by Tami Hoag
“Who do we work for, Elwood?”
“Technically or figuratively?”
“Who do we work for, Elwood?”
Kovac had raised them all on this.
“The victim.”
“My employer hasn’t properly notified me to terminate my services,” she said without any of her usual humor.
Elwood gave a big sigh. “Tinks, for someone so determined to get ahead, you devote a lot of time to putting your backside in a crack.”
“Yeah,” she said, digging her car keys out of her coat pocket. “I’m an oxymoron. Emphasis on the moron.”
16
CHAPTER
THE WORLD IS full of tragedy, Sergeant Kovac.
Savard’s voice stayed in his head as he drove toward Mike Fallon’s. His mind played the trick of making her sound breathy in a sexy way. It made the play of light and shadow on her face dramatic and soft, the look in her eyes full of mystery.
That part was true enough. Amanda Savard was a puzzle, and he’d always found puzzles too tempting. He was usually pretty good at them, but he knew instinctively this one would be more difficult than most, and the odds of any kind of payoff weren’t good. She wouldn’t appreciate his trying, that was for damn sure.
You may call me Lieutenant Savard.
“Amanda,” he said, just to be defiant. She wouldn’t like knowing he was saying her name while he was alone any more than she liked it in her presence. Maybe less. She couldn’t boss him around if she wasn’t there to hear him, and control was her big thing. He wondered why, wondered what events had shaped her into the woman she was. “What’s your tragedy, Amanda?”
She didn’t wear a wedding ring. There were no pictures of a significant other in her office. She didn’t seem the type to troll bars for the kind of guy who could have given her that shiner.
He didn’t buy the explanation of a fall. The placement of the wounds was too suspicious. Who took a fall and broke it with her face? The natural reaction to falling was to bring the hands out to hit first and save doing the kind of damage that had been done to her. She hadn’t had a mark on her hands.
The idea of someone striking a woman made him sick and furious. The idea of this particular woman allowing it baffled him.
He set the questions aside as he pulled into Mike Fallon’s driveway. There were no cars at the curb or in the drive. No one answered the doorbell.
Kovac pulled out his cell phone and dialed Mike’s number from the scrap of paper he’d scribbled it on. The phone rang unanswered. That Mike was asleep or unconscious from tranquilizers or booze seemed a good bet, and either possibility suited Kovac fine. All he really wanted was a few minutes alone in the house.
He went around the side and checked the garage. The car was there. He went around to the back and took the key out from under the mat.
The house was silent. No distant sound of a television or radio or a shower running. The old man was probably dead to the world. He could have another five or ten minutes before he had to face the day he would bury his son.
Kovac went to the kitchen counter cluttered with the pharmaceuticals that kept Mike Fallon functioning in one way or another, and sorted through the bottles. Prilosec, Darvocet, Ambien.
Ambien, aka zolpidem. The barbiturate found in Andy Fallon’s blood. Kovac stared at the bottle, a tight feeling in his chest. He popped the childproof cap and looked inside. Empty. The prescription was for thirty tablets with instructions to take one at bedtime as needed. The refill date was November 7.
It was probably just a coincidence that father and son had been using the same stuff to knock themselves out. Ambien was a common prescription sleep aid. But there had been no Ambien at Andy Fallon’s house, and that seemed strange. If he’d taken the drug the night of his death, then where was the bottle? Not in the medicine cabinet, not in the garbage, not in the nightstand. Mike’s bottle was empty, but he could have taken all the pills himself in accordance with the instructions. On the other hand, if “as needed” meant once or twice a week, then there were a hell of a lot of pills unaccounted for.
Kovac let possibilities run through his mind, unchecked, uncensored. None of them pleasant, but then, that was the nature of his work and the bent of his mind because of the work. He couldn’t afford to trust, to discount, to filter possibilities through a screen of denial the way most people did. He didn’t feel badly about that. It didn’t depress him, the way it did others in his line of work. The simple truth of the world was that people, even otherwise decent people, regularly did rotten things to other people, even to their own children.
Still, he couldn’t come up with a scenario in which Mike Fallon played a direct role in his son’s death. The old man’s physical limitations made it impossible. He supposed Andy could have taken the pills from his father’s stash, but that didn’t ring true for him either. Or he could have gotten them from a friend. He thought again of the sheets and towels in the washing machine, of the few clean dishes in Andy’s dishwasher.
“Hey, Mike! You up?” he called. “It’s Kovac!”
No answer.
He set the prescription bottle back on the counter and went out of the cramped little kitchen. The house had a stillness to it he didn’t like, a sense of being vacant. Maybe Neil had come and carted Mike away already, but the funeral was hours away. Maybe Mike had other relatives who were, even now, giving him comfort and coffee and saying all the right things, but Kovac didn’t think so. He’d known Mike Fallon only in the context of being alone. Isolated first by his toughness, then by his bitterness. It was hard to imagine anyone loving him the way people in close families loved one another. Not that Kovac knew much about it. His own family was scattered to the four winds. He never saw any of them.
He looked at the empty rooms of Mike Fallon’s house and wondered if he was looking at his own future.
“Mike? It’s Kovac,” he called again, turning down the short hall to the bedrooms.
The smell hit him first. Not overpowering, but unmistakable. Dread fell like an anvil on his chest. His heart beat up against it like a fist hammering on a door.
He swore under his breath, pulling the Glock from its holster. With his foot, he pushed open the door to the spare bedroom. Nothing. No one. Just empty twin beds with white chenille spreads, and a sepia-toned portrait of Jesus in a cheap metal frame on the wall.
“Mike?”
He moved toward Fallon’s bedroom door, already knowing. The images of what he would find on the other side were rolling through his head. Still, he stood to the side as he turned the knob. He filled his lungs with air and pushed the door open with his foot.
The room was in the same state of disarray as when he had last seen it. The framed photographs Fallon had smashed were still piled where Kovac had left them. The bed was still unmade. The jelly glass still sat on the nightstand with a splash of whiskey in it. Dirty clothes still littered the floor.
Kovac stared at the empty room, at a loss for a moment, trying to clear the images he’d had from his head. The smell was stronger here, where he was standing. Blood and excrement and urine. The biting, metallic scent of gunpowder. The bathroom door was directly across from him. Closed.
He stood to the side and knocked, said Fallon’s name again, though barely loud enough to hear himself. He turned the knob and pushed the door open.
The shower curtain looked as if someone had given birth on it. Bloody chunks of tissue and hair clung to it.
Iron Mike Fallon sat in his wheelchair, in his underwear, his head and shoulders flung backward, arms hanging out to the sides. The spindly, hairy, useless legs were canted over to the left. His mouth hung open and his eyes were wide, as if he had realized in the final instant that the reality of death was surprisingly different from the way he had imagined it would be.
“Aw, Mikey,” Kovac said softly.
Out of long habit, he came into the room carefully, taking in the details automatically, even as another part of his brain considered his ow
n loss in this. Mike Fallon had broken him in, set a standard, became a legend to live up to. Like a father in a lot of ways. Better than, he supposed, considering Mike’s strained relationships with his own sons. It had been bad enough to see the old man soured and angry and pathetic. To see him dead in his underwear was the final indignity.
The back of his skull was gone, blown wide open. A flap of scalp clung to the crown of his head by a collection of bloody gray hairs. Brain matter and tiny bone fragments had splattered the floor. An old .38 service revolver lay on the floor to Fallon’s right, flung there as his body had jerked in its death spasm.
Iron Mike Fallon, just another cop to end it all by his own hand with the gun he had carried to protect the public. God knew how many did it each year. Too many. They spent their careers as a part of a brotherhood but died alone—because none of them knew how to deal with the stress and every last one was afraid to tell anybody. It didn’t matter if they’d turned in the badge. A cop was a cop until the day he died.
That day was today for Mike Fallon. The day his son would be buried.
A man should never outlive his kids, Kojak. He ought to die before they can break his heart.
Kovac touched two fingers to the old man’s throat. A mere formality, though he’d known people who’d survived such wounds. Or rather, he’d known a few whose hearts had continued beating for a time because the damage had been done to some less useful part of the brain. It wasn’t really survival.
Fallon was cool to the touch. Rigor was setting in in the face and throat, but not yet in the upper body. Based on that, Kovac put the time of death within the last five or six hours. Two or three in the morning. The loneliest hours of the night. The hours that seem to stretch endlessly when a man was lying awake, staring into the dark at the bleaker realities of his life.
Kovac went out of the room, out of the house, and stood on the back stoop, staring at nothing. He lit a cigarette and smoked it, his fingers stiffening in the cold. He had gloves in his pockets, but didn’t bother to put them on. Sometimes it was good to hurt. Physical pain as an affirmation of life, as an acknowledgment of deeper suffering.
He wished for a glass of whiskey to toast the old man, but that would have to wait. He finished the cigarette and reached for his cell phone.
“This is Kovac, homicide. Send me the tag ’em and bag ’em boys. I’ve got a DB,” he said. “And send the A team. He used to be one of ours.”
HE HAD TAKEN a seat on the front step, trench coat wrapped around his freezing ass, and was smoking a second cigarette by the time Liska rolled up.
“Jesus, Tinks, what’re you trying to do? Bring down the neighborhood?” he called as she climbed out of the car. It was her own, the Saturn sporting a trash bag window.
“You think the neighborhood watch block commander will call the cops?” she asked, coming up the sidewalk.
“He’ll probably gun you down in the street. Shoot first, ask questions later. America at the dawn of the new millennium.”
“If I’m lucky he’ll hit the gas tank and toast the rotten thing. I could stand a break this week.”
“You and me both,” Kovac said. He nodded at the car as Liska came up the snow-packed steps, ignoring the clean wheelchair ramp. “So what happened?”
She shrugged it off. “Just another victim of the moral decline. In the Haaff ramp, no less.”
“World’s going to hell on Rollerblades.”
“Keeps the paychecks coming.”
“Did they get anything?”
“Not that I could tell. There was nothing worth getting, except my address off some junk mail.”
Kovac frowned. “I don’t like that.”
“Yeah, well . . . Didn’t your mother ever tell you you’ll get hemorrhoids sitting on cold concrete?”
“Naw.” He got up slowly, stiffly. “She told me I’d go blind beating off.”
“I didn’t need that image in my head.”
“Beats what you’ll see inside,” he said. He bent over to crush out the cigarette and dropped the butt off the side of the stoop, behind a juniper shrub.
Neither of them spoke for a moment as an awkward tension fell around them.
“I’m really sorry, Sam,” Liska said softly. “I know he meant a lot to you.”
Kovac sighed. “It’s always the tough ones that eat their guns.”
Liska gave him a little shove. “Hey, you do that to me, I’ll revive you just so I can shoot you myself.”
He tried to smile but couldn’t, so he looked away, to next door. Fallon’s neighbor had plywood silhouettes of the three wise men on camels in front of their picture window, hot on the trail of the Christ child. A schnauzer was taking a whiz on one of the camels.
“I’m not that tough, Tinks,” he confessed. He felt as if all of that old armor had rusted and flaked away, layer by layer, leaving him exposed. Which was worse? Being too hard to feel, too remote to be touched, or being open to feel the touch of other people’s lives and emotions, open to being hurt by that contact? Hell of a choice on a day like this. Like trying to decide if you’d rather be stabbed or bludgeoned, he thought.
“Good.” Liska put her hand on his back and leaned her head against his shoulder for a few seconds. The contact gave comfort, like something cool against a burn.
Better to be open, he decided, reflecting back on the original question. Even if it hurt more often than not. Sometimes it felt like this. He slipped his arm around his partner’s shoulders and gave her a squeeze. “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it. Really,” she teased, straight-faced, as she stepped away. “I have a reputation to uphold. And speaking of people with reputations . . . Guess who was seen dining together this morning at that celebrity hot spot Chez Chuck.”
Kovac waited.
“Cal Springer and Bruce Ogden.”
“I’ll be damned.”
“Strange bedfellows, huh?”
“Were they happy to see you?”
“Yeah, like they’d be happy to have head lice. My guess is it wasn’t a planned meeting. Cal was sweating like a monk in a whorehouse. He bolted at the first chance.”
“He’s pretty damn nervous for a man who’s been cleared of any wrongdoing.”
“I’ll say. And Ogden . . .” She looked out at the street as if she might find something there to compare him to. A garbage truck rumbled past. “That guy’s like a keg of nitro with a tricky detonator. I’d love a peek in his personnel jacket.”
“Savard told me she’ll check Fallon’s case file regarding the Curtis investigation. See what notes he might have made about Ogden, whether Ogden threatened him, that kind of thing.”
“But she wouldn’t let you see the file.”
“No.”
“You’re losing your touch, Sam.”
He huffed a laugh. “What touch? I’m hoping she gets so sick of the sight of me she gives me what I want just to make me go away. Aversion therapy.”
“Well, I have to say, if I weren’t such the tough cupcake, Ogden would have given me a little chill this morning,” Liska admitted. “There we are, him getting in my face, and all I could think of was Curtis—beaten to death with a ball bat.”
Kovac turned it over in his head. “You’re thinking what if Ogden was the one harassing Curtis and went off on him for complaining to IA. But Ogden would never have been privy to the Curtis investigation if there’d been any beef about him harassing Curtis in the past. That shit only happens in the movies.”
“Yeah,” Liska said on a sigh. “If you were Mel Gibson and I were Jodie Foster, that could happen.”
“Mel Gibson’s short.”
“Okay. If you were . . . Bruce Willis.”
“He’s short and bald.”
“Al Pacino?”
“Looks like someone dragged him down a gravel road behind a truck.”
Liska rolled her eyes. “Jesus. Harrison Ford?”
“He’s getting kind of old.”
“So are you,” Lisk
a pointed out, then looked at the street again. “Where’s the CSU?” She bounced up and down a little on the balls of her feet. She wasn’t wearing a hat, and the rims of her ears had turned bright pink in the cold.
“At a terminal domestic situation,” Kovac said. “Get this. Common-law wife says she got fed up with the hubby raping her when she was passed out drunk—after nine years of it. She stabbed him in the chest, face, and groin with a busted vodka bottle.”
“Wow. Absolut homicide.”
“Good one. Anyway, they’ll be a little while.”
“I’ll do the Polaroids, then.” She held her hand out for his car keys so she could go get the camera.
By the book. Every violent death was processed like a homicide.
Kovac went back into the house with her and started making notes. There was a certain comfort in the routine, provided he didn’t remind himself the victim had been his mentor once upon a lifetime ago. Liska made none of the usual dark jokes they used to take the edge off a horrific death scene. For a time the only sound was the click and whir of the camera as it spat out one gruesome photo after another. When he realized the sound had stopped, Kovac looked up from his notebook.
Liska was squatting down in front of Fallon, staring at him as if she expected him to answer some question she had asked telepathically.
“What?” Kovac asked.
She didn’t answer, but stood and glanced from wall to wall in the narrow bathroom, then over her shoulder and back. Her brows puckered together and she made a little knot of her mouth. “Why’d he back in?”
“Huh?”
“This room is narrow, besides the obstacles of the toilet and sink. Why’d he back in? That had to be tricky. Why bother?”
Kovac considered the old man and the question. “He goes in frontwise, whoever opens the door opens it on the hamburger side of his head. Maybe he wanted to preserve a little dignity.”
“Then he might have had the consideration to put on some clothes, don’t you think? Those skivvies don’t exactly scream ‘Respect me.’”
