Dust to Dust

by Tami Hoag

  “No, he couldn’t prove it. We closed the case,” she said, struggling to keep her focus over another wave of unsteadiness. Pain pounded her head like a hammer. “He was moving on to other assignments.”

  Not by choice. By order. Her order.

  “Did Ogden know that?”

  “Yes, he did. What was he doing there—at Andy’s?”

  “Sightseeing.”

  “That’s ghoulish.”

  “Stupid too, but I don’t think he’s the brightest bulb in the chandelier to begin with.”

  “Have you questioned him about his presence at the scene?”

  “I have no right to question anyone, Lieutenant,” Kovac reminded her. “The case is closed. A tragic accident. Remember?”

  “I’m not likely to forget.”

  “I assumed Ogden and his partner responded to the radio call. I had no reason to think he’d have any other motive to be there. Silly question—was there bad blood between him and Fallon? Had Ogden threatened him?”

  “Not that I’m aware of. No more animosity than the usual, I should say.”

  “You’re all used to having people hate you.”

  “So are you, Sergeant.”

  “Not my own kind.”

  She let that pass. “Resentment comes with the territory. People who do bad things don’t like to suffer the consequences of their actions. Bad cops are worse than criminals in that respect. They have the idea they can hide behind the badge. When it turns out they can’t . . .

  “I can check the case file,” she said, letting out a long, carefully measured breath. She felt hot and clammy with sweat. She needed to sit down, but she didn’t want to show weakness in front of him, nor did she want him to think she would pull the case up on the computer while he waited. “I don’t expect to find anything. At any rate, you and I both know in our hearts that—despite what the ME ruled—Andy probably committed suicide.”

  “I don’t let my heart get involved, Lieutenant. I let my gut do my feeling for me.”

  “You know what I mean. He wasn’t murdered.”

  “I know he’s dead,” Kovac conceded stubbornly. “I know he shouldn’t be.”

  “The world is full of tragedy, Sergeant Kovac,” she said, breathing a little too quickly. “This is our piece of it for the week. Maybe it would make more sense to us if it were a crime, but it wasn’t. That means we deal with it and move on.”

  “Is that what you’re doing?” he asked, moving to the end of the desk where she stood. “Dealing with it?”

  Savard got the feeling he wasn’t talking about Andy Fallon anymore. He seemed to be looking at the marks on her face—what he could see of them around the sunglasses. She started to take a step back, but the floor didn’t quite seem to be under her foot. Blackness closed in around her, and the dizziness came in a rippling wave.

  Kovac moved quickly, catching her by the upper arms. She brought her hands up to his chest to steady herself.

  “You need to see a doctor,” he insisted.

  “No. I’ll be fine. I just need to sit for a minute.”

  She pushed against him, wanting free. He didn’t let go. Instead, he turned her, and this time when her knees gave out, her butt hit her chair. Kovac pulled the sunglasses off her face and looked into her eyes.

  “How many of me do you see?” he asked.

  “One is plenty.”

  “Follow my finger,” he ordered, moving it back and forth, then up and down in front of her face. His expression was grim. His eyes were a smoky shade of brown, a hint of blue in the depths. More interesting up close than from a distance, she thought absently.

  “Jesus,” he muttered, staring at the area around her right eye. One big hand came up and cradled that side of her face gently, thumb pressing experimentally against the bones. “Ten bucks says that scars.”

  “It won’t be my first,” she said softly.

  His hand stilled. His gaze found hers, searching. She turned away.

  “You need to see someone,” he said again, sitting back against her desk. “You might have a concussion. This is the voice of experience talking.” He pointed to a butterfly clip holding together a gash over his left eye. The area surrounding it was mottled purple with a yellow tint.

  “Did you have a concussion?” Savard asked. “That might explain some things.”

  “Naw. My head’s like granite. Maybe you and I have something in common after all,” he said, as if he’d given the subject some thought.

  “I imagine you have a job to do, Sergeant,” she said, moving her chair toward the desk and hoping the motion wouldn’t make her dizzy enough to fall off or to vomit. Kovac didn’t move. She didn’t like the proximity at all. He could have lifted his hand and touched her hair, touched her face the way he had a moment ago.

  She didn’t like him behind the desk. That was her space. He had breached a defense, and she imagined he knew it.

  “You don’t want to talk about Andy Fallon,” he said quietly. “Why is that, Lieutenant?”

  She closed her eyes in frustration, then opened them. “Because he’s dead and I feel responsible.”

  “You think you should have seen it coming. Sometimes you can’t,” he said. “Sometimes you’re watching for one thing, and life belts you with a sucker punch out of nowhere.” He pantomimed a slow left hook that pulled up just short of her injured eye.

  Savard stared at him. “You probably have an actual murder to investigate,” she said, reaching for the telephone. “I suggest you get to it.”

  He watched as she dialed to get her messages. He didn’t look happy, but then, she’d never seen him happy. Perhaps he never was.

  Something else we have in common, Sergeant, she thought.

  He went back around the desk reluctantly and picked up his hat.

  “It’s not always smart to be brave, Amanda,” he said quietly.

  “You may call me Lieutenant Savard.”

  His mouth hooked up on one corner. “Yeah. I know. I just wanted to hear how it sounded.” He paused. “When you saw Andy Sunday night, did you have a glass of wine?”

  “I don’t drink. We had coffee.”

  “Mmm. Did you know Andy changed his sheets and did his laundry before he killed himself?” he asked. “Strange, huh?”

  Savard said nothing.

  “See you at the funeral,” he said, and walked out.

  She watched him go, her messages playing to a deaf ear.

  15

  CHAPTER

  FOR FORTY YEARS the uniforms had liked having breakfast at a place called Cheap Charlie’s, which was located in the no-man’s-land northeast of the Metrodome. Run-down, with a filthy fifties exterior, the place had spat in the face of progress, recession, gentrification, and everything else that might have changed it in the years it had existed. Cheap Charlie’s had no need to change. Their clientele was cops. The decades could come and go, but cops would never change. Tradition was all.

  Mike Fallon had probably eaten here as a rookie, Liska thought, looking at the place through the blue bag serving as her passenger’s window. She had lucked out and caught a parking spot in the front just as a radio car was pulling out.

  She had eaten here as a rookie. They had probably all been served by the same waitress, a woman called Cheeks. In her heyday, before modern photography, Cheeks had looked like a chipmunk with a full load of nuts in her mouth. All cheeks, no chin, and a button of a nose. In the intervening years, gravity had done its thing to the point that Jowls would have been a more appropriate nickname, but Cheeks had stuck.

  She was working the counter this morning, a shrunken doll with slitted eyes and a leaning tower of dyed-black hair, pouring coffee and smoking a cigarette in defiance of all known health codes. Not one cop in the place would reprimand her, and the place was a sea of uniforms and mustaches. A lot of the detectives ate breakfast here as well. Kovac among them some days. Tradition.

  She went to the counter and took a vacant stool beside Elwood Knutson, her
gaze scanning the room.

  “Elwood, I thought you were too enlightened to eat here.”

  “I am,” he said, regarding a plate smeared with the remains of bacon and eggs. “But I’ve decided to try the Protein Power diet, and I couldn’t think of a better place for the required breakfast. See, it’s so out, it’s hip again. What’s your excuse?”

  “I haven’t had a really good heartburn in a long time.”

  “You’re in for a treat.”

  “Bingo,” she said to herself as she spotted Ogden. He had wedged himself into a booth at the back and had an expression on his face that suggested he hadn’t had a proper bowel movement in too long. Because of the angles, she couldn’t see his breakfast partner and the recipient of his sour scowl.

  Elwood didn’t turn, studying Liska instead. “Something I should know about?”

  “Something you might know about. Do you remember when that uniform Curtis was murdered off duty?”

  “Yes. Part of a string of gay crimes. A serial killer in the making.”

  “Supposedly. What do you know about gay-bashing in the department?”

  Elwood nibbled thoughtfully on the end of a bacon strip. He wore a mouse-brown porkpie hat with the brim bent up in front.

  “I know I find it deplorable to harass or discriminate on the basis of sexual preference,” he said. “Who are we to choose for others? Love is rare—”

  “Thank you. That’s admirable. I’ll send your mailing address to the ACLU,” Liska said dryly. “We’re not talking about you, Elwood.”

  “Who are we talking about?”

  She glanced around discreetly for eavesdroppers, hoping for a few. “I’m talking about the uniforms. What’s it like in the trenches? Department PC policy aside, what’s the attitude among the rank and file? I heard Curtis had complained to IA about harassment. What was that about? Are they still letting Neanderthals into the club? I thought that went out with Rodney King and the LA riots.”

  “Sadly, the job attracts them,” Elwood commented. “It’s the badge. It’s like a shiny coin to a monkey.”

  The uniform on the other side of Liska looked around her to give Elwood a dirty look.

  “Might have been an orangutan in a past life,” Liska whispered. She took a sip of the coffee Cheeks had poured for her and was instantly reminded it was time to change the oil in the Saturn. “Anyway, I know that Curtis investigation was a major cluster fuck.”

  “That was Springer’s. His conception was a cluster fuck.”

  “That’s true, but it was a uniform that screwed the pooch on that investigation, the way I hear it. Big dumb ox of a guy name of Ogden. You know him?”

  “We don’t travel in the same social circles, I’m afraid.”

  “I’d be more afraid if you did,” Liska said, sliding from the stool.

  She made her way toward the back of the diner, fielding greetings without looking, holding her gaze on Ogden. He still hadn’t noticed her, and his conversation with the man she couldn’t see was becoming more intense. She couldn’t make out the words, but the anger was distinct. She wished she could have come in behind him and blindsided him, but the diner was too narrow. He finally saw her and straightened, nearly tipping over a glass of orange juice.

  “I’d go with prune if I were you,” she said. “I hear those steroids can stop a person up like concrete.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ogden said. “I’m no steroid juicer.”

  A comeback stuck in Liska’s mouth as she got her first look at Ogden’s dining companion. Cal Springer. And he couldn’t have looked more guilty if he had been caught with a hooker.

  “Hey, Cal. Interesting company you keep. Is this how you don’t look bad to IA? Hanging out with the guy they think screwed your case? Maybe people are wrong about you. Maybe you really are as dumb as you look.”

  “Why don’t you mind your own business, Liska?”

  “I wouldn’t be much of a detective, then, would I?” she pointed out. “Look, Cal, I’m not on your ass here. I’m just saying it looks bad, that’s all. You should think about these things if you want to be a political animal.”

  He turned toward the window. No view there. The plate glass was fogged over with smoke and hot breath and airborne grease.

  “Where’s your partner these days, Cal?” Liska asked. “I need to talk to him.”

  “Vacation. Two weeks in Hawaii.”

  “Lucky stiff.”

  Springer looked as if he would have preferred two weeks in hell to this conversation.

  Liska turned back to Ogden and asked him point-blank: “How’d you and your partner come to be at the Fallon scene?”

  Ogden scratched at his flattop. His scalp was fish-belly white between the fine, short hairs. “Caught the call on the radio.”

  “And you just happened to be in the neighborhood.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Dumb luck. Well, that’d be the kind you’d have.”

  Ogden’s little eyes looked like BBs set in dough. He rolled the sloped shoulders back. “I don’t like your attitude, Liska.”

  Liska laughed. “You don’t like my attitude? Guess what, Ox,” she said, bending down to get in his face. “You’re a few evolutionary limbs below me in the cop tree. I can shit my attitude all over your head if I want and nobody will listen to you complain about it. Now, if I don’t like your attitude—and I don’t—that’s a problem.

  “Why were you there?” she asked again.

  “I told you, we caught the call.”

  “Burgess had the first response. Burgess was first on the scene.”

  “We thought he might need help.”

  “With a DB.”

  “He was riding alone. He had to secure the scene.”

  “So you and Rubel came and tromped all over it. And it was just a happy coincidence that the vic turned out to be the IA investigator that was on you for the Curtis screw-up.”

  “That’s right.”

  Liska shook her head in amazement. “Were you busting rocks with your head when they were passing out brains? What were you thinking? You want IA on you again?”

  Ogden looked around, scowling at anyone he thought might be listening. “We responded to a call. How were we supposed to know the DB was Fallon?”

  “But when you found out, you stayed. You put your prints all over his house—”

  “So? He offed himself. It wasn’t like somebody did it for him.”

  “You couldn’t know that. You still don’t know that. And it’s never your call to make as long as you’re in a uniform.”

  “The ME ruled it,” he said. “It wasn’t a murder.”

  “It wasn’t a spectator sport either, but you couldn’t resist, could you? Did you take a couple of Polaroids to share with the rest of the homophobes back in the locker room?”

  Ogden slid out of the booth and stood up. Liska tried to hold her ground, but had to take a step back or be forced back. One big vein stood out in a zigzag on his forehead, like a lightning bolt. His eyes were cold and as flat as buttons. The chill of fear that went through her was instinctive, and that was frightening to her in and of itself. Fear was not a common companion.

  “I don’t answer to you, Liska,” he said in a tone that was both quiet and taut.

  She met his glare with her own, knowing she was poking a stick at a bull. It might not have been the smartest tack, but it was the one she’d chosen and there was nothing to do now but ride it out. “Fuck up another one of my crime scenes and you won’t have to answer to anyone, Ogden. You won’t be wearing a badge anymore.”

  The vein pulsed like something in a horror movie, and color pushed up from his too-tight collar into his face.

  “Hey, B.O., let’s rock ’n’ roll.”

  Liska knew it had to be Ogden’s partner, Rubel, coming toward them from the front of the diner. Still, she didn’t turn away from Ogden. She sure as hell would never have turned her back on him. He couldn’t seem to brea
k his fixation on her. The rage within him swelled with every short breath. She could see it, feel it.

  Liska’s brain flashed on the crime scene photos from the Curtis murder. Rage. Overkill. A human skull smashed like a pumpkin.

  People around them were staring now. Cal Springer got up from the booth and beat a path for the front door, narrowly missing banging shoulders with Rubel.

  “B.O., come on. Let’s do it,” Rubel ordered.

  Ogden looked at him finally, and the tension snapped like a twig. Liska felt the air rush out of her lungs. Rubel gave her a once-over from behind a pair of mirrored shades.

  He was definitely the better-looking of the two. Dark hair, square jaw, built like Michelangelo’s David on steroids. He was the brains of the pair, she guessed, when he herded his partner toward the door. Hustling Ogden away from trouble, much as he had done that day at Fallon’s.

  She followed them out to the sidewalk. They were headed toward the corner parking lot across the street.

  “Hey, Rubel!” she called. He turned and stared at her. “I need to speak with you too. Alone. Come to the CID offices at the end of your shift.”

  He didn’t answer. His expression didn’t change. He and Ogden walked away, the collective width of their shoulders taking up the entire sidewalk.

  If Andy Fallon’s death had not been ruled an accident or suicide, Ogden would have been high on the list of suspects. Was he stupid to have shown up at the scene? Maybe not. Responding to the dead body call had given him ample opportunity to legitimately put his fingerprints all over Andy Fallon’s house.

  How did you force a man to hang himself?

  A chill went through her, and Liska knew it had little to do with the temperature and everything to do with the fact that she was looking at another cop and trying to see what was rotten about him.

  The little bell rang on Cheap Charlie’s door as it swung open behind her.

  “Call me a stickler for details,” Elwood said, “but I was of the impression we don’t investigate closed cases.”

  Liska watched the uniforms get into a cruiser. Rubel was the driver. Ogden rode shotgun. The car dipped down on its springs as he got in on the passenger’s side.