Tami Hoag - Prior Bad Acts

“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?”