Kovac And Liska: Prior Bad Acts Part 38

Kovac huffed. "Please. Like you didn't already think he was watching p.o.r.n."

"Yeah, but hearing it from the horse's mouth was too much."

They stood in the front yard, near Christine Neal's house, waiting for the ME's people to roll out the victim, cloaked in the anonymous black body bag. It would be the last private moment for Christine Neal.

By day's end the cops and the media would be dragging out the details of her life like entrails from a carca.s.s. By the end of the next day, everyone with a television or a newspaper subscription in the metro area would know how old she was, who her family was, what her neighbors knew about her, how her coworkers felt about her.

Kovac lit a cigarette, giving Liska a warning glare. She held her hands up in surrender.

"Maybe the doer wasn't Donny Bergen," Lieutenant Dawes said.

"It was," Kovac snapped.

"Why? Because you want to pin the plan on David Moore?"

"It all fits," he insisted. "The a.s.sault Friday night, Bergen showing up at the hotel bar dressed in black like the guy on the tape from the parking garage. Moore wanted out of the marriage, but he didn't want to lose anything. Carey is kidnapped, murdered, and he's the grieving husband, the devoted single father, inherits everything via Lucy."

Dawes's phone rang. She sighed and took the call, walking away.

Liska s.h.i.+fted her weight to her right foot, effectively moving closer to her partner. They stood at right angles, facing the house, their backs to the gathering mob of media and curious onlookers.

Kovac stared at the house, raised his cigarette to his lips, knowing she could see the slight trembling of his hand. Their killer had murdered twice, senselessly. There was no reason to think he wouldn't do it again. Especially if he'd been paid to do it.

Christine Neal and the nanny had been just for sport. He could have stolen either car without harming anyone. Wear a mask, tie the women up, tape their mouths shut. They hadn't needed to see him.

"Sam, there are other possibilities," Liska said.

"Maybe there are," he conceded. "But are any of them good, Tinks? You think this is going to have a happy ending? You know as well as I do more kidnap victims are murdered within the first few hours of the abduction than not. And those are the ones s.n.a.t.c.hed for ransom. There's no ransom involved here. There hasn't been a call. There's not going to be a call.

"Let's say it's not Donny Bergen," he suggested. "Who's up next? Stan Dempsey? Your boy Bobby? You think either of those scenarios is going to end well? We've looked at two dead women inside an hour."

"You need to hold it together, Kojak," Liska said firmly but gently as the ME's people came out the front door with the gurney. "If Carey Moore is still alive, she sure as h.e.l.l doesn't need you writing her off."

Kovac squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed his forehead with one hand. What made a good cop was objectivity. Objectivity and dogged tenacity. He had made his career on both.

He finished his cigarette, put it out on the front step, and dropped the b.u.t.t into a jack-o'-lantern.

Liska put a hand on his arm, drawing his attention back to her. The concern in her eyes touched him. "Are you gonna be all right?"

Kovac forced a smile. "Remains to be seen, doesn't it? I'd rather work ten murders than one abduction."

"You'd better not be blaming yourself," Liska warned. "That's self-indulgent bulls.h.i.+t. I'll have to kick your a.s.s."

Somehow he managed to chuckle, not because he felt any better but because that was the reaction Liska wanted.

"Let's get back to work, Tinker Bell," he said. "We've got crimes to solve."

53.

THE QUIET LASTED For so long, Carey began to think she had been abandoned. Maybe the car had been left on train tracks, and she was waiting as her death hurtled toward her. Maybe the car had been left in the back of a junkyard, and she would die of dehydration after days of suffering. Maybe anything.

She felt through the broken pieces of plastic from the light cover to find a shard she could use for a weapon in case her captor ever came to get her.

She wondered who he was. Stan Dempsey? Had he really gone that far off the deep end? He was a cop, for G.o.d's sake. How could he reconcile hurting people, maybe killing people, with having served twenty-plus years as a police officer?

Justice,Kovac had said. Dempsey was meting out justice as he perceived it. If he was performing an act of justice, how could it be a crime?

She wished she could have seen the videotape he had made and left behind for his colleagues to find. What was his demeanor? What was his tone of voice? How did he look? How did he sound?

How about it wasn't Stan Dempsey at all? How about the note David had made to himself:$25,000 . What if Kovac had been right from the start, and her husband wanted her out of his life badly enough to hire someone to do it?

She wondered if Kovac was looking for her. Almost certainly he was. He would have called early, or come over and helped himself to coffee. But how would he have any idea where to look? She was the needle in the haystack.

She thought about Lucy. Where was she? Was she afraid? Was she with David? Was she alive?

Shoes crunched on gravel. A key slid into the trunk lock and turned.

As the trunk lid went up, sunlight hit Carey full in the face and blinded her. The silhouette of a person loomed over her, but she couldn't make out features. She could tell the hair was shoulder length. A woman's haircut, she thought.

"You can come out now, Carey. I have everything ready for you."

The voice of a man.

He bent down over her to lift her out.

Terrified, Carey swung her arm and stabbed at him with the broken shard of plastic, driving the tip into some part of his face. He cried out and stumbled backward.

Out of the trunk! Out of the trunk!

Her mind raced faster than she could move. She had been in the cramped trunk long enough to have become stiff, and her body had already been hurting from the a.s.sault. The concussion made her head swim as she tried to scramble out of the trunk.

Her feet hit the ground, but her legs were weak, and buckled beneath her. She landed on her battered knees, pain spiking through her. Awkwardly she got her feet under her and tried to push forward, to run before she was fully upright.

The world around her tilted one way, then another. She stumbled forward, fell, tried again, stumbled, fell. The ground rushed up at her, hard-packed dirt and clumps of dead weeds that had faded to beige. She put her arms out to break her fall, and tiny stones dug into the heels of her hands.

It was a nightmare, and the worst part of it was that she knew she was wide-awake.

As she tried to rise again, hands caught her from behind, pulled her up, and held her. Carey tried to kick, tried to struggle. She didn't have the strength to fight him or pull free of him. Even if she had, she couldn't outrun him. And even if she could have outrun him, there was nowhere to run. All around was nothing but countryside and clumps of bare trees and fields of dry cornstalks.

Fear shook her like a rag doll. She tried not to cry out loud, knowing her abductor would likely find her fear exciting, arousing. But tears filled her eyes and coursed down her face, and she couldn't help it.

"You don't have to run," the soft voice said. "I would never hurt you, Carey. You're my angel."

He turned her toward him and held her at arm's length.

"Oh, my G.o.d," Carey whispered, terror rising in her throat to choke her.

The first thing that struck her was the gaping wound in the hollow of his cheek where she had stabbed him with the shard of plastic. Blood poured from it, ran down over his jaw, down his throat, onto the brown sweater he wore.

The second thing that struck her was the makeup--the painted lips, the overdone eye shadow, the smudged mascara, the blush on his cheekbones. The stubble of his beard was dark beneath the caked foundation makeup.

He reached up with one hand and pulled the blond wig from his head.

"It's me," he said as if he were an old, dear friend. "Karl. Karl Dahl."

54.

CAREY STARED ATKarl Dahl--the bald head, bruised and scabbed over on one side where he appeared to have been struck with something; the garish makeup; the jagged edge of the bleeding wound in his cheek, moving in and out as he breathed through his mouth. The whites of his eyes were bloodred. He was dressed as a woman, in a calf-length brown skirt and low-heeled boots.

Behind him, maybe twenty yards behind him and off to his right, was a huge old burned-out brick building. Two stories high, charred black, it looked to have been abandoned for a very long time. All the windows were dark, gaping holes. She could see sunlight inside where sections of the roof had either burned through or fallen in.

Karl Dahl meant to drag her inside that building. Carey pulled back, but he held fast to her arm, his grip tight and hard.

"You don't need to be afraid of me, Carey," he said calmly.

The way he said her name was like the stroke of a lover's hand. She didn't like it.

"You should call me Judge Moore, Karl," she said, her voice almost unrecognizable to her. A dry, hoa.r.s.e rasping from her aching throat. Her larynx felt the size of a fist. She had wanted to sound strong and calm as she tried to establish herself in his mind as a person to be respected.

He smiled and shook his head. "No. We're past that. You're the only one's been kind to me. You understand them things I did before wasn't bad, really."

Karl Dahl's criminal record showed arrests and time served for a variety of crimes--criminal trespa.s.s, window peeping, indecent exposure, breaking and entering. Nothing violent. No kidnap, no a.s.sault, no rape, no-- But he was on trial for the brutal murders of a woman and two children from a family who had been nothing but kind to him.

Chris Logan's words from Friday afternoon came back to her.

"It's an escalating pattern of behavior. That's what these pervs do. They start small and work their way up."

He was right. Carey knew as much about the Karl Dahls of the world as Logan did. The Boston Strangler had started out as a Peeping Tom.

As a prosecutor she had been able to knit a defendant's criminal life together that way when preparing for trial, bridging one step up to the next on the criminal evolutionary scale. And she would try like h.e.l.l to get it all past the presiding judge.

Now she was the judge. And as a judge, she had to adhere to a different standard.

"I don't know very much about you, Karl," she said, her breath hitching in her throat.

She looked past his left shoulder and saw the car. Anka's car. Panic stabbed through her. She had spoken to Anka as the girl had gone out Sat.u.r.day night to get a movie. Lost in thought, she hadn't paid any attention when Anka came home. She vaguely remembered hearing the kitchen door open. In her peripheral vision she had been aware of a blonde walking through the hall and going up the stairs.

That the blonde might have been Karl Dahl made her skin crawl. How long had he been in her home? What had he done there while she had been in the den, discovering the depravity to which her husband had lowered himself? Had he been upstairs when she had come up and fallen onto her bed without bothering to undress? Had he been in her room? Had he been in Lucy's room?

For the briefest of seconds, the crime scene photo of the Haas foster children flashed through her head.

"Oh, me," Karl said shyly, "there ain't that much to know."

"Sure there is," Carey said, her voice shaking. "Everybody has a story."

"I'd sure like to hear yours," he said. "Let's go inside. I have everything ready for you."

"What does that mean, Karl?"

He smiled a secretive smile made sinister by the clownish makeup and the still-bleeding gash in his face, which he seemed not to notice. "You'll see soon enough."

He started toward the building, pulling Carey in tow. Everything in her told her not to go into the building with him. At least if they were outside, someone might drive by, and she would have a chance to escape. The odds of that happening diminished with every step he dragged her.

"C-can't we just s-stay out here for a while, Karl?" she asked. "I'm not f-feeling very well. Could I just have some fresh air for a while?"

It wasn't a lie. Even as she said it, she felt her stomach twist, and she dropped down on her knees again and vomited in the weeds. Karl held on to her hand like a lover would to comfort her.

"You need to lie down is what you need," he said gently, squatting down beside her. "You've just got yourself all stirred up."

"N-no. Could we please j-just sit here for a minute? I'm very dizzy."

"That's from that person beating on you in that parking garage, isn't it?" he asked. "On account of me. I seen all about it on television this morning. And I read about it in theStar Tribune . I like a good newspaper. You get more of the story.

"I'm sorry for what that man done to you," he said. "I seen that story, and I knew right then you was my angel."

Carey s.h.i.+vered as she sat back on her heels. "I'm not an angel, Karl. I'm a person. I have a family. I h-have a l-little girl. I'm a judge. I was just doing my job."

"You're cold," Karl declared. "Let's go inside. I've made a fire."

He hooked an arm under hers and lifted her with him when he stood.

"What is this place?" she asked. "Where are we?"

"My secret place. I've stayed here many times, and no one ever bothers me."