Prior Bad Acts

by Tami Hoag

  “I’ve already questioned them outside on the courthouse steps.”

  “I’m sure you have. You wore your good suit. The rumpled hair and the tie askew are a nice touch. You’ll probably get marriage proposals called in to the television stations after they run the piece on the news.”

  “Don’t play that card with me, Carey,” he warned. “This isn’t about politics. This is about what’s right.”

  “A fair trial is right.”

  “Putting away the sick son of a bitch who killed that family is right.”

  “Yes,” Carey agreed. “That’s your job. Make the case good enough to stick. If you really think the outcome of this trial hangs in the balance of this one issue, then I’m inclined to agree with Kenny Scott-you barely have enough to sustain the indictment.”

  “You want me to make my prima facie case right here, right now?” Logan challenged. Anger slashed red along his cheekbones. It was never difficult to read him. If the glare in his eyes didn’t give him away, his pale Irish complexion did.

  “No,” Carey said. “I’m just warning you, Chris. If you rush this before a jury to soothe the public outcry, and you lose-”

  “I have enough to convict him.”

  “Then why are you here?” she demanded. “Would you barge into Judge Olson’s chambers? Or Judge Denholm’s? No. You’re here because you think you should have special privileges, that I should knuckle under and bend to your will because we used to be colleagues and because I’m a woman. If I were a man-”

  “I never would have slept with you.” Logan completed the sentence.

  Carey stepped back as if he’d slapped her. He might as well have. During the years they had worked together, there had always been something between them, an attraction both had felt but neither had acted on, with the exception of one night.

  They had been putting in long hours, preparing for a trial-her last before her appointment to the bench, as it had happened. Carey had been drained of energy from fighting with David about her long hours, about her lack of support for his career.

  With David every issue was turned around until it was about him. Her career was interfering with his spotlight. Never mind that when he was working on a project she sometimes didn’t see him at all for weeks at a time, and it was only on a rare occasion that he included her in any part of the process. It never failed that when she needed his support-as she had on that last case-he was never there for her.

  But there Chris Logan had been, understanding and sharing the pressure of the upcoming trial, strong and passionate…

  “You’ll leave this office now,” she said, her voice hard and tight with emotion. “Or I’ll call a deputy and you can deal with the consequences.”

  She went to the door and yanked it open, stared at Logan with eyes as fierce as his.

  He looked away and down. “Carey, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “No, you shouldn’t have. And you will never say it again.”

  “No. I’m sorry,” he backpedaled. “It’s this case. It’s just getting to me,” he said, shaking his head, raking a hand back through his thick hair.

  “Don’t try to give me an excuse,” Carey snapped. “There is no excuse. You’re pissed off and you’re trying to undermine my authority, and I won’t stand for it. If you come within a yard of that line again, I’ll have you removed from this case, and think about what that would do for your public image. Get out.”

  He didn’t look at her. She wanted to think he was too embarrassed by his own behavior, but that probably wasn’t the case. He was regrouping, switching tracks to a wiser course of action. Logan ’s passion for his work was a thing to behold in the courtroom. Defense attorneys of no small caliber were routinely blown out of the water and crushed. But he had never learned to completely control it when he needed to, and so his strongest asset was also his Achilles’ heel.

  “You’ve seen the crime scene photographs,” he said quietly. “You know what was done to that woman, to those two little kids, foster kids. They didn’t even belong there, really. It was just the luck of the draw that they ended up at that house.

  “I look at those photos every day. Can’t get them out of my head. I dream about them at night. I’ve never had a case affect me the way this one has.”

  “Then you should stop looking at the pictures,” Carey said, despite what she had been thinking about the photographs herself. “There’s no point in it. You can’t make a trial be about your own personal obsession, Chris. You’ll lose your perspective; you’ll make mistakes. Like this one. Go. Now.”

  He sighed and nodded, then met her gaze with genuine apology in his eyes. “I am sorry.”

  Carey said nothing. He turned and walked out, shoving his hands in his pants pockets, the wide shoulders slumping a bit. If this had been a movie, she would have run after him and forgiven him, and they would have ended up in each other’s arms in a mad embrace. But it wasn’t a movie; this was the real world. She had a job to do, she had a husband, she had a child. She couldn’t have Chris Logan, and she knew better than to want him.

  What she really wanted was someone strong to hold her, support her, shelter her. But she didn’t have that. As lonely as it was, she’d learned a long time ago to handle her battles and her insecurities on her own.

  Carey put her coat on, slung her purse over one shoulder, and picked up the large old leather briefcase her father had carried when he had sat on the bench as a judge in this same building. She wished she could have gone to him for advice, as she had for most of her life. But Alzheimer’s had stolen her father away from her in the last few years. He no longer recognized her, and so all she had of him were things, his gavel, his briefcase, photographs, and memories.

  Feeling hollow and beaten, she left the office. The press would still be waiting outside, hoping in vain that she would come out the main doors.

  Instead, she took the skyway across the street to the garage where she parked her car. Afraid to lose the impressive background shot of the Hennepin County Government Center, none of the television people had decamped to find her elsewhere. She braced herself for confrontation with a newspaper reporter, but the skyway was empty, and most of the cars were gone from the level where Carey had parked.

  She would have to consider a uniformed escort now that the news of her ruling had broken. And she felt even more of a coward for thinking it, because she pictured herself hiding behind a deputy, trying to avoid the fallout of her own decision.

  Lost in her thoughts, she fumbled to dig her keys out of her purse, while her Palm Pilot and a lipstick tumbled out. She sighed heavily, set down the briefcase, and bent awkwardly to scoop up the things she had dropped.

  As she began to straighten, something hit her hard across the back, stunning her, knocking her breath from her. A second blow sent her sprawling forward.

  The rough concrete tore at the palms of her hands. Her knees hit the surface like a pair of hammerheads. She tried to draw breath to scream, but couldn’t. Her purse flew out ahead of her, its contents spewing out, skidding and rolling.

  Her assailant swung at her again, just missing her head as Carey shoved herself to the right, one hand outstretched to try to snag her keys. Some kind of club. She couldn’t really see it, was just aware of the sound as it struck the concrete. Her assailant cursed.

  “You fucking bitch! You fucking cunt!” Not shouting, but a harsh, hoarse, rasping sound full of venom.

  He fell on her, bouncing her head into the floor like a basketball. Did he mean to kill her? Rape her?

  Carey flailed at the car keys, breaking a nail, scraping her fingers, catching hold.

  Her attacker grabbed her by the hair, yanked her head back.

  Did he have a knife? Would he slit her throat?

  She fumbled with the key to her BMW, frantically pushing the buttons. The car’s alarm screamed, and the lights began to flash.

  The voice behind her swore again. He slammed her head down. What little bre
ath she had regained huffed out of her as he kicked her hard in the side.

  Then everything went terrifyingly black.

  4

  SAM KOVAC STOOD in front of the mirror in the john down the hall from the Criminal Investigative Division offices, his shirt half-off. He needed to go to the gym, except that he hadn’t been in a gym since he’d been in a uniform. A long damn time ago.

  Now that he was on the downhill side of forty, he was beginning to wonder if he shouldn’t do something about that. But the notion of sweating and making a fool of himself in front of the young hot bods that populated health clubs, an obvious and pathetic display of midlife crisis, was enough to make him leave his jockstrap in the drawer. Nor was he interested in hanging out in the weight room with the muscleheads who wore the Minneapolis PD uniform, the guys who reeked of testosterone and couldn’t buy shirts off the rack. Bunch of freaks. Probably most of them were trying to overcompensate for small dicks, or homosexual tendencies, or the fact that they used to get the snot pounded out of them for their lunch money every day when they were kids.

  Kovac assessed himself with a critical eye. He looked like an old tomcat that had taken his share of licks in alley fights and had dished out plenty of his own. A scar here, a scar there, a cranky expression, a twice-broken, high-bridged nose. His hair was equal parts brown and gray and had a tendency to stand up. Partly from his Slovak heritage and partly because he never paid more than ten bucks for a haircut.

  But overall, he didn’t think he looked that bad. No beer gut. No hair sprouting out his ears. Women had never run screaming at the sight of him. At least none that weren’t wanted for something.

  At his last department-mandated physical, the doctor had preached at him that it wasn’t too late to reverse the damage he had done to himself smoking and drinking and living on a steady diet of sodium, fat, and job stress. Kovac had told the doctor if he had to give up all that, he might as well eat his gun, because he wouldn’t have anything left to live for.

  The men’s room door swung in and Nikki Liska stepped inside.

  “Jesus, the least you could do is go into a stall,” she said.

  Kovac scowled at her. “Very funny. What the hell are you doing in here? This is the men’s room, for Christ’s sake!”

  “So where are they?” Liska challenged, crossing her arms over her chest. “The least I could get out of this is a sneak peek at a little throbbing manhood.”

  Kovac felt his cheeks heat. Liska had been his partner for enough years that he should have been immune to her mouth, but she never ceased to outdo herself. Her personality was her loudest, largest feature. The rest of her was five-five with big blue eyes and a white-blond pixie haircut. To the unsuspecting, she looked sweet and perky. But the last guy to call her that had gone home from the party with a limp.

  Her eyes narrowed. “I don’t believe it.”

  “Don’t make a big deal,” Kovac warned.

  “You, Sam Kovac, are an optimist.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “I’m a pragmatist.”

  “You’re full of shit,” Liska said, marching into the room. She walked right up to him and smacked him on the arm. “The patch!”

  “Ouch!”

  “Don’t be such a baby.”

  She admired the fresh nicotine patch affixed to his upper arm. Kovac pulled his shirt back on and started doing the buttons, grumbling under his breath.

  Liska leaned back against the counter. “I thought you told the doctor to take a hike.”

  “I told him I have shoes older than he is,” Kovac groused. “It’s got nothing to do with him. You know I try to quit once a year. It’s an annual event. It’s like a holiday.”

  He had only tried quitting more times than he could count. It never lasted more than a few weeks, a month at the outside. Something always happened that made him think he should just enjoy himself, because in any given moment he could become a statistic. He was a homicide cop. A sunny outlook didn’t come with the job.

  “Nothing to do with Tim Metzger having a heart attack last week,” Liska said.

  Kovac didn’t answer her. He focused on tying his tie. It was hard enough to face mortality on his own terms. If he had to share his feelings with Liska-or anyone else-he would sooner have thrown himself in front of a bus.

  Liska looked up at him, speculating. “Are you seeing someone and not spilling all the details to me?”

  Scowling, Kovac straightened the knot in his tie and snugged it up against his collar. “Did you come in here for some other reason than trying to see a dick?”

  “We’re up,” she said.

  “That’s what I get for hanging around to do my paperwork. What is it?”

  “Assault,” she said. “In the government center parking ramp. Get this. Our vic is none other than the Honorable Judge Moore.”

  “ Moore?” Kovac said with disgust. “Can’t we just leave her for dead?”

  5

  FRIDAY NIGHT IN the Hennepin County Medical Center ER could resemble a violent punk rock Halloween party, but the evening was young. The ghouls and gangbangers were still home, primping their nose rings and polishing their tattoos.

  “Sam Kovac! Fuck me sideways!”

  “He can do that?” Liska asked. “A man of hidden talents, our Sam.”

  Kathleen Casey, trauma nurse and ER pit bull, waved a hand in dismissal as she marched up to them. “The hell if I know. But I’d rather find out than deal with these people.”

  She rolled her eyes toward the waiting area, where reporters and camera crews were perched on the furniture like a flock of vultures. “God save us from the media. Give me your average street scum any night.”

  As if on cue, several of them spotted Kovac and started toward him.

  “Kovac!”

  “Detective!”

  “Do you have any leads-”

  “Do you know what prompted the attack-”

  “Did this have anything to do with the ruling on the Dahl case?”

  The usual cacophony. Rapid-fire questions they knew damn well he wouldn’t answer. Kovac held up a hand to ward them off. “No comment.”

  Casey took an aggressive step toward them and shooed them with her hands. “Back to the chairs with you before I break out my Taser.”

  Casey had been through the wars. Kovac called her the Iron Leprechaun. Five feet nothing, with a hedge of maroon hair and a sweet-Irish-mother kind of a face that drew people to her so they could confide in her, then implode in some spectacular way.

  Kovac had known her forever. She was a longtime veteran of HCMC, with a brief stint at a small-town ER in the Minnesota hinterland, also known by Kovac as Outer Mongolia. He tried never to venture south of the airport, east of the river, west of the 494 freeway, or north of downtown.

  “So what’s the story with our vic?” he asked as they started down a side hall at a quick clip.

  “Resident Pain-in-the-Ass will want to fill you in ad nauseam,” she said. “Quick and dirty: Someone beat the ever-living-crap out of her.”

  “Sexual assault?” Liska asked.

  “No.”

  “She’s conscious?”

  “Yes, but she hasn’t had a lot to say.”

  “I wish we could have said that earlier in the day,” Kovac muttered.

  They had all heard about Judge Moore’s ruling on Karl Dahl’s past criminal record. Carey Moore had been a kick-ass prosecutor, but on the bench she had earned the motto “ Moore is less,” giving perps a benefit of the doubt no cop in town believed they deserved, and they felt betrayed because of it.

  The resident making notes in Judge Moore’s chart looked like she had probably been the president of the science club in high school-last year. Drowning in her lab coat, stringy brown hair scraped back into a ponytail, and black plastic rectangular glasses.

  Liska shoved a badge in her face and got aggressive. “So? Spill it, sweetie. I want to get home before menopause set
s in.”

  It was always fun to set young doctors back on their heels before their egos could metastasize and take over their humanity.

  This one used a lot of fifty-dollar words to explain that their victim had a mild concussion, a couple of cracked ribs, and a lot of nasty bruises and abrasions.

  The uniformed cop who had answered the initial 911 call had filled in Kovac and Liska on the details of the assault as they had walked the crime scene. Moore had been on her way to her car in the parking ramp adjacent to the government center. The assailant had hit her from behind, knocked her down, smacked her around. Apparent motive: robbery. If anything more had been on the agenda, there hadn’t been time. Moore ’s car alarm had gone off, and the mutt had run away with her wallet.

  Kovac looked over the top of the doctor’s head and into the examination room. Carey Moore was propped up on a hospital bed, looking like she’d gone five rounds with one big, badass dude. The bruises hadn’t turned blue yet, but Kovac had seen more than enough victims of beatings to read the damage and predict what would greet the vic in the mirror the next morning. There was a contusion on her forehead crowning a lump the size of a golf ball. One eye, the flesh around it already swollen, was going to turn black.

  A short line of stitches crawled over her swollen lower lip like a black ant. She had a cell phone pressed to one ear. Alerting the scavengers out in the waiting room, or complaining to the mayor how people weren’t safe on the streets, no thanks to her.

  He moved past the doctor without acknowledging her, walked up to Judge Moore, took the phone out of her hand, and clicked it off.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she demanded.

  “I’ll need your undivided attention, Judge Moore. That is, if you want your assailant caught and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. You might care about that more now than you did a couple of hours ago.”

  She snatched the phone back from him and turned it on, never taking her glare off his face. “I was on the line with my nanny, letting her know I’m going to be late and not to let my daughter see any news on television. I don’t want her to find out from strangers that her mother has been attacked.