Dust to Dust

by Tami Hoag

  Poor kid. Even going so far as to try to understand Mike through his life experiences. What was to understand? There weren’t that many layers to guys like Mike Fallon. That was where Neil had the edge on Andy: he had understood Mike perfectly.

  “I’VE GOT NOTHING to say to you, Kovac. Not without having my lawyer present.”

  Neil Fallon glared at him and paced by the door to the interview room. He looked natural in the orange jailhouse jumpsuit, except it should have had dirt and grease on it. He had had to cuff the pants legs to keep from tripping over them.

  “This isn’t about you, Neil,” Kovac said, sitting in the plastic chair and squaring an ankle over a knee. Mr. Relaxation.

  “Then why are you here? I got nothing to say to you.”

  “So you’ve said. So I guess you don’t want a chance to help yourself out.”

  “How can I help myself out if it isn’t about me?”

  “Good faith.”

  Fallon’s eyebrows climbed his forehead. “Good faith? Stick it up your ass.”

  “For a guy who claims to be straight, you’re awful big on wanting me to stick something up my ass,” Kovac observed.

  “Fuck you!” Fallon snapped, catching himself too late. He growled and paced some more. “I’m suing you, Kovac. Suing this rotten police department.”

  Kovac sighed his boredom. “Look, Neil, you tell me you’re innocent. You tell me you wouldn’t kill your old man.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “So help me understand some things. That’s all I’m asking. Understanding is the key to enlightenment. You know, the policeman is your friend,” he said as if he were talking to a four-year-old. “And if he’s not, you’re fucked. Make me like you here, Neil.”

  Fallon leaned against the wall beside the door and crossed his arms, thinking.

  “My lawyer says not to talk to you without him present.”

  “Once you’ve engaged counsel, nothing you say without him present can be used against you. You can’t get hurt here. You can only help yourself. I never wanted us to be enemies, Neil. Hell, we shared a bottle. You’re a decent, hardworking guy. So am I.”

  Fallon waited, lower lip sticking out.

  “I brought you some cigarettes,” Kovac said, holding up the pack.

  Fallon came over and took it, making a face. “They’re all bent!”

  “Hey, they still burn.”

  “Jesus,” he grumbled, but took one out and tried to straighten it. Kovac handed him a lighter.

  “I’m just curious about some things with Andy—and no, I don’t think you killed him. I don’t know if anybody did. Everybody says he was depressed. I just want a clearer picture of that, that’s all.”

  Behind the haze of smoke, Fallon narrowed his eyes, thinking: trick question.

  “See, I’m a homicide cop,” Kovac went on. “I look sideways at everybody when somebody’s suddenly dead. It’s nothing personal. If my old man turned up dead, I’d look at my mother, for chrissake. But there’s another picture here to look at. Say, what if Andy wanted to get close with your dad again. He wanted a chance to win him back, so to speak. So he tries to do some things with Mike, talk to him, spend time with him. Maybe he buys him that big-ass TV in the living room—”

  “Wyatt bought that,” Fallon said, matter-of-fact. He took a seat and considered the crooked cigarette.

  “What?”

  “Ace Wyatt. The old man’s guardian angel,” Fallon said sarcastically. “It was always that way since the shooting. Wyatt helped with hospital bills, bought stuff for the house, for Andy and me. Mike always said that’s how it was—cops looking out for cops. That’s what it’s all about, he said, obligation. And that’s what it was. Wyatt never wanted to spend any time with the old man, or with any of us. He’d come into the house and act like he thought he was getting fleas. Big asshole.”

  “Yeah, that’s pretty rotten, buying you stuff like that.”

  “I always figured he felt guilty ’cause Mike caught that bullet. Wyatt living right across the street from Thorne and all. Him being the one that Thorne called for help. It should have been him in that wheelchair. But Mike beat him to it.”

  Kovac digested the theory, thinking Fallon probably had a pretty good handle on it. Mike had caught that bullet instead of Ace Wyatt, and he’d never let Wyatt forget it. The fading image of the noble legend washed away by the acid rain of reality.

  “Mike needed something, he’d call Wyatt,” Neil went on, puffing on the L-shaped cigarette. “And don’t think he didn’t throw that up in my face every chance he got. I should have been taking care of him. The oldest son and all that bullshit. Like he ever did shit for me.”

  “How old was Andy at the time of the shooting?”

  “Seven or eight, I guess. Why?”

  “Someone told me he had wanted to sit down with Mike and talk about what happened. To try to get a better understanding of your father.”

  Fallon laughed and coughed and puffed on the crooked cigarette. “Yeah, that was Andy. Mr. Sensitivity. What’s to understand? Mike was a bitter old son of a bitch, that’s all.”

  “I guess Mike didn’t want to talk about what happened. Had Andy said anything to you?”

  He thought about it for a moment, looking as if he was trying to remember. “I guess he said something about it one of those last times I saw him. Mentioned it in relation to Mike not wanting him poking at old wounds. I didn’t pay much attention. What was the point digging all that up?” He studied Kovac for a moment. “Why do you care?”

  Kovac turned the information over in his mind, mixing it into what he already had, trying to recall something he thought Mike had said in the last few days of his life.

  “I’m just thinking,” he said, just to fill airtime. “Andy had some problems with depression. If it meant a lot to him to get back with the old man, and Mike wouldn’t cooperate, then maybe he really did hit bottom and check out. And maybe Mike blamed himself. . . .”

  “Well, that would be a first.” Fallon finished the cigarette and crushed the butt out on the sole of his shoe. “Never blame yourself when you can blame someone else. That was Mike.”

  Kovac checked his watch.

  “So if you’re on the suicide angle now, how long before I get outta here?”

  “It’s out of my hands, Neil,” Kovac said, pushing to his feet. He went to the door and pushed the buzzer for the jailer. “Not my fault. It’s those rotten lawyers. I’d help you if I could. Keep the cigarettes. It’s the least I can do.”

  31

  CHAPTER

  THE MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE printed Ace Wyatt’s shooting schedule for Crime Time in the entertainment news every Thursday. Part of the show’s gimmick was Wyatt’s interaction with the audience. It was like a fucking infomercial, Kovac had thought the few times he’d watched it. Or something from the Food Channel. Ace Wyatt: the Emeril Lagasse of law enforcement.

  The crime du jour was being reenacted in a hockey rink in the suburb of St. Louis Park. Murder by curling stone: a cautionary tale of poor sportsmanship. Kovac badged the security bruiser standing at the roped-off section of bleachers and walked into the thick of Ace Mania.

  A twelve-by-twelve red carpet had been spread on a section of the ice. The camera stood at one corner of it, along with a bored videographer who looked like Gandhi in a down jacket. Another videographer, this one on skates and with a handheld camera, leaned against the frame of the hockey goalie’s net. Four lucky fans had been chosen to sit in the penalty boxes. Another hundred sat behind them. Lots of large women and wimpy-looking older men in red PROActive! sweatshirts.

  “We need quiet now, people!” shouted a thin, rawboned woman in black-rimmed glasses and a coat that looked as if it had been made from olive-green shag carpeting. She clapped her hands precisely three times and the crowd obediently went silent.

  The director, a fat guy gnawing on a Slim-Fast bar, shouted at the two actors: “Places! Let’s get it right this time!”

&nb
sp; One of the actors, a fiftyish guy in a Nordic patterned sweater and what looked like blue tights, slipped and slid across the ice, arms working like spastic propellers at his sides.

  “It’s bothering me, Donald,” he complained. “How can I think like a curler when there’s a hockey goal sitting there?”

  “Tight shots, Keith. No one’s going to see the net. Think small. If you have to think at all.”

  The actor went to find his mark. The director gave the God-spare-me-from-actors shake of the head.

  Kovac spotted Wyatt sitting away from the audience, having his makeup retouched. Hugging themselves against the cold of the arena, a couple of Hollywood mover-shaker types stood behind him, smiling gamely while Gaines snapped a Polaroid. An anorexic young woman with brilliant red hair sculpted into a hedge on top of her head, and a twenty-something guy in a black leather coat and tiny rectangular spectacles.

  “One more for the scrapbook,” Gaines said. The flash burst, and the camera spat out its product.

  “The audience doesn’t seem to mind the cold,” the guy said.

  Gaines gave them the engaging grin. “They love Captain Wyatt. We turn away droves at every taping. They’re so excited to be here. What’s a little chill?”

  The girl bounced up and down and rubbed her hands over her arms. “I’ve never been so cold in my life! I haven’t been warm one minute since I got off the plane. How do people live here?”

  “You think this is cold?” Kovac said, and huffed his disgust. “Come back in January. You’ll think you died and went to Siberia. Colder than a grave-digger’s ass.”

  The girl looked at him the way she might look at some odd creature in the zoo. Gaines lost the grin.

  “Sergeant Kovac. What a pleasure,” he said flatly.

  “For me too,” Kovac said, giving the scene the disdainful once-over again. “I don’t get to the circus every day. I have a real job.”

  “Yvette Halston,” the redhead introduced herself. “Vice president, creative development, Warner Brothers television.”

  The guy stuck his hand out. “Kelsey Vroman, vice president, reality programming.”

  Reality programming.

  “Kovac. Sergeant. Homicide.”

  “Sam!” Wyatt came up out of his chair, shooing the makeup woman away. He pulled the paper-towel bib out of the neck of his double-breasted navy Italian suit and tossed it aside. “What brings you here? Did you get the lab results back on the Fallon evidence?”

  The WB VPs pricked up their ears at the sound of real cop talk.

  “Not yet.”

  “I made a couple of phone calls. They’re on it today.”

  “Yeah, thanks, Ace,” he said without appreciation. “Actually, I came to ask you about something else. Have you got a minute?”

  Gaines came to Wyatt’s side, clipboard in hand, and tried to show him a schedule. “Captain, Donald wants to get through this section before one. The rest of the curling people were told to be here no later than one-thirty for the interview portion. We’ll be cutting lunch by thirty minutes as it is. The union people will have a fit.”

  “Then break for lunch now,” Wyatt ordered.

  “But they’re ready for the shot.”

  “Then they’ll be ready after lunch, won’t they?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Then what’s the problem, Gavin?”

  “Yeah, Gavin,” Kovac goaded. “What’s the problem?”

  Gaines gave Kovac a cold look. “I believe you’re the one who pointed out that Captain Wyatt is retired from the force,” he said. “He has other obligations than to solve your case for you, but he’s too decent a man to tell you to go away.”

  “Gavin . . .” Wyatt chided. “I don’t have any obligations more important than a murder investigation.”

  The VPs both got wet on that one.

  “Ace,” the redhead purred, “you’re consulting on a case? You didn’t tell us! That could be very exciting! What do you think, Kelsey?”

  “We could get something set up with various law enforcement agencies for a weekly segment. Police, DEA, FBI. Have the consultation at the end of the show. Five minutes, mano a mano, detective to detective. Ace offers the benefit of his no-nonsense wisdom. I like it. It adds a sense of immediacy and vitality. Don’t you think so, Gavin?”

  “It could work very well,” Gaines said diplomatically. “I’m just concerned about our schedule today.”

  “We’ll deal with it, Gavin,” Wyatt said dismissively, then turned to Kovac again. “Let’s go upstairs, Sam. You can have a bite while we talk. Our caterer is fabulous. Gavin found him. Makes the best little quiches.”

  Wyatt led the way up the concrete steps to a room overlooking the rink through a long window. Food had been artistically arranged on a long table draped in red with the Crime Time scrapbook as a centerpiece. Wyatt didn’t go near the spread, but gestured Kovac to.

  “I don’t like to eat when we’re shooting,” he explained, opening a bottle of water. “I stay sharper that way.”

  “Gotta stay on your toes for this.” And not bust the girdle, Kovac thought. Wyatt looked as if he hadn’t taken a full breath in five hours.

  “I know you don’t think much of it, Sam,” he said, “but we’re serving a real purpose here. Helping solve crimes, helping people stand up for themselves and prevent crime.”

  “Making a bundle.”

  “That’s not a crime.”

  “No. Never mind me,” Kovac said, paging idly through the scrapbook, slowing at the pages from Wyatt’s retirement party. Posed and candid—if there could be such a thing as a candid shot of Ace—Polaroid shots of the great man in his glory. A shot of Wyatt pumping Kovac’s hand, Kovac looking as if he’d just grabbed hold of an eel. A posed shot with a Channel Five reporter. A candid of Wyatt speaking to Amanda Savard. His gaze lingered.

  “I don’t like game shows either,” Kovac said, trying to remember having seen her there that night, but he’d been too busy feeling sorry for himself. “I’m told I’m getting cranky in my old age, but that’s bullshit. I’ve always been cranky.”

  “You’re not old, Sam,” Wyatt pointed out. “You’re younger than me, and look where I am now. A great second career. On top of the world.”

  “I’ll probably just stick with the one career until someone shoots me,” Kovac said. “Which reminds me why I’m here.”

  “Mike.” Wyatt nodded. “Do you have anything more on the son, on Neil?”

  “I’m more here about Andy, actually.”

  Wyatt’s brow furrowed. “Andy? I don’t understand.”

  “I’m curious as to the why of it all,” he said in vague explanation. “I know he’d been looking into the Thorne murder, thinking maybe Mike would want to reminisce, maybe they could get closer through it.”

  “Ah . . .”

  “He talked to you.” He put it as if it were a statement of fact, as if he’d seen the notes, leaving little room for denial, even though he knew no such thing.

  “Yes,” Wyatt said. “He mentioned it to me. I know Mike didn’t want any part of it. Painful memories.”

  “For you too.”

  Wyatt nodded. “It was a terrible night. Forever changed the lives of everyone involved.”

  “Tied you to the Fallons like you were family.”

  “In a way, yes. You don’t go through something like that with another officer and not come away with a bond.”

  “Especially with the circumstances.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “With you living right across the street. With the Thornes calling you for help, but Mike getting there ahead of you. You had to feel a little like Mike took that bullet instead of you, huh? Mike probably felt that too.”

  “The tricks of fate,” Wyatt said with a dramatic sigh. “My number wasn’t up. Mike’s was.”

  “There must have been a little guilt though. You went above and beyond the call helping Mike out all these years.”

  Wyatt stood sil
ent for a moment. Kovac waited, wondering what the makeup was hiding. Surprise? Anger?

  “Where are you going with this, Sam?”

  Kovac shrugged a little and picked a baby carrot from a tray on the table. “I know Mike took advantage all these years, Ace,” he said, snapping the carrot in two. “I’m just wondering . . . With you making the big move to Hollywood . . . Making big dough . . . I’m just wondering if he might have tried to squeeze you for a little more.”

  Kovac could see the color rise in Wyatt’s face now.

  “I don’t like the direction you’re taking,” he said quietly. “I tried to do right by Mike and his family. And maybe he did take advantage and play on my guilt for not being the one in the chair. But that was between Mike and me, and that’s how it should stay. We both deserve better than what you’re thinking.”

  “I’m not thinking anything, Ace. I don’t get paid to think. I’m just wondering, that’s all. You know me, I’ve gotta take things apart and see how they work.”

  “The job’s made you too cynical, Sam. Maybe it’s time you got out.”

  Kovac narrowed his eyes a little, studying Wyatt, trying to decide if that was a threat. Wyatt could make a couple of his famous phone calls, and that’d be it. Kiss the career good-bye or spend eternity down in Records listening to Russell Turvey hawk up lugies. And for what? To reveal the awful truth that Ace Wyatt felt guilty for being alive and whole? Even if Mike had tried to squeeze a little extra something out of him, the notion of Wyatt killing over that was ludicrous.

  Unless the reason he had paid Mike Fallon off all these years had to do with some other kind of guilt altogether.

  “How well did you know the Thornes?”

  Gaines rapped on the open door and came into the room then, eyebrows raised at Wyatt. “Excuse me, Captain. Kelsey and Yvette have gone to buy parkas. Everyone is breaking for lunch. Will you be joining the audience, or is this going to take longer?” he asked, emphasizing the word this with a look at Kovac. He pulled a small lint brush from a jacket pocket and gave Wyatt’s lapels a quick swipe.