Tami Hoag - Prior Bad Acts

As she went to put one of the bracelets on him, he jabbed back hard with an elbow, hitting her square in the sternum.

Liska staggered backward, seeing stars, the wind knocked out of her.

Bobby Haas spun around from the bench with something in his hand, something he had grabbed from the tools on the wall.

A hammer.

His beautiful face had darkened and twisted with rage. He came at her, swinging the hammer as hard as he could.

Liska caught a heel on some piece of lawn equipment, went down on her back, cracked her head on the garage floor. She rolled to one side just as the hammer’s blow bounced off the concrete where her head had been.

Making it to her hands and knees, she scrambled under the handles of a wheelbarrow and shot forward, gaining her feet.

The hammer hit the wheelbarrow and it rang like a Chinese gong.

“You fucking bitch,” he said, but he didn’t shout.

That frightened her almost as much as his actions. He was trying to kill her yet had the presence of mind not to shout, not to be heard by a neighbor or by his father inside the house.

He kept coming with the hammer.

Liska rounded a bicycle and shoved it into his path.

His eyes were absolutely black. Flat black, bottomless, emotionless. Like a snake, like a shark, like a killer.

She pulled her weapon, but he was so close she barely had it out of the shoulder holster before he was on her.

She ducked low. The hammer hit the wall, splintering wood.

Liska put a shoulder into the boy’s solar plexus and drove him back a couple of steps. As she started to raise the gun, he swung again.

The hammer struck the back of her hand. The gun went flying.

“You fucking cunt!” He spat the words at her, full of venom.

Liska ducked away from him, darted to the side. She stuck her hand into her coat pocket and came out with her tactical baton.

With a quick, practiced move, she snapped it out to its full length and swung it like a baseball bat as hard as she could into Bobby Haas’s ribs just as he pulled his arm back for another blow.

She felt a couple of his ribs give way, and he doubled over, dropping the hammer.

The second blow was a hard, downward overhand that hit his left shoulder and fractured his collarbone.

Screaming in pain, the boy dropped to his knees and elbows on the floor, fell sideways, and curled into a fetal position, crying like the child he should have been.

“Flat on your face, you little shit!” Liska shouted, the adrenaline roaring through her.

“It hurts!”

“It damn well better hurt, you rotten little bastard! On your face, now, or I’ll give you something to cry about!”

Sobbing, he moved in slow motion to his hands and knees. Furious and scared, Liska put a foot into his back and shoved him flat. She read him his rights even as she pulled her cell phone out to call for backup.

“I CAN’T LEAVE you alone for a minute,” Kovac crabbed, walking across the lawn to the Haas garage. “You owe me dinner.”

“Excuse me? The Son of Satan just tried to kill me with a hammer!”

“And your point would be…?”

Liska scowled at him. “Don’t make fun of me, Sam. I’ve never been so freaked-out in my life!”

Kovac gave her shoulder a squeeze. “I can see that, Tinks. I just thought a little obnoxious levity might be in order.”

“How would that be different from how you usually are?”

“Smart-ass.”

To have Liska admit to being afraid took a lot. Now she would get pissy, because she had let someone see that she wasn’t really as tough as she pretended to be.

“You should have seen him, Sam. When he turned around and came at me with that hammer…” She shivered and pretended she was cold, rubbing her hands up and down her arms. “What I saw in that kid’s eyes… I’ve never seen before. And I don’t want to see it again.”

Bobby Haas had been hauled out on a gurney and taken away in an ambulance. And still she was more shaken than Kovac had ever seen her. She scowled down at the ground, uncomfortable with the uniforms and the forensics team crawling all over the place, lest they see through her act too.

Kovac took off his trench coat and put it around her. She could have drowned in it, she was so little. With an arm around her shoulders, he guided her to the Haases’ front porch, and they sat on the edge of it. She leaned into him.

“Slow it all down, kiddo,” he said. “Slow it all down.”

She took a deep breath and let it out.

“I asked the unis to get Wayne Haas,” she said. “I’m not telling him this. I can’t. You have to.”

“All the lights and sirens, and he hasn’t come out on his own?”

“Bobby told me he went to bed early because he wasn’t feeling well.”

“I should sleep so hard,” Kovac said. “If my neighbor doesn’t stop banging on his roof in the mornings, I’ll take a hammer to him.”

Liska wasn’t listening to him. She looked up at the sky and shook her head. “Oh, God…”

“It’s because he’s a kid,” Kovac said quietly. “That’s too close to home.”

“You know, I really wanted to feel sorry for him,” she said. “I did feel sorry for him. The poor, motherless child.”

“I don’t know if Bobby Haas was ever a child.”

“Maybe that was the problem.”

“And maybe he had three sixes branded on the back of his head,” Kovac said. “Don’t try to figure it out, Tinks. There’s a reason that’s not our job.”

They couldn’t do it. The toll was too heavy emotionally, and emotion took away objectivity, and one thing a detective absolutely had to be was objective.

Hypocrite, he thought.

One of the forensics people stuck her head out of the garage. “Detectives, I think you need to come see this.

“Becker took the stuff out of the briefcase to inventory,” she explained. “This is pretty scary.”

Inside the garage, Kovac looked over the items that had been spread across the workbench-Carey’s files having to do with The State v. Karl Dahl. The papers she had been taking home to look at over the weekend. All of it was wet and stinking.

“Jesus, he pissed on it!” he said with disgust.

Liska had moved on to the rest of it. “Oh, my God…” she whispered. “Sam…”

All neatly contained in Ziploc bags: a journal; two clear four-pocket plastic sheets holding photos of Bobby with his father-playing catch, fishing, being happy; half a dozen large Ziploc plastic bags with newspaper clippings in them, organized by month.

MINNEAPOLIS MASSACRE

GRUESOME HOMICIDES SHAKE QUIET NEIGHBORHOOD

CRIME SCENE“A BLOODBATH”ACCORDING TO DETECTIVES

DRIFTER ACCUSED IN BRUTAL SLAYINGS

Kovac found the clippings only slightly weird and creepy. It wasn’t unheard of for loved ones of homicide victims to keep track of the case in the media.

Then came the final, smaller plastic bag.

The bottom dropped out of his stomach, and a sudden cold sweat misted his skin.

“Holy God…”

Liska looked over at him. “What is it?”

In a case like the Haas murders, the detectives often kept certain details of the crime secret from the public, details only the killer would know. It helped them weed out the crackpots who always came out of the woodwork to confess to heinous crimes in a sick attempt to gain attention.

Kovac held that secret up to the light.

“Oh, Jesus!”

Perfectly preserved, vacuum sealed on a single sheet together, side by side by side-largest to smallest-the right thumbs of Marlene Haas, and Brittany and Ashton Pratt.

“Jesus H.,” Kovac breathed. “Karl Dahl didn’t do it.”

The irony was bitter. Stan Dempsey had ruined his career and his sanity trying to see Karl Dahl convicted of the Haas homicides. He had been so convinced of Dahl’s guilt. Everyone had. The strange drifter with a record of sexually oriented crimes-relatively minor crimes, but just the same… He’d known the victims. He’d been seen going into the victims’ home on the day of the murders. He’d had no alibi. When he’d been arrested, Karl Dahl had been in possession of a necklace that belonged to Marlene Haas.