by Tami Hoag
“Oh, God . . .”
“What’d you do then, Neil?” Kovac prodded gently, stepping close.
“I h-hit h-him b-back. Oh, Christ!” He sobbed and bent over, putting both hands over his face. “And now he’s dead. They’re both dead! Oh, God!”
Kovac took the cigarette from him, breathing in the smoke, craving one of his own. With regret, he put it out on the table, burning a black mark in the woodgrain surface.
“Did you kill him, Neil?” he asked softly. “Did you kill Mike?”
Fallon shook his head, hands still over his face. “No.”
“We can test your hands for gunpowder residue,” Liska said.
“We’ll do what’s called a neutron activation analysis,” Kovac explained. “It won’t matter how many times you’ve washed your hands since. Microscopic particles become embedded in your skin from the blowback. It shows up for weeks after.”
He was bluffing, playing the card as a scare tactic. The test could only show whether the person had come in contact with barium and antimony—components of gunpowder—and a million other mixtures, natural and man-made. Practically speaking, even a positive result would have little forensic value and less validity in a courtroom. Too much time had elapsed between the incident and the test. Defense attorneys made a living at arguing that time equaled contamination of evidence. Paid forensic expert witnesses would have a field day disputing the results. But Neil Fallon probably didn’t know that.
A knock sounded at the door, and Elwood moved away from it. Lieutenant Leonard stuck his head in. A constipated expression hardened his face. “Sergeant. Can I have a word?”
“I’m kind of in the middle of something here,” Kovac said impatiently.
Leonard just looked at him, eloquent in his silence. Kovac looked back at Neil Fallon and stifled a sigh. If he was going to confess to anything, this was the time to get it: while he was emotionally weak, before he had a chance to pull up the shields and regroup, before he could utter the L word.
Kovac felt like a pitcher being taken out of the game while he was still throwing heat.
He turned to Liska. “Guess you’re the closer,” he said under his breath.
“Sergeant . . .” Leonard said.
Kovac stepped out the door and followed him into the next room, where Leonard had been watching through the glass. The room was dark. A theater with a window for a movie screen. Ace Wyatt stood at the window with his arms crossed, looking through the murky pane at Neil Fallon. Wyatt gave Kovac the profile for another few seconds, then the heavy-things-on-my-mind look. It was the same expression plastered on billboards around the Twin Cities advertising his television show.
“Why are you doing this, Sam?” Wyatt asked. “Hasn’t this family suffered enough?”
“That depends. If it turns out this one killed the other two, then the answer would be no.”
“Did something happen at the autopsy I don’t know about?”
“Why should you know anything about it?” Kovac challenged. “Maggie Stone isn’t in the habit of passing that kind of information around.”
Wyatt ignored the question, above the curiosity of the common street cop. “You’re treating him like you know for a fact Mike was murdered.”
“We’ve got good reasons,” Kovac said. He pulled the Polaroids out of his inside coat pocket and spread them out on the window ledge. “First, he did it in the can. Lots of people do, but it had to be a hassle for him to get in there with the chair—backward, no less. Liska picked up on that. I thought maybe he wanted to leave us a neat death scene, but it makes more sense that somebody else wanted to leave us a neat death scene. When was the last time old Mike gave a shit about anyone else? The gun came out of the closet in his bedroom. Why wouldn’t he just do it there? It’s not like he was worried about making a mess. The place was a pigsty.
“Plus there’s Neil Fallon’s record, his history of problems with the old man, the fact that he lied about being at the house.”
“But the time he was there and the time of death don’t line up,” Leonard pointed out.
“Other factors might have skewed the TOD,” Kovac said. “Stone will tell you that.”
“But there wasn’t anything conclusive in the autopsy to say murder, was there?” Wyatt asked.
Kovac lifted a shoulder, his eyes moving from the Polaroids to the interview room and back. Neil Fallon was sitting, both elbows on the table, his head in his hands. Liska stood beside him, leaning down.
“If something happened that night, you’d be better off telling us now, Neil,” she said quietly, like a friend. “Get it off your chest. You’re carrying a lot of weight there.”
Fallon shook his head. “I didn’t kill him.” His voice sounded tinny and far away as it came out of the television that was mounted on a wall bracket near the window. The camera in the interview room looked down on the parties involved, making them appear small and distorted.
“I hit him,” he said. “I did that. I hit him in the face. My own father. And him in that goddamn chair. And now he’s dead.”
“We’ll do the neutron activation,” Kovac told Leonard and Wyatt. “See if we can’t scare something out of him.”
“And if you can’t?” Leonard asked.
“Then I apologize for the inconvenience and we try something else.”
Wyatt frowned. “Why not wait until you get word from Stone? There’s no sense tormenting the man unnecessarily. Mike was one of ours—”
“And he deserves to have us do more than go through the motions,” Kovac said, his temper rising. “You want I should just wave this one through, Ace? You want to go to Maggie Stone and try to get her to sign this one off as an accident too? Keep it all quiet so Iron Mike’s legend isn’t tarnished? Jesus. What if this hump capped him?”
“Kovac,” Leonard snapped.
Kovac shot him a glare. “What? This is the homicide squad. We investigate violent deaths. Mike Fallon died a violent death, and we want to look the other way because we think he killed himself, because that could be us in the Polaroids in five years. Suicide makes too much sense to us, because we know what the job can do to a man, how it can leave him with nothing.”
“And maybe that’s why you want to think it’s something else, Sam,” Wyatt said. “Because if Mike Fallon didn’t kill himself, maybe you won’t either.”
“No. I didn’t want to see it. Liska put it in my face. I might have walked away from it. But she was right to dig at it, to look at it like any other shooting. There’s too much going on here to just say what a shame.”
“I’m just thinking of showing due respect for his only remaining family,” Wyatt said. “At least until the ME gives us something concrete.”
“Well, that’s fine. And if you had any say in the matter, maybe I’d listen to you. But unless I had a dream, I was at your retirement party, Ace. What you think about my investigation doesn’t amount to a hill of rat shit.”
Ace Wyatt’s face went purple.
Leonard stepped up. “You’re out of line, Kovac.”
“What line is that? The ass-kissing line?” Kovac muttered as he walked away from the pair. Wyatt’s toady, Gaines, stood in the back corner of the room, staring at him with the smug smirk of a classroom tattletale. Kovac gave him a look of distaste and turned back toward the window.
“If I was out of line, I’m sorry,” he said without sincerity. “It’s been a hell of a week.”
“No,” Wyatt said on a tight sigh. “You’re right, Sam. I don’t have any say here. It’s your investigation. If you want to punish Neil Fallon and invite a lawsuit against the department because you need some time on the shrink’s couch, it’s not my place to do anything about it. That is a shame, and I wish it didn’t have to be that way.”
“Yeah, well, I wish for world peace and for the Vikings to win the Super Bowl before I die,” Kovac said. “You know how it is, Ace. Murder’s an ugly business.”
“If that’s what this is.”
> “If that’s what this is. And if that’s what this is, then I’ll nail the turd that did it. I don’t care who it is.”
He went back to the window and stood watching.
“Are you right- or left-handed, Mr. Fallon?” Elwood asked.
“Left.”
Elwood set a small kit of containers and cotton swabs on the table. Fallon stared at the test kit, straightening in his chair.
“We’ll swab the back of your index finger and thumb with a five percent nitric acid solution,” Liska explained. “It doesn’t hurt.”
Kovac jerked his gaze to the photos of Mike Fallon’s death scene.
“Jesus,” he whispered, picking up one Polaroid and then another, looking at them, then setting them aside. One after another. His pulse kicked up a notch.
“What?” Wyatt demanded.
The thing he had known was there but hadn’t been able to see. He looked at the last of the photographs.
“Please hold out your left hand, Mr. Fallon,” Elwood said, preparing a swab.
Neil Fallon started to reach out, his hand trembling visibly.
Kovac held the Polaroid up against the window. A split-screen image of father and son. Mike Fallon, a dead husk, bloody, half-beheaded; the gun that had killed him lying on the floor on the right side of his chair, apparently having fallen from his hand as life rushed out of him.
“Mr. Fallon?”
The question mark in Elwood’s voice caught Kovac’s ear.
“Mr. Fallon, I need you to hold out your hand.”
“No.”
Neil Fallon pushed his chair back from the table and stood up. “No. I’m not doing it. I don’t have to do it. I won’t.”
“It’s not a big deal, Neil,” Liska said. “If you didn’t shoot him.”
He moved back, shoving the chair aside, tipping it over. “I didn’t kill anybody. You think I did, then charge me or go fuck yourselves. I’m outta here.”
Elwood turned toward the window.
Kovac stared at the photograph as Neil Fallon stormed out of the interview room.
“Mike Fallon was left-handed,” he said, looking at Wyatt. “Mike Fallon was murdered.”
26
CHAPTER
“MIKE FALLON WAS left-handed,” Kovac said. “He’s gonna kill himself, he takes the gun in his left hand.”
He pantomimed the action for the people assembled in Leonard’s office: Leonard, Liska, Elwood, and Chris Logan from the county attorney’s office. “He supports the left hand with the right, sticks the barrel in his mouth, pulls the trigger. Bang! That’s it. He’s dead. The recoil pulls the arms away from the body. So maybe the gun is flung away from him. Or maybe it stays in the gun hand—the left hand—as that arm swings to the side. But there’s no way it falls to the right side of the chair.”
“You’re sure he was left-handed?” Logan asked. The prosecutor looked as if he’d been blown across the street from the government center by an arctic wind: dark hair mussed, cheeks red. The mono-brow formed a dark V above his eyes.
“I’m sure,” Kovac said. “I don’t know why it didn’t hit me at the scene. I guess because it made too much sense that Mike offed himself.”
“But his son would know he was left-handed.”
“Neil’s left-handed too,” Kovac argued. “So he helps the old man along to the next life, pulls back, sets the gun down with his left hand. That puts it on Mike’s right.”
Logan’s frown deepened. “That’s too thin. You have anything else? Fingerprints on the gun?”
“No. Mike’s prints are on the gun, but they’re smudged. Like maybe someone had their hands on top of his.”
“Maybe doesn’t cut it. Maybe his hands were sweating and he changed his grip repeatedly. Maybe the prints smudged as the gun slipped from his hands after he pulled the trigger.”
“A witness puts Neil Fallon at the scene that night,” Elwood said.
“And Fallon lied about it,” Kovac added.
“But it was two or three hours before the TOD, right?”
Liska took a turn. “He didn’t get along with Mike. Lots of pent-up resentment and jealousy. Mike wouldn’t loan him the money he needed. Fallon admits to having argued with his father. He admits to having hit him.”
“But he doesn’t admit to having killed him.”
Kovac swore. “Is that what we have to do now? Serve every damn perp up on a platter to you guys? Dressed up like Christmas turkeys with signed confessions in their beaks?”
“You have to bring me more than what you’ve got. His lawyer’s going to have him out of here in five minutes. You have motive, and that’s it. You have opportunity that doesn’t jibe with the ME’s take on what happened. You’ve got no physical evidence, no witnesses. So the guy lied to you. Everybody lies to the cops.
“You don’t have enough to hold him. I don’t have enough to take to the grand jury. Put him at the scene when someone heard a gunshot. Find the old man’s blood on his shoes. Something. Anything.”
“If Neil had his hands over Mike’s on the gun, then he left his fingerprints on the old man’s skin,” Liska pointed out.
“It’ll be hard to pick up now,” Kovac said. “Stone and Lars clipped the fingernails, examined the hands for defense wounds . . .”
“It’s still worth a call,” she insisted. “Ply her with your charm, Sam.”
Kovac rolled his eyes. “How about a search warrant for Neil Fallon’s place? So we can find the bloody shoes.”
“Type out an affidavit and go see Judge Lundquist with my blessing,” Logan said, checking his watch. “I’m all for nailing this bastard if he killed the old man.” He shrugged into his coat. “But the case has to stand up. Otherwise it’s another cluster fuck for the press to turn their cameras on, and I’m not going to be the guy in the spotlight stomping on the burning bag of dog shit.
“I’ve got to go,” he announced. “I’m due in judge’s chambers.” He was out the door and gone before anyone could object.
“The downside to drawing the politically ambitious prosecutor,” Elwood said. “He’ll take only well-calculated risks he knows he can win.”
“Logan’s smart,” Leonard interjected. “The department can’t take another fiasco.”
Translation: We fuck up and the brass is up Leonard’s ass with a fire hose, Kovac thought. With Ace Wyatt orchestrating the charge from behind the scenes. And the shit storm would drench him and Liska. Elwood might escape, being on the periphery of the case.
“I’ll get the affidavit,” Kovac said.
Liska’s pager went off and she grabbed for her belt.
“Should we get a sheriff’s unit to sit on Neil Fallon’s place?” Elwood asked. “They’ll want in on the search. It’s their jurisdiction.”
Leonard started to say something. Kovac spoke over him, ignoring the lieutenant’s authority to run the case.
“Call Tippen. See what he can do for us. If anyone from the SO is coming to the party, I want it to be him.”
“Sam, I’ve gotta go,” Liska said. “Ibsen’s regained consciousness. Do you need me for the search?”
“No, go ahead.”
“The night-shift supervisor called me,” Leonard said loudly, bringing her up short of the door. “I agreed you could be Castleton’s second on the Ibsen assault. In case you were wondering.”
“Thanks, Lieutenant,” she said, trying unsuccessfully not to look sheepish. “I meant to tell you. Ibsen is my informant.”
“Maybe when you get back, you can take five minutes to fill me in as to what he’s been informing you about.”
“Sure, later.” She turned away from him, making big eyes at Kovac.
“Good luck, Tinks,” he said. “I hope the guy has total recall and twenty-twenty night vision.”
“I’ll be happy if he can do more than drool.”
“REGAINING CONSCIOUSNESS,” AS it turned out, was something of an overstatement. Ibsen had cracked an eye partially open and moaned. The medical sta
ff of the Hennepin County Medical Center ICU had responded by pumping him full of morphine.
He looked small and fragile and pathetic in the bed, swathed in bandages, wired to an array of machines. No one sat at his bedside praying for God to spare him. Not one person had come to see him, according to the ICU staff, even though his boss at Boys Will Be Girls had been notified, and had presumably told Ibsen’s friends at the club. Apparently, he didn’t have any. Then again, maybe the idea that he had been beaten to a pulp was enough to deter acquaintances from associating with him.
“Can you hear me, Mr. Ibsen?” she asked for the third time.
He lay with his head turned toward her, eyes open but unfocused. Some people claimed conversation penetrated the brains of even the deeply comatose. Who was she to say it didn’t?
“We’ll get the people who did this to you,” she promised.
Cops. She felt sick to her stomach thinking it. Cops had done this damage. Cops had committed this crime, this sacrilege against the uniforms they wore. The damage didn’t end with Ken Ibsen. It extended to the image of the department, to the trust the public was supposed to have in the officers they paid to protect them. She hated Ogden and Rubel for betraying that trust, and for undermining her belief in the community of cops that had been her second family most of her life.
She wasn’t naive. She knew not all cops were good cops. There were plenty of assholes walking around with badges. But murder and attempted murder? At the very core of her being she still didn’t want to believe it. Ken Ibsen was barely living proof that she would have to.
“They’ve got a hell of a lot to answer for,” she whispered, and turned away.
A uniform sat outside the door to Ibsen’s room with a fishing magazine in his lap. Hess, according to the name tag. A fat guy waiting for retirement or a heart attack, whichever came first. He gave Liska the “Oh, it’s just a girl” smirk. She wanted to kick his chair. She wanted to yank the magazine out of his hands and beat him on the head with it. She could afford to do neither.
“What precinct are you out of, Hess?”
“Third.”
“Do you know why you were pulled downtown?”