Prior Bad Acts (23 page)

“What’s the matter, Ms. Bird?” Kovac asked. “Can’t remember your lines?”

“There’s nothing to remember,” she said. “I don’t know anything that might help you.”

“You don’t know about the payoff? The twenty-five thousand dollars?”

He had told David Moore he would bluff a confession out of her, but Kovac knew in truth he had to tread lightly. It didn’t take a very clever defense attorney to get tossed anything a client had said without first being Mirandized. A good lawyer could get a confession tossed even after the client’s rights had been read to them. They would argue the police had violated the client’s rights by denying them counsel, even though one of the first items mentioned in Miranda was the right to an attorney. Or they would argue that their client hadn’t been of a clear mind, or some other lawyer bullshit.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ginnie Bird said.

Her eyes were a little glassy. The end of her nose was red. Kovac glanced around the room, hoping against hope to see drug paraphernalia out in plain sight. Then he could have taken her in, questioned her at the station, put a little scare in her. But he didn’t see anything.

“You don’t know anything about your boyfriend here paying someone to get rid of his wife?”

“David would never do that,” she said adamantly. “Never. Why can’t you just leave us alone? All we want is to be happy.”

“Yeah,” Kovac said. “The problem with that is Mrs. Moore. And somebody tried to eliminate that problem last night. If you know who that somebody was, and you don’t tell me, you become an accessory after the fact. If you knew about what was going to happen before it happened, that’s conspiracy. Either way, you go to jail.”

“I can’t tell you anything, because there’s nothing to tell,” she said. “David is going to divorce her. He told her tonight.”

“Did he?” Kovac said, looking at Moore. “That’s an interesting spin.”

“I think you should leave now, Detective,” Ginnie Bird said. “I know my rights.”

As explained to her by the lawyer the escort agency had sent to bail her out, back when she got paid per sex act, Kovac thought. What an idiot David Moore was, throwing away a woman like Carey, and a beautiful daughter, for this chick.

He turned to Moore, shaking his head. “Man, you have to be one of the all-time fools.”

Moore said nothing.

“I’ll see you around,” Kovac said, ambling toward the door. “And next time I’ll come with warrants. And just let me give you fair warning, Mr. Moore. If I find one shred of solid direct evidence that links you to your wife’s attack, I will unleash hell on you.”

Back on the street, Kovac walked down to the unmarked car assigned to tail David Moore and told the officers to call him if Moore so much as came out of the building to fart.

Back in his own car, he settled behind the wheel and just sat there, willing his blood pressure to calm down. He wanted to take David Moore apart. He wanted the guy to be guilty. He wanted someone to cough up the real name of Don Something, the alleged director of photography, so he could put the guy under a spotlight and get him to sweat out his connection to Moore.

That was what he wanted. The problem with that was that he wasn’t supposed to want anything. A good detective didn’t draw conclusions until he had all the facts. Getting too close to a crime—or to the victim of a crime—was a stop on the way to madness. Or to the civilian review board. If anyone had seen him knock David Moore back into that elevator, Moore would have had a corroborating witness for his brutality charge.

Still . . . it had sure as hell felt good to do it.

As Kovac savored the moment, his cell phone started to bleat.

“Kovac.”

“Liska.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t sound so happy to hear from me. I’ll get the wrong idea,” Liska said sarcastically. “Who were you expecting to call you? The Queen of Sheba? Catherine Zeta-Jones? Oxsana the Amazing Contortionist?”

“Is there a reason I’m talking to you?” Kovac asked, cranky because he had actually let himself think the call might be from Carey. And if Liska had known that, she would have given him no end of shit. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

“Yeah,” she said. “You need to book it over to HCMC.”

“Why?”

“Because Kenny Scott had a visit today from your friend Stan Dempsey.”

34

KARL KNEW HE
couldn’t stay in the park all night. He had been there for a long time as it was, though no one had paid him any mind. But the city didn’t allow overnight parking in the lot.

He had spent the afternoon wandering from park bench to park bench. The day had been so pretty, people had stayed in the park to have cookouts, to watch the sun set, to squeak out every drop of good weather. The smell of meat grilling had made Karl’s stomach growl. But now the warm day had given way to a chilly evening that was nipping right through his brown cashmere poncho and sneaking up under his skirt. It was time to move to a warmer hiding spot.

He stared across the street at Carey Moore’s house. One set of windows upstairs and one set downstairs glowed with lamplight.

In the afternoon, Karl had spotted her briefly as a black Mercedes sedan had rolled out of the garage. She was in the passenger’s seat. A police officer was driving. A small head of unruly dark hair had bounced up and down in the backseat. Carey Moore’s child.

Karl closed his eyes and imagined her heavy with child. A beautiful sight. A Madonna. His angel. He wondered what she might be doing right at that very moment.

At one point earlier in the evening, a man got out of a sedan parked behind the police cruiser, went to the driver’s side of the car, and said something to the officers inside, then walked up into the yard and stood near the lighted downstairs windows. Another cop. Plainclothes.

Time had stretched by and nothing happened.

As he contemplated this peculiar turn of events, the Moores’ garage door rose and the same black sedan rolled out with only the driver inside. A man, he reckoned, by the size of him. The husband, he supposed. He drove away fast, like maybe he was mad about something. Another sedan had slid away from the curb to follow him. The plainclothes cop had followed moments later.

The important thing to Karl was that the husband was gone.

Soon it would be time for him to speak to Carey Moore. To thank her for her kindness to him. To explain to her his feelings for her and how much she meant to him. In his whole life hardly anyone had ever taken his side in anything. She had risked her life to take his side in this trial.

He imagined kneeling at her feet, pouring his heart out to her. He imagined her expressing her understanding to him. In his imagination she was lit from behind with a golden light, and she stood with her arms opened, looking just like a statue of the Virgin Mary his mother had kept on her dresser. It was a beautiful dream.

Karl looked up at the stars in the clear night sky—what stars a man could see with a city all around him—and thought this might become the most perfect night of his life.

After a while, he got up and straightened his skirt and walked back to the parking lot and Christine Neal’s Volvo.

Stan Dempsey drove through Carey Moore’s neighborhood, but not past her home. He knew the officers in the radio car out front would be making note of the plate numbers of every vehicle that cruised by and immediately running them through the system, looking to get a hit on a possible suspect.

Instead, he cruised up the next block, toward the Moore home, then turned in at the driveway of a dark house near the end of the street and sat there, watching.

A dark sedan backed out of the garage fast and drove toward him in a hurry. Seconds later, an unmarked car followed. Shortly after that, a second unmarked car. As it passed under the streetlight, Stan thought it might be Sam Kovac behind the wheel.

Kovac was a good cop, a straight shooter, probably the best detective on the squad. It would be difficult to pull off anything under Kovac’s nose. But now he had gone from Carey Moore’s house and from her neighborhood, and Stan could see a window of opportunity cracking open.

He didn’t mean to get away with anything. He meant only to finish his job. When his job was finished, he would be honored to have Sam Kovac close the case.

When his job was finished . . .

35

CAREY SAT ON
the love seat in the den for a long time, doing nothing, thinking nothing, staring at nothing. The house was absolutely silent. The tension that had charged the air was gone. She felt drained, empty.

Around ten-thirty, Anka quietly came downstairs and stopped just outside the den.

“Are you all right, Mrs. Moore?”

Carey waved a hand. “No, but there’s nothing to do about it. Are you going out?”

“Only to pick a movie and get some popcorn. Can I bring something for you?”

“No. Thank you, Anka.”

The girl lingered at the doorway a moment longer, seeming like she wanted to say something more. But if she had, she thought better of it.

Carey went back to staring, feeling nothing. She wondered what she would feel the next day, and the day after that. Relief? Anxiety? And she wondered how Lucy would react to her father’s sudden absence.

David was a different person with Lucy. With their daughter, he was the man she had married—sweet, fun, brimming with promise. His relationship with Lucy was pure love, untainted by what the rest of his life had become. With Lucy he had no track record. She only cared that he was her daddy. Her expectations were simple. He had yet to disappoint her.

Carey purposely didn’t wonder what David was feeling or doing. She told herself she didn’t care. She
didn’t
care. What did that say about her? About their marriage?

Restless, she got up from her seat and walked around the room. She still hurt everywhere, and her head was pounding. A Vicodin and bed sounded like the best plan.

As she walked around behind David’s desk, photos of Lucy caught her eye. David’s screen saver was a slide show of their daughter dressed up in her various costumes—the princess, the fairy, the ballerina.

Carey sat down in the desk chair and watched the images float across the screen. Lucy was the spitting image of herself as a child—impish grin, bright blue eyes, an unruly mop of dark hair that had eventually given up its curls.

Oh, to be that innocent again.

The computer mouse rested on its small green pad beside the keyboard. Only vaguely curious, she moved the mouse and clicked on the AOL icon at the bottom of the screen.

What came up and filled the screen was as far removed from the innocence of a child as anything could have been.

What came on the screen was a scene of such degradation, it made Carey feel ill and dizzy, as if she’d just gotten hit in the head all over again.

A naked woman bound and gagged, hung spread-eagled from chains on her wrists and ankles, blood running down her arms. She was being raped by two men wearing leather hoods to cover their faces, one behind her, one in front of her. She appeared to be terrified.

This was what her husband had been looking at when she had come to tell him she wanted a divorce. Carey began to shake. She moved the cursor to the Web address bar and clicked on the downward arrow, bringing up a listing of every Web site David had looked at for who knew how long. Porn site after porn site.

She clicked on an arrow, and another photograph, equally violent as the first, popped up.

It took a moment for her to recover enough from the shock to process the rest of the page—the title, the graphics. It was a promotion for a movie available on DVD or VHS. The ad promised savage sadism, violent scenes of torture and rape.

The film was by David M. Greer.

36

“WHOSE CLUSTER FUCK
is this?” Kovac demanded as he stormed into the ER and made a beeline for Liska. He had been mobbed by the press swarming all over the ambulance bay. Four large uniformed officers were keeping them from rushing the door.

“It’s a fucking feeding frenzy out there,” he snapped.

“I’m taking responsibility for the whole thing, Detective Kovac,” Lieutenant Dawes said, coming away from a coffee vending machine across the room.

Kovac pulled up short and grimaced. “Lieutenant.”

“Way to stick your foot in it, Kojak,” Liska said, rolling her eyes at him.

Dawes didn’t react at all.

“I personally called Mr. Scott this morning to tell him Stan Dempsey was at large, but I only got his voice mail,” she said. “I then dispatched two officers to go to Mr. Scott’s home and tell him in person if he was at home, and to wait if he wasn’t.”

“So what went wrong?” Kovac asked.

“A call went out to all units to respond to a sighting of Karl Dahl not far from where the officers were.”

“They took the priority call,” Kovac said.

“Which turned out to be a false alarm. But in all the confusion of trying to run down the suspect, there was a collision involving the officers’ car and a minivan—”

“And the coppers are still giving their statements and filling out paperwork,” Kovac said.

“One of the officers was killed,” Dawes said soberly.

“Oh, Jesus,” Kovac said. Add that charge to Dahl’s indictment, he thought—another person dead because of that creep.

“And the ball got dropped,” Dawes went on. “By the time I found out and drove to Kenny Scott’s home myself, it was already dark. The basement light was on. If not for that one screwup on Dempsey’s part, Scott would still be bound to a chair.”

“Is he alive?”

“Yes,” Dawes said, leading the way down a corridor. “It wasn’t Dempsey’s intent to kill. Turns out he just wanted to make a statement.”

They turned into the room where Kenny Scott had been brought for treatment, and Kovac was instantly taken aback by the putrid smell of burned flesh.

Kenny Scott lay propped up on the hospital bed with an IV dripping something into his arm. His hands and feet were grotesquely swollen. Ligature marks dug deep into his wrists and ankles. But by far the most shocking injury Stan Dempsey had inflicted on Karl Dahl’s lawyer was literally burned across Scott’s forehead.

One word:
GUILTY.