Tami Hoag - Prior Bad Acts

Kovac looked at her, tipping his head a little to one side. “You want me to stay?” The idea seemed to surprise him. “I’ll stay. I’ll stay as long as you want.”

He sat on the edge of the bed, settling in. Carey looked away, embarrassed now that she’d said anything.

“I know this will sound stupid,” she said. “I mean, I know I’m safe and that Lucy is safe, but…”

Kovac reached out and pressed a finger to her lips.

“It’s all right. I know. You feel like something bad could happen at any second. You’re ready to jump out of your skin. That’s normal.”

“I told you I don’t make a very good victim,” she said. “I don’t know what to do.”

“There’s no handbook,” Kovac said. “You have to feel what you feel. And it takes as long as it takes.”

“That’s scary,” she admitted, then changed direction out of self-preservation. “What happened to Dahl? Is he dead?”

“Yeah. Stan Dempsey’s last act: He shot and killed Karl Dahl. When I heard the shot, I thought he was shooting at you, but he shot Dahl. Made sure he’ll never escape justice again.”

“And Kenny Scott? Dempsey told me he would do to me what he did to Kenny. What did he do? Is Kenny dead?”

“No,” Kovac said. “Dempsey roughed him up, tied him in a chair, and branded the word GUILTY across his forehead with a wood-burning tool.”

He rattled that off so matter-of-factly. As if it were something he saw every day of the week. Of course, he’d seen far worse than that. So had she.

“He told me he wouldn’t have killed me,” she said softly. “Dempsey. After I… he said to me, ‘You killed me. I wouldn’t have killed you.’”

Kovac put a big hand over hers. “You couldn’t have known that, Carey. You were in fear for your life. You did what you had to do to save yourself. For all you knew, Dempsey was gonna take you back to his nest and torture you the way Marlene Haas was tortured. I’d lay odds that’s what he had planned for Dahl. He had a whole duffel bag full of stuff-a hacksaw, an electric knife, hammers, a meat fork, knives. He had all that with him for a reason.”

Carey looked down at his hand on hers. Having just that much connection made her feel calmer.

“Have you ever had to kill anyone?” she asked.

“Once,” he said. “I didn’t want to, but I didn’t have a choice. Neither did you.”

Somehow that didn’t make her feel any better.

“Does he have any family?” she asked, dreading the answer. She didn’t want to know that he had been a father, a grandfather, a beloved husband…

Kovac shook his head. “Not close-in any sense of the word. A grown daughter in Portland, Oregon, who hasn’t bothered to return any of the lieutenant’s calls. An elderly uncle in very poor health in a rest home. The uncle owns a cabin out on one of the smaller lakes.

“Looks like that’s where Stan based himself after he split town. The property and the pickup were registered to Walter Dempsey, the uncle.”

What a sad, strange little man Stan Dempsey had been. Alone. Invisible to most people, even to those who should have been close to him.

“The job was all he had, wasn’t it?” she said.

“Honey, the job is all I have, but I don’t go around disfiguring people,” Kovac said. “Could someone have reached out to Stan over the years, tried to bring him out of his shell? I suppose so. Hell, I could have tried, and I didn’t. But he was a grown man. His life was what he made it. Right down to how it ended.”

“He didn’t put the knife in my hand,” Carey said softly.

Kovac hooked a finger beneath her chin and made her look up at him.

“No. He put you in a situation where you had to use it,” he said quietly.

He stared into her eyes, his face the portrait of a good and honorable man. “Carey, I would give anything if I could turn the clock back. If I could have gotten to the scene five minutes sooner and spared you having to wrestle with this. ’Cause I’ll tell you what: If I’d seen him threatening you, I would have blown his ass off the planet. And I wouldn’t lose a lot of sleep over it.”

Carey gave a little half laugh. “I don’t know what this says about me, but that’s the sweetest thing anyone has said to me in a long time.”

He smiled back at her, touched her cheek, and said, “My pleasure. I’m going to leave you alone now and let you get some rest. And don’t argue with me-you’re staying overnight.”

“Yes, sir.”

He didn’t move from the bed. He didn’t take his eyes off her. He shook his head a little. “I owe you an apology.”

“For what?”

“For the way I behaved at the beginning of this. I was a jerk. I was judging you without having all the facts, making assumptions. I’m sorry.”

“Not so easy being the judge, is it?” she said.

“No. Turned out I was very wrong about you,” he said. “You are one brave lady, Carey Moore.”

“No,” Carey said. “I was terrified.”

“I should hope so. If you weren’t, I’d be scared of you,” he said. “But that’s what bravery is: to be afraid and do what you have to do anyway. You can’t have courage without fear.”

The door swung open and the doctor walked in. Kovac eased away from the bed.

“I’ll see you in the morning,” he said. “But if you need me, call me. I’ll be here before you can hang up the phone.”

“You’re a good man, Sam Kovac,” Carey said.

A good man, a strong man, a man of his word. The world could have done with a few more Sam Kovacs in it.

He blushed a little at the compliment, his mouth crooking up on one side, then slipped out the door.

“I’M NOT GOING to go through the motions and reprimand you for being a couple of cowboys, Detective Kovac, Detective Tippen.”

Lieutenant Dawes stood at the head of the table in the war room. It was past nine o’clock, but she had gathered the task force to recap the events of the day and reassess what still needed to be done.

“I know all too well the both of you are selectively deaf anyway.”

Tippen cupped a hand to one ear. “Did someone say something?”

“Instead,” she said, “I’m going to ask everyone to raise their coffee cups in a salute to a job well done.”

The “Hear, hears” were loud.

“Where’s the beer?” Kovac complained.

“We’ll get to that,” Dawes said. “Work before play.”

They went over the details of everything that had happened that day. Two murders discovered and cleared, an abduction with a happy ending. Happy for everyone but Stan Dempsey.

“Did his daughter ever call back?” Liska asked.

Dawes shook her head. “Not yet. The Portland PD made contact with her yesterday. I’ve called her directly and left messages. I’ll try again later this evening. Obviously, she and her father weren’t close.”

“That’s beyond ‘not close,’” Liska said. “That’s downright cold.”

“It’s sad,” Elwood said. “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have an ungrateful child.”

“Thank you, Mr. Shakespeare,” Tippen said dryly. “I’m personally not interested in Stan’s family dynamics at the moment. Let’s move on. I’m hungry.

“So we have to assume he had the Moores ’ house under surveillance,” he went on. “But what would have made him follow the nanny’s car? Dahl was dressed as a woman.”

“I guess we’ll never know that,” Dawes said. “Maybe he was in a position to see something going on in the garage. He could have seen through the windows from the neighbor’s yard.”

“You’re saying he would have watched Dahl put the judge in the trunk and done nothing?” Liska said.