Kovac And Liska: Prior Bad Acts Part 41

He pretended not to have heard her, his little trick for avoiding a topic.

"What brought you to Minneapolis?"

"A train," he said, and laughed and laughed.

"You like moving around from town to town?"

"It suits me," he said, nodding. "Can't stay in one place too long."

"Why is that?"

His face darkened as he looked down at the knife he'd used to cut the sausage, a nine-inch boning knife Carey knew to be sharp enough to cut paper. "It's just best to move on."

Because he went from town to town murdering innocent people? The system had coughed up a record on Karl Dahl, but there was no way of knowing what he might have done and gotten away with. He was one of those people who drifted along below the radar.

No one wanted to pay any attention to men like Karl, the strange, the quiet, the disenfranchised. All the ordinary citizens, with jobs and mortgages and kids, wanted nothing more than for the Karl Dahls of the world to pa.s.s through and keep on going.

Karl might have quietly left a string of homicides in his wake as he'd moved from place to place. He could have been invisible, blending into the background, calling no attention to himself.

If not for the neighbor stupidly stepping out of his house to videotape the tornado bearing down on the city that fateful day, Karl Dahl might have walked away from the Haas ma.s.sacre into the mists, hopped another train, and gone on to another state, and the Haas murders would have gone unsolved.

"Come on," he said.

He abandoned his lunch and approached her again.

Carey sat very still, like a small prey animal afraid to move or breathe. He put a hand around her wrist and pulled her up out of the chair. Not roughly, but firmly.

"I made this nice bed for you," he said. "I want you to lie down on it."

She wouldn't have thought it possible, but the sense of dread became heavier, more oppressive. She knew too much about what had been done to Marlene Haas.

Had it started like this? Karl fixating on the woman, deciding she was his angel because she had helped him out, then wanting to possess her physically and s.e.xually, flying into a rage when she tried to reject him. The rage unleashing the demons that lived in his soul. The demons spinning themselves into a frenzy.

"Lie down now," Karl ordered her as she stepped to the edge of the nest he had made for her. The idea of his touching her, forcing himself on her, was beyond revolting.

Afraid to antagonize him, Carey lowered herself to the floor, lay down on her side, curled into the fetal position. Karl sat down and put her head in his lap and stroked her hair.

"You sleep now, angel. We have all the time in the world."

For what? she wondered. Did he think she would become his willing traveling companion? Or did he think that in death her soul would become his forever?

"You're with me now. I haven't had an angel in a long, long time."

"You had an angel once?" she asked in a hushed voice. "What was her name?"

He didn't answer the question. Finally, he said very softly, "I had an angel once."

"What happened to her?" Carey asked.

Karl looked down into her face, expressionless. "She went to heaven . . . like angels do."

57.

CAREY HELD EVERYmuscle in her body tight against the violent trembling shuddering through her. She closed her eyes and pretended to sleep while Karl Dahl continued to stroke her hair and whisper to her,"You are my perfect angel," over . . . and over . . . and over.

She had no idea how much time pa.s.sed. An hour that seemed like minutes. Minutes that seemed like an hour.

Questions of who his last angel had been played through her mind, the possibilities all bad. Men like Karl didn't come from loving homes with doting parents. They came from unhappy childhoods. Absent or abusive father. A mother who either blamed the child for everything wrong in her life or clung to the son because of her abusive husband. The child learned the power of violence, and his only example of a man's relationship with a woman was a terrible, distorted story laced with hate and self-loathing.

Some people would have pitied the Karl Dahls of the world. She pitied Karl the child, but a sad story was not license to commit murder. Carey knew plenty of people with similar backgrounds--cops, lawyers, social workers--who had suffered a Karl Dahl childhood but raised themselves above it, instead of succ.u.mbing to it.

But then she was a prosecutor by nature, and prosecutors tended to think in black-and-white. Good or Evil. Innocent or Guilty.

And as a judge, she was supposed to operate with a blindfold on.

She wondered about Karl's last angel and what had happened to her. Did he consider his mother his angel, and had she died of old age or disease or her husband's brutality? Had his angel been his teenage love? Or his first victim? Or his last victim?

Marlene Haas had been kind to him, had offered him work, had offered him food. He had returned her kindness with horror. Karl Dahl was not a man destined for happy endings.

Based on a store of terrible knowledge, Carey projected what would happen to her if she couldn't escape. Karl would play out his little fantasy of loving and caring for her, but he would tire of it or feel the need to move on. Or she would do something to anger him, and that anger would be a trigger to his rage, and in his rage he would kill her.

"Can't stay in one place too long."

"Why is that?"

His face darkened as he looked down at the knife he'd used to cut the sausage. . . .

"It's just best to move on."

He couldn't take her with him. She would slow him down and draw people's attention to him. He would see only one practical and expedient solution to the situation.

Carey opened her eyes a crack. She could see the knife he had stolen from her home, lying on the makeshift table maybe six feet away.

She could feel the shape of her cell phone in her pants pocket.

Karl moved away from her, easing her head down on one of the pillows. He spoke to her in the softest of whispers, as if he believed her subconscious could hear him.

"Now, I have to step outside to relieve myself, angel. I'm sorry, but I'm having to make sure you don't try to leave me."

Carey lay very still as he moved to her feet. He slipped a plastic cable tie around one ankle and then the other, looping the second through the first, hobbling her. Then used more cable ties to attach the hobble to a concrete block. She probably wouldn't be able to stand up, let alone run.

She listened to him move around the little room; then she couldn't hear him anymore. She counted to twenty, afraid if she opened her eyes sooner he would be standing in the doorway, watching her; but he was gone.

Shaking like a palsy victim, Carey sat up, fished the phone out of her pocket, and pressed the b.u.t.ton to turn it on. She held it against her breast to m.u.f.fle the little tune it played as it came to life, and she watched the screen anxiously as it told her it was searching for a signal.

"Come on, come on," she whispered. She was shaking so badly, she was afraid she would drop the thing.

One bar lit up on the signal indicator, then two. The battery icon in the lower right-hand corner showed only a sliver of power left.

"Come on, come on. . . ."

A third signal bar lit, and the brand name of the phone service appeared across the top of the screen. She had a connection.

Carey punched Kovac's number, listened to his phone ring on the end of the call.

"Come on, Sam. . . ."

58.

"THERE'S A CABINon one of the small lakes off Minnetonka," Elwood said. "It's owned by a Walter Dempsey. I found a reference to a Walter Dempsey in Stan's personnel file from a few years back."

"Did you call the local cops?" Kovac asked.

"They're sending three units to lock the place down, and take Dempsey into custody if he's there."

"You and Tinks go out there. See what's what. Who knows? Maybe we'll get lucky. Maybe he went back there for a breather after he finished his craft project on Kenny Scott."

"If he's not there, we pull back," Elwood said, "keep the local coppers on surveillance. They can move in and grab him when he shows."

"He's probably got an a.r.s.enal in the cabin," Kovac said.

"I already warned them." Elwood nodded toward the door to the interview room. "How's that going?"

Kovac scowled. "These people make me want to go take a hot shower. Bunch of f.u.c.king pervs."

"Literally," Elwood said.

"And Tippen recognized this a.s.shole?"

"Makes you wonder."

"I don't want to wonder," Kovac said with disgust. "Jesus Christ. Remind me never to sit in a chair after he gets up from it."

"He's a student of the cinema," Elwood said seriously. "X-rated films are, like it or not, a subgenre, and protected by the First Amendment rights to freedom of expression."

"Somehow, I don't think the founding fathers were thinking ofDebbie Does Dallas when they wrote that," Kovac said dryly. "Tell him he'll go blind watching that s.h.i.t."

The cell phone clipped to his belt rang. He snapped the holder free and looked at the screen.

"Oh, my G.o.d," he breathed as his heart began to pound.

Carey.

59.

"COME ON, SAM. . . .Come on, Sam. . . ." she breathed against the body of the phone, her eyes riveted to the opening that had once been a doorway into the room.

"Carey? Jesus G.o.d, are you all right?"

"No," she murmured, terrified to raise her voice.

"Carey, can you speak up? I can barely hear you."

"No. I can't. He's going to come back soon."

"Who? Who took you?"

"Karl Dahl."

There was an uncharacteristic beat of silence before he asked, "Where are you?"

"In an old munitions building. It's a ruin. It's burned. And I can smell a refinery of some kind. I can't see it, but I can smell it. Hurry, Sam, please."