Prior Bad Acts (35 page)

66

LISKA PULLED UP
in front of the Haas house. It was only a small detour on her way home to St. Paul. She felt like she owed them the visit to tell them Karl Dahl would never hurt anyone again. She could give them good news for once, instead of bad news, excuses, and accusations. She could take ten minutes out of her life for that.

There were lights on downstairs and in the detached garage. Wayne Haas’s car was in the driveway. She went first to the garage, thinking father and son might be there together, working on some project. Hoping for both of them that that would be the case.

A radio was playing hip-hop, something she heard enough around her own house to have learned to thoroughly hate it. A sure sign of going over the hill.

“Mr. Haas? Bobby?” she called out as she neared the side door.

The rain had stopped, but the grass was wet, and she could feel it soaking into the leather of her shoes.
No good deed goes unpunished.

She knocked, looking into the garage through the glass panes of the old side door. The usual assortment of junk—lawn mowers, bikes, yard tools, paint cans.

Bobby Haas was sitting on a stool at the workbench that ran from wall to wall across the end of the building. He looked up from a book, slipped off the stool, and came to the door.

“Detective Liska? What are you doing here?”

“Can I come in? It’s getting really cold out here.”

He stepped back from the door to let her in. Liska automatically took in her surroundings at a glance—garden tools hanging on the garage walls, fishing rods that hadn’t been out in a long time. Bobby moved toward the long workbench.

“I came with some good news for a change,” she said. “Is your dad around?”

Bobby frowned. “He went to bed early. He wasn’t feeling well.”

“Is he okay? Does he need to go to a doctor?”

“No. I think he’s mostly just worn-out,” the boy said, looking sad. “He’s always worn-out.”

“You want things to be the way they were before,” Liska said.

“He doesn’t even want to try. He couldn’t care less about me.”

“I’m sure that’s not true, Bobby. Your dad’s in a bad place. He feels ashamed that you’ve had to be the strong one in the family, when he should be strong for you.”

None of this impressed the boy. He had run out of patience. Like every boy, he wanted to be the center of his father’s world. There was no greater disappointment than for a son to find out that he wasn’t.

“Yeah, well,” Bobby said, tears glazing his eyes, “I wish he would just get over it. It’s been more than a year and every day he still gets up depressed over what happened, and every day he comes home from work depressed over what happened. It’s like I’m not even there. He’s supposed to be my
dad
. What about me? What about what I need?”

Liska put a hand on his back and patted, offering the same silent comfort she had given her oldest boy the many times his father had disappointed him. Bobby Haas was trembling against the raw emotions rising up inside him. He was at an age when those emotions were suddenly bigger and stronger than he knew what to do with.

He stepped away from her and walked in a small circle, his hands on his hips. “He’s supposed to love
me,
not a bunch of dead people he can’t do anything about!”

Struggling to bat the tears back, to take the feelings that had burst free and shove them back inside, he walked his small circle, breathing hard.

Liska wondered what must have happened to spark all of this. A fight with Wayne? Or Wayne not having it in him to fight? The truth of it was, Wayne Haas was a broken man, and she really didn’t think he would ever pull out of it. It looked like Bobby had come to that realization as well.

The boy swiped at his eyes, embarrassed he had lost his composure in front of her.

“So what are you doing out here?” Nikki asked, trying for a more upbeat tone as she walked toward the workbench, where textbooks and notebooks were spread out beneath the fluorescent work light.

“Studying,” Bobby said. “I can have the radio on out here and it doesn’t bother my dad.”

“I’ll have to pass this idea on to my boys,” she said, checking out his books. Advanced biology, chemistry, psychology. “Looks like you’re thinking of becoming a doctor.”

“I want to be a forensic pathologist.”

“Smart choice.” Creepy choice, all things considered, but it was better than having him say he wanted to spend his life digging graves, she supposed. With the kinds of tragedies he’d had in his young life, it made a certain kind of sense. “Your patients can never sue you for malpractice. They’re already dead.”

“Right,” he said, managing a little smile.

“You’ve made yourself quite the office out here.”

He had converted some of the shelves above the workbench into bookshelves. On the work surface, he had put down a number of twelve-by-twelve marble tiles to spread his work over. Pens and pencils were neatly organized in mismatched cups and water glasses. A couple of stacking trays held notebooks and file folders. The level of organization was frightening to a woman whose filing system consisted of stacking piles of paper all over her dining room table.

Bobby moved between her and the bench as if he was worried she might try to steal his chemistry notes.

Liska considered it a triumph that she had gotten Kyle and R.J. to keep a path open on the floor of their bedroom so they could escape in the event of a fire. This kid kept his paper clips sorted by size.

“I should have you come and organize my kitchen,” she said. “But then I might be expected to cook.”

He had “in” and “out” trays labeled for bills and family finances.

“You pay the bills?” she asked.

“If I leave it to Dad, it doesn’t get done.”

Even as debilitated as Wayne Haas seemed to be, she thought it strange that he would give that responsibility to a seventeen-year-old boy.

“You don’t ever get to just be a kid, do you?”

Bobby shrugged and looked away from her. “It doesn’t matter. I’ve always had to take care of things myself.”

There was a bitter, ironic edge to his words.

“So what’s the good news?” he asked. “You said you have good news.”

“Karl Dahl was shot and killed this afternoon,” she said. “He won’t be hurting anyone ever again.”

“Good. So it’s over?”

Liska helped herself to a seat on an old riding lawn mower. “As far as Karl Dahl goes. We’re still looking into the assault on Judge Moore.”

“So she’s off the hook for siding with him now, ’cause he’s dead?” Bobby said. “She can go back to her life and do the same thing all over again?”

“Actually, she’s in the hospital,” Liska said. “Dahl abducted her last night. She’s lucky to be alive.”

Bobby couldn’t seem to muster up any sympathy. “If she’d just done what she was supposed to do, none of this would have happened.”

“Judge Moore didn’t let Karl Dahl break jail.”

“She would have let him walk,” the boy said. “He was supposed to go to prison, like, a long time ago. Maybe my dad could have had some closure and moved on if that had happened.”

“Life doesn’t always follow the plan, Bobby. Most of the time it just happens, and we do the best we can.”

Of course he wouldn’t go for that, she thought. This kid probably did an outline for a grocery list. He wanted everything neat and tidy and under his control. She couldn’t blame him. He’d had so little control over his own young life, he had to take it where he could.

On the wall at the far end of the bench, he had put up a coatrack and hung a variety of layers to put on when he started to get cold, in order of lightest weight to heaviest—a short-sleeved T-shirt, a long-sleeved T-shirt, a sweatshirt with a University of Minnesota logo, the black jacket he had been wearing the first two times she had spoken with him.

At least the clothes weren’t pressed and on padded hangers. The shirts hung crooked. He had tossed the jacket up on the hook inside out. Nice to know he wasn’t entirely perfect.

Liska stared at the coat, at the square white tag sewn into the back at the neck. About one inch by one inch. She frowned, but brought her attention back to the boy.

“Maybe your dad can have that closure now,” she said. “With Karl Dahl dead, maybe he’ll be able to let go some of the anger and start to heal. Maybe you can do that together.”

Bobby looked off in the direction of the house as if he could see through the walls and into his father’s bedroom. If he could have willed something to happen, he would have.

Liska’s eyes drifted back to the clothes on the hooks. A picnic bench beneath the coatrack gave a place to sit down and change shoes. Beneath the bench were a small herd of sneakers, a pair of army boots, and what looked like a small piece of luggage partially hidden by a greasy old towel.

No, not luggage.

Liska went to the bench and pulled the towel away, revealing an old brown leather briefcase big enough to carry a bowling ball, or the files, notes, briefs, and motions a judge might carry home at the end of the day.

“Great old briefcase,” she said. “My uncle William carried one of these when I was a kid. He was a real estate attorney.”

Bobby Haas said nothing. He looked from the briefcase to Liska.

“Lawyers like to carry so much paper,” she said. “I think it makes them feel like they must be important. Uncle William had one arm longer than the other from hauling that briefcase around.”

Stamped in gold beneath the heavy brass clasp and lock was a name partially rubbed away over the years, but she could still make it out:
A. H. GREER, ESQ.

“Where did you get this, Bobby?” Liska asked as she straightened up and looked hard at the boy.

“I don’t remember. Salvation Army, I think.”

“Really? The things you can find,” she said. “This is really nice. They don’t even make them like this anymore. Did you know Judge Moore had one just like this?”

“No. How would I know that?”

“I don’t know,” Liska said. “You tell me. It was stolen from her when she was attacked Friday night.”

“Are you saying you think I stole it?” he said, becoming visibly upset at the idea. “I didn’t. That’s not even her name.”

“No, it isn’t. But I can tell you whose name it is. Alec Greer, Esquire, is Judge Moore’s father.”

Red in the face, the boy said, “Well, this isn’t hers. I got it a long time ago.”

“Then you won’t mind if I have a look inside,” Liska said.

His eyes went to the briefcase again, then back to her. He was breathing faster. “Don’t you need a warrant or something?”

“I can get a warrant. Is that what you want? I can call my partner, and we can stand here and wait for him to bring a search warrant. Then we can spend all night picking this garage apart, and it won’t make any difference. What’s in that briefcase isn’t going to change, unless you have some magical powers you haven’t shared with me.”

He was sweating a little bit now. He didn’t have an instant answer. Liska could all but see the gears in his brain racing as he considered and dismissed options.

“Bobby, the only way you have this briefcase is if you took it from Judge Moore,” she said. “Turn around, spread your feet, put your arms out to your sides and your hands flat on the counter.”

He did as he was told.

“Bobby Haas,” she said, walking up behind him with handcuffs, “I’m putting you under arrest for the assault of Carey Moore.”

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.