Kovac And Liska: Prior Bad Acts Part 22

This is what it's like to lose your mind,he thought, but there was no emotion attached. No fear, no panic, no despair.

Kenny Scott, Karl Dahl's attorney, lived in an unremarkable house in an unremarkable neighborhood. The house was not unlike Stan's own, built in the fifties, a story-and-a-half rectangle like every other rectangle on the block.

The juniper shrubs were overgrown, and the gra.s.s in the yard looked poor, as if Scott never fertilized or aerated it. Stan shook his head as he parked the truck down the block. Yards needed tending. If a person let their yard go, that spoke to their lack of character as far as Stan was concerned. But then he'd already known Kenny Scott lacked character.

He got out of the truck, taking a small duffel bag with him, and walked down the sidewalk toward Scott's house. Across the street there were some boys playing with a football in a front yard. They paid no attention to Stan. A woman struggling with a baby stroller was at the side of a minivan in the driveway of the house two doors away from Scott's. She didn't even glance at Stan as he walked past. He had always been a person no one noticed. A lot of times that had worked to his advantage.

He turned down Kenny Scott's driveway and walked around to the back of the house. There was a small concrete patio with a black Weber grill, a gla.s.s-topped round table with an umbrella sticking up through the center of it, and four metal chairs with green cushions.

Stan put his duffel bag on the table, unzipped it, and chose a handgun. A .22. Small, quiet. A lot of criminals thought they had to carry big guns, .44s, .357s. That was just c.r.a.p. That was ego, idiots trying to look like big men. A .22 did the job close range, very little mess, very little noise, and it was easy for the shooter to pocket and simply walk away from the scene with.

He zipped the duffel bag and slung it over one shoulder and across his chest, shoving the bag itself behind him, out of his way. Then he went to the back door and knocked.

A television was playing somewhere inside. Kenny Scott was watching a college football game. Stan himself was a lifelong fan of college football, the Michigan Wolverines in particular. But as with everything in Stan's life, that was something only he knew about himself, because no one else had ever bothered to ask.

He knocked on the door again.

The attorney came through the kitchen, looking puzzled. Stan could see him through the gla.s.s in the back door. Scott looked out through the gla.s.s, still confused.

"Detective . . . ?" he asked as he opened the door.

"Counselor," Stan said. "Can I have a moment of your time?"

Scott still didn't know what to think, but he took a step back, because Stan was, he thought, a known quant.i.ty. Stan stepped inside and pointed the .22 in Scott's face.

Scott's eyes went round. "What the h.e.l.l?"

"Turn around, Mr. Scott."

"Are you out of your mind?"

"Yes, sir, I am," Stan said flatly. "Turn around. Up against the wall."

The reality of the situation was starting to dawn on the lawyer. Fear flashed in his eyes.

"What do you want with me?" he asked. "I haven't done anything to you."

Stan wanted to laugh out loud, but he didn't. How could Kenny Scott think his actions as Karl Dahl's attorney hadn't had any impact on anyone else?

"Turn around. I won't say it again, Mr. Scott."

Kenny Scott didn't react. He didn't believe this was happening.

Stan backhanded him across the face with the .22, snapping his head sharply to one side. Blood splattered sideways and hit the dingy beige wall. Stan thought he could see the individual droplets fly in slow motion, changing shape and dimension as they went, skittering along sideways as they hit the surface of the wall.

Sound came to him slightly delayed, then quickly caught up like some kind of strange special effect in a movie, the sound of the gun connecting with Kenny Scott's cheekbone, the attorney's grunt of pain, the thump of him hitting the wall.

Stan held him there with his gun hand, pulled handcuffs out of his left jacket pocket, and cuffed one wrist and then the other behind the lawyer's back.

"Why are you doing this?" Scott asked again.

This time Stan could hear the fear in his voice. Scott could tell this situation wasn't going to go well for him. He was probably already imagining what Stan might do to him.

Stan felt a rush of power that was exciting. This was what Karl Dahl had felt gaining control of his victims.

"Down the stairs," he said, jerking Scott away from the wall and shoving him to the right, toward the head of the bas.e.m.e.nt stairs. Blood ran down the wall from where Scott's face had been. His nose was bleeding, as well as the gash on his cheek from where the sight of the .22 had cut him.

The lawyer had begun to cry. "Please don't do this."

He already believed he was going to die, which told Stan he must have felt that that was what he deserved.

"Down the stairs."

Stan gave him a little push. Scott brought his shoulder against the door frame to block himself. Stan grabbed him by the arm, yanked him sideways, shoved him forward.

The lawyer stumbled, started to fall, twisted sideways, trying to use the wall to stop his momentum.

"You feel helpless?" Stan said. "You think this is how Marlene Haas felt when your client was torturing her? Or how those children felt as he took them down to the bas.e.m.e.nt?"

"Jesus," Scott said. "You can't hold that against me. I'm a public defender, for G.o.d's sake. I don't get a choice who I represent. You think I want to defend Karl Dahl?"

"You're trying to get him off," Stan said, pushing him down another few steps.

"That's my job."

"It's just a d.a.m.n game to you people. You know what Dahl is, and still you try to get him off on some technicality."

"The rules are there for a reason--"

"For you to bend them around and let that sick b.a.s.t.a.r.d get away with what he did to those people. Let him go so he can rape and murder someone else's family?"

"Defendants are presumed innocent--"

"Innocent?"

Stan felt the rage rise up inside him like a column of fire. "He butchered that woman. He violated those children and hung them from the ceiling. I was there. I saw them. I smelled their deaths. Do you have any idea what that's like, Counselor? Have you ever been to a death scene?"

Scott didn't answer him. Of course he didn't know what it was like to stand in the place where a violent death had occurred. He had never experienced the unsettling feeling of evil lingering in the air, mingling with the last vibrations of terror. He didn't know what it was like to feel as if he could almost still hear the screams of the victims as their lives were being torn out of their bodies.

"You look for loopholes to get these sc.u.mbags off," Stan said bitterly. "You're as guilty as Karl Dahl. And you're going to pay for that."

He put his foot into Kenny Scott's back and pushed. The lawyer went headfirst down the final few steps and landed on the concrete floor with a dull thump like a bag of wet cement.

Stan stepped over the groaning lawyer and went to a workbench built up against one wall. The duffel bag went on the bench. Stan unzipped the bag, looked inside, trying to decide what appealed to him most for this situation.

"You're going on trial, Mr. Scott," Stan said, pulling his choice from the bag. "And n.o.body is going to try to get you acquitted."

27.

DAVID MOORE,the brilliant filmmaker who hadn't made a film in years, had a Web site devoted to himself. Arrogant p.r.i.c.k.

Back at his desk, Kovac looked it over. It wasn't a cheap deal. Sharp graphics, great color, a little slide-show montage of his work. A lot of self-aggrandizing c.r.a.p about his credentials and awards he had won in the past. He certainly made himself sound like a genius.

Kovac wondered if he ever got a call off this site to produce anything or if it was just for ego. He knew nothing about the making of doc.u.mentary films, except that when he watched one on PBS, they always seemed to be funded by grants from big oil companies and private trusts for the endowment of the arts. The latter of which was apparently where Edmund Ivors came into the game.

He didn't know what kind of a living a man could make doing what David Moore did. Seemed to him that if the guy only got one film made in a decade, either he made a boatload of money doing it or he was leeching off his wife.

Kovac suspected choice B. David Moore was all talk and no walk. His most recent work had been producing the occasional commercial for local television.

The best thing Kovac could see about Moore's Web site was that the jerk had included numerous photographs of himself. Photographs of him hard at work and twenty pounds thinner. Photographs of him in black tie at some awards bash.

Carey was with him in that one. She looked happier then, with a brilliant smile, her hand on her husband's arm. A knockout dress that flashed a little skin. She would have been a prosecutor at the time, trying to make a name for herself in the county attorney's office. And Husband had been at the top of his game, the man of the hour.

Cut from the same inferior materials as Liska's ex, Kovac thought. Big mouth, fragile ego. What had Carey said? That her husband resented her.

With guys like that around, it was a pure d.a.m.n wonder that women bothered to a.s.sociate with men at all. Not that he'd been any great catch himself, Kovac admitted. At least he couldn't say he had ever resented either of his wives when he'd been married to them. Afterward was a whole other matter.

The four-star Marquette Hotel had been designed as part of the central complex of the IDS Center, a soaring fifty-plus dramatic stories of dark gla.s.s. The hotel connected to the main office tower via the Crystal Court--a gla.s.s-enclosed 23,000-square-foot urban park with a gla.s.s ceiling 121 feet above the ground and a 105-foot cascading water fountain at its center.

The complex connected to the rest of the city by the skyway system--enclosed second-story sidewalks that linked most of the major buildings downtown. The skyways allowed you to travel by foot all over downtown without ever setting a toe outdoors, a great thing when winter temperatures dropped well below zero and the winds howled through the concrete canyons of the city.

At the front desk, Kovac showed his badge to a young clerk, who immediately went and fetched the manager, a rail-thin red-haired man with a very serious face. Brendan Whitman, his name tag said. Kovac went through the introduction business again, then showed Whitman the photograph of David Moore he had printed from the Web site.

"Mr. Whitman, do you recognize the man in this picture?"

"Yes. That's Mr. Greer," he said without hesitation.

Mr. Greer. David Moore had chosen his father-in-law's name to use when checking into hotels to cheat on his namesake's daughter. Pa.s.sive-aggressive p.r.i.c.k.

"Can you tell me if Mr. Greer was checked into the hotel yesterday?"

Whitman looked at him, suspicious. "What's this about?"

"This is about a police investigation into an a.s.sault last night. I'm sure you wouldn't want the good name of your hotel to be a.s.sociated with an a.s.sault if there was no need."

"Of course not."

"So let's try this again. Did Mr. Greer check into the hotel yesterday?"

"Yes. I checked him in myself."

"What time was that?"

Whitman thought about it. "Around three in the afternoon, as usual."

"He's a regular?"

"Every other week. He's from Los Angeles. Does something in the movie industry. Was Mr. Greer injured in the a.s.sault?"

"Not yet," Kovac muttered under his breath. "Is he usually with a lady when he comes in?"

"No. Always by himself."

"Have you ever seen him here with a woman?"

"Yes. I've seen him several times with a woman in the bar."

"What did she look like?"

Whitman squinted as he thought about it. "Ummm . . . medium height, slender, blond."

"Do you keep records on your guests?" Kovac asked. "Could you, say, type Mr. Greer's name into your computer and bring up a list of his stays at the hotel?"

"Yes, but you'll need a warrant for that," Whitman said. "If we just gave out that kind of information, it would open the hotel to lawsuits. If we can show we were compelled by the authorities to give over the information . . ."

"I understand," Kovac said, though he didn't like it.

There was no chance of his getting a warrant for David Moore's hotel records, or for his financials, which Kovac would have loved to get his hands on. To get a warrant, he had to show reasonable cause for the specific items or information he wanted. As he had been told by more than one prosecutor, Carey Moore among them, if what he wanted was a fishing license, he would have to get it from the state Department of Natural Resources.

Moore's hotel stays would be pertinent in divorce court, not criminal court. The investigation was about Carey Moore's a.s.sault, and David Moore's alibi held. Unless Kovac could come up with something that connected Moore to the actual perpetrator of the crime, he was out of luck.

Liska would have been all over him if she'd known he was even asking the questions he had asked Brendan Whitman. She already thought the warning flags were up, which irritated him. For Christ's sake, couldn't he feel sorry for Carey Moore without falling in love with her overnight? He couldn't simply dislike her husband for cheating on her?

It wasn't like he fell for women at the drop of a hat. For the most part, he'd sworn off relationships. They never worked out for him. He wasn't exactly sure why. He was a decent guy, treated women with respect. He knew the job had taken its toll on his marriages. The hours, the grimness, the stress. His better qualities apparently weren't enough to offset that.

He was a cop. It wasn't what he did; it was who he was. He could no more change that than he could change the color of his eyes, so he just didn't think about it . . . most of the time. The one woman he'd fallen for who would have understood that, because she had been a cop herself, had committed suicide right in front of him.

He still thought about her, still felt pain at the loss. He still second-guessed himself sometimes late at night when the nightmare of that scene woke him. If only he'd known the depth of her pain . . . If only he had unraveled the mystery of her an hour sooner . . . If only he could have reached her before she fired the gun . . .

Pointless to think about it, he knew. What happened, happened. No one could change that. It hadn't been in the cards for him to save Amanda Savard.

"She's another damsel in distress who needs rescuing. . . ."Liska's words whispered in his ear. Kovac shut them out and closed the door on the whole topic.

The lobby bar was empty except for the bartender, who was busy checking bottles. Kovac pulled out a stool and sat down.

"Sorry, sir," the bartender said. "We don't open till four."