by Tami Hoag
“Life doesn’t always follow the plan, Bobby. Most of the time it just happens, and we do the best we can.”
Of course he wouldn’t go for that, she thought. This kid probably did an outline for a grocery list. He wanted everything neat and tidy and under his control. She couldn’t blame him. He’d had so little control over his own young life, he had to take it where he could.
On the wall at the far end of the bench, he had put up a coatrack and hung a variety of layers to put on when he started to get cold, in order of lightest weight to heaviest-a short-sleeved T-shirt, a long-sleeved T-shirt, a sweatshirt with a University of Minnesota logo, the black jacket he had been wearing the first two times she had spoken with him.
At least the clothes weren’t pressed and on padded hangers. The shirts hung crooked. He had tossed the jacket up on the hook inside out. Nice to know he wasn’t entirely perfect.
Liska stared at the coat, at the square white tag sewn into the back at the neck. About one inch by one inch. She frowned, but brought her attention back to the boy.
“Maybe your dad can have that closure now,” she said. “With Karl Dahl dead, maybe he’ll be able to let go some of the anger and start to heal. Maybe you can do that together.”
Bobby looked off in the direction of the house as if he could see through the walls and into his father’s bedroom. If he could have willed something to happen, he would have.
Liska’s eyes drifted back to the clothes on the hooks. A picnic bench beneath the coatrack gave a place to sit down and change shoes. Beneath the bench were a small herd of sneakers, a pair of army boots, and what looked like a small piece of luggage partially hidden by a greasy old towel.
No, not luggage.
Liska went to the bench and pulled the towel away, revealing an old brown leather briefcase big enough to carry a bowling ball, or the files, notes, briefs, and motions a judge might carry home at the end of the day.
“Great old briefcase,” she said. “My uncle William carried one of these when I was a kid. He was a real estate attorney.”
Bobby Haas said nothing. He looked from the briefcase to Liska.
“Lawyers like to carry so much paper,” she said. “I think it makes them feel like they must be important. Uncle William had one arm longer than the other from hauling that briefcase around.”
Stamped in gold beneath the heavy brass clasp and lock was a name partially rubbed away over the years, but she could still make it out:A. H. GREER, ESQ.
“Where did you get this, Bobby?” Liska asked as she straightened up and looked hard at the boy.
“I don’t remember. Salvation Army, I think.”
“Really? The things you can find,” she said. “This is really nice. They don’t even make them like this anymore. Did you know Judge Moore had one just like this?”
“No. How would I know that?”
“I don’t know,” Liska said. “You tell me. It was stolen from her when she was attacked Friday night.”
“Are you saying you think I stole it?” he said, becoming visibly upset at the idea. “I didn’t. That’s not even her name.”
“No, it isn’t. But I can tell you whose name it is. Alec Greer, Esquire, is Judge Moore’s father.”
Red in the face, the boy said, “Well, this isn’t hers. I got it a long time ago.”
“Then you won’t mind if I have a look inside,” Liska said.
His eyes went to the briefcase again, then back to her. He was breathing faster. “Don’t you need a warrant or something?”
“I can get a warrant. Is that what you want? I can call my partner, and we can stand here and wait for him to bring a search warrant. Then we can spend all night picking this garage apart, and it won’t make any difference. What’s in that briefcase isn’t going to change, unless you have some magical powers you haven’t shared with me.”
He was sweating a little bit now. He didn’t have an instant answer. Liska could all but see the gears in his brain racing as he considered and dismissed options.
“Bobby, the only way you have this briefcase is if you took it from Judge Moore,” she said. “Turn around, spread your feet, put your arms out to your sides and your hands flat on the counter.”
He did as he was told.
“Bobby Haas,” she said, walking up behind him with handcuffs, “I’m putting you under arrest for the assault of Carey Moore.”
As she went to put one of the bracelets on him, he jabbed back hard with an elbow, hitting her square in the sternum.
Liska staggered backward, seeing stars, the wind knocked out of her.
Bobby Haas spun around from the bench with something in his hand, something he had grabbed from the tools on the wall.
A hammer.
His beautiful face had darkened and twisted with rage. He came at her, swinging the hammer as hard as he could.
Liska caught a heel on some piece of lawn equipment, went down on her back, cracked her head on the garage floor. She rolled to one side just as the hammer’s blow bounced off the concrete where her head had been.
Making it to her hands and knees, she scrambled under the handles of a wheelbarrow and shot forward, gaining her feet.
The hammer hit the wheelbarrow and it rang like a Chinese gong.
“You fucking bitch,” he said, but he didn’t shout.
That frightened her almost as much as his actions. He was trying to kill her yet had the presence of mind not to shout, not to be heard by a neighbor or by his father inside the house.
He kept coming with the hammer.
Liska rounded a bicycle and shoved it into his path.
His eyes were absolutely black. Flat black, bottomless, emotionless. Like a snake, like a shark, like a killer.
She pulled her weapon, but he was so close she barely had it out of the shoulder holster before he was on her.
She ducked low. The hammer hit the wall, splintering wood.
Liska put a shoulder into the boy’s solar plexus and drove him back a couple of steps. As she started to raise the gun, he swung again.
The hammer struck the back of her hand. The gun went flying.
“You fucking cunt!” He spat the words at her, full of venom.
Liska ducked away from him, darted to the side. She stuck her hand into her coat pocket and came out with her tactical baton.
With a quick, practiced move, she snapped it out to its full length and swung it like a baseball bat as hard as she could into Bobby Haas’s ribs just as he pulled his arm back for another blow.
She felt a couple of his ribs give way, and he doubled over, dropping the hammer.
The second blow was a hard, downward overhand that hit his left shoulder and fractured his collarbone.
Screaming in pain, the boy dropped to his knees and elbows on the floor, fell sideways, and curled into a fetal position, crying like the child he should have been.
“Flat on your face, you little shit!” Liska shouted, the adrenaline roaring through her.
“It hurts!”
“It damn well better hurt, you rotten little bastard! On your face, now, or I’ll give you something to cry about!”
Sobbing, he moved in slow motion to his hands and knees. Furious and scared, Liska put a foot into his back and shoved him flat. She read him his rights even as she pulled her cell phone out to call for backup.
67
“I CAN’T LEAVE you alone for a minute,” Kovac crabbed, walking across the lawn to the Haas garage. “You owe me dinner.”
“Excuse me? The Son of Satan just tried to kill me with a hammer!”
“And your point would be…?”
Liska scowled at him. “Don’t make fun of me, Sam. I’ve never been so freaked-out in my life!”
Kovac gave her shoulder a squeeze. “I can see that, Tinks. I just thought a little obnoxious levity might be in order.”
“How would that be different from how you usually are?”
“Smart-ass.”
To have Liska admit to
being afraid took a lot. Now she would get pissy, because she had let someone see that she wasn’t really as tough as she pretended to be.
“You should have seen him, Sam. When he turned around and came at me with that hammer…” She shivered and pretended she was cold, rubbing her hands up and down her arms. “What I saw in that kid’s eyes… I’ve never seen before. And I don’t want to see it again.”
Bobby Haas had been hauled out on a gurney and taken away in an ambulance. And still she was more shaken than Kovac had ever seen her. She scowled down at the ground, uncomfortable with the uniforms and the forensics team crawling all over the place, lest they see through her act too.
Kovac took off his trench coat and put it around her. She could have drowned in it, she was so little. With an arm around her shoulders, he guided her to the Haases’ front porch, and they sat on the edge of it. She leaned into him.
“Slow it all down, kiddo,” he said. “Slow it all down.”
She took a deep breath and let it out.
“I asked the unis to get Wayne Haas,” she said. “I’m not telling him this. I can’t. You have to.”
“All the lights and sirens, and he hasn’t come out on his own?”
“Bobby told me he went to bed early because he wasn’t feeling well.”
“I should sleep so hard,” Kovac said. “If my neighbor doesn’t stop banging on his roof in the mornings, I’ll take a hammer to him.”
Liska wasn’t listening to him. She looked up at the sky and shook her head. “Oh, God…”
“It’s because he’s a kid,” Kovac said quietly. “That’s too close to home.”
“You know, I really wanted to feel sorry for him,” she said. “I did feel sorry for him. The poor, motherless child.”
“I don’t know if Bobby Haas was ever a child.”
“Maybe that was the problem.”
“And maybe he had three sixes branded on the back of his head,” Kovac said. “Don’t try to figure it out, Tinks. There’s a reason that’s not our job.”
They couldn’t do it. The toll was too heavy emotionally, and emotion took away objectivity, and one thing a detective absolutely had to be was objective.
Hypocrite, he thought.
One of the forensics people stuck her head out of the garage. “Detectives, I think you need to come see this.
“Becker took the stuff out of the briefcase to inventory,” she explained. “This is pretty scary.”
Inside the garage, Kovac looked over the items that had been spread across the workbench-Carey’s files having to do withThe State v. Karl Dahl. The papers she had been taking home to look at over the weekend. All of it was wet and stinking.
“Jesus, he pissed on it!” he said with disgust.
Liska had moved on to the rest of it. “Oh, my God…” she whispered. “Sam…”
All neatly contained in Ziploc bags: a journal; two clear four-pocket plastic sheets holding photos of Bobby with his father-playing catch, fishing, being happy; half a dozen large Ziploc plastic bags with newspaper clippings in them, organized by month.
MINNEAPOLIS MASSACRE
GRUESOME HOMICIDES SHAKE QUIET NEIGHBORHOOD
CRIME SCENE“A BLOODBATH”ACCORDING TO DETECTIVES
DRIFTER ACCUSED IN BRUTAL SLAYINGS
Kovac found the clippings only slightly weird and creepy. It wasn’t unheard of for loved ones of homicide victims to keep track of the case in the media.
Then came the final, smaller plastic bag.
The bottom dropped out of his stomach, and a sudden cold sweat misted his skin.
“Holy God…”
Liska looked over at him. “What is it?”
In a case like the Haas murders, the detectives often kept certain details of the crime secret from the public, details only the killer would know. It helped them weed out the crackpots who always came out of the woodwork to confess to heinous crimes in a sick attempt to gain attention.
Kovac held that secret up to the light.
“Oh, Jesus!”
Perfectly preserved, vacuum sealed on a single sheet together, side by side by side-largest to smallest-the right thumbs of Marlene Haas, and Brittany and Ashton Pratt.
“Jesus H.,” Kovac breathed. “Karl Dahl didn’t do it.”
The irony was bitter. Stan Dempsey had ruined his career and his sanity trying to see Karl Dahl convicted of the Haas homicides. He had been so convinced of Dahl’s guilt. Everyone had. The strange drifter with a record of sexually oriented crimes-relatively minor crimes, but just the same… He’d known the victims. He’d been seen going into the victims’ home on the day of the murders. He’d had no alibi. When he’d been arrested, Karl Dahl had been in possession of a necklace that belonged to Marlene Haas.
It had to be Dahl. No one wanted to think their neighbor or their mailman or their meter reader could be capable of the atrocities committed on Marlene and her foster children. No one would even have considered the boy next door.
The killer had had to be Karl Dahl. Dahl had been arrested, indicted, would likely have been convicted. Case closed.
Instead, Dahl’s arrest had triggered a terrible series of events. Dahl had escaped jail, murdered two women, and abducted a third. Carey Moore had been forced to kill Stan Dempsey out of fear for her life.
Karl Dahl, as it turned out, had indeed been a murderer, but he hadn’t been guilty of the crimes he had been accused of committing.
Kovac put down the vacuum-sealed bag. No one said anything. There was too much-and nothing-to say.
“Detective Liska?” One of the officers Liska had sent into the house filled the doorway.
She didn’t turn her head away from the things laid out in front of them.
“Your guy in the house?” the officer said. “He’s dead. Looks like maybe he had a heart attack.”
“I’m sure it does,” Liska murmured. “I’m sure it does.”
68
THE JOURNAL OF Bobby Haas read like a Stephen King novel. The first entry was dated a couple of weeks prior to the murders. The boy had written about his anger over his parents’ discussions about possibly trying to adopt the “two little worms,” as he called them.
He wrote at length about his feelings of betrayal and rejection. Everything had been fine when it had just been the three of them. He had felt important. He’d had the undivided attention of his parents, particularly of his dad. Then Marlene had, in his mind, turned on him, rejected him. She had wanted something more-more children,other children. He wasn’t good enough for her.
Just like before,he had written.
Women didn’t love him. In his mind, every woman in his life had rejected him-his mother, the first Mrs. Haas, Marlene Haas. His vitriol directed at Marlene Haas jumped off the page. Women were selfish bitches-and worse-who ultimately became bored with him. Like a girl with a favorite doll, Marlene had tired of him and moved on to other, newer toys.
He hated her. He loved his dad. Marlene had been trying to pull Wayne ’s attention from Bobby, trying to ruin their father-son bond, which had clearly been the most important relationship in Bobby’s life.
The details of his planning the murders were chilling. The accounts of the murders themselves were horrific. He told about feeling powerful and invincible as he watched the realization of what was about to happen to her and her “precious little worms” dawn across Marlene’s face.
In the more recent entries, he had written about his attempt to kill Carey Moore, and his growing frustration that his father was paying more attention to Marlene and the foster children now than when they had been alive, and less and less attention to him. That wasn’t what the plan had been.
He doesn’t want to be alive. I’ll be doing us both a favor…
He had written pages about selenium poisoning, which conveniently mimicked the symptoms of a heart attack and wouldn’t show up in the standard basic toxicology screen.
How ironic that Bobby had turned around and done the very same thing he h
ad accused Marlene Haas of. He had tired of their presence-Marlene, the foster kids, and finally Wayne, the father he had so desperately wanted all his life. They had worn out their usefulness to him, so he had broken them and cast them aside.
The diary of a budding serial killer.
Kovac knew the journal would be valuable to the profilers and the psychologists, who were always looking for more insight into the minds of murderers. But if not for them, he would have thrown the thing in an incinerator. The book was tainted with the evil that lived in Bobby Haas, and he, for one, wanted to put it somewhere that evil could never escape.
Processing the Haas scene had gone well into the next day. By five o’clock that morning, the story had broken locally, then hit the news networks. By eight, the media feeding frenzy was on.
The chief and Lieutenant Dawes, along with Chris Logan, had handled the press conference. Kovac and Liska had gone to their respective homes for a few hours of much-needed sleep. Not even his neighbor’s hammering had stirred Kovac.
He’d never felt so exhausted in his life. The job was sometimes, but not often, physically demanding. But it was the emotional exhaustion that left him feeling drained of all energy.
Why did it seem like the only time he spent with his emotions was during a crisis?
Because after the crisis had passed, he didn’t want to feel very much at all. It seemed the safest way to be. And the easiest. If he didn’t want to expend emotional energy interacting with people, it was easy for him to retreat. Being single had a great many advantages that way, compared to being married-at least compared to being married to the two wives he’d had.
Love just never worked out for him. His last wife had not only left him; she’d left the state, left the Midwest. At the time, she had only recently given birth to their first child, a daughter. But the marriage had been over long before the baby was born. Heartbroken, he had relinquished custody and had never seen his child again.
It wasn’t often he allowed himself to think about it, and he never spoke of it. What was the point?
