by Tami Hoag
“What the hell did you say to him?”
“Nothing,” Rubel returned.
“I was talking to the other ox. You said something stupid, didn’t you? Christ, what a question! I might as well ask if shit is brown,” Kovac said with disgust.
“He attacked me,” Ogden said indignantly. “He assaulted an officer.”
“Yeah?” Kovac said tightly, getting in his face. “You want to go there, Ogden? You want to make a report detailing this little fiasco? You want Mr. Pierce there to give a statement? You want your supervisor reading what a dickhead you are?”
Sulking, the officer pulled a dingy handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbed it under his nose.
“You’re gonna be lucky he doesn’t call the citizens’ commission and sue the department,” Kovac said. “Now get outta here and go do your jobs.”
Rubel led the way out the front door, jaw set, eyes narrow. Ogden hustled up alongside him to the street, bloody rag held to his nose with one hand, the other gesticulating as he tried to impress something on his partner, who didn’t want to hear.
The crime scene van pulled up behind the radio car at the curb. A pair of shitty compacts swarmed in from opposite directions like buzzards. Newsies. Kovac felt his lip start to curl. He stepped back into the house, catching Burgess reaching for a stack of videocassettes on a shelf beside the television.
“Don’t touch anything!” Kovac snapped. “Get out on the lawn and keep the reporters away. ‘No comment’—do you think you can manage that, or is it too many syllables?”
Burgess ducked his head.
“And I want every license plate on the block noted and run. Got that?”
“Yessir,” the cop said through his teeth as he went out.
“Where do they get these guys?” Kovac asked as he went back to the kitchen.
“They breed them up north as pack animals,” Liska said, meeting him at the archway into the room. “Ogden made a crack about one less fag. Pierce lost it. Who can blame him?”
“Great,” Kovac muttered. “Let’s hope he doesn’t decide to get vocal about it. Bad enough Andy Fallon’s dead. We don’t need to broadcast to the whole metropolitan area which way his willy waggled.”
The crime scene team came through then, toting their cases and cameras. The scene would be photographed again and videotaped. The area of the death scene would be dusted for prints. If there was any evidence to gather, it would be photographed, its exact position measured and noted; it would be logged and marked and packaged with great care taken to establish the chain of custody so that its every moment could be accounted for. And all the while Andy Fallon’s body would hang there, waiting for the arrival of the ME’s people.
Kovac briefed the senior criminalist and directed them upstairs.
Liska had herded Steve Pierce back to the kitchen table. He sat like a man who wanted to pace, one hand rubbing his throat. Ogden’s blood stained his knuckles. He had pulled his tie loose and undone his collar. The black suit was limp and rumpled.
“Mind if we sit down, Steve?” Kovac asked.
Pierce made no reply. They sat anyway. Kovac produced a microcassette recorder from his pocket, turned it on, and placed it on the table.
“We’ll make a recording of our conversation here, Steve,” he explained casually. “So that we’re sure we’ve got all the details straight when we get back to the station to write our reports. Is that all right with you?”
Pierce nodded wearily, dragging a hand back through his hair.
“I’ll need you to answer out loud, Steve.”
“Yes. Sure. Fine.” He tried to clear his throat. Distress etched lines beside his mouth. “Will they . . . take him down now?” he asked, his voice closing off on the last words.
“The medical examiner’s people will do that,” Liska explained.
He looked at her as if it had only just dawned on him there would have to be an autopsy. His eyes filled again and he looked out the window at the snow in the backyard, trying to compose himself.
“What do you do for a living, Steve?” Kovac asked.
“Investments. I’m with Daring-Landis.”
“Do you live here? In this house?”
“No.”
“What brought you here this morning?”
“Andy was supposed to meet me for coffee at the Uptown Caribou yesterday. He wanted to talk to me about something. He didn’t show. He didn’t answer my calls. I was concerned so I came by.”
“What was your relationship with Andy Fallon?”
“We’re friends,” he said. Present tense. “From college. Buddies. You know.”
“Suppose you tell us,” Kovac said. “What kind of buddies?”
Pierce’s brow creased. “You know, out for beer and pizza, the occasional basketball game. Get together for Monday Night Football. Guy stuff.”
“Nothing more . . . intimate?”
Kovac watched his face carefully. Pierce colored from the collar up.
“What are you suggesting, Detective?”
“I’m asking if the two of you had a sexual relationship,” Kovac said with calm bluntness.
Pierce looked as if his head might burst. “I’m straight. Not that it’s any of your business.”
“There’s a dead body upstairs,” Kovac said. “That makes everything my business. What about Mr. Fallon?”
“Andy’s gay,” Pierce said, resentment bitter in his eyes. “Does that make it all right that he’s dead?”
Kovac spread his hands. “Hey, I don’t care who plugs what in where. I just need a frame of reference for my investigation.”
“You have a real way with words, Detective.”
“You said Andy wanted to talk something over with you,” Liska prompted, diverting his attention to her. Allowing Kovac to watch every facial tic. “Do you know what?”
“No. He didn’t say.”
“When did you last speak with him?” Kovac asked.
Pierce cut him a sideways look, the resentment lingering.
“Um, Friday, I guess it was. My fiancée was busy that night so I swung by to see Andy. We hadn’t seen much of each other lately. I came by to suggest we get together for coffee or something. Catch up.”
“So the two of you were supposed to meet yesterday, but Andy was a no-show.”
“I called a couple of times, got the machine. He never called back. I decided to swing by. See if everything was all right.”
“Why wouldn’t you just think he was busy? Maybe he had to go to work early.”
Pierce glared at him. “Pardon me for being concerned about my friends. I guess I should just be an asshole like you. I could be at my desk now. I could have saved myself the trouble of seeing—”
He cut himself off as the image rose in his memory again. His face was still red but with a waxy sheen to it now as he looked out the window, as if the sight of the snow, white and serene, might cool and soothe him.
“How’d you get into the house?” Kovac asked. “You have a key?”
“The door wasn’t locked.”
“Had he talked about suicide? Had he seemed depressed?” Liska asked.
“He had seemed . . . frustrated. A little down, yes, but not to the point that he’d kill himself. I just won’t believe that. He wouldn’t have done something like that without trying to reach out to someone first.”
That was what the survivors always wanted to think at first. Kovac knew from experience. They always wanted to believe the loved one would have asked for help before taking that fatal step. They never wanted to think they might have missed a sign. If it turned out Andy Fallon had committed suicide, at some point Steve Pierce would start wondering if there hadn’t been a dozen signs and he’d missed them all because he was selfish or scared or blind.
“Down about what?”
Pierce made a helpless gesture. “I don’t know. Work. Or maybe his family. I know there’d been some strain between him and his dad.”
“What about other
relationships?” Liska asked. “Was he involved with anyone?”
“No.”
“How can you be sure?” Kovac asked. “You weren’t living here. You weren’t seeing each other. You just got together for the occasional cup o’ joe.”
“We were friends.”
“Yet you don’t really know what was bothering him. You don’t really know how depressed he might have been.”
“I knew Andy. He would not have killed himself,” Pierce insisted, his patience wearing thin.
“Aside from the door being unlocked,” Liska said, “did anything seem to be missing or out of place?”
“Not that I noticed. I wasn’t looking, though. I came to find Andy.”
“Steve, did you ever know Andy to practice any unusual sexual rituals?” Kovac asked.
Pierce shot up out of his chair, sending it skidding backward. “You people are unbelievable!” He jerked around as if scanning the kitchen for a witness or a weapon.
Kovac remembered the knives on the island and the rage in Pierce’s face as he’d pounded Ogden. He got up and put himself between Pierce and the knife block.
“This isn’t personal, Steve. It’s our job,” he said. “We need the clearest picture we can get.”
“You’re a bunch of fucking sadists!” Pierce shouted. “My friend is dead and—”
“And I didn’t know him from Adam,” Kovac said reasonably. “And I don’t know you from Adam. For all I know, you might have killed him yourself.”
“That’s absurd!”
“And you know what?” Kovac went on. “I find a dead guy hanging naked, watching himself in a mirror . . . Call me a prude, but that strikes me odd. You know, I gotta think maybe this guy was into something a little out of the ordinary. But maybe you’re into that too. Maybe you don’t bat an eye at shit like that. What do I know? Maybe you choke yourself to get off every other day. Maybe you play spank the monkey with a cattle prod. If you do, if you and Fallon were involved in something like that together, you’re better off telling us now, Steve.”
Pierce was crying now, tears streaming, the muscles in his face straining as if he was fighting to hold in all the raw emotions ripping through him. “No.”
“No, you weren’t involved in that kind of thing, or no, you won’t tell us?” Kovac prodded.
Pierce closed his eyes and hung his head. “God, I can’t believe this is happening.” The burden of it all suddenly too much, he sank down to the floor on his knees and curled forward, his head in his hands. “Why is this happening?”
Kovac watched him, a feeling of weary, familiar remorse coming over him. He squatted down beside Steve Pierce and put a hand on his shoulder.
“That’s what we want to find out, Steve,” he said softly. “You may not always like the way we do it. And you may not like what we find. But in the end, that’s all we want—the truth.”
Even as he said it, Kovac knew that when they found the truth, no one was going to want it. There simply wasn’t going to be a good reason for Andy Fallon to be dead.
5
CHAPTER
MIKE FALLON’S HOUSE looked somehow more alone in the cold gray light of day. Night had a way of enveloping a neighborhood; homes seemed to huddle together like a flock with only slips of velvet darkness between them. By day, they were separated and isolated by light and driveways and fences and snow.
Kovac looked up at the house and wondered if Mike already knew. People sometimes did. As if a shock wave had somehow rippled out from the death scene, reaching them faster than the speed of sound, or the speed of the messenger.
He’s dead to me.
He doubted Mike Fallon would remember saying those words, but they still rang in Kovac’s ears as he sat alone in the car. He had dropped Liska at the station to get a running start on the investigation. She would contact Andy Fallon’s IA supervisor to find out what he’d been working on, what his attitude had been lately. She would get his jacket sent up from personnel, find out if he’d been making any use of the department shrink.
Kovac would’ve traded places with her in a heartbeat, except the sense of obligation was too strong. He cursed himself for a sap and got out of the car. Some days life just sucked when you were a decent human being.
He peered into the house through a narrow, rectangular window in the front door. The living room seemed shabbier than it had the night before. The walls needed paint. The sofa should have seen the back door of Goodwill years ago. A strange contrast to the massage chair and big-screen TV.
He rang the doorbell and knocked for good measure, then waited, impatient, trying not to wonder what a stranger would think of his living room with the empty fish tank. Someday he’d have to get around to getting a life outside the job.
His hands fidgeted at his coat pockets. He dug out a stick of Juicy Fruit, his nerves quivering at the base of his neck like ants just beneath his skin. He knocked again. Flashes of last night popped in his memory—Mike Fallon, the old cop, broken, discarded, depressed, drunk. . . . There was no sign of life within the house. No motion. No sound.
Sinking in snow halfway up his shins, he went around to the side of the house, looking for a bedroom window. Wouldn’t that be a story for the six o’clock news? Father-son cop suicides. Paul Harvey would probably pick that one up to depress all of America over lunch tomorrow. Pointless death over chicken salad and Big Macs.
He found a ladder in the tiny garage that was bursting at the seams with the usual life’s accumulation of barely used junk. A nearly new Subaru Outback tricked out for a handicapped driver took up most of the space. Some other cop must have returned it from Patrick’s back lot after the party, or someone else had taken Mike to the bar, then melted into the woodwork when the trouble started. Someone who didn’t want a drunk puking in his backseat.
The shade was up on Mike Fallon’s bedroom window. Mike lay on his back on the bed, arms flung out, head turned to one side, mouth hanging open like a busted gate. Kovac held his breath and looked for some sign of Fallon’s heart beating beneath his thin T-shirt.
“Hey, Mikey!” he shouted, knocking on the window.
Fallon didn’t flinch.
“Mike Fallon!”
The old man jolted on the second round of pounding, eyes slitting open, resentful of the light. He made a raw sound of fear at the sight of the face pressed to his window.
“Mike, it’s Sam Kovac!”
Fallon rocked himself up in the bed, hawking up a night’s worth of phlegm.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he shouted. “Are you out of your fucking head?”
Kovac cupped his hands around the sides of his face so he could see better. “You gotta let me in, Mike. We need to talk.” His breath fogged the glass and he wiped the moisture away with his coat sleeve.
Fallon scowled and waved him off. “Leave me alone. I don’t need to hear it from you.”
“Hear what?”
“Last night. Bad enough I did it. I don’t need my nose rubbed in it.”
He looked pathetic sitting there in his underwear like a derelict Humpty-Dumpty: the barrel body and the twig legs, beard stubble and bloodshot eyes. He brushed over the flattop, wincing, pressing gingerly.
“Just let me in, will you?” Kovac said. “It’s important.”
Fallon squinted at him, trying to size it up. No one hated a surprise more than a cop.
Finally, he lifted a hand in defeat. “There’s a key under the mat in back.”
“A KEY UNDER the mat.” Kovac set it on the counter and cocked a look at the old man. “Jeez, Mike. You used to be a cop. You oughta know better.”
Fallon ignored him. The kitchen smelled of bacon grease and fried onions. The curtains were stiff with age. The countertops were lined with cups and glasses and plates and cereal boxes, and a giant jar of Metamucil with prescription bottles clustered around it like white-capped toadstools. All the doors had been taken off the lower cupboards, exposing the contents: boxes of instant potatoes, canned veg
etables, about a case of Campbell’s soup.
Fallon hadn’t bothered with pants. He rolled around the small room in his chair, his hairy, atrophied legs pushed to one side, out of the way. He ferreted out a bottle of Tylenol from the pharmacy on the counter, and got himself a glass of water from the door of the refrigerator.
“What’s so damned important?” he demanded gruffly, though Kovac could see the tension in Fallon’s shoulders, as if he was bracing himself. “I got a hangover could drop a cow.”
“Mike.” Kovac waited until Fallon turned and looked at him, then took a deep breath. “Andy’s dead. I’m sorry.”
Blunt. Just like that. People always thought they had to lead in to bad news with platitudes, but that wasn’t the way. All that did was give the recipient a chance to panic at the many horrible possibilities. He had learned long ago to just say it and get it over with.
Fallon looked away, his jaw working.
“We don’t know yet what happened.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know what happened?” Fallon demanded. “Was he shot? Was he stabbed? Was it a car accident?” He worked up a temper, anger being more comfortable, more familiar than grief. A flush began at the base of his throat and pushed upward. “You’re a detective. Somebody’s dead. You can’t tell me how they got that way? Jesus H.”
Kovac let it roll off. “It might have been an accident. Or it might have been suicide, Mike. We found him hanging. I wish I didn’t have to tell you, but there it is. I’m really sorry.”
Sorry. As Andy had been. He could see the word on the mirror over the reflection of Andy Fallon. Naked. Dead. Bloated. Rotting. Sorry didn’t mean a whole lot in the face of that.
Mike seemed to deflate and shrivel. Tears filled his small red eyes and spilled down his cheeks like glass beads.
“Oh, Jesus,” he said. A plea, not a curse. “Oh, dear Jesus.”
He brought a trembling hand to his mouth. It was the size of a canned ham but looked fragile, the skin thin and spotted. A sound of terrific pain wrenched free of his soul.
Kovac looked away, wanting to allow the man at least that much privacy. This was the worst part of being the messenger: trespassing on those first acute moments of grief, moments that should not be witnessed by anyone.
