Kovac And Liska: Prior Bad Acts Part 9

The container rocked as someone pulled himself up to get a better look inside. One of the cops, he figured. Confirmation was a nightstick stabbing down through the garbage three inches from his head. The stick came down again and again, gradually moving away from him.

"Careful the rats don't pull you in there headfirst, Doug." The other cop.

"It's clear."

"You officers want some coffee or somethin'?"

"Who are you, Jamal? King of the d.a.m.n world? Boss kick your a.s.s, givin' away s.h.i.+t."

"That's okay, fellas. We've got to keep moving. Thanks anyway."

The Dumpster lid lowered.

"You see this guy, call 911."

"d.a.m.n straight."

Karl didn't breathe right until he heard the cruiser continue its way down the alley. And then still he didn't move.

"Man, that's one bad dude, that Dahl," Jamal said. "Killed them kids. Cut that woman."

"Crazy motherf.u.c.ker."

There was silence for a moment while they finished their smokes, then went back into the diner.

Still Karl waited before he dared to poke his head out and look down the alley. The cruiser was gone. There was no one in sight.

Careful not to make a sound, he climbed out of his hiding spot and made his way down the alley under the cover of shadows. Toward the end of the block on the left-hand side, he could see a broad landing and steps leading down from the back door of a business.

If the homeless man the restaurant workers had spoken about slept under those stairs regularly, there was a good chance he kept his stuff stashed under there.

Karl slipped across the alley. He could see a grocery cart loaded down with the stuff homeless people keep--soda cans and beer cans they gathered for the recycling money, filthy blankets and clothes.

He needed to get rid of the jail jumpsuit and into a disguise. No one looked twice at street people if they could help it.

The owner of the cart was nowhere in sight. Like as not, he was still working his alleys, or panhandling on the street in front of restaurants with no valet. The night was young.

Karl began to dig through the stuff in the shopping cart. A garbage sack full of cans. Another with beer and liquor bottles. Wedged down into the folds of an old blanket, he found a bottle of bourbon with two fingers' worth in the bottom and helped himself to it, hoping it would numb his pounding head and aching throat.

"Hey! That's my stuff!" The indignant voice came from beneath the stairs, under a pile of discarded upholstery fabric. The fabric rustled and moved, and a dark lump of rags and matted hair emerged.

"You can't have it! Pope Clement gave that to me!"

The man came at Karl, arms flailing, mouth tearing wide to shout. Without hesitation, Karl swung the bourbon bottle downward and hit the man in the head as hard as he could.

Without a sound, the ragman dropped straight to his knees, his momentum carrying him into Karl and knocking Karl backward. Regaining his balance, Karl was on him in an instant, hitting him again and again, feeling bone give way and splinter beneath the heavy gla.s.s of the bottle. He kept pounding away, as if the bottle were a hammer, over and over until there was no skull left to break.

Spent, he sat back on his heels, trying not to wheeze. He was sweating and shaking and dizzy. He wiped a hand over his face, and it came away sticky with the ragman's blood and brain matter.

Karl pulled the carca.s.s back under the steps, stumbling over another bottle, this one with something clear in it. Karl opened it and sniffed. Grain alcohol. He used it to wash the blood off his face and hands, then drank the last swallow.

Methodically, he pulled off the dead man's coat and s.h.i.+rt and T-s.h.i.+rt. He stripped off his own jail jumpsuit and dressed in the dead man's clothes, which reeked of body odor, bourbon, urine, and feces.

The man had stashed his money down the front of his undershorts, taped against his s.c.r.o.t.u.m. Karl took it, still warm from the body heat of his victim, peeled off a couple of bills to put in his pocket, then stashed the rest the same way the dead man had.

Hiding the jumpsuit beneath it, he covered the body over with the musty remnants of upholstery fabric that had made the man's nest, then went back to dig through the shopping cart for anything else he might be able to use.

He found a steak knife with a good blade and slipped it in the coat pocket. He found a knit cap and pulled it on, wincing as the wool settled onto his wounds. The idea that it was probably infested with lice made his skin crawl, but he had no choice. He had no choice about anything if he wanted to stay alive.

He rubbed his hands on the filthy pavement, then rubbed them over his face, working in the grime. Hide in plain sight. He knew how to do that. He knew how to be invisible. He was an unremarkable man with a forgettable face devoid of expression. It was easy for people to look right through him.

It would be impossible now for him to try to leave the city. The police would be all over the bus stations, the train depots, the truck stops. They might set up roadblocks and checkpoints. They would be expecting him to run. His picture would be everywhere, a picture of him clean-shaven and bareheaded. But he would no longer be that man, and no one would catch him running.

In fact, it seemed to Karl the best thing for him to do right now was stay put. The cops had already been down this alley. They had already been told about the homeless guy living under these stairs. He couldn't say for certain, but he imagined the police had checked out the spot on their way down the alley. They had maybe even spoken with the ragman long enough to know that he communicated regularly with Pope Clement.

Knowing he was in as safe a place as any, Karl crawled back under the stairs and stretched out beside the dead man's still-warm body to catch some sleep.

11.

IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHTby the time they had interviewed Jerome "Stench" Walden. The kid's mother had come to the door, drunk and smoking a cigarillo. A charming woman.

Jerome had looked embarra.s.sed that he was stuck in a c.r.a.ppy house that smelled of sour beer and fried onions and cheap tobacco. In a clean set of gray sweats, the T-s.h.i.+rt bearing the initialsUSC in maroon block letters, he looked as incongruous in his setting as Bobby Haas had looked kneeling at his father's feet, trying to comfort him. Not surprisingly, Jerome's story of the after-school and evening adventures matched Bobby Haas's version of events.

Kovac didn't believe them, but then he rarely believed anyone. He was too accustomed to being lied to. Everybody lied to the cops, even the innocent. He wouldn't have believed his own grandmother without a corroborating witness.

The security videotape from the government center parking ramp was on Kovac's desk when they arrived back at the CID offices. They went into a conference room, watched the oft-copied-over tape, and drank some bad coffee.

They had run out of desire for conversation on their way in but had been partners long enough that they were comfortable with their silences. Neither of them said a word as they watched the tape through the first time.

The tape was so grainy that if Kovac hadn't known they were looking at Carey Moore, he couldn't have positively ID'd her. She walked into the camera frame, proceeding toward her car, a black 5-series BMW sedan. She was carrying a handbag slung over one shoulder, and a large briefcase that looked heavy. Her father's briefcase.

She stuck her hand into the purse to dig out car keys and dropped a couple of objects on the floor. Stopping, she set the briefcase down and bent to pick up what she had dropped.

At that moment the a.s.sailant came from the left of the screen. Difficult to make out size, due to the angle of the camera, which was pointed down from above them. Dressed in jeans and a dark coat with the hood up. Impossible to make out a face.

He hit her hard across the back with some kind of a club or baton, maybe a small baseball bat. The attack was fast and violent, and it looked to Kovac that the a.s.sailant was more interested in hurting her than in taking anything.

They knew from what Judge Moore had told them that she had managed to set off her car alarm, at which point the perpetrator got off her, took the time to kick her hard in the side, then grabbed up her wallet. He spun around and s.n.a.t.c.hed the briefcase she had set down, and ran out of the frame, going for a staircase, Kovac a.s.sumed. According to the garage attendant sitting in the pay booth on street level, no car had come squealing down the ramp at the time of the a.s.sault in a big hurry to leave.

Liska rewound the tape and hit the play b.u.t.ton. "This sucks."

"Yeah. What's the point in having these cameras if they're going to use the tapes so many times we might as well be trying to watch cartoons from the moon?"

"They need to go digital."

"Costs money."

"Yeah? Well, if I had to park in that ramp all day every day, I'd have to take a second mortgage on my house. I think they can afford it."

In the morning one of them would drop the tape with the video geek in the lab and see if she could enhance the images to the point of being useful, but Kovac doubted that would happen.

He tossed out the question to get their brains rolling. "Who do we look at besides Leopold and Loeb?"

"They seem like decent kids."

"So did the aforementioned," Kovac pointed out. "So did Ted Bundy."

Liska shrugged. "It'll be hard to corroborate their story. Who would notice either one of them? They're too normal. And there was only one guy on the video. Where's the sidekick?"

"I want the tapes from the entrances to the garage, see if either of their cars rolls in sometime before six-thirty. They could have left a vehicle there, taken a staircase down to the street, then come back after all the hoopla to get the car. Make sure the uniform who took down all the tag numbers runs them through the DMV."

"They could have parked anywhere downtown," Liska said. "It would have been stupid to park in that ramp."

"They're a couple of seventeen-year-old boys. Forethought is not a big priority at that age."

"Thanks for the tip. I'm going to go home and lock my eldest in his room for the next ten years or so."

"I think we can rule out Wayne Haas," Kovac said. "He's too big to be the guy on the tape, and he doesn't look built for speed either. He's got plenty of motive to hate Judge Moore, but I don't like him for this."

"Me neither. Could be an ex-con with a grudge," Liska said. "Could be any nutjob following the Dahl case."

"What do we know about the parents of the foster kids?" Kovac asked, frowning as that train of thought slipped into his head.

"The mother's in jail on a narcotics charge. Dad's got a sheet too, a.s.sault being the big prizewinner for us."

"Is he running around loose?"

"He is."

Most crime was simple and straightforward. A killed B because B had something of value, or B cheated A in a drug deal, or B did A's girlfriend while A was out of town. The obvious suspects almost always turned out to be the perps. Twisted conspiracies were the stuff of novels and movies.

"We'll need to talk to Dempsey."

"He'll be a good source."

"He's a pretty good suspect too," Liska said.

Kovac gave her a sharp look. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Come on, Sam. Dempsey has a lot riding on convicting Karl Dahl. You know the department has just been trying to keep a lid on him until it's over. They won't fire him and give the defense more ammunition than they already have against him. But as soon as that trial is over, it'sadios Stan. He can't be the president of the Carey Moore fan club."

Kovac chewed on a thumbnail, scowling at the possibilities. He could hear the allegations. The lead detective was obsessed. Dempsey couldn't be in the field, because he'd had a breakdown. He wanted Dahl to be his guy; Judge Moore's ruling was a slap in the face of his investigation . . .

All that would be fodder anyway. The department hadn't fired Stan Dempsey because they would have looked bad in the media and because they were afraid Dempsey would sue. Poor old Stan was screwed no matter what.

"Jesus," Kovac muttered, rubbing his hands over his face and back through his hair. "I don't like it."

"Since when is this job about what we like?" Liska asked.

"I mean, talk to him, yes. n.o.body knows the players in the Dahl case better than Stan."

"We have to look at him, Sam, and you have to be the one to do it," Liska said. "You know him. He's old-school. He'll take it better from you."

Kovac heaved a sigh, pus.h.i.+ng himself up out of his chair. "All right. But you get Mutt and Jeff and their alibi. Looks to me like they both need a mother figure anyway."

Liska rolled her eyes. "Yeah, that's me. Mother Earth packing heat. I'm a B movie from the fifties."

She got up from her chair and stretched, her sweater rising up above the waistband of her slacks to show the Glock 9mm she wore on a belt holster. "I'm outta here, Kojak. I'll see you in the morning."

"It already is morning."

"Don't tell me that. I'm gone."

Kovac prowled around the office for a while after she'd gone. He was always restless on the front end of a case. He wanted to work around the clock. Get on it. Get after it.

Homicide cops in the Minneapolis PD had a window of about three days on a murder before the next murder or a.s.sault case came along and the last one got shuffled to a back burner. Or maybe he was that way because there was no need for him to be any other way. The job was his life. He had nothing to go home for.

He put his coat on and walked out of the building to stand on the wide front steps that led up the big Gothic stone building that was the color of raw liver. He wanted a smoke, but he didn't take it. The one he'd had on the Haas front porch had been for effect.

The streets were mostly empty on this end of downtown. All the Friday-night excitement would be at the other end, where bars and clubs crowded around the TargetCenter, home of the NBA Timberwolves. Night life. There was a concept.

Kovac walked down to the parking ramp where he left his car every day. The facility had been named for a cop who had been murdered back in the late eighties for no other reason than that he wore the uniform. Sitting in a pizza parlor, the guy had been minding his own business, probably thinking about the fact that he was about to retire, when some gang punk pulled a piece and shot him dead in front of a dozen witnesses.

The guy had lived with the potential and real dangers of being a cop every day he was on the job, survived to retirement, only to be gunned down, off duty, having a pizza.

No one planned on becoming a victim.

Marlene Haas hadn't gotten up on that fateful day thinking of the horrors that would take place in her home in a matter of hours.

Carey Moore had been headed home, thinking of her little daughter, maybe thinking of the absentee husband, maybe thinking about the s.h.i.+tstorm she had just unleashed with her decision on Karl Dahl's prior bad acts. And bam, out of nowhere, some mutt knocked her flat and beat the c.r.a.p out of her.

Kovac scowled at the bent his thoughts were taking--poor Carey Moore. He didn't want to think of her as a person with problems and issues and emotions. Still, when he drove out of the ramp onto the street, he didn't head for home. He turned the opposite direction and drove toward Lake of the Isles.