Kovac And Liska: Prior Bad Acts Part 2

But then he saw himself exploding, raging, storming behind the desk. Eyes huge with shock, she bolted, tripping as she scrambled to get out of her chair and run. He trapped her in the corner, her back against a cabinet, and screamed in her face.

He wanted her to feel the kind of terror Marlene Haas must have felt that day when Karl Dahl had come into her home and tortured her and her two children over the course of several hours before he had butchered her.

Rage built and built inside him like a fire, searing his organs, melting the edges of his brain. He felt huge and violent and monstrous inside. He saw himself wrapping his stubby hands around her beautiful white throat, choking her, shaking her.

But no one pa.s.sing by Stan Dempsey saw anything but a bony man, with a heavily lined, expressionless face, loitering at the end of the hall.

He cleared the images from his mind and left the building to have a cigarette.

3.

6:27 P.M.

I'm a coward,Carey Moore thought, staring at the clock on her desk. Not for the ruling she had made but for hiding from it.

After Logan and Scott had left her office, she had instructed her clerk to tell all callers she had gone for the day. She didn't have the energy to deal with reporters, and even though it was Friday afternoon, she knew they would be lying in wait. The case ofTheState v. Karl Dahl was too big a story to blow off for an early weekend.

She wanted to close her eyes and, when she opened them again, magically be home with her daughter. They would cook dinner together and have a "girls' night in" evening of manicures and storybook reading.

David had left a message that he had a dinner meeting with a potential backer for a doc.u.mentary comparing the gangsters who had run amok in the Twin Cities area in the thirties and the gangs that ran the streets in the new millennium. Once upon a time Carey would have been disappointed to lose him for an evening. These days it was a relief to have him gone.

All day, she carried the weight of her work on her shoulders, the Dahl case being the heaviest thing she had ever been called on to handle. And every evening David was home, the tension of their relationship made Carey feel as if she were living in a highly pressurized chamber and that the pressure was such that everything inside her wanted to collapse. There was no downtime, no release.

Over the decade of their marriage, their once-good ability to communicate had slowly eroded away. Neither of them was happy now, and neither of them wanted to talk about it. They both hid in their work, and only truly came together for their daughter, Lucy, who was five and oblivious to the tension between them.

Carey walked around her office, arms crossed, and looked out the window at the city below. Traffic still clogged the streets of downtown Minneapolis. Headlights and taillights glowing. The occasional honk of a horn.

If this had been New York, the horns would have been blaring in a cacophony of sound, but even with constant growth and an influx of people from other parts of the country and other parts of the world, this was still the Midwest, and manners and courtesy were still important.

There was an order to things here, and a logic to that order. Stability. Life made sense. Which made something like the Haas murders all the more horrific. No one could make sense of such brutality. Random acts of violence undermined the foundation of what Minnesotans believed about their society.

The office door opened and Chris Logan filled the s.p.a.ce, looking like an avenging angel.

Carey stared at him, her outer calm belying the jolt of unpleasant surprise that shot through her. "You've just dispelled my theory that Minnesotans are still polite and mannerly."

"Everyone's gone," Logan said, as if the lack of a monitor in the outer office excused his behavior.

"I'm just leaving myself," she said, opening the closet where she had hung her coat.

"I can't believe you're doing this, Carey."

"You shouldn't be here, Chris," she said firmly. "I'm not having an ex parte discussion with you about this case. If you leave now, I won't report you to the disciplinary committee."

"Don't try to throw your weight around with me," Logan snapped. "That so p.i.s.ses me off, and you know it."

"I don't have totry, " she pointed out. "I'm a judge, and you're a prosecutor with a case before me. It's improper for you to come in here and question my decisions."

"I've already questioned them outside on the courthouse steps."

"I'm sure you have. You wore your good suit. The rumpled hair and the tie askew are a nice touch. You'll probably get marriage proposals called in to the television stations after they run the piece on the news."

"Don't play that card with me, Carey," he warned. "This isn't about politics. This is about what's right."

"A fair trial is right."

"Putting away the sick son of a b.i.t.c.h who killed that family is right."

"Yes," Carey agreed. "That's your job. Make the case good enough to stick. If you really think the outcome of this trial hangs in the balance of this one issue, then I'm inclined to agree with Kenny Scott--you barely have enough to sustain the indictment."

"You want me to make my prima facie case right here, right now?" Logan challenged. Anger slashed red along his cheekbones. It was never difficult to read him. If the glare in his eyes didn't give him away, his pale Irish complexion did.

"No," Carey said. "I'm just warning you, Chris. If you rush this before a jury to soothe the public outcry, and you lose--"

"I have enough to convict him."

"Then why are you here?" she demanded. "Would you barge into Judge Olson's chambers? Or Judge Denholm's? No. You're here because you think you should have special privileges, that I should knuckle under and bend to your will because we used to be colleagues and because I'm a woman. If I were a man--"

"I never would have slept with you." Logan completed the sentence.

Carey stepped back as if he'd slapped her. He might as well have. During the years they had worked together, there had always been something between them, an attraction both had felt but neither had acted on, with the exception of one night.

They had been putting in long hours, preparing for a trial--her last before her appointment to the bench, as it had happened. Carey had been drained of energy from fighting with David about her long hours, about her lack of support for his career.

With David every issue was turned around until it was about him. Her career was interfering with his spotlight. Never mind that when he was working on a project she sometimes didn't see him at all for weeks at a time, and it was only on a rare occasion that he included her in any part of the process. It never failed that when she needed his support--as she had on that last case--he was never there for her.

But there Chris Logan had been, understanding and sharing the pressure of the upcoming trial, strong and pa.s.sionate. . . .

"You'll leave this office now," she said, her voice hard and tight with emotion. "Or I'll call a deputy and you can deal with the consequences."

She went to the door and yanked it open, stared at Logan with eyes as fierce as his.

He looked away and down. "Carey, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that."

"No, you shouldn't have. And you willnever say it again."

"No. I'm sorry," he backpedaled. "It's this case. It's just getting to me," he said, shaking his head, raking a hand back through his thick hair.

"Don't try to give me an excuse," Carey snapped. "There is no excuse. You're p.i.s.sed off and you're trying to undermine my authority, and I won't stand for it. If you come within a yard of that line again, I'll have you removed from this case, and think about what that would do for your public image. Get out."

He didn't look at her. She wanted to think he was too embarra.s.sed by his own behavior, but that probably wasn't the case. He was regrouping, switching tracks to a wiser course of action. Logan's pa.s.sion for his work was a thing to behold in the courtroom. Defense attorneys of no small caliber were routinely blown out of the water and crushed. But he had never learned to completely control it when he needed to, and so his strongest a.s.set was also his Achilles' heel.

"You've seen the crime scene photographs," he said quietly. "You know what was done to that woman, to those two little kids, foster kids. They didn't even belong there, really. It was just the luck of the draw that they ended up at that house.

"I look at those photos every day. Can't get them out of my head. I dream about them at night. I've never had a case affect me the way this one has."

"Then you should stop looking at the pictures," Carey said, despite what she had been thinking about the photographs herself. "There's no point in it. You can't make a trial be about your own personal obsession, Chris. You'll lose your perspective; you'll make mistakes. Like this one. Go. Now."

He sighed and nodded, then met her gaze with genuine apology in his eyes. "I am sorry."

Carey said nothing. He turned and walked out, shoving his hands in his pants pockets, the wide shoulders slumping a bit. If this had been a movie, she would have run after him and forgiven him, and they would have ended up in each other's arms in a mad embrace. But it wasn't a movie; this was the real world. She had a job to do, she had a husband, she had a child. She couldn't have Chris Logan, and she knew better than to want him.

What she really wanted was someone strong to hold her, support her, shelter her. But she didn't have that. As lonely as it was, she'd learned a long time ago to handle her battles and her insecurities on her own.

Carey put her coat on, slung her purse over one shoulder, and picked up the large old leather briefcase her father had carried when he had sat on the bench as a judge in this same building. She wished she could have gone to him for advice, as she had for most of her life. But Alzheimer's had stolen her father away from her in the last few years. He no longer recognized her, and so all she had of him were things, his gavel, his briefcase, photographs, and memories.

Feeling hollow and beaten, she left the office. The press would still be waiting outside, hoping in vain that she would come out the main doors.

Instead, she took the skyway across the street to the garage where she parked her car. Afraid to lose the impressive background shot of the HennepinCountyGovernmentCenter, none of the television people had decamped to find her elsewhere. She braced herself for confrontation with a newspaper reporter, but the skyway was empty, and most of the cars were gone from the level where Carey had parked.

She would have to consider a uniformed escort now that the news of her ruling had broken. And she felt even more of a coward for thinking it, because she pictured herself hiding behind a deputy, trying to avoid the fallout of her own decision.

Lost in her thoughts, she fumbled to dig her keys out of her purse, while her Palm Pilot and a lipstick tumbled out. She sighed heavily, set down the briefcase, and bent awkwardly to scoop up the things she had dropped.

As she began to straighten, something hit her hard across the back, stunning her, knocking her breath from her. A second blow sent her sprawling forward.

The rough concrete tore at the palms of her hands. Her knees. .h.i.t the surface like a pair of hammerheads. She tried to draw breath to scream, but couldn't. Her purse flew out ahead of her, its contents spewing out, skidding and rolling.

Her a.s.sailant swung at her again, just missing her head as Carey shoved herself to the right, one hand outstretched to try to snag her keys. Some kind of club. She couldn't really see it, was just aware of the sound as it struck the concrete. Her a.s.sailant cursed.

"You f.u.c.king b.i.t.c.h! You f.u.c.king c.u.n.t!" Not shouting, but a harsh, hoa.r.s.e, rasping sound full of venom.

He fell on her, bouncing her head into the floor like a basketball. Did he mean to kill her? Rape her?

Carey flailed at the car keys, breaking a nail, sc.r.a.ping her fingers, catching hold.

Her attacker grabbed her by the hair, yanked her head back.

Did he have a knife? Would he slit her throat?

She fumbled with the key to her BMW, frantically pushing the b.u.t.tons. The car's alarm screamed, and the lights began to flash.

The voice behind her swore again. He slammed her head down. What little breath she had regained huffed out of her as he kicked her hard in the side.

Then everything went terrifyingly black.

4.

SAM KOVAC STOODin front of the mirror in the john down the hall from the Criminal Investigative Division offices, his shirt half-off. He needed to go to the gym, except that he hadn't been in a gym since he'd been in a uniform. A long d.a.m.n time ago.

Now that he was on the downhill side of forty, he was beginning to wonder if he shouldn't do something about that. But the notion of sweating and making a fool of himself in front of the young hot bods that populated health clubs, an obvious and pathetic display of midlife crisis, was enough to make him leave his jockstrap in the drawer. Nor was he interested in hanging out in the weight room with the muscleheads who wore the Minneapolis PD uniform, the guys who reeked of testosterone and couldn't buy shirts off the rack. Bunch of freaks. Probably most of them were trying to overcompensate for small d.i.c.ks, or h.o.m.os.e.xual tendencies, or the fact that they used to get the snot pounded out of them for their lunch money every day when they were kids.

Kovac a.s.sessed himself with a critical eye. He looked like an old tomcat that had taken his share of licks in alley fights and had dished out plenty of his own. A scar here, a scar there, a cranky expression, a twice-broken, high-bridged nose. His hair was equal parts brown and gray and had a tendency to stand up. Partly from his Slovak heritage and partly because he never paid more than ten bucks for a haircut.

But overall, he didn't think he looked that bad. No beer gut. No hair sprouting out his ears. Women had never run screaming at the sight of him. At least none that weren't wanted for something.

At his last department-mandated physical, the doctor had preached at him that it wasn't too late to reverse the damage he had done to himself smoking and drinking and living on a steady diet of sodium, fat, and job stress. Kovac had told the doctor if he had to give up all that, he might as well eat his gun, because he wouldn't have anything left to live for.

The men's room door swung in and Nikki Liska stepped inside.

"Jesus, the least you could do is go into a stall," she said.

Kovac scowled at her. "Very funny. What the h.e.l.l are you doing in here? This is the men's room, for Christ's sake!"

"So where are they?" Liska challenged, crossing her arms over her chest. "The least I could get out of this is a sneak peek at a little throbbing manhood."

Kovac felt his cheeks heat. Liska had been his partner for enough years that he should have been immune to her mouth, but she never ceased to outdo herself. Her personality was her loudest, largest feature. The rest of her was five-five with big blue eyes and a white-blond pixie haircut. To the unsuspecting, she looked sweet and perky. But the last guy to call her that had gone home from the party with a limp.

Her eyes narrowed. "I don't believe it."

"Don't make a big deal," Kovac warned.

"You, Sam Kovac, are an optimist."

"No, I'm not."

"Yes, you are."

"I'm a pragmatist."

"You're full of s.h.i.t," Liska said, marching into the room. She walked right up to him and smacked him on the arm. "The patch!"

"Ouch!"

"Don't be such a baby."