Prior Bad Acts (29 page)

50

THE CAR SLOWED
down and turned. Gravel crunched beneath the tires, and Carey’s heart began to pound hard at the base of her throat. No one was ever taken to a remote area against their will for any good reason.

She tried the phone again, but still she had no signal, and her battery was starting to run low. The case of the phone had cracked when she had broken the plastic light cover. Hands shaking, she turned it off and stuck it into the front pocket of her jeans once more. The tail of her shirt would hide the outline of it . . . as long as she was wearing a shirt.

The car rolled to a halt.

She had no weapon. Her physical strength, even with adrenaline fueling it, would be no match for a man bent on harming her. The car rocked as the driver got out.

Her breath held tight in her lungs as she waited for the trunk to unlock, waited for the sudden blinding light as the lid opened, waited to finally see the face of her captor.

But the trunk didn’t open.

A car door opened again, but no one got in.

Carey wondered where the hell she was. There was no traffic noise at all. No sound of human voices. All she could hear was the very faint squawking of geese flying south for the winter. She wished for their freedom, and thanked God that at least she wasn’t hearing the sound of a shovel digging a shallow grave.

51

CHRISTINE NEAL’S COTTAGE
would have looked just as at home if it had been found somewhere on Nantucket Island. The small garage was empty. The front door of the house was locked, but a little hand-painted sign bade visitors welcome and announced, “Grandma Lives Here.”

The uniformed officers had rung the doorbell and looked in the windows but had seen no sign of Christine Neal.

Dawes gave the signal. “Break it in.”

The house was quiet and smelled fresh, as if it had just been cleaned.

“Well, this is weird right off the bat,” Liska said.

“What?” Kovac asked.

“Look at this place,” she said. “It’s so—so—
neat
.”

At Kovac’s request, she had met them at the Neal home. They were both good detectives in their own right, but Kovac liked the way they worked a scene together. They complemented each other in the way they saw things, in the feelings they picked up, in the way they processed what they took in.

“Not everyone shares your enlightened view of organization,” Kovac said as they walked around the living room, looking for any sign of something wrong.

He had sent one of the uniforms to the backyard and one to the basement. Dawes stood just inside the front door, deep in conversation with the chief of detectives, trying to explain the debacle at the Moore house.

“Not everyone has two boys and a homicide cop in the family,” Liska said. “Look at the pattern in this carpet. Freshly vacuumed. I’m lucky I can
see
my carpet.”

“Mmmm . . . You should tell Speed he can work off some of his delinquent child support tidying your house once a week.”

“Ha. Two boys, a homicide cop, and an asshole. I would have the same house, but it would smell like sweat socks, cigarettes, and bad Mexican food.”

They went into the kitchen, finding it equally immaculate.

“The boys with him this weekend?” Kovac asked.

“Yeah. I can’t wait to find out what useful skill he’s taught them this time,” Liska said. “The last time they were with him, he taught them how to pat down a hype without getting stuck with a dirty needle.”

Kovac looked out the window over the sink, into the fenced backyard. A happy scarecrow hung on a post in a vegetable garden studded with orange pumpkins.

“That’s Speed, always the model father,” he said.

“He’s the only one they’ve got,” Liska said. “Hey, look at this. She’s a breast cancer survivor.”

She stood in front of the refrigerator, looking at a collage of photographs. The life and times of Christine Neal.

“I hope to God she’s visiting those grandkids,” Kovac said.

The officer came up from the basement and said, “Nothing down there but wet laundry in the washing machine.”

Kovac turned down the hall, checked out the bathroom—spotless—and continued on to what he thought might be a bedroom.

The vacuum had been run in this room as well, right up to the white eyelet dust ruffle of the queen-sized bed.

Kovac looked around the room. Nothing had been overturned or disturbed.

He went down on one knee beside the bed and lifted the fabric.

Christine Neal stared at him with sightless eyes.

52

“I DON’T GET IT,”
Kovac said. “Why kill this woman? Just to take her car?”

“Maybe he knew her,” Liska suggested. “Maybe she could ID him.”

“You think Christine Neal was into porn? Is there a whole over-fifty porn movie industry out there I don’t know about?”

“I don’t want to know. I’m still reeling from Tippen.”

Kovac huffed. “Please. Like you didn’t already think he was watching porn.”

“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 carcass. 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 assault 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 shifted 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 snatched 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 hell 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 butt 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 bullshit. I’ll have to kick your ass.”

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 F
or 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 God’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 assault. 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 God,” 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.”