by Tami Hoag
Kovac trudged up the sidewalk to his house and went inside, not bothering to turn on lights. Plenty spilled in from next door. His home was not so different from Mike Fallon’s in that it was short on furniture. The last divorce had left him with the castoffs, which he had never bothered to replace or add to. He was himself a castoff, so it seemed only fitting. His biggest indulgence in the last five years had been the aquarium. A sorry attempt to bring other living creatures into his home.
There were no photographs of children or family. Two failed marriages seemed nothing to brag about. He had a lot of bad memories and a daughter he hadn’t seen since her infancy. She was dead to him in a way, he supposed. But it was more as if she had never existed. After the divorce, her mother had remarried with embarrassing haste, and the new family had moved to Seattle. Kovac hadn’t watched his daughter grow up or play sports or follow him into law enforcement. He had trained himself not to think about the lost opportunities . . . most of the time.
He went upstairs to his bedroom, but the bed didn’t interest him. His head was throbbing. He sat down in the chair by the window and looked out at the garish light show next door.
He’s dead to me, Mike Fallon had said about his son.
What would prompt a man to say such a thing about a child who had clearly been the pride of his life? Why would he cut that tie when he had so little else?
Kovac dug his Nicorette gum out of his pocket and tossed it in the wastebasket, reached into the nightstand drawer for a half-empty pack of Salems, and lit one up.
Who was gonna tell him not to?
3
CHAPTER
THE PHOTOGRAPH HAS a fake quality to it. Most people would have glanced at it, felt an immediate burst of horror, then quickly decided it was some kind of sick joke.
The photographer is not most people.
As the artist considers the portrait, there is an initial sense of shock, but what follows immediately on its heels is a strange, complicated mix of emotions: horror, fascination, relief, guilt. And beneath that layer, another darker dimension of feeling: a certain sense of excitement . . . a sense of control . . . a sense of power. Feelings that are frightening, sickening.
There is tremendous power in taking a life. To take a life: the phrase implies to take the energy of another living creature and add it to one’s own life force. The idea is seductive in a sinister way. Addictive to a certain type of individual: the kind who kills for sport.
I’m not that. I could never be that.
Even as the pledge is made, memories of another death flash frame by frame through the memory: violence, movement, blood, white noise roaring in the ears, a deafening internal scream that can’t be heard. Then silence and the stillness, and the terrible realization: I did that.
And the sense of excitement . . . and power . . .
The dark feelings move through the soul like a snake, sinuous and shiny. The conscience shudders in its wake. Fear rises like a flood tide.
The photographer stares at the captured image of a corpse dancing on the end of a rope, the image reflected in a mirror, the mirror scrawled with the single word. Sorry.
So sorry.
4
CHAPTER
“ANDY FALLON IS dead.”
Liska met Kovac with the news at the door into the CID offices.
The breath went out of him. “What?”
“Andy Fallon is dead. A friend found him this morning. It looks like suicide.”
“Jesus,” Kovac muttered, feeling as disoriented as he had this morning when he’d rolled out of bed too fast for his throbbing head. In the back of his mind he saw Mike Fallon, frail and white; heard him say the words. He’s dead to me. “Jesus.”
Liska stared up at him, expectant.
He shook himself mentally. “Who’s up?”
“Springer and Copeland,” she said, glancing sideways for eavesdroppers. “Were up. Past tense. I figured you’d want it, so I grabbed it.”
“I don’t know if I should thank you or wish your parents had practiced better birth control,” Kovac grumbled, heading toward their cubicle.
“Did you know Andy?”
“No. Not really. I met him a couple of times. Suicide. Man, I don’t want to be the one to tell Mike.”
“You’d rather some uniform do it? Or someone from the ME’s office?” Liska said with disapproval.
Kovac blew out a breath and closed his eyes for a second as the burden settled on his shoulders. “No.”
Fate had tied him to Iron Mike years ago, and again last night. The least he could do was maintain some continuity for the old man. Let the news come from a familiar face.
“Don’t you think we should jump on it?” Liska said, glancing around for Copeland and Springer. “Try to keep a lid on things. Andy being on the job and all.”
“Yeah,” Kovac said, glancing at the blinking light on his phone. “Let’s blow this joint before Leonard saddles us with another ‘murder of tomorrow.’ ”
ANDY FALLON LIVED in a one-and-a-half-story house just north of the trendy district known as Uptown. Home to the upwardly mobile and the stylishly hip, Uptown was, in fact, south of downtown, which had never made any sense to Kovac. “Uptown” in the sense of being too chic for the likes of him, he supposed. The business center was an area of reclamations and renovations—coffee bars, yuppie restaurants, and art house movie theaters. Homes on the west side, near Lake of the Isles and Lake Calhoun, went for a premium. Fallon’s was just far enough north and east to be affordable on a single cop’s salary.
Two radio cars sat at the curb out front. Liska marched ahead up the sidewalk, always eager for a new case. Kovac trailed behind, dreading this one.
“Wait’ll you get a load of this,” said the uniform who met them at the door. “It’s one for the scrapbook.”
His tone was almost snide. He’d been at it too long, had grown numb to the sight of dead people to the point where they were no longer people to him—they were bodies. All cops got that way or they got off the street before they could lose their minds. Death simply couldn’t affect them in a personal way every time they encountered it. Kovac knew he was surely no exception. But this time would be different. It already was.
Liska gave the cop the flat look all detectives mastered early on in their career. “Where’s the body?”
“Bedroom. Upstairs.”
“Who found him?”
“A ‘friend,’” the uniform said, again with the snide tone, making the quotation marks with his fingers. “He’s in the kitchen, crying.”
Kovac looked at the name tag, leaning in, crowding him. “Burgess?”
“Yeah,” he said, visibly resisting the urge to step back.
Liska scribbled his name and badge number in her notebook.
“You were first on the scene?” Kovac said.
“Yeah.”
“You used that mouth to talk to the guy found the body?”
Burgess frowned, suspicious. “Yeah . . .”
Kovac took another small step into the cop’s space. “Burgess, are you always such a fucking asshole or is today special?”
The cop colored, his features growing taut.
“Keep the mouth in check,” Kovac ordered. “The vic was a cop, and so’s his old man. Show some respect.”
Burgess pressed his lips together and took a step back, eyes cold. “Yes, sir.”
“I don’t want anyone coming in here unless they’ve got a badge or they’re from the ME. Got that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And I want a log of every name, badge number, and the time they walk in the door and walk back out. Can you manage that?”
“Yes. Sir.”
“Ooh, he didn’t like that,” Liska whispered gleefully as they left Burgess at the door and headed toward the back of the house.
“Yeah? Fuck him.” Kovac glanced down at her. “Andy Fallon was queer?”
“Gay,” she corrected. “How would I know? I don’t hang out wit
h IA rats. What do you take me for?”
“You really want to know?” Kovac asked, then, “He worked IA? No wonder Mike said the kid was dead to him.”
The kitchen was hunter green with pristine white woodwork and had everything in its place. It was the kitchen of someone who knew how to do more than run the microwave—commercial range, pots hanging from the iron rack above a granite-topped island loaded with big-ass knives in a wood block.
On the far side of the room, at a round table nestled into a bay window, sat the “friend,” head in hands. A good-looking guy in a dark suit. Red hair, stylishly cut. A rectangular face full of sharp angles and freckles. The freckles stood out against skin washed ashen by stress and by the cold gray light spilling in the windows. He barely glanced up as they walked into the room.
Liska flashed her ID and introduced them. “We understand you found the body, Mr.—”
“Pierce,” he said hoarsely, and sniffed. “Steve Pierce. Yes. I . . . found him.”
“We know this is terribly upsetting for you, Mr. Pierce, but we’ll need to talk to you when we finish. Do you understand?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t understand any of this. I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it.”
“We’re sorry for your loss,” Liska said automatically.
“He wouldn’t do this,” he mumbled, staring at the tabletop. “He wouldn’t do this. It’s just not possible.”
Kovac said nothing. A sense of dread built in his chest as they climbed the stairs.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this, Tinks,” he muttered, pulling on latex gloves. “Or maybe I’m having a heart attack. That’d be my luck. I finally quit smoking and I have a heart attack.”
“Well, don’t die at the scene,” Liska said. “The paperwork would be a big pain in the ass.”
“You’re full of sympathy.”
“Better than what you’re full of. You’re not having a heart attack.”
The second floor of the house had probably been open attic space at one time, but had been nicely converted to a master suite. Joist beams had been left exposed, creating a loft effect. A lovely, private place to die, Kovac thought, taking in the scene at a glance.
The body hung from a traditional rope noose just a few feet beyond the four-poster bed. The rope looped over a ceiling beam and was tied off somewhere at the head of the bed frame, that end of it hidden by the bedding. The bed was neatly made, hadn’t been slept in or even sat upon. Kovac noted these things in the back of his mind, his concentration on the victim. He flashed on the photographs he’d turned over on the dresser in Mike Fallon’s bedroom the night before: the handsome young man, the star athlete, the fresh-faced new cop with Mike beaming proudly beside him. He could see that same academy graduation photograph sitting on Andy Fallon’s dresser. Good-looking kid, he remembered thinking.
Now the handsome face was discolored, distorted, purple and bloated, the mouth frozen in a kind of sneer. The eyes were half-open and cloudy. He’d been there a while. A day or so, Kovac guessed from the apparent lack of rigor, the tautness of the skin, the smell. The sickly sweet aroma of beginning decay commingled with stale urine and feces. In death, the muscles had relaxed, bladder and bowel discharging on the floor.
The body was nude. His arms hung at his sides, hands curled into fists held slightly forward of the hips. Dark spots dotted the knuckles—lividity, the blood settling in the lowest levels of the extremities. The feet, no more than a few inches off the floor, were swollen and deep purple as well.
Kovac squatted down, took hold of an ankle, and pressed his thumb against the flesh for a moment, then let go. He watched for the skin to blanch, but nothing happened. The blood had clotted long before. The leg was cold to the touch.
An oak-framed full-length mirror was propped against the wall some ten feet in front of the corpse. The body was reflected fully, the reflection distorted by the angle of the mirror. The word Sorry had been written on the glass with something dark.
“I always figured these IA guys for kinky.”
Kovac looked to the two uniforms standing ten feet away, smirking at the mirror. The cops were a pair of buzz-cut no-necks, the bigger one having a head as square as a concrete block. Their name tags read “Rubel” and “Ogden.”
“Hey, Dumb and Dumber,” Kovac snapped. “Get the hell outta my death scene. What the fuck’s the matter with you? Tromping all over the place.”
“It’s a suicide,” the uglier one said, as if that mattered.
Kovac felt his face flush. “Don’t tell me what’s what, Moose. You don’t know dick. Maybe in twenty years you’ll have a right to an opinion. Now get the fuck outta here. Go downstairs and secure the zone. I don’t want anyone coming closer than the street. And keep your big fat yaps shut. Where there’s a corpse, there’s newsies. I read one word about this,” he said, pointing to the reflection in the mirror, “I’ll know who gets reamed new ones. You got me?”
The officers glanced at each other sullenly, then headed for the stairs.
“IA rat offs himself,” the ugly one said under his breath. “So what’s the crime? Looks like a service to everyone, you ask me.”
Kovac stared at the body. He could see Liska snooping around, making notes of every detail, sketching the room, the placement of the furniture and of anything that might be deemed significant. They took turns at that job—keeping the notes at the scene. It was his turn to shoot the preliminary Polaroids.
He started with the room itself, then slowly moved in on the body, photographing it from all angles. Each flash burned an imprint on his memory—the dead thing that had been Mike Fallon’s son; the beam from which the noose hung; the Reebok exercise steps that sat just behind the body, near enough to have been what Andy Fallon had used for his big dismount into the hereafter; the mirror. Sorry.
Sorry. Yes, it was.
Had Andy Fallon been sorry? About what? Or had someone else scrawled the word?
The furnace blower kicked on, and the corpse began to twist slightly like a giant rotting piñata. The reflection in the mirror was a macabre dance partner.
“I never understand people who get naked to commit suicide,” Liska said.
“It’s symbolic. Shedding their earthly skin.”
“Nobody is finding me naked.”
“Maybe he didn’t commit suicide,” Kovac said.
“You think someone could have done this to him? Or forced him to do it? Murder by hanging is rare.”
“What’s with the mirror?” Kovac asked, though it wasn’t a question to him.
Liska studied the naked corpse for a moment, then looked to the mirror, catching a slice of her own reflection with that of Andy Fallon.
“Oh, man,” she said quietly. “Autoerotic misadventure? I’ve never had one before.”
Kovac said nothing, trying to imagine what he would tell Mike. Bad enough to have to explain autoerotic asphyxiation to strangers, which he had done a couple of times in his career. But how did you tell a tough, hard-line, old-time cop that his son had been trying to get himself off by cutting off his oxygen supply, and had strangled himself in the process?
“But why the message?” Liska wondered aloud. “Sorry says suicide to me. Why would he write that if he was doing this just to get off?”
Kovac touched a hand to the top of his throbbing head and winced. “You know, some days it just doesn’t pay to get out of bed.”
“Yeah, well . . . Here’s your option,” Liska said, nodding to the body. “Doesn’t look too sweet to me. I always figure a bad day living beats any day dead.”
“Fuck me,” Kovac muttered.
Liska squatted down in front of the mirror to examine the letters more closely. She looked at Kovac’s reflection. “Not in front of a corpse. I’m not that kind of girl.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I do.” She rose slowly, dropped the act, and touched his arm, looking up at him with earnest blue eyes. “I’m sorry,
Sam. Like ol’ Iron Mike doesn’t have it bad enough.”
Kovac stared at his partner for a moment, stared at the small hand on his coat sleeve and briefly considered taking hold of it. Just for the comfort of contact with another human. She wore no rings—so as not to confuse potential suitors, she said. Her fingernails were short and unpolished.
“Yeah,” he whispered.
Below them there was a shout, then a sudden loud crash, followed by more shouting. Liska ran down the stairs like a mountain goat. Kovac pounded down behind her.
Rubel was trying to haul Steve Pierce off Ogden’s prone body. “Off him!” Rubel shouted.
In a rage, Pierce shrugged him off and took a swing at Ogden, connecting, by the sound of the thump and the grunt. Rubel grabbed Pierce again, hooking a thick arm around his throat and dragging him up and back, screaming in his ear.
“I said, off him!”
Ogden, scrambling to get his legs under himself, slipped on the polished wood. Shards of broken glass and china crunched beneath his thick cop brogues. He grabbed the edge of the china cabinet they had crashed into and hauled himself up, rattling everything left in it. His face was mottled and his nose was bleeding. He swiped a hand under it, eyes widening in disbelief. He had to have forty pounds on Steve Pierce.
“You’re under arrest, asshole!” he yelled, pointing a bloody finger at Pierce.
“Let him go!” Liska shouted at Rubel.
Pierce’s face had gone purple above the choke hold. Rubel released him and Pierce dropped to his knees, wheezing. He gasped and looked up at Ogden with venom in his eyes. “You son of a bitch!”
“Nobody’s under arrest,” Kovac declared, stepping between them.
“I want them out of here!” Pierce demanded hoarsely, fighting his way to his feet. His eyes gleamed with tears and fury. “Get them out of here!”
“You—” Ogden started.
Kovac hit him in the chest with the heel of his hand. It was like slapping a slab of granite. “Shut up! Outta here!”
Rubel stalked past and Ogden fell in step, fuming. Kovac dogged their heels into the living room.
