Tami Hoag - Prior Bad Acts

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?”