Dust to Dust

by Tami Hoag

  They went into a den with dark blue walls and fat leather armchairs the color of a fielder’s glove. Pierce went to a small wet bar in one corner and freshened his glass from a bottle of Macallan. Fifty bucks a bottle. Kovac knew because he had been asked to kick in a few so the department could buy a bottle for the last lieutenant when he left. He’d personally never paid more than twenty dollars for a bottle of booze in his life.

  “Andy’s brother told me Andy stopped by about a month ago to come out of the closet,” Kovac said, leaning a hip against the bar. Pierce frowned at that and made a task of wiping imaginary condensation off the soapstone counter. “I guess it didn’t go well with the old man, huh?”

  “What was the point of telling him?” Pierce’s voice tightened with anger he was trying hard to camouflage. “Sure, Dad, I’m still the same son who made you so proud in all those ball games,” he said with heavy sarcasm to the room at large. “I just like it up the ass, that’s all.”

  He tipped back the scotch and drank it like apple juice. “Jesus, what did he expect? He should have just let well enough alone. Let the old man see what he wanted to see. That’s all people really want anyway.”

  “How long had you known Andy was gay?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t mark it on the calendar,” Pierce said, walking away.

  “A month? A year? Ten years?”

  “A while.” Impatient. “What difference does it make?”

  “Coming out—was that something he’d saved for his family? Everyone else in his life knew? His friends, his coworkers?”

  “It wasn’t like he was a queen or something,” Pierce snapped. “It wasn’t anybody’s business unless Andy wanted it to be. We roomed together in college. He told me then. I didn’t care. It didn’t matter. More chicks for me, right? Major competition out of the dating pool.”

  “Why’d he tell them now?” Kovac asked. “His father, his brother? What brought that on? People don’t just up and spill their guts. Something pushes them to it.”

  “Is there a point to this? Because if there’s not, I’d sooner just sit here alone and drink myself into unconsciousness.”

  “You don’t strike me as someone wanting to sit down, Steve,” Kovac said. He pushed away from the bar to lean against one of the fat leather chairs. It smelled like a fielder’s mitt too. That probably cost extra.

  Pierce held himself stiff before Kovac’s scrutiny. People even lied with their body language—or tried to. That was seldom as successful as the verbal variety.

  “Your friend took a big step coming out,” Kovac said. “And he landed on his chin, at least with his father. That kind of rejection might push a person. A person like Andy, close to his dad, wanting to please him—”

  “No.”

  “He wrote an apology on the mirror. Why would he do that if he was just playing around, just getting himself off?”

  “I don’t know. He just wouldn’t have killed himself, that’s all.”

  “Or maybe the note on the mirror wasn’t Andy’s,” Kovac suggested. “Maybe Andy had a boyfriend over. Maybe they were having a little game, something went wrong. . . . The boyfriend got scared. . . . Do you happen to know the names of any of his partners?”

  “No.”

  “None? You being best pals and all? That seems strange.”

  “I wasn’t interested in his sex life. It didn’t have anything to do with me.” He took a drink of the scotch and stared sullenly at an electrical outlet on the other side of the room.

  “This morning you told me he wasn’t seeing anybody. Like maybe you were interested.”

  “Which reminds me,” Pierce said. “We’ve had this conversation before, Detective. I don’t care to relive the experience.”

  Kovac spread his hands. “Hey, you seem like a man with something he wants to get off his chest, Steve. I’m just giving you an outlet here, you know what I mean?”

  “I know that I don’t have anything of value to tell you.”

  Kovac smoothed a hand over his mustache and down his chin. “You’re sure?”

  Keys rattled in the front door, giving Pierce the opportunity to escape. Kovac followed him to the front hall. A drop-dead blonde had let herself in and was stepping out of a pair of low boots even as she set take-out bags on the hall table.

  Garlic chicken and Mongolian beef. Kovac’s stomach growled, and he remembered the lasagna on his coffee table with a fondness it didn’t deserve.

  “I told you, I don’t feel like eating, Joss.”

  “You need to eat something, sweetie,” the blonde chided gently, slipping out of her coat. Her features were beautifully sculpted, eyes impossibly large. Her shoulder-length hair looked like pale gold silk. “I was hoping the aroma might revive your appetite.”

  She hung the coat on an oak hall tree, which looked a hundred years old and worth a small fortune. When she turned around, she caught sight of Kovac for the first time and stiffened her back. She looked as unhappy as a queen finding an uninvited peasant in her chambers. Regal in her bearing and her disdain. Even in her stocking feet, she was as tall as Pierce and looked athletic. She dressed with the conservative flair of someone born to money—expensive fabrics, traditional style; tawny wool slacks and a navy blue blazer, an ivory turtleneck sweater that looked incredibly soft.

  Kovac flashed his badge at her. “Kovac. Homicide. I’m here about Andy Fallon. Sorry to disrupt your evening, ma’am.”

  “Homicide?” she said with wary surprise, her eyes going wider. They were brown, like Bambi’s. “But Andy wasn’t murdered.”

  “We need to be as sure of that as you, Miss . . .”

  “Jocelyn Daring,” she said, but didn’t offer her hand. “I’m Steven’s fiancée.”

  “And the boss’s daughter,” Kovac ventured.

  “You’re out of line, Kovac,” Pierce warned.

  “Sorry,” Kovac said. “You’ll get that a lot with me. Inappropriate is my middle name. I guess I wasn’t brought up right.”

  The look Jocelyn Daring gave him could have freeze-dried coffee. Kovac didn’t care. He was busy thinking that Steve Pierce was an up-and-comer for Daring-Landis, and that up-and-comers for Daring-Landis probably needed to be straight arrows with skeleton-free closets.

  The fiancée put her hand on Steve Pierce’s arm in a gesture that struck Kovac as both possessive and reassuring. She kept her eyes on Kovac. “Is there really any reason for you to be here now, Detective? Steven’s had a terrible shock today. We’d like to have some time alone to process the grief. Besides, it’s hardly his fault Andy committed suicide.”

  Pierce didn’t even look at her. His stare was directed across the hall and through the open doorway of the den—or into another dimension. It wasn’t difficult to imagine what he was seeing. The question was what it meant to him, and whether the weight of the emotion pressing in on him had anything to do with guilt. If it did, what kind of guilt.

  “I just had some questions, that’s all,” Kovac said. “Trying to get a clear picture of who Andy was, who his friends were, what might have pushed him to the edge—provided he stepped over it voluntarily. You know, trying to find out if he’d had any recent disappointments, ended relationships, personal setbacks of any kind.”

  Jocelyn Daring opened the slim black purse she’d set on the table beside the food and extracted a business card. Her fingers were long and elegant, the nails gleamed like sheer pearl. The square-cut diamond on her left ring finger could’ve choked a goat.

  “If you have any more questions, why don’t you call first?” she suggested.

  Kovac took the card in at a glance and raised a brow. “A lawyer?”

  “Steven told me about the way you treated him this morning, Detective. I won’t allow that to happen again. Do you understand me?”

  Pierce still wasn’t looking at her. Kovac nodded. “Yeah. I’m a little slow, but I think I’m beginning to see how things are.”

  He moved past them to the door, then paused with his han
d on the knob and looked back at them. Jocelyn Daring had moved in front of Steve Pierce again, putting herself between Kovac and her fiancé-client, protecting him.

  “Did you know Andy Fallon, Ms. Daring?” Kovac asked.

  “Yes,” she said simply. No tears. No strain of grief.

  “My condolences on your loss,” Kovac said, and let himself out into the cold.

  7

  CHAPTER

  SMALL AND UNREMARKABLE, Liska’s house sat shoulder to shoulder with half a dozen like it on a street in a neighborhood of St. Paul that had no name. “Near Grand Avenue” was what people who lived there liked to say, because Grand Avenue was just that: grand. Lined with beautiful restored mansions of former lumber barons. The governor’s mansion was on Grand Avenue. Not even the fact that the governor was a former professional wrestler could bring the neighborhood down. St. Paul’s version of Uptown, the heart of the Grand Avenue area was a trendy stretch of boutiques and upscale restaurants.

  Liska’s neighborhood was a lot like Andy Fallon’s—just far enough outside the chic radius to be affordable on a single income. Theoretically, Liska’s ex paid child support, which was supposed to ease the financial burden of single motherhood. But what Speed Hatcher had been ordered by the court to pay and what he actually came across with were two very different figures.

  That’s what she got for marrying a narc. Narcs lived too close to the edge too much of the time; the line between who they were on the job and who they were in civilian life often blurred very badly. For Speed, the line no longer existed. He liked that edge too well.

  In retrospect, Liska knew she had caught glimpses of that wildness in him from the first, when they’d both still been in uniform. She admitted it was part of what had attracted her to him. That and a dazzling smile and a great ass. But while wildness might have been a desirable trait in a lover, it was not in a father. The smile could make her take him back only so many times. The ass, it turned out, had been a serious liability. Too many other women wanted to get their hands on it.

  She shuffled the Polaroids of Andy Fallon and wondered if his lovers had felt the same way. Fallon had been a knockout before rigor set in. The kind of looks that made women lament same-sex attraction.

  She spread the photographs on her living room coffee table, with a copy of the St. Paul Pioneer Press at the ready to cover them if one of the boys wandered in, though it was late and both Kyle and R.J. had been in bed for an hour. It wasn’t unknown for one or the other to come out bleary-eyed in his pajamas and snuggle up to her on the couch while she tried to unwind with Letterman or a book.

  A part of her wished that would happen now so she could put the pictures out of her head and try to be a normal human being for a while. She had a headache and her jaw throbbed from grinding her teeth. The cap on the day had been getting cornered by Lieutenant Leonard while she’d waited for Kovac to show—which he hadn’t. Jamal Jackson was making noise about suing her for brutality. He didn’t have a case, but that wouldn’t stop him from hooking up with some slimy ACLU lawyer and making her life a misery until the case was thrown out of court. The report would go in her jacket whether the charges were substantiated or not. Next she’d have IA on her case while she tried to dig into theirs.

  Great. If the incident had happened a week ago, she might have met Andy Fallon before he became a corpse.

  She studied the photographs, not feeling the shock or revulsion an ordinary person would have. She had been toughened past that initial instinctive response long ago. She looked at them as a cop, searching for what they could tell her. Then the thought occurred that Andy Fallon had been twelve once, just like Kyle, her oldest.

  A tremor of fear rattled through her, slipping past her guard because she was tired. The worry that she didn’t spend enough quality time with the boys was always in her mind, chewing at the edge of her consciousness. Their lives seemed to be set at fast-forward. The boys were swamped with school and Scouts and hockey. She was overburdened with work and trying to keep the house and put food on the table and sign permission slips and show up for parent-teacher meetings and attend to the thousand other business details of motherhood. They were all so exhausted, there was little energy left for one another at the end of the day. How was she supposed to know if one of them might be slipping through the cracks?

  She’d read that experimentation with autoerotic asphyxiation was not uncommon among adolescent boys. Every year a fair portion of teen deaths written off as suicides were in fact autoerotic accidents. At twelve, Kyle was still more interested in Nintendo than girls, but puberty was right around the corner. Liska wanted to sneak around that corner and beat the shit out of puberty with her ASP.

  She tried not to think about it as she focused on Andy Fallon. If his death was an accident, then why the note on the mirror? If this kind of sexual practice was a habitual thing for him, would Steve Pierce have known about it? Probably not, if they were just buddies. If they were more than that . . . If Pierce was lying, was he lying to protect Fallon’s memory or to protect himself?

  The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition—aka the DSM-IV—was on the table, open to page 529 and the heading “Sexual Masochism.” Amazing the things people learned to do to get themselves off. The fantasies ranged from rape to bondage to being spanked to being peed on to wearing a diaper. Halfway down the page she found what she was looking for.

  One particularly dangerous form of Sexual Masochism, called “hypoxyphilia,” involves sexual arousal by oxygen deprivation. . . . Oxygen-depriving activities may be engaged in alone or with a partner. Because of equipment malfunction, errors in placement of the noose or ligature, or other mistakes, accidental deaths sometimes occur. . . . Sexual Masochism is usually chronic, and the person tends to repeat the same masochistic act.

  Alone or with a partner. Pierce’s initial response to the question of Fallon’s sexual habits had been indignation, but indignation could be used to cover any number of other emotions: embarrassment, fear, guilt. Steve Pierce professed to be straight. Maybe he was trying to hide the fact that he really wasn’t, or that he had dabbled on the other side of that line. Or maybe he was telling the truth and Andy Fallon had other partners. Who?

  They needed to find out more about Andy Fallon’s private life. If he’d been lucky, there would be one to uncover. Anyone looking into Liska’s private life would have had a short glance at nothing. She couldn’t remember the last decent date she’d had. She never socialized with anyone but cops, and cops made lousy boyfriends as a rule. On the other hand, men with normal jobs found her a little too intimidating. The idea of a girlfriend who could handle a tactical baton and a nine-millimeter handgun was a bit much for the average Joe. So what was a girl to do? And when was a mother of two to do it?

  She sensed the presence at her front door a split second before she heard the faint rattle of the lock being opened. Adrenaline surged through her. She came up off the couch in a heartbeat, eyes never leaving the door, hand reaching for the cordless phone. She wished it was her gun, but the gun remained locked in a cabinet when she was home—a necessary precaution for the safety of the boys and their friends. The ASP, however, was never far out of reach. Her right hand closed on the cushioned handle and she snapped her wrist in a well-practiced move to extend the steel rod to its full length.

  She moved to the hinged side of the door as it began to ease open, and took a position with the baton.

  A Cartman hand puppet popped into view, the South Park character craning its fat head around the door to look up at her.

  “Hey, lady, you gonna shoot my ass?”

  Relief and anger poured through Liska in a hot-cold mix that prickled her skin.

  “Goddammit, Speed, I ought to shoot your ass! One of these days I’m going to plug you through that door and let you bleed out on the front step. It’d serve you right.”

  “Is that any way to talk to the father of your children?” he asked, slipping inside and c
losing the door behind him. Not for the first time, Liska wished she didn’t have to let him have a key. She didn’t like him coming and going from her life and the boys’ lives at will, but neither did she want a hostile relationship with him—for the sake of Kyle and R.J. Speed was an asshole, but he was their father and they needed him.

  “The boys up?”

  “It’s eleven-thirty, Speed. No one should be up. Kyle and R.J. and I live in the real world, where people have to get up in the morning.”

  He shrugged and tried to look innocent. Other women would have fallen for it. Liska was too familiar with the expression and the lack of sincerity behind it.

  “What do you really want?”

  He grinned the wicked grin of a romance-novel pirate. He must have been working a case, she thought. Though his blond hair was cropped almost military-short, he hadn’t shaved in a few days. He wore a filthy old army field coat hanging open over faded, paint-spattered jeans and an old black sweatshirt. Despite all this, he looked sexy as hell. But she had long ago become immune.

  “I could say I want you,” he said, moving toward her.

  “Yeah,” Liska said, unimpressed. “And I could still coldcock you. Give me a reason.”

  The smile dropped off. Just like that.

  “I can’t drop by to leave a toy for my kids?” he said, pulling the puppet off his hand. “What the hell’s the matter with you, Nikki? You have to be such a bitch about everything?”

  “You break into my house at eleven-thirty, scare the shit out of me, and expect me to be happy to see you? What’s wrong with that picture?”

  “I didn’t break in. I have a key.”

  “Yeah, you have a key. Do you have a fucking telephone? Could you use that once in a while instead of just blowing in like a tornado?”

  Speed didn’t bother to answer. He never answered questions he didn’t like. He put the Cartman puppet down on the coffee table and picked up one of the Polaroids of Andy Fallon.