by Tami Hoag
Like you really think you can pull this off.
“Whatever you decide,” he said at last, “this wasn’t a mistake, Amanda.”
She said nothing and he let himself out, the cold slapping him in the face.
Here’s your reality, Kovac, he thought as the door shut and locked behind him. Out in the cold, alone.
It wasn’t anything less than he’d had before, but it was worse now because he’d had a taste of what could be.
He drove back into the city on empty roads, went back to an empty house and an empty bed, and lay awake the rest of the night staring inward at the emptiness of his life.
30
CHAPTER
LISKA PULLED INTO the driveway, barely sparing a glance at the dashboard clock. Saturday morning in her house meant youth hockey. Kyle and R.J. started the day on the ice at six A.M. She had left them under the watchful charge of a buddy who worked sex crimes for the St. Paul PD and had two boys of his own in the same league. No adult would come within ten feet of those children with Milo watching them.
Barely seven-thirty now, and the sun was just coming up. Most of Eden Prairie was probably still sleeping off the eggnog hangovers from the Friday night Christmas parties. Liska didn’t care. She’d spent the forty-five minutes driving out here stoking her anger like a blast furnace. She didn’t care if she had to kick the door in and drag his hairy ass out of bed. She was going to speak with Cal Springer, and he was going to listen.
She stormed to the front door of the too-nice house and leaned on the bell, then stabbed at it over and over. She could hear it ringing inside, and no other sound. The cul-de-sac was still. Cars parked overnight in driveways had windows thick with frost. The toothpick-young trees in the yards were flocked with white. Liska’s breath silvered the air. It was so cold, it hurt to breathe.
The door opened and Mrs. Cal, dressed in a flannel nightgown, stared out at her, her little mouth a round O of surprise.
“Where is he?” Liska demanded, walking in uninvited.
Patsy Springer stepped back. “Calvin? What? What do you want at this hour? I don’t—”
Liska gave her a look that had cracked confessions out of hardened criminals. “Where is he?”
Cal’s voice came from the direction of the kitchen. “Who is it, Pats?”
Liska moved past the wife, digging a hand down into her purse as she homed in on her target. Cal sat at the oak table in the breakfast nook wearing the same clothes he’d had on the day before, a soft-boiled egg and a bowl of Malt-O-Meal in front of him. He gaped like a fish when he saw her.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded. “This is my home, Liska—”
She pulled the Polaroids from her purse and slapped them down on the table beside his plate. Springer started to move his chair back. She grabbed a handful of his hair and held him in place, close at her side, ignoring his howl of pain.
“These are my children, Cal,” she said, working to keep from shouting in his face. “Do you see them? Are you looking at these?”
“What’s the matter with you?”
“I’m angry. These are my boys. Do you know who sent me these pictures, Cal? I’ll give you two guesses.”
“I don’t know what you’re doing here!” he said, trying to get up again.
Liska yanked his hair and wound her fingers into it even tighter. Mrs. Cal hovered at the archway to the front hall, her hands fluttering at her chest.
“She’s crazy, Calvin! She’s crazy!”
“Rubel and Ogden sent me these,” Liska said, grabbing one of the snapshots with her free hand. She stuck it in Cal Springer’s face. “I can’t prove it, but they did. These are the people you’re dealing with, Cal. This is what shitbags they are. They would threaten little children. And you’re protecting them. That makes you the same as one of them, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Calvin?” the wife shrieked. “Should I call nine-one-one?”
“Shut up, Patsy!” he shouted.
“If anyone harms a hair on the head of one of these boys,” Liska said, “I’ll kill that person. I mean that, Cal. I’ll fucking kill them, and no one will ever find all the pieces. Do you understand me?”
He tried to get away from her. Liska yanked his hair and hit him in the forehead with her knuckles.
“Owww!”
“You stupid son of a bitch!” she yelled, and hit him again. “What’s wrong with you? How can you get in bed with them?”
She shoved him away from her abruptly and he fell off the chair and scrambled backward across the floor like a crab.
“You’re despicable!” Liska shouted.
She grabbed the cup with the soft-boiled egg and threw it at him. He brought his arms up to protect himself and fell backward, hitting his head on a cabinet. It sounded like a gunshot. Mrs. Springer screamed.
“You go to Castleton, you spineless worm,” Liska ordered. “Tell him where you weren’t Thursday night. You go to IA. They don’t love anything more than they love a sniveling, worthless piece of shit like you. You turn these animals in or I’ll make the rest of your career a misery Job couldn’t survive! Nobody. Nobody threatens my children and gets away with it!”
She threw the Malt-O-Meal at him as a final exclamation point, then gathered up the Polaroids and stuffed them back into her bag. Springer stayed where he was, Malt-O-Meal running down his cheek.
Liska took a couple of fast, deep breaths to compose herself, and looked at Patsy Springer. “I’m sorry to have interrupted your breakfast,” she said, her voice still trembling with rage.
Mrs. Cal made a little cry in her throat and ran into a corner of the room.
“I’ll see myself out,” Liska said, and left the house, shaking so hard she felt as if she was having a seizure.
When she got in the Saturn, she let go of a sigh.
“Well,” she said aloud as she cranked the key and started the engine. “I feel better.”
WHY DID YOU have to tell? I could have made it right. . . .
What the hell had Jocelyn Daring meant by that?
Kovac sat on a small chair in one corner of Andy Fallon’s bedroom, staring at nothing. He replayed the memory of Jocelyn Daring walking into Pierce’s study. The look on her face. The fury in her eyes. If he hadn’t been there to stop her, what kind of damage might she have done to Pierce?
He probably should have arrested her for what she had done. Minnesota laws had zero tolerance for domestic abuse. Even if the victim didn’t want to press charges, the state did. But he hadn’t taken that step. Mitigating circumstances, a lawyer might argue. Poor Jocelyn. Upon hearing her fiancé’s confession of a homosexual relationship, she lost her mind for a moment and struck out. Why add insult to her injury?
Because she might decide to finish the job.
She had left the house willingly, silently, dragging an overflowing suitcase to the waiting car of her maid of honor. Steve Pierce had gone by cab to the nearest ER to claim he’d slipped on the ice and cracked his head.
Love American style.
Love . . .
Kovac tried to shake off that thought and focus instead on the scene of Andy Fallon’s death. That was part of the reason he had come here: to get his mind on something other than the big tumble he might have actually taken for a lady with lieutenant’s bars and some deep dark trouble on her mind. He was trying not to wonder at the source of her nightmare, trying not to think that what had happened wasn’t an isolated incident, and that was why she’d asked him to go—because she was afraid it would happen again and he would want to know why. Those were the thoughts he had come here to avoid. Those thoughts he kept thinking and then reminding himself not to.
Nor did he want to think about how it had felt to make love to her or the incredible sense of protectiveness that had come over him as he’d held her after the nightmare. He would put his mind on work, which was the only thing he was really very good at anyway. The job never told him to take a hike.
The corpse sme
ll lingered in the room. Kovac stuck his nose over a steaming cup of Caribou dark roast and breathed deep.
I guess I’d be doing a public service if I invited you in for a cup of coffee. . . .
He blinked out the image of Amanda standing at her front door, peeking out at him. He needed to consider a different blonde.
Question: Could Jocelyn Daring have killed her fiancé’s gay lover? Yes. Had she had the opportunity? He didn’t know and couldn’t ask her. The case was officially closed; he had no right to question anyone. Had Pierce mentioned being with her the night of Andy Fallon’s death? If she’d had the opportunity and taken it, how had she pulled it off? How would she have gotten Fallon to bed? No one had suggested Andy Fallon had flipped the switch both ways. Everyone had spoken too highly of him to imagine he might go to bed with his lover’s girlfriend. So, there was that problem.
He thought of the sleeping pills, of the wineglasses in the dishwasher.
Maybe . . .
Next question: If she had drugged him, knocked him out, could she have hung him? Could she have lifted a man’s deadweight?
He stared at the bed, then at the beam the rope had hung from. He got up from the chair and went to sit on the edge of the bed, then rose and stood approximately where the body had been hanging. The full-length mirror was positioned exactly as it had been; the word Sorry appeared scrawled across his belly. The mirror had been dusted for prints but hadn’t been confiscated as evidence because no crime had been committed. Kovac looked in it now and tried to picture Jocelyn Daring on the bed behind him.
It might have been possible to get the victim into a sitting position on the edge of the bed, put the noose around his neck, then hoist him up with the rope and tie the rope off on the bedpost. Maybe. What had Andy Fallon weighed? One-seventy-five? One-eighty? One hundred eighty pounds of unconscious, uncooperative weight. Jocelyn was strong, but . . .
While a woman might have struggled to accomplish what he had just imagined, a man would have been able to pull it off more easily.
Could Neil have followed that same basic plan? Killed his brother for not loaning him money, or for not being a loser like him, or because he was jealous, or because he wanted to punish their father before he did him in too?
Kovac went back to his chair and sat again. He looked at how tidy the room was, remembered how perfectly made the bed had been. It had struck him odd that Andy wouldn’t have sat on the bed before he did the deed. And that there were sheets in the washing machine.
Who did their laundry, then killed themselves?
He thought of Neil Fallon’s place as they had executed the search warrant. The kind of frat-house filth and disorder that gave single guys a bad name. Pierce had said it: Neil’s the messy type, don’t you think? . . . devastation at the scene, fingerprints everywhere . . .
Neil Fallon hadn’t changed a sheet in his life. There was no evidence in his own home that he had any idea how to run a dishwasher.
Who then? Who else had motive? Ogden’s beef with IA was over. Unless Fallon had come up with something new. And they might never know that unless they found Fallon’s personal notes on the case. And how could that ox Ogden pull off something with this much finesse? It wouldn’t be his nature. Beating someone with a pipe was his nature. How would Ogden even have gotten in the front door? Fallon wouldn’t have let him in the house. Maybe at gunpoint.
There was no denying Liska had stirred the hornet’s nest looking at the Curtis-Ogden angle. . . .
As for Steve Pierce, Kovac felt he had done his confessing. He didn’t see Pierce killing his lover in cold blood, the way Fallon had died. If he had loved Andy the way he seemed to, he couldn’t have humiliated him that way. And the sex-game angle didn’t play, according to Kate Conlan.
Kovac sighed. “Speak to me, Andy.”
It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out most murders. A true whodunit was the exception rather than the rule. Most people were killed by someone they knew, for a reason that was simple.
Calls to the friends in Andy’s address book had turned up nothing. He hadn’t been that close to that many people. Too many years of living a secret life. Only Pierce had mentioned having seen him recently with another man. Another lover?
Most people were killed by someone they knew, for a reason that was simple.
Private life: family, friends, lovers, ex-lovers.
Professional life: coworkers, enemies made on the job or because of the job.
He didn’t know what other cases Andy had had in the hopper. Savard wouldn’t give that out, especially since his death had been ruled something other than homicide. She didn’t seem concerned that any of his current caseload might be harboring a murderer. And so Kovac came back to the only case he knew anything about: Curtis-Ogden.
No. That wasn’t exactly true. According to Pierce, Andy might have been looking into the Thorne murder. But what could have come of a case closed twenty years ago—besides resentment from his father?
Which brought Kovac back to suicide. Maybe a guy like Andy—a guy who dotted all his i’s and crossed all his t’s, a guy who needed approval and control . . . Maybe a guy like that would change his sheets before he stretched his neck.
Most people were killed by someone they knew, for a reason that was simple. Themselves. Suicide. Depression.
Death didn’t get more simple than that.
Too bad he couldn’t make himself buy it.
THE HOMICIDE OFFICE was quiet on Saturday. Leonard never came in on weekends. Shift detectives were primarily on call. People sometimes came into the office to catch up on paperwork. Kovac spent most of his Saturdays here because he had no life.
He hung his coat up and wondered what Amanda was doing with her Saturday. Was she thinking about him, about what had happened? Was she reliving the moment he’d walked out the door, rewriting it in her head so that she asked him to stay?
He fell into his chair and stared at the telephone.
No. No, he wouldn’t call. But he snatched up the receiver to check his voice mail. On the off chance . . . There was nothing. He sighed, flipped through the Rolodex, and dialed a number.
“Records, Turvey.” The voice on the other end rattled with gravel and phlegm.
“Russell, you old mole. Why don’t you get a fucking life?”
“Ha! What the hell would I want with that? J. Christ. If I had to interact with regular people . . .” The old man made a gargling noise. “Argh. I’d sooner hump a monkey.”
“Yeah, there’s an image.” Russell Turvey: sixty-whatever years old with a face like Popeye, a cigarette hanging on his lip, a stomach like a basketball, doing it with a monkey.
Turvey laughed and coughed and hacked. His lungs sounded like a couple of plastic bags half-full of Jell-O.
Kovac picked up the pack of Salems he’d bought on the way in and threw it in the garbage.
“What’d you need, Sam? Is it legal?”
“Sure.”
“Well, shit. You’re no fun. Getting dull in your old age. Hey, that was too bad about Iron Mike, huh? I heard it was you found him. It’s always those hard-ass guys that eat their guns.”
“Yeah, well, he might not have. I’m looking into it.”
“J. Christ! You’re shittin’ me! Who’d waste a bullet on a moldy old turd like him?”
“I’ll keep you posted,” Kovac promised. “Listen, Russ, I came across an old badge the other day in a junk shop. I’m curious who might have worn it. Can you find something like that?”
“Sure. If I don’t have it, I know who does. I got nothing else to do here but sit around with my thumb up my ass.”
“You’re killing me with the visuals here, Russell.”
“Argh. Come on down and take a picture for your scrapbook. What’s the badge number?”
“Fourteen twenty-eight. Looked like a seventies issue. I was just curious.”
“I’ll dig it up.”
“Thanks. I owe you one.”
“Catch
the bastard that capped Mike. We’ll call it even.”
“I’ll do what I can.”
“I know you, Sam. You’ll do nine times more than that, and some brass cocksucker’ll take all the credit.”
“The way of the world, Russ.”
“Argh. Fuck ’em.” He hacked into the phone and hung up.
Kovac dug the cigarettes out of the garbage, bent the pack in two, and tossed it back in.
He turned the computer on and spent the next hour getting to know Jocelyn Daring. Through one source, he found out she had graduated cum laude from Northwestern, where she had been a standout field hockey player. Athletic. Strong—he already knew that. Aggressive—he’d seen that for himself. She was fourth in her class at the University of Minnesota law school. Ambitious. Hardworking. Through DMV records he discovered she had a lead foot and did a poor job feeding parking meters. That could suggest a certain disregard for rules . . . or so would say John Quinn and his profiler pals.
But he discovered no criminal record, no newspaper stories about her flipping out in a restaurant or anything of the sort. He hadn’t really expected to. Even if Jocelyn had a history of irrational behavior, her family had the bucks to cover it up.
Not so the Fallon clan, Kovac could see as he went through the file Elwood had put together on Neil. Neil’s life foibles were a matter of public record. The assault conviction, a couple of DUIs, tax problems, health code violations at the bar, run-ins with agents of the Department of Natural Resources for taking more than his legal limit of damn near every living creature that had a season on it.
The pattern was one of wanting more than what he was entitled to. A man with resentment for authority. The complete opposite of his brother—something Neil undoubtedly blamed Andy for, though it had most likely happened the other way around. Andy had watched Neil screw up and cause trouble, and he had gone a hundred eighty degrees in the other direction to please his father. And he’d done it right up to the end, with the unforgivable exception of telling the old man the truth about his sexuality.
