anger and disgust every cop in town was feeling.

A triple murderer was loose on the streets because some dickhead in a uniform had blown it. Kovac knew from experience it wouldn’t matter who the dickhead was specifically, and it wouldn’t matter which agency he worked for. Every cop, every deputy sheriff in Minneapolis, would take heat for it from the public, from the media, from department brass.

“The public will love it,” Kovac said with his usual sarcasm. “Now they have two branches of the justice system not to trust.”

Carey Moore closed her eyes but didn’t succeed in blocking out anything but the light. “Has someone told Wayne Haas?”

“I had that pleasure.”

“How did he take it?”

“How do you think?”

She didn’t answer him. Both her question and his had been rhetorical.

As they sat there in the Moores ’ beautiful den, it was so quiet in the house that the sound of a key unlocking the front door seemed as loud as a gunshot. Kovac had a direct view of the entry. He rose from his chair, at attention, and waited, feeling a strange mix of curiosity and aggression.

David Moore walked in, his tie askew, shirt collar undone. He was a good-enough-looking guy, Kovac supposed. Medium height, blondish conservative haircut. He might have been the athletic type once, but he was going soft, and his face and neck had a slight doughy quality that suggested indulgence. He wore a rumpled brown suit and a petulant expression.

In other words, in Kovac’s vernacular: asshole.

Kovac took an instant dislike to Carey Moore’s husband before one word came out of his mouth.

“Carey? What’s going on?” the husband demanded, coming into the den. “What happened to you?”

Not said with loving concern, but almost as if he was offended that she looked the way she did.

“I was mugged in the parking ramp.”

“Oh, my God.”

“Your wife was attacked, Mr. Moore,” Kovac said. “We believe it may have been an attempt on her life.”

David Moore just stood there like a moron, looking from his battered wife to Kovac. “Who are you?”

Kovac showed him his badge. “Kovac. I’m a detective with the Homicide division.”

“Homicide?”

“We also handle assaults. Assaults are the homicides of tomorrow,” he said with a hint of sarcasm he knew David Moore wouldn’t get. It was an inside joke. It always seemed like the department was more keen on solving the assaults, because there were more of them, and clearing them kept the violent-crime stats down.

Moore dismissed him, tossed his jacket on a chair, and finally went to his wife.

“Are you all right?”

“Does she look all right?”

Carey Moore gave Kovac the skunk eye.

The husband sat down on the love seat. “My God, Carey. Why didn’t you call me?”

“Why don’t you check your messages?” she said with an edge in her voice. “I did call you. I called you from the emergency room six hours ago.”

Moore had the sense to look guilty. “Oh, shit. My battery must be dead.”

“Or something,” Kovac muttered.

The husband looked at him. “Excuse me?”

“I have to ask you some questions, Mr. Moore. It’s just routine. Where were you between the hours of six and seven o’clock tonight?”

The judge glared at him. “Detective, this isn’t necessary.”

David Moore stood up, outraged. “Are you implying I might have attacked my own wife?”

“I’m not implying anything,” Kovac said calmly. “I’m asking you a question. Do you have some problem with giving me a straight answer?”

“I don’t like your attitude, Detective.”

“Nobody does. Lucky for me, I don’t give a rat’s ass.”

Moore flushed an unhealthy shade of red. He jammed his hands at his waist. “My wife is a respected member of the bar-”

“I know who your wife is, Mr. Moore,” Kovac said. “Who are you? That’s what I need to know. And so far, just from observation, I’m not coming up with a lot of flattering adjectives here.”

Moore drew breath for another diatribe of indignation. His wife cut him off.

“David, stop it. For God’s sake, just answer the man’s questions. He’s doing his job.”

The husband clearly didn’t like being chastened. He went a darker shade of red with embarrassment or anger, or both.

“Carey, he’s not being respectful of you.”

She looked away from him and shook her head with an I’m so sick of you sigh.

“I’m not trying to be a hard-ass here, Mr. Moore,” Kovac lied. “But it’s going on two o’clock in the morning. Your wife has been beaten, and she’s received two threatening phone calls since. I don’t have the patience to tiptoe around your ego.

“So let’s try this again. Where have you been this evening?”

Moore clearly wanted to turn on his heel and storm out of the room. The big, dramatic exit for the put-upon hero of his own story.

The bruising and swelling was coming out in his wife’s face. She was beginning to look like something that might live under a bridge in a horror movie. One eye was nearly swollen shut. The lump on her forehead looked like a horrible deformity. Her lower lip was twice its normal size. The stitches had pulled, and the split was beginning to bleed again.

David Moore hadn’t so much as offered her a reassuring touch. He’d asked for no details of her attack, had made no comment on Kovac’s suggestion it might have been an attempt on her life. He hadn’t even inquired if she might have been raped.

“I had a business dinner,” Moore said.

“Where?”

“That new place in the IDS Tower next to the Marquette Hotel, Buffalo Grill.”

“What time was your reservation?”

“Seven-thirty, but we met for drinks first.”

“When was that, and where?”

Moore looked away. “Why don’t I just give the name of the business associate I was meeting? You’ll want that anyway, won’t you?”

Kovac gave him the flat cop eyes. “Why don’t you just answer the question I asked you?”

“Gentlemen?” the judge said abruptly. “I’m not feeling well. I’d really like to go lie down now. Feel free to continue without me.”

She started to get off the love seat under her own steam. The husband finally moved to help her, taking hold of one elbow to steady her.

“I’ll help you upstairs.”

She didn’t thank him.

Kovac watched them go, trying to read their body language. The judge was stiff and limping, but forcing her back as straight as she could. She kept her chin up, and she didn’t lean on her husband, even though he was now trying to appear as solicitous as possible.

Kovac would have loved to hear the conversation between them as they went up the stairs, but they kept their voices to themselves. Instead, he took the opportunity to prowl around the den, looking for hints of who these people were, but there were more signs of who their decorator was than what made the Moore family tick.

The room seemed to belong predominantly to the husband. A lot of electronic toys-big plasma screen TV on the wall above the fireplace, stereo equipment, satellite radio setup. A couple of framed award certificates with Moore ’s name on them.

Kovac found the lack of family photographs and incidental personal touches telling. No one was in the middle of reading a novel or knitting a sweater. There were no toys or storybooks that would have belonged to Princess Lucy. A pricey, large flat-screen computer monitor sat in the middle of an immaculate desk. The bookcase behind the desk held books about the film industry, biographies of people Kovac had heard of and more he had not. A lot of videotape cases.

“They should have kept her in the hospital,” David Moore complained as he came back into the room.

“She wouldn’t stay,” Kovac said, pulling a videotape off a shelf and pretending to study its title. “She wanted to come home, be with her family, except for you, of course.”

“What the hell-?”

“She knew you weren’t here,” Kovac went on. “And she didn’t want us tracking you down. Why do you think that is?”

“I don’t think I told her where the dinner was,” Moore said. “We’re both very busy people. The details sometimes get lost.”

“What are you so busy with, Mr. Moore? These business associates you were with-what kind of business are they in?”

“I’m a documentary filmmaker. The people I was with are potential financial backers for a film I want to make juxtaposing the gangsters of the thirties with street gangs of today.”

“And why didn’t you want to talk about these people in front of your wife?” Kovac asked, ambling closer to Carey Moore’s husband. “Why didn’t she want to stick around for the rest of this conversation?”

Moore tried to look confused. “I don’t know what you mean, Detective. I was just trying to be helpful. I knew you would want their names-”

“But you didn’t want to say where you met them for drinks?”

“I never said that.”

“Uh-huh.”

Flustered, Moore huffed a sigh. “We met in the lobby bar of the Marquette. Nothing suspicious about that, is there?”

Kovac shrugged. “Depends. Who are these cohorts of yours?”

“Edmund Ivors,” Moore said without hesitation. “He’s a businessman. He made his fortune in multiplex theaters and likes to give back to the industry by helping talented filmmakers.”

“Like yourself.”

“Yes.”

“Should I have heard of you?” Kovac asked, deliberately rude.

A muscle flexed in David Moore’s jaw. “I’d be surprised if you had,” he said tightly. “You don’t strike me as the intellectual type.”

Kovac raised his brows, amused. “Whoa. Go easy there, Sport. I’m not as dumb as I look. You really don’t want to poke a stick at me, Dave,” he said, smiling like a crocodile. “I’ll feed it to you the hard way. But hey, points for showing some balls. Who else was at your little soiree?”

Moore sulked. “An associate of Mr. Ivors. Ms. Bird, uh, Ginnie Bird.”

“Associate?” Kovac arched a brow. “Is that anything like being his niece?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Moore said impatiently.

“You don’t know what a euphemism is?” Kovac said. “I’ll be blunt, then: Is Ms. Bird about work, or is Ms. Bird about fucking somebody?”

Moore glared at him. “Who the hell do you think you are, speaking that way-”

Kovac got in his face and backed him off a step. “I’m the homicide dick who’s half-past sick of your attitude, pal. I think you didn’t want to say in front of your wife that one of the people you spent the last six hours with, having the longest business dinner in recorded history, was a woman. And I think the reason that is, is that your wife doesn’t trust you, and you know it.”

Moore breathed heavily in and out of his nose, furious. Kovac figured the guy wanted to lay him out flat right there and then but didn’t have the guts or the muscle to do the job.

“This conversation is over, Detective,” Moore said, his jaw set tight. “I won’t be treated like a criminal in my own home. You’ll leave now. And in the morning, I’ll be making phone calls to people who will make your life unpleasant.”

A nasty smile curved Kovac’s mouth. “Is that a threat, Mr. Moore?” he questioned softly. “Are you threatening me? You know people who’ll do that kind of job for you? That would send you straight to the head of my shit list of suspects.”

“My wife is a very well-connected woman,” Moore said. “Connected to people who have the power to pull your strings.”

Kovac chuckled like a predator with one paw already holding down his next live snack. “And you think she’d really do that for you? That’s funny. I’d tag her for one of those ladies who wants her man to get out from behind her and fight his own battles.”

“Get out of my house.” The hate in David Moore’s eyes was electric.

Kovac knew he was pushing a line, but he was enjoying himself too much to back off. He leaned against the side of an armchair the size of a small rhinoceros and crossed his arms.

“You know, you haven’t asked one single question about what happened in that parking ramp. Is that because you don’t need to or because you don’t give a shit?”

“Of course I care!” David Moore rubbed his hands over his face and looked up at the ceiling as he moved away. “Carey insists it was a mugging. Do you really think someone tried to… meant to… harm her?”

“I’ve seen the videotape from the garage,” Kovac said. “I think this mutt would have beaten her to death if she hadn’t managed to hit her car alarm and spook him. There’d been one menacing call to the house before I got her back here from the hospital, and she just had an out-and-out threat on her cell phone. ‘I’m coming to get you,’ the guy said.”

“Jesus,” Moore said under his breath. “Can’t you trace the calls? Can’t you get an identification from the video? Clean it up, enhance it, zoom in on the guy’s face-”

“We traced the number. That’s a dead end. As far as magically making a bad video good- Hollywood doesn’t write real crimes, Mr. Moore. And they don’t budget real police departments. The teenager next door in this neighborhood probably has more sophisticated electronics than our Bureau of Investigation.

“We’ll do everything we can to run this mutt to ground, but your wife is in serious danger,” Kovac said. “It’s partly my job to see that nothing worse happens to her, and I take my job very seriously, Mr. Moore.

“My victim is my first priority. You see, I don’t get that many live ones. If I seem a little overprotective, a little too aggressive, that’s why. Nobody else ranks above the judge while I’m on this case. Not you, not the chief of police, not the pope, not God Almighty. That’s how I work.

“You’ll have twenty-four-hour surveillance on your house. A technician was here already, to rig up your house phones so we can trap and locate call origins and so we have recordings of all calls in or out.”

Moore dropped down onto a big square leather ottoman, braced his elbows on his knees, and put his head in his hands. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

“Your wife made a very unpopular ruling today on the case against Karl Dahl,” Kovac said. “Were you aware of that?”

“Yes, of course.”

But it hadn’t seemed important enough to him that he would forgo a business dinner in order to be there with her for support.

“This is an emotionally charged case, Mr. Moore. People have strong opinions, mostly that Karl Dahl should be boiled in tar, strung up in front of the government center like a piñata, and everyone in the state should get a few swings at him with an ax.

“Your wife made a ruling in his favor today, and tonight the son of a bitch broke jail. A triple murderer is running loose in the streets, and people are going to blame Judge Moore for that, even though she didn’t have a damn thing to do with it.”

“He escaped?” Moore asked, alarmed. “Do you think he was the one?”

“No,” Kovac said. “But I think everyone in the Twin Cities is going to believe your wife is Karl Dahl’s patron saint, including Karl Dahl.”

Adrenaline ebbing, Kovac sighed and pushed away from the chair. He pulled out a business card and dropped it onto the ottoman next to David Moore’s thigh.

“I’ll leave now,” he said. Now that he was good and ready.

He shook his head at himself as he walked out into the night. For guys, life was nothing but one big pissing contest. It was a pure damn wonder women didn’t take over the world while men were busy trying to prove who had the biggest dick.

He raised a hand to the uniforms in the prowl car down the street as he got into his own car. He looked across the street at the Moore house, at the upstairs room with the light burning in the window, and wondered what the rest of the night was going to be like for Carey and David Moore.