Prior Bad Acts

by Tami Hoag

  “I’m sure, as a mother, you can understand that. You remember what it was like. Your kids look up to you like you’ve got the key to the world. That love is like no other. That bond is stronger than anything.”

  Amber Franken’s eyes welled with tears. She looked away, arms crossed tight, as if she was trying to hold herself together.

  “You miss them, don’t you?” Liska said softly.

  It didn’t matter how unfit a mother this chick had been; absence had erased the bad memories and left her with sweet, sentimental images of time with her children. Children she would never see again.

  “I can only imagine what that must feel like, knowing that they’re gone. Knowing what they went through before they died…”

  Amber began to cry in earnest. She put her hands over her face and sobbed, “I miss them so much!”

  Genuinely feeling sorry for the girl, Liska sat patiently as the worst of the storm wore itself out. There couldn’t be anything worse in the world than to think of your children being tortured by a sadist.

  After a few minutes, Amber pulled up the tail of her shirt and wiped her face and nose with it.

  Liska tried again. “Why was Ethan Pratt here to see you ten days ago?”

  Amber drew in a shuddering breath. “To talk about the lawsuits. He wants in on them, the rotten son of a bitch. Like he was ever anything more than a sperm donor. Fucking leech. I told him to hire his own damn lawyer.”

  “Did he say anything about Karl Dahl’s trial coming up?”

  She wiped her nose again, this time with the back of her hand, which she then wiped on the leg of her pants. “He said he’d want Judge Moore next time he got arrested, ’cause she cares more about the guy on trial than the victims.”

  “Did he seem angry about that?”

  “He called her a fucking cunt, if that’s what you mean.”

  “That’s what I mean,” Liska said.

  20

  THEY BOTH HEARD the car roll into the attached garage. Carey Moore looked over at the door Kovac presumed was the entrance from the garage. Her expression was transparent, even behind the bruises and swelling. Hope, eagerness, a little apprehension.

  Kovac rose before she could, went to the door himself, and locked it until he heard the voices-David Moore, the Swedish girl, a child. They sounded relaxed, happy. Kovac wanted to open the door and smack the husband’s smile off his face. Instead, he opened it a crack and gave them a flat, unfriendly look.

  David Moore was unpleasantly surprised. “What are you doing here?”

  “What are you doing leaving a woman with a concussion alone?”

  “I checked on her several times in the night, Detective,” the Swedish girl said, trying to be helpful. “Mrs. Moore was fine.”

  Kovac ignored her, holding his stare on the husband.

  “We went out to breakfast,” David Moore said defensively. “I thought Carey should sleep in.”

  A dark-haired little girl with big blue eyes sat comfortably in the crook of his arm. She had her mother’s directness.

  “Who are you?”

  “Honey, this is a police detective,” Moore said. “He’s here because of your mom getting hurt last night.”

  She turned the look on her father. “Where’s Mommy?”

  “I’m here, sweetie,” Carey Moore said, wedging herself in between the doorjamb and Kovac.

  Lucy Moore took one look at her mother, and the blue eyes went liquid. “Mommy?”

  “I look pretty bad, don’t I?” Carey said softly. Kovac stepped back a little and let her past. “I’m okay, though. Honest. It’s just scrapes and bruises.”

  Lucy didn’t seem to know what to make of the situation. She gave her father a suspicious look, then turned it on her mother.

  “You look scary,” she declared.

  “I know.”

  “You should maybe put some makeup on.”

  Carey’s eyes glazed with tears as she smiled and tried to laugh, and reached out for her daughter. “Come on. You can help me with that, and tell me all about what you had for breakfast.”

  The little girl wriggled down out of her father’s arms and went to her mother, taking her hand and leading her into the kitchen.

  “I had pancakes with blueberries in them and lots of syrup. I like syrup.”

  “I know you do.”

  “And it doesn’t matter either, ’cause I brush my teeth.”

  Kovac watched them go through the kitchen and down the hall. The mother-daughter thing touched him in a very tender, very well hidden part of his soul. He didn’t allow himself to examine the feeling. He turned back to David Moore.

  “We need to talk.”

  “Can I take my coat off first?” Moore asked, petulant.

  Kovac turned to the Swedish girl. “You too.”

  They went into the kitchen and sat down, and Kovac filled them in on the Stan Dempsey situation. The Swedish girl listened, wide-eyed. Stockholm in the dead of winter was looking better and better.

  “You can’t be unavailable,” Kovac said, directing his comment at David Moore. “No cell phones turned off or ignored.”

  Moore looked unsettled. “You think this guy is serious?”

  Kovac refrained from asking him if he had always been this stupid or if it was a recent affliction. “I know he’s serious. You can’t just take your daughter and go off to do as you please. I’d be happier if she didn’t leave the house until the situation is resolved.”

  “Should we leave town?”

  “I don’t think your wife is in any condition to travel right now. She needs to get clearance from her doctor. If you just do what I’m telling you, you should be fine. I’ll have officers here around the clock.”

  The nanny murmured something in Swedish. Oh, my God, or Holy shit, or Fuck this, Kovac figured. She shot a nervous glance at David Moore, who pretended not to see her. Kovac filed the moment away in his head. The nanny and the daddy? He remembered she had been defensive of Moore the night before when Kovac had asked about the guy’s schedule.

  Lazy bastard. He couldn’t even put out the effort to get a mistress outside his own household.

  “I have to go,” Kovac said. “You both have my card if you need me. If you need to leave the house, notify the officers out front, and tell them where you’re going and when you expect to be back.”

  David Moore looked unhappy. “I’m a prisoner in my own home?”

  “Yeah,” Kovac said. “Sorry it’s such an inconvenience to you to have the lives of your wife and daughter threatened.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I know what you meant. You don’t want to be under my thumb,” Kovac said. “What the hell have you got going on that’s so damned important? You’re suddenly Mr. Ambition?”

  Moore narrowed his eyes. “I resent that.”

  “I’m sure you do.”

  “I’m working on a business deal.”

  “Yeah? Well, it’s the age of telecommunication. Pick up a phone; send an e-mail.”

  Moore stared just to the left of Kovac’s head. He was going to do whatever the hell he wanted. Asshole.

  “I’ll need your cell phone number too,” Kovac said to the nanny.

  She recited it, and Kovac wrote it down in his notebook.

  “I’ll let myself out,” he said, and left them in the kitchen, pausing in the hall to listen in case they were stupid enough to go lovey-dovey before he was out the door.

  “I’m going to make a fresh pot of coffee.” Moore.

  “I’m going to my room. I have studying to do.” The nanny.

  Kovac waited for her at the foot of the stairs. She looked surprised to see him, but not alarmed.

  “Anka, I need to have a word with you.”

  “I don’t know anything,” she said. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

  “They don’t have crime in Sweden?”

  “Not like here. It’s crazy, evil, what that man did to that family, to those ch
ildren. And now you say this other man, a detective with the police department, wants to hurt Mrs. Moore or Lucy?”

  “It’s pretty scary stuff,” Kovac conceded. “Judge Moore is in a position that attracts a lot of attention, not all of it good.”

  Anka looked away, clearly upset.

  “Anka, I’m going to ask you something very personal,” Kovac said. “And I need you to answer me honestly. It’s very important that I have a clear picture of what’s going on. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Yes,” she answered, nervous, anxious.

  “Do you have something going on with Mr. Moore?”

  Kovac watched her expression carefully. Shock and offense.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “Mr. Moore is my employer.”

  “He’s not more than that to you?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  The answer was a beat too slow, and she didn’t quite meet his eyes.

  “You’re not sleeping with him?”

  She gave a little gasp. “No! I’m going upstairs now. I have nothing more to say to you. Good day.”

  Indignation. Outrage.

  But she still didn’t quite meet his eyes.

  21

  KARL GOT OFF the bus at Calhoun Square in a trendy area of Minneapolis known as Uptown even though it was actually south of downtown. The neighborhood was full of nicely redone older homes, lovely yards, and established trees on the boulevard. It was an area of young upwardly mobile families, upwardly mobile gay couples, comfortably well-off retirees.

  There weren’t a lot of people looking the way Karl was looking, but he planned to remedy that quickly.

  He went into the Calhoun Square shopping mall, a collection of boutiques and restaurants tucked into an old brick building that had been converted from blue-collar beginnings. A bored girl at a kiosk on the first floor watched him approach, with a mix of disgust and trepidation. As he neared her, Karl thought she might run, but he held out a twenty-dollar bill and told her he needed a cap.

  She eyed the twenty, and her greed got the better of her. She sold him a plain khaki ball cap and offered back no change.

  As he went toward the men’s room, Karl looked over his shoulder and saw her stick the bill in her purse. The dishonesty of people in general made him shake his head.

  He took the cap and went into the men’s room to discard the ragman’s hair and knit cap.

  Because it was early, he had the place to himself, and decided he would take the opportunity to wash his face and head.

  Removal of the cap was a painful process. The wool had knitted into the bloody head wound he’d gotten when Snake was pounding him into the cell bars. As he peeled the cap away bit by bit, the wound opened in several places and began to bleed again. He stared at himself in the mirror, thinking he looked like something out of a horror movie, a red-eyed demon up from hell. His lip was throbbing something fierce. Grotesquely swollen and red, it reminded him in a way of the folds of tender flesh between a woman’s legs.

  For the briefest of moments, he imagined he could smell the musky scent of a woman who was ready for sex. He enjoyed that moment. Then he pulled his bridge out of his pants pocket, rinsed it off in the sink, and put it back in his mouth. There probably weren’t many people in this part of town who went around without teeth.

  The ball cap went on with the sunglasses.

  He neatly rolled the sleeves of his shirt halfway up his forearms. There wasn’t anything he could do about the filthy pants except roll the cuffs up. He took off his shoes and socks, threw the socks in the trash, and put the shoes back on. This would do for the moment.

  Pulling the brim of the ball cap down low, he exited the bathroom, the building, and walked away into the neighborhood. Hands in his pockets, he strolled down the sidewalk like a man without a care in the world. Maybe he was just walking home from Starbucks. Maybe he’d been doing yard work, and that was why his pants were dirty.

  As he walked, Karl scoped out the houses on this side of the block. Bikes on the front porch meant more than one person in the household. A couple or a family. He looked for the smaller homes-single story, or story and a half. The ones with large flower beds, now dead from the cold, told him perhaps the people, or person, who lived there had a lot of spare time. Older, retired maybe.

  A small Cape Cod type of a house caught his eye. Blue with white shutters, and a picket fence around the front yard. A country-crafty wooden welcome sign hung beside the front door: “Grandma Lives Here.” Karl turned the corner, then turned again down the alley.

  Privacy fences blocked off the view into the backyards of most of the houses. Grandma Lives Here had a fence made of wide vertical cedar planks that had been allowed to weather to a silvery gray.

  Karl slipped between that fence and the neighbor’s, testing for loose boards as he worked his way to the back of the one-car garage. There were none. There was, however, a window on the side of the house, at the back, which was blocked from view from the street by a big lilac bush.

  In the garage, a car started. Karl watched through the lilac bush as a late-model Volvo backed down the driveway. He couldn’t make out the driver’s face. A woman, he thought, based on her cautious maneuvering as she backed the car out into the street.

  Grandma was leaving. Karl wondered if there was a Grandpa still inside. He looked in the side window of the garage and, judging from the absence of power tools, concluded there probably was no man of the house.

  The window at the back side of the house had been left open partway to let in the fresh air this lovely fall morning. Winter was coming, and once it hit, no one would open a window for the next five months.

  Several large, heavy plant pots with dead plants in them had been parked alongside the garage, between the garage and the privacy fence. Waiting to be cleaned out and put away for the winter. Karl rolled the largest across the narrow space, tipped it upside down, and used it for a step stool.

  A little work with the ragman’s steak knife, and Karl was able to peel the screen away enough for him to crawl inside. When he was in, he carefully pulled the screen back down and into place.

  He had expected the house to be littered with Grandma stuff-porcelain poodles and old china and fussy furniture with flowered fabric and lace doilies. Instead, the space looked like something from a decorating magazine, with sage-colored walls and dark, modern furnishings.

  In the kitchen Karl found the story of Grandma Lives Here. Her refrigerator was covered with photos of her with other people-friends, family, grandchildren. So many smiling, happy faces.

  According to unopened mail on the counter, Grandma’s name was Christine Neal.

  Christine Neal was in her late fifties, trim and athletic. She ran in marathons. Went on vacations to exotic places. In several photographs, she was as bald as Karl was. A banner at one of her races called for support for a local breast cancer survivors group.

  Karl pulled the refrigerator open and helped himself to an orange. It was cold and juicy and refreshing. When he had finished and thrown the peel in the trash, he wiped the handle of the refrigerator with a towel and went in search of a bathroom.

  There was only one downstairs, adjacent to what must be Christine Neal’s bedroom. White and immaculate, it smelled of lavender.

  In the medicine cabinet, he found mint-flavored dental floss, tore a string off for himself, and set to cleaning all the bits out from between his teeth-the orange he had just eaten, the piece of pork chop he had found in the garbage earlier. He took the toothbrush from the holder, helped himself to toothpaste, and brushed his teeth with vigor. He pulled his bridge out of his mouth, brushed it, and re-placed it.

  Karl undressed and threw the ragman’s filthy clothes down the laundry chute, happy to be rid of them. Carefully, he removed the money taped to his scrotum. Naked, he sat down on the toilet and settled in to have his first bowel movement as a free man. What a pleasant, quiet, private experience.

  He picked u
p a copy of People and leafed through it. He took very little interest in the entertainment world. He rarely looked at television, only knew about movies from the posters at the theaters.

  He didn’t recognize many stars. The girls all looked young and too skinny, and they dressed like whores. They shouldn’t be surprised to be raped and killed, going around like that. The men were unremarkable. Half of them looked like they had dressed at the Goodwill and didn’t have sense enough to tuck in their shirts. Most of them needed a haircut and a shave.

  So did he, he reminded himself.

  The shower was hot and had good water pressure. Karl lathered himself with Olay soap and rinsed off the top layer of grime. Then he lathered himself again, picked Christine Neal’s pink razor off the shelf, and began to shave. He started with his head and worked his way down-his face, his chest, his belly. He considered himself lucky not to have a hairy back like a lot of men did, else he would have needed help.

  From his belly, he skipped down to his legs, as careful not to nick himself as any woman would be. Then he helped himself to a fresh razor blade and began the very delicate task of shaving his privates. Karl couldn’t stand the feeling of hair prickling out of him. It made him feel unclean.

  He stroked his penis and made himself hard, making the shaving of his scrotum easier.

  A woman’s scream broke his concentration.

  Christine Neal stood in the bathroom doorway, frozen in shock. Her eyes locked with Karl’s for the briefest moment; then she bolted.

  Karl leapt out of the shower, slipped on the wet tile, but managed not to fall. He sprinted down the hall and tackled Christine Neal from behind as she reached for the phone on the kitchen counter. The handset tumbled to the floor.

  She was a strong, athletic woman, and she twisted, and arched her back, and kicked and scratched at him. They struggled on the floor, Christine Neal grunting and trying to scream and choking on her own breath. Her hand swung wildly along the floor and managed to grab the phone again.

  Karl lunged to get the thing away from her, rolling partly off her to get it. Christine Neal scrambled desperately to get her feet under her. Before she could take a step, Karl grabbed her by the ankle, and she fell once more. She was sobbing now, hysterical, trying to call out for help.