by Tami Hoag
“What I can’t figure is where Edmund Ivors fits into this sordid little puzzle. What’s a guy like him have to gain acting as your beard, helping you out with your alibi?”
“I don’t need an alibi,” Moore said. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”
Kovac just looked at him, stunned to silence for a moment.
“You haven’t done anything wrong? Jesus Christ, you cheat on your wife with whores, spend her money to finance your secret life. What part of that isn’t wrong?”
The elevator gave a little jerk and groan and began to descend.
Kovac hit the key for the second floor and pulled Moore out into the hall with him when the doors opened. The door to the stairs was just to the right. He gave Moore a shove in the back.
“Step into my office here for a minute, Ace.”
“Fuck you, Kovac,” Moore said, turning around.
“Are you resisting?” Kovac asked, incredulous. “Are you resisting me? ’Cause if you’re resisting, all bets are off, pal.”
“Are you arresting me?”
“You want to have this conversation downtown? ’Cause I’ll be happy to take you there and put you in the box for a formal questioning. Is that what you want?” Kovac asked. “You want to up the ante? You want to call my bluff? Go ahead. Then you can call a lawyer, and I can call Chris Logan, and he’ll have you arraigned and toss your ass in the can. And if you think a judge is going to give you bail for trying to kill one of their own, you’re even dumber than you look. Is that what you want?”
“I didn’t try to kill my wife!”
The door to apartment 214 opened and a woman stuck her head out, glaring at them. “Take your fight somewhere else, or I’ll call the cops.”
Kovac pulled his badge out of his coat pocket and showed it to her. “This is already police business, ma’am. Go back into your apartment and lock the door.”
The woman disappeared.
Kovac turned back to David Moore.
“Why didn’t you tell me a man joined your little party at the bar last night?”
Moore looked away, looked confused, shrugged, spread his hands. Only the first thing was significant.
“I-I don’t know,” he stammered. “I didn’t know the guy. Why would I mention it?”
“Because you don’t leave things out when you talk to the cops, Einstein. It tends to make us suspicious when we find out after the fact. Who was he?”
“Ivors knew him. He’s-uh-in the business. He’s a-a director of photography. He stopped by. We talked about my project.”
“What’s his name?”
“Don something. I don’t remember his last name.”
“He drops by to talk about your project. Maybe ’cause he’s interested in doing whatever he does for you, right? And you don’t remember him. He didn’t give you a business card?”
“It was a casual conversation. Ivors wanted me to meet him. That’s all.”
“So why did Ivors and your little Bird friend not say something about him to me either?”
“I don’t know. They didn’t think it was important. He was only there for a few minutes.”
“I’m supposed to swallow this load of horseshit?” Kovac asked.
“I don’t care what you believe.”
“That’s a very poor attitude you’ve got, Sport. You damn well ought to care what I think. Because I have the power to take your putrid little life apart turd by turd and poke at every slimy thing crawling under your lies.
“And now I’m gonna go upstairs and talk to the little chickadee without you being there. Did you all get your lies lined up beak to tail earlier today? ’Cause I’ll be a lying son of a bitch and tell her that you talked and told me all about your plan, so she might as well too. And Edmund Ivors won’t be there to put words in her mouth this time.”
Moore ’s cell phone rang, tucked somewhere in a pocket.
“Why don’t you answer that, Dave?” Kovac suggested. “That’s probably her right now, wanting to know where the hell you are.”
Moore didn’t move.
Kovac pushed past him, took the stairs back up to the third floor, and knocked on the door of apartment 309.
Ginnie Bird opened the door immediately, her face falling as she was greeted with the unpleasant surprise of Kovac.
“Can I come in?” he asked even as he stepped inside the apartment and past her.
Moore came in behind him. “You don’t have to talk to him, Ginnie. Not without a lawyer.”
Kovac arched a brow. “Ms. Bird isn’t under arrest. Why would she want a lawyer present?”
Ginnie Bird looked like a deer in the headlights. Dumb as a sack of hair, this girl. Her assets lay elsewhere-in plain sight. Deep purple silk and lace were artfully arranged over her unnaturally round breasts and slender frame in the form of a camisole and a thong. She wore a sheer purple robe over the ensemble for her version of modesty. It barely came to the top of her thighs. She balanced on a pair of silver stilettos. All ready to offer comfort and white-hot sex to poor beleaguered David Moore.
Kovac looked around what he could see of the apartment. Hardwood on the hall floor, white carpet flowing through a dining/living room to a small gas fireplace with a granite surround. Contemporary furnishings-chrome, glass, leather.
“Nice digs,” Kovac said. “But we’re a long way from Hudson, Wisconsin. You must be very good at what you do to have a place on this side of the river and the other, Ms. Bird.”
“Ginnie is a casting director-” Moore started.
Kovac turned on him. “You’re interfering with a police investigation, asshole. You can sit down and shut up, or I can put you in the hall facedown on the floor, hog-tied.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” Moore said.
“Hey, you’re the one who decided I’m crazy. You don’t know what I might do. And you really don’t want to find out the hard way, do you?”
Moore held up his hands and took a couple of steps backward into the dining room area to pace.
Kovac turned back to Ginnie Bird. “Ms. Bird, you were at the Marquette Hotel last night, having drinks with your boyfriend here, Edmund Ivors, and a third man who dropped by. Who was that man?”
Her eyes darted to Moore. Kovac moved into her line of sight.
“Don… something,” she said. “It was loud in the bar. I couldn’t catch his last name.”
“What was he doing there?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t paying attention.”
She shifted to the left, trying to make eye contact with Moore again.
“What’s the matter, Ms. Bird?” Kovac asked. “Can’t remember your lines?”
“There’s nothing to remember,” she said. “I don’t know anything that might help you.”
“You don’t know about the payoff? The twenty-five thousand dollars?”
He had told David Moore he would bluff a confession out of her, but Kovac knew in truth he had to tread lightly. It didn’t take a very clever defense attorney to get tossed anything a client had said without first being Mirandized. A good lawyer could get a confession tossed even after the client’s rights had been read to them. They would argue the police had violated the client’s rights by denying them counsel, even though one of the first items mentioned in Miranda was the right to an attorney. Or they would argue that their client hadn’t been of a clear mind, or some other lawyer bullshit.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ginnie Bird said.
Her eyes were a little glassy. The end of her nose was red. Kovac glanced around the room, hoping against hope to see drug paraphernalia out in plain sight. Then he could have taken her in, questioned her at the station, put a little scare in her. But he didn’t see anything.
“You don’t know anything about your boyfriend here paying someone to get rid of his wife?”
“David would never do that,” she said adamantly. “Never. Why can’t you just leave us alone? All we want is to be happy.”
“Ye
ah,” Kovac said. “The problem with that is Mrs. Moore. And somebody tried to eliminate that problem last night. If you know who that somebody was, and you don’t tell me, you become an accessory after the fact. If you knew about what was going to happen before it happened, that’s conspiracy. Either way, you go to jail.”
“I can’t tell you anything, because there’s nothing to tell,” she said. “David is going to divorce her. He told her tonight.”
“Did he?” Kovac said, looking at Moore. “That’s an interesting spin.”
“I think you should leave now, Detective,” Ginnie Bird said. “I know my rights.”
As explained to her by the lawyer the escort agency had sent to bail her out, back when she got paid per sex act, Kovac thought. What an idiot David Moore was, throwing away a woman like Carey, and a beautiful daughter, for this chick.
He turned to Moore, shaking his head. “Man, you have to be one of the all-time fools.”
Moore said nothing.
“I’ll see you around,” Kovac said, ambling toward the door. “And next time I’ll come with warrants. And just let me give you fair warning, Mr. Moore. If I find one shred of solid direct evidence that links you to your wife’s attack, I will unleash hell on you.”
Back on the street, Kovac walked down to the unmarked car assigned to tail David Moore and told the officers to call him if Moore so much as came out of the building to fart.
Back in his own car, he settled behind the wheel and just sat there, willing his blood pressure to calm down. He wanted to take David Moore apart. He wanted the guy to be guilty. He wanted someone to cough up the real name of Don Something, the alleged director of photography, so he could put the guy under a spotlight and get him to sweat out his connection to Moore.
That was what he wanted. The problem with that was that he wasn’t supposed to want anything. A good detective didn’t draw conclusions until he had all the facts. Getting too close to a crime-or to the victim of a crime-was a stop on the way to madness. Or to the civilian review board. If anyone had seen him knock David Moore back into that elevator, Moore would have had a corroborating witness for his brutality charge.
Still… it had sure as hell felt good to do it.
As Kovac savored the moment, his cell phone started to bleat.
“Kovac.”
“Liska.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t sound so happy to hear from me. I’ll get the wrong idea,” Liska said sarcastically. “Who were you expecting to call you? The Queen of Sheba? Catherine Zeta-Jones? Oxsana the Amazing Contortionist?”
“Is there a reason I’m talking to you?” Kovac asked, cranky because he had actually let himself think the call might be from Carey. And if Liska had known that, she would have given him no end of shit. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
“Yeah,” she said. “You need to book it over to HCMC.”
“Why?”
“Because Kenny Scott had a visit today from your friend Stan Dempsey.”
34
KARL KNEW HE couldn’t stay in the park all night. He had been there for a long time as it was, though no one had paid him any mind. But the city didn’t allow overnight parking in the lot.
He had spent the afternoon wandering from park bench to park bench. The day had been so pretty, people had stayed in the park to have cookouts, to watch the sun set, to squeak out every drop of good weather. The smell of meat grilling had made Karl’s stomach growl. But now the warm day had given way to a chilly evening that was nipping right through his brown cashmere poncho and sneaking up under his skirt. It was time to move to a warmer hiding spot.
He stared across the street at Carey Moore’s house. One set of windows upstairs and one set downstairs glowed with lamplight.
In the afternoon, Karl had spotted her briefly as a black Mercedes sedan had rolled out of the garage. She was in the passenger’s seat. A police officer was driving. A small head of unruly dark hair had bounced up and down in the backseat. Carey Moore’s child.
Karl closed his eyes and imagined her heavy with child. A beautiful sight. A Madonna. His angel. He wondered what she might be doing right at that very moment.
At one point earlier in the evening, a man got out of a sedan parked behind the police cruiser, went to the driver’s side of the car, and said something to the officers inside, then walked up into the yard and stood near the lighted downstairs windows. Another cop. Plainclothes.
Time had stretched by and nothing happened.
As he contemplated this peculiar turn of events, the Moores ’ garage door rose and the same black sedan rolled out with only the driver inside. A man, he reckoned, by the size of him. The husband, he supposed. He drove away fast, like maybe he was mad about something. Another sedan had slid away from the curb to follow him. The plainclothes cop had followed moments later.
The important thing to Karl was that the husband was gone.
Soon it would be time for him to speak to Carey Moore. To thank her for her kindness to him. To explain to her his feelings for her and how much she meant to him. In his whole life hardly anyone had ever taken his side in anything. She had risked her life to take his side in this trial.
He imagined kneeling at her feet, pouring his heart out to her. He imagined her expressing her understanding to him. In his imagination she was lit from behind with a golden light, and she stood with her arms opened, looking just like a statue of the Virgin Mary his mother had kept on her dresser. It was a beautiful dream.
Karl looked up at the stars in the clear night sky-what stars a man could see with a city all around him-and thought this might become the most perfect night of his life.
After a while, he got up and straightened his skirt and walked back to the parking lot and Christine Neal’s Volvo.
Stan Dempsey drove through Carey Moore’s neighborhood, but not past her home. He knew the officers in the radio car out front would be making note of the plate numbers of every vehicle that cruised by and immediately running them through the system, looking to get a hit on a possible suspect.
Instead, he cruised up the next block, toward the Moore home, then turned in at the driveway of a dark house near the end of the street and sat there, watching.
A dark sedan backed out of the garage fast and drove toward him in a hurry. Seconds later, an unmarked car followed. Shortly after that, a second unmarked car. As it passed under the streetlight, Stan thought it might be Sam Kovac behind the wheel.
Kovac was a good cop, a straight shooter, probably the best detective on the squad. It would be difficult to pull off anything under Kovac’s nose. But now he had gone from Carey Moore’s house and from her neighborhood, and Stan could see a window of opportunity cracking open.
He didn’t mean to get away with anything. He meant only to finish his job. When his job was finished, he would be honored to have Sam Kovac close the case.
When his job was finished…
35
CAREY SAT ON the love seat in the den for a long time, doing nothing, thinking nothing, staring at nothing. The house was absolutely silent. The tension that had charged the air was gone. She felt drained, empty.
Around ten-thirty, Anka quietly came downstairs and stopped just outside the den.
“Are you all right, Mrs. Moore?”
Carey waved a hand. “No, but there’s nothing to do about it. Are you going out?”
“Only to pick a movie and get some popcorn. Can I bring something for you?”
“No. Thank you, Anka.”
The girl lingered at the doorway a moment longer, seeming like she wanted to say something more. But if she had, she thought better of it.
Carey went back to staring, feeling nothing. She wondered what she would feel the next day, and the day after that. Relief? Anxiety? And she wondered how Lucy would react to her father’s sudden absence.
David was a different person with Lucy. With their daughter, he was the man she had married-sweet, fun, brimming with promise. His relationship with Lucy was
pure love, untainted by what the rest of his life had become. With Lucy he had no track record. She only cared that he was her daddy. Her expectations were simple. He had yet to disappoint her.
Carey purposely didn’t wonder what David was feeling or doing. She told herself she didn’t care. She didn’t care. What did that say about her? About their marriage?
Restless, she got up from her seat and walked around the room. She still hurt everywhere, and her head was pounding. A Vicodin and bed sounded like the best plan.
As she walked around behind David’s desk, photos of Lucy caught her eye. David’s screen saver was a slide show of their daughter dressed up in her various costumes-the princess, the fairy, the ballerina.
Carey sat down in the desk chair and watched the images float across the screen. Lucy was the spitting image of herself as a child-impish grin, bright blue eyes, an unruly mop of dark hair that had eventually given up its curls.
Oh, to be that innocent again.
The computer mouse rested on its small green pad beside the keyboard. Only vaguely curious, she moved the mouse and clicked on the AOL icon at the bottom of the screen.
What came up and filled the screen was as far removed from the innocence of a child as anything could have been.
What came on the screen was a scene of such degradation, it made Carey feel ill and dizzy, as if she’d just gotten hit in the head all over again.
A naked woman bound and gagged, hung spread-eagled from chains on her wrists and ankles, blood running down her arms. She was being raped by two men wearing leather hoods to cover their faces, one behind her, one in front of her. She appeared to be terrified.
This was what her husband had been looking at when she had come to tell him she wanted a divorce. Carey began to shake. She moved the cursor to the Web address bar and clicked on the downward arrow, bringing up a listing of every Web site David had looked at for who knew how long. Porn site after porn site.
She clicked on an arrow, and another photograph, equally violent as the first, popped up.
