Prior Bad Acts

by Tami Hoag

  A large woman with jet-black hair up in a bun, and a face like a cigar store Indian, came away from the counter with a ferocious expression and a damp rag in one hand.

  “Hey, you! Out!” she shouted. She had an accent he thought might be Greek.

  Karl pulled a twenty out of his coat pocket and shook it at her. For the first time since he’d been choked, he tried to speak. His voice was as rough as the back of a rasp, and it hurt like hell to use it.

  “I got money,” he said. “All I want is a cup of coffee, ma’am, and maybe some eggs. I got money. Please, ma’am?”

  The woman stopped a good ten feet away from him and gave him the eye.

  “I’m down on my luck, ma’am,” he said. “I don’t mean no harm. You can take the whole twenty if that’s it. I just want a square meal. It ain’t often I can afford to have one someone else ain’t throwed out first.”

  She was still glaring at him, her arms crossed beneath her ample bosom. “You can’t eat here. You scare my customers.”

  There were no other customers in the place.

  “Please, ma’am? Just a cup of coffee. A biscuit. Anything…”

  The woman appeared unmoved, but the fact that she hadn’t started screaming at him seemed a good sign to Karl.

  “If you could be so kind, ma’am,” he said softly. “The Lord loves them what helps the down-and-out.”

  The waitress snorted at that, turned on the heel of her orthopedic shoes, and walked off.

  Karl wondered if she would go into the kitchen and tell the squat man to come run him off. Until he would find out, he watched the news on the television that was bolted to the wall above the diner counter.

  He was the news. His escape, the search for him, the warning to citizens not to approach him but to call the police if they thought they had spotted him. Larger than life, Karl thought, and it pleased him. It wasn’t often in his life that he had been considered important.

  When the newspeople moved on to the next story, it was of Judge Carey Moore. She had been attacked in a parking ramp last night and rushed to the Hennepin County Medical Center. Karl wondered if she had been there at the same time he had. That would be something, he thought, that the woman who had championed him that very day would be in the same emergency room as him, and maybe even because of him.

  She had been the talk of the county jail. Much of it lewd and crude talk, because she was a beautiful woman and all men in prison tended to think about-besides getting out-was having sex. The notion that she was a judge excited them all the more. To take a woman in a position of power and dominate her was a very erotic fantasy. Karl felt it working on him as he watched file footage of Judge Moore giving a press conference.

  Her eyes were large and unblinking, her expression very serious. Her mouth was every man’s wet dream-the upper lip a perfect Cupid’s bow, the lower one full and slightly down-turned, as if she was on the verge of a pout. Her neck was smooth and pale and elegant.

  Karl had never known a woman like that, not in any sense of the word. She was an angel. She was his angel.

  The television was showing a picture of her home. A live shot, the crawler on the bottom of the screen said. It was a beautiful brick house with a neat yard and a black iron fence. Not a mansion, but the kind of a house a lady would live in.

  The reporter talked about how people in that neighborhood were never bothered by terrible crimes, but a crime had been visited upon one of their own. How one of their own was paying the price for siding with a murderer.

  Live near Lake of the Isles, Candy Cross, Channel 3 News.

  Lake of the Isles…What a fine-sounding place…

  The large Greek lady came across the room of empty tables, still scowling, but with a styrofoam carton and cup. She set them on the table and stepped back before Karl’s lice could jump on her.

  “Here,” she said. “But you can’t eat here. You scare my customers. Go away.”

  “God bless you, ma’am,” Karl whispered, and handed the woman the twenty.

  She folded the bill and stuffed it down her cleavage.

  She didn’t come back with change.

  15

  KOVAC WOKE TO a pounding he thought was inside his head. The clock read 7:32. In the morning. On Saturday.

  He rolled out of bed, naked as the day he was born, and went to look out the window. On the roof of the house next door, his idiot neighbor was swinging a hammer. The sound reverberated in the otherwise-still morning air like gunshots.

  Kovac shoved the old double-hung window open. “Hey! Elmer Fudd! What the hell are you doing?” he shouted.

  The neighbor looked over at him, hammer cocked in his hand like he might throw it. The guy was seventy-plus, with mean, piggy little eyes and more hair growing out of his ears than on his head. Not that his head could be seen. He wore his favorite red plaid bomber cap with the flaps tied up on top of his head. The ends of the ties stuck up like antennae.

  “Getting a jump on the Christmas lights!” he said.

  “At seven-fucking-thirty in the morning?”

  The old man frowned deeply. “You’ve got a filthy mouth on you!”

  “I’m not even warmed up,” Kovac said. “Are you out of your fucking head? Christmas? It isn’t even Halloween!”

  “Shows what you know!” the old man shouted. “Farmer’s Almanac says it’s an early winter. Could be a blizzard by Halloween.”

  “Could be I’m gonna shoot you dead off that roof if you don’t stop with the hammer.”

  The neighbor gave him a face. “I’m within my rights. City ordinance says I can bang all I want after seven-thirtyA.M. ”

  Dismissing Kovac, the old man teed up a nail and smacked it into his roof. Every year it was the same thing-the most god-awful array of mixed holiday messages filled the man’s yard, crowned his roof, hung from the eaves, lit up the trees. Santa Claus bringing gifts to the baby Jesus. The herald angel beaming down on an army of plywood snowmen. All of it illuminated with more wattage than the whole of Times Square. For eight weeks it was like living next door to the sun.

  “You ever hear of common courtesy, you rancid old fart?”

  The old man stuck his tongue out.

  Kovac turned around and mooned him.

  So began his day. A shower. The patch. Coffee. A couple of doughnuts, just to perpetuate the stereotype. The local morning news was all about Karl Dahl’s escape and the public outcry caused by it. The attack on Carey Moore was a distant second. Half the city probably thought she deserved it. Now that the newsies had all but announced her home address, there would probably be a steady stream of cars driving by to egg her house.

  Or worse…

  Kovac sighed, rubbed a hand over his face, and tried to decide where to start. He or Liska would have to speak to the judge’s clerk. See if she had any hate mail on file. Cross-reference the phone number from the two threatening calls with the judge’s phone logs. They needed to get a printout of any recently released felons Carey Moore had put away in her capacity as either prosecutor or judge.

  They had to meet Lieutenant Dawes downtown at nine so she could impress upon them what her boss had no doubt already impressed upon her, and right up the food chain to the chief, who had already been read the riot act by the mayor, and the county attorney, who had heard it from the state attorney general. Kovac and Liska would be lectured on the gravity of the situation, like they were morons who hadn’t managed to figure that out for themselves.

  Christ, how he hated the politics of the system. He had always wanted to line up the brass monkeys, ask those who hadn’t worked on the street in the last decade to take a giant step back, and have them drop into a big black hole.

  If he could avoid that meeting, postpone it until, say, the case was solved, he would.

  He needed to speak with Stan Dempsey.

  Man, you are desperate.

  Kovac had never balked at going after a bad cop. A wrong guy was a wrong guy, badge or no. He’d even toughed out a stretch
working Internal Affairs a million years ago. He hadn’t liked it, but he’d done it. But Stan Dempsey wasn’t a bad cop. Kovac felt nothing but pity for the man.

  Stan Dempsey was a guy who had plodded along through life mostly under the radar. A decent cop, but no one the brass would take notice of until they decided he was a liability. He was a guy who really didn’t have any friends, because he was odd and quiet and antisocial. Stan Dempsey would probably have been more comfortable working in the morgue than on the streets, but he was a cop, and that was probably all he had ever wanted to be.

  Kovac doubted that anyone Dempsey had ever partnered with knew much of anything about him. But everyone knew Dempsey had lost it in the interview room when they had first questioned Karl Dahl for the Haas murders. Dempsey had exploded into a rage that was three times bigger than he was. Totally out of his head. It had taken two other detectives to pull him off Dahl. Ranting, eyes rolling back in his head, practically foaming at the mouth. He had had to be sedated.

  Kovac tried to imagine Stan Dempsey lying in wait for Carey Moore in the parking garage, rushing out at her, knocking her down, hitting her again and again.

  You fucking bitch! You fucking cunt!

  The rage was there. Pent up behind that hangdog face and emotionless demeanor. Kovac grabbed a pen and a receipt from Domino’s Pizza and scribbled a note to see if the video geek could zoom in somehow on the weapon. If it was a police baton… that wouldn’t be a good thing.

  Stan Dempsey lived maybe a mile away from Kovac. His house was a small story and a half with gray shingle siding and white trim. The yard was scattered with stray leaves that had drifted across the sidewalk from a maple tree on the boulevard.

  Kovac went to the front door and rang the bell. The house was silent. No barking dog, no Stan. He rang the bell again and waited.

  Where would Stan Dempsey go this early on a Saturday morning? The supermarket for his groceries. He struck Kovac as the kind of guy who would eat liver and onions… and hash… and all those kinds of food that normal people wouldn’t eat. Tongue… oxtail…

  Still no Stan coming to the door. Kovac tried to turn the doorknob. Locked.

  He could have gone for a walk. Maybe he’d gotten out of town for the weekend. An old fragment of memory made Kovac think Dempsey was a fisherman. Maybe he had a cabin on one of Minnesota ’s ten-thousand-plus lakes.

  Kovac moved off the front step and went to the picture window that faced the street. The drapes were closed. He couldn’t see inside.

  Around the side of the house, a lace curtain hung in a window that might have been a dining room. But the window was shorter vertically than the picture window, and Kovac wasn’t tall enough to look in.

  He went around to the back of the house. A charcoal grill was in its place near the back door. Inexpensive white plastic furniture sat on a concrete patio. A single chair and a small table. A lonely tableau. Kovac grabbed the chair and went back to the window with the lace curtain.

  What he expected to see, he didn’t know. But he hadn’t expected what he found. A small traditional dining room, the walls painted a weak mint green. A traditional cherry buffet. A traditional cherrywood dining room table… with an arsenal of weapons laid out neatly on top of it. And a video camera sitting on a tripod, pointed at the one chair pulled out from the table.

  “Oh, shit,” Kovac said under his breath as his stomach dropped.

  “Can I help you?”

  Kovac looked over his shoulder to find a tiny old lady in a lavender flowered housecoat and slippers that had been made to look like white rabbits with floppy pink-lined ears.

  “I’m a police officer, ma’am,” he said, getting down off the chair. He pulled his badge and ID out of his coat pocket and showed them to her.

  She squinted at them. “Mr. Dempsey is a police officer too,” she said. “A detective.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I know.”

  “I’m his neighbor. Hilda Thorenson.”

  He wanted to tell Hilda it wasn’t a good idea to approach a stranger who might have been looking to rob the place, but now was not the time.

  “Do you know if Mr. Dempsey is home?” he asked.

  “Oh, no. I wouldn’t know that. Why? Is something the matter?”

  “Maybe,” Kovac said.

  His mind was racing. Visions of Stan Dempsey eating his gun flashed through his head. He didn’t want to find that. He’d handled a couple of cop suicides in his career. He didn’t want to look at another dead cop and think: There but for the grace of God go I. He didn’t want to have to tell another wife, child, girlfriend that their loved one had chosen to end his life because the emotional pain of that life had been just too much to bear.

  Family never understood the why of that. Why hadn’t their husband/wife/girlfriend/boyfriend/father/mother come to them to unload that pain? Why hadn’t he or she gone to a minister, a priest, a rabbi, a shrink for help? They didn’t understand that cops felt no one understood them but other cops. And still, cops didn’t confide in one another about the problems they had. They didn’t want to seem weak to their peers, didn’t want to give superiors a reason to look at them.

  Kovac felt guilty all of a sudden that he hadn’t made more of an effort to get to know Stan Dempsey over the years. Maybe if he had, the guy would have had at least two white plastic chairs in his backyard.

  “I need to get inside Mr. Dempsey’s house,” he told Hilda Thorenson. “I’m afraid something might have happened to him.”

  The old woman looked alarmed. “Oh, dear!”

  Kovac went to try the back door. Locked. Shit. He was too damned old to be kicking doors in.

  “I have a key,” the neighbor said. “For emergencies. Wait here. I’ll go get it.”

  Kovac watched her go at something slightly more than a snail’s pace. She had to be eighty if she was a day. Dempsey might have been in the house at that very minute, sitting on the toilet, trying to work up the courage to pull the trigger.

  He had already been feeling desperate, trapped at a desk while other people took over the case that had pushed him to the breaking point. He would have been upset about Judge Moore’s ruling, maybe to the point of acting out against her. And Karl Dahl’s escape would surely have pushed him over the edge.

  Kovac couldn’t wait for a key.

  He went to the back door and blocked the screen door open. He grabbed a bug candle in a small galvanized pot and smashed one of the old glass panes in the door. Ten seconds later he was in the house, calling for Dempsey.

  Without even trying to take in the scene, Kovac dashed through the small house.

  “Stan? It’s Sam Kovac. Where are you?” he shouted as he pushed open the door to the small bathroom off the hall. Empty. Dempsey’s home office. Empty. He took the stairs two at a time, bracing himself mentally for the sound of the shot.

  “Stan? Where are you? We need to talk.”

  Bedroom one. Bedroom two. Empty.

  Taking a deep breath, Kovac rested his hand on the doorknob of the bathroom. This was where they did it, often as not, in the bathroom, where the mess could be steam-cleaned.

  Kovac pushed the door open.

  Empty.

  A second’s relief.

  He ran back down the stairs and out the back door, nearly mowing down the nosy neighbor.

  Garage.

  Carbon monoxide.

  But the small detached garage sat empty.

  No Stan Dempsey. No car.

  Shit.

  “What’s happening?” the old lady asked. “Is Mr. Dempsey hurt?”

  “He’s not here, ma’am,” Kovac said.

  “Well, I don’t know where he’d go,” she said, as if she couldn’t possibly imagine Stan Dempsey having a life.

  Kovac rubbed the back of his neck and sighed heavily. “Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to return to your home. The police will be sealing off this residence.”

  The woman looked confused and frightened as she backed away.


  “Oh, dear.”

  “Thank you for your help,” Kovac said. He stood there until the old lady turned away and retreated, the bunny ears of her slippers bobbing up and down as she went.

  The basement of the Haas home had been where the murdered children had been hung from the ceiling. There was a certain logic to thinking Stan Dempsey might have chosen the basement, might have hanged himself down there.

  Kovac went back inside and flipped on the light leading down to the basement.

  “Stan? It’s Sam Kovac. I’m coming downstairs,” Kovac warned, going slowly, taking one step at a time.

  The basement was finished with knotty pine paneling, cheap green carpet, and a yellowed acoustical tile ceiling that had absorbed years of cigarette smoke. No walls divided the space. A laundry area in one corner. Storage took up one end. In the remaining quarter Stan Dempsey had set up his own command center.

  Several freestanding bulletin boards were covered with photos from the Haas murder scene, photos from the autopsies. Copies of reports, copies of Dempsey’s own notes. He had taped white butcher paper to the wall above the bulletin boards with time lines sketched out-who was where, when; what time the bodies had been discovered; the approximate time of death as stated by the ME. Boxes on an old card table held copies of files on the case.

  None of it struck Kovac as being particularly unusual. He had a basement full of old case files and notes himself. Most of the detectives he knew did. They hung on to them for various reasons-superstition, paranoia, in case an old case got overturned on appeal, in case the station burned to the ground and the originals were destroyed. He had laid out cases himself in his home office so he could ponder and stew over them in his off hours.

  The thing that bothered Kovac about Stan Dempsey’s basement was the chair. A single straight-backed wooden chair sat front and center by the board with the photographs. An oversized red glass ashtray sat on the floor beside it, full of ashes and butts.