Tami Hoag - Prior Bad Acts

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.

WITH RARE EXCEPTIONS, Stan Dempsey had not slept for more than an hour at a stretch since he had walked into the Haas home on that fateful August evening, now more than a year ago. What sleep he got was fractured with nightmare images and emotions so strong he had no idea what to do with them.

He had been a simple man all his life. Quiet to the point that kids in school had thought him damaged in some way. He had really never had a friend in the way most people thought of friends. No slap-on-the-back buddies to drink with and watch sports with. Those things held no interest for him.

From childhood he had wanted to be a police detective like Joe Friday on Dragnet. He had been a voracious reader of detective stories and had starred in many of his boyhood daydreams. He always got his man.

He had served in the army and taken two years of junior college. When he finally made it to the police academy, he had worked harder than anyone in his class. The day of his graduation had been one of the proudest days of his life. The day he had made detective had been the pinnacle. His only dream had come true.

That his dream had now soured into this broken, bloodstained nightmare that was his life crushed him. Crushed his spirit, his sense of self, his sense of order in his world. He felt as though a huge black iron anvil had fallen from the sky and landed on him, and the feelings he had always kept so neatly contained had been forced from their box and were trying to come out through his eyes, his ears, his mouth, the tips of his fingers.

His superiors in the department worried that he might have an anger-management issue, that he might have a nervous breakdown. They would have been terrified to know the things that really went on in his brain-thoughts of retribution, brutal vengeance, striking out at anyone he perceived to be on the wrong side of what was right. As his anxiety increased with the approach of the trial, the less he felt able to control those thoughts and the emotions that went with them.