by Tami Hoag
“I don’t care what you need, Detective Kovac,” she said. “You aren’t more important than my child.”
Kovac arched a brow and took a step back. So much for her weakened physical state. She looked like a tigress ready to tear his throat out. “My mistake.”
“Yes, it is.”
She looked down then, touched a hand to her forehead, and winced as her fingers brushed against the angry red abrasion. Flesh v. Concrete.
“I’m sorry, Anka. We got cut off. Please get Lucy in her pajamas and put a movie on for her.” She was silent for a moment, listening to the nanny. “Yes, all right. Put her on… Hi, sweet pea,” she said softly, tears welling in her eyes.
Kovac turned a little away from her in order to look like he wasn’t eavesdropping, even though he was.
“No, honey, I won’t be home before you go to bed. I’m sorry… I know I promised, but I had an accident and fell down, and I’m at the doctor now…”
She closed her eyes, and a couple of tears squeezed out from between her lashes. “No, honey, I don’t know what time Daddy will get home… Why don’t you have a slumber party with Anka?”
She touched a knuckle beneath the blackening eye to discreetly wipe away the tears.
Kovac scowled and turned away completely. He didn’t want to feel sorry for Carey Moore. She was no friend to him, certainly no friend to Stan Dempsey, who would never be right again after working the Haas murders. He couldn’t even imagine what Wayne Haas and his son were feeling after hearing about the judge’s ruling against the prosecution. The last thing Kovac wanted was to feel sorry for her.
“I’ll see you in the morning, sweetheart… I love you more…” Her voice strained, she said good night and ended the call.
Kovac waited. Liska joined him.
“Did you make her cry?” she whispered, accusatory.
“I didn’t do anything!”
“And you wonder why you’re single.”
“I know why I’m single,” he grumbled. “And I know why I’m going to stay that way.”
“Let’s get this over with.” Judge Moore had her voice and her composure back.
Kovac shrugged. Liska gave him a look of womanly disgust and pushed past him.
“Judge Moore, I’m Detective Liska-”
“I know who you are,” the judge said. “Can we cut to the chase, Detective? I want to go home.”
The resident piped up then. “No, I’m sorry, Judge Moore. You have a concussion. We’ll need to admit you overnight for observation.”
Carey Moore raised her chin and gave the young doctor a glimpse of the steely look she had leveled at many a difficult witness in her days as a prosecutor. “I’m going home to my daughter. I’ll sign a release. Why don’t you get that process started?”
The science club president looked like she didn’t know whether she should be offended or afraid. She disappeared into the hall.
“You might want to reconsider that, Judge Moore,” Liska said. “Someone attacked you.”
“I was mugged. It’s over.”
“With all due respect, you don’t know that.”
Kovac watched her set her jaw as best she could, considering the split lip. She wanted to believe what she wanted to believe.
“You managed to piss off a lot of people today, Judge,” he said. “Maybe someone decided they needed to express themselves in person.”
“He stole my wallet.”
“Bonus.”
“He?” Liska said. “Did you see him?”
“No. He was behind me. The voice was male.”
“Young, old? Black, white?”
“Angry. That’s what I remember. Angry. Full of rage.”
“What did he say?”
“‘You fucking bitch. You fucking cunt,’” the judge said without emotion.
“Did he use your name?” Kovac asked.
“No.”
“You didn’t recognize the voice.”
“No. Of course not.”
“So, he knocked you down, grabbed your purse. That was it?” Kovac said, knowing that that wasn’t so.
She closed her eyes briefly, started to sigh, winced again, and tried to cover that up. Tough cookie, he thought. The mutt had done a number on her. She had to be in a considerable amount of pain, and he knew from experience docs didn’t dole out the good narcotics to people with concussions. They had probably given her some Tylenol. Big deal. Like putting a Band-Aid on a shark bite. She had to have one mother of a headache.
“I was going to my car-”
“Did you see anyone in the parking ramp?” Kovac asked.
“No.”
“In the skyway?”
“No. I went to pull my keys out of my purse-”
“You should have had them out before you left the government center.”
She flicked an annoyed look at him. “I dropped my Palm Pilot, bent to pick it up, he hit me from behind, hard across the back, with some kind of club. He kept hitting me, cursing me. I was trying to grab my car keys.”
“Where was your wallet?”
“I dropped my purse when he knocked me down. Everything spilled out of it.”
Kovac and Liska exchanged a glance.
“And he was calling you names, hitting you?” Liska said.
“Yes.”
“‘You fucking bitch, you fucking cunt,’” Kovac said.
“Yes.”
“And when did he go for your wallet?”
“I don’t know. I hit the alarm on my car key. He slammed my head down. I lost consciousness.”
“He took your wallet as he left,” Kovac said.
“I guess.”
Then the wallet hadn’t been his first objective. Purse snatchers snatched purses. Muggers hit and ran. This guy had been focused on his victim, personalized the attack by calling her names, prolonged the attack, grabbed the wallet as an afterthought as he took off.
“He knocked you down from behind and he kept hitting you?” Kovac said. “Where was he? Standing over you?”
“No. Closer. I remember he grabbed my hair and yanked my head back. I felt his weight on me.”
“So he was on his knees? Maybe straddling you?”
She knew where he was going, and she didn’t want to hear it. Carey Moore had prosecuted more than her share of violent crimes-assaults, rapes, murders. She didn’t want to admit that someone might have tried to rape her, kill her.
“Was your driver’s license in your wallet?” Liska asked.
“Yes.”
“Is the address on the license your home address?”
“No. I’ve known better than that for a long time, Detective.”
“Was there anything in your purse that might have had your home address on it?”
She didn’t answer for a moment, staring down at her hands, which had been scraped badly on the concrete. Several fingernails were broken and jagged.
“No. I don’t think so,” she said at last, the strength in her voice draining away. “I’m very tired. I want to go home. I didn’t see the man who attacked me. I can’t tell you anything that will be of any use to you. Can we wrap this up?”
“Did you have anything with you besides your purse?” Liska asked.
“My briefcase. Did someone pick it up? I have work to do over the weekend.”
“No one at the scene said anything about a briefcase,” Kovac said. “They have your purse and the stuff that came out of it. What was in the briefcase?”
He could see a little panic creeping in around the edges of her composure. “Briefs, reports, letters regarding sentencing recommendations.”
“Something every mugger would want,” Kovac commented with sarcasm.
Carey Moore ignored him. “The briefcase was my father’s. It’s important to me.”
“Any paper in it regarding The State v. Karl Dahl?”
She refused to look at him, pissed off because he was proving her wrong in her assumption the attack was random. He couldn’t re
ally blame her. Nobody wanted to think of themselves as a specific target of violence.
“Yes.”
“We’ll also need to know what other cases you’ve presided over in the recent past,” Liska said. “Who might have a grudge. Who’s up for a stiff sentence. Cons you sent up who’ve been recently released. Anything.”
“Yes,” said the judge in a voice that was barely a whisper. The adrenaline had burned off, and she was headed for the lowest of lows, Kovac knew. He’d seen it a thousand times. He’d been a victim of it himself once or twice.
“Can your husband come and get you, Judge Moore?” Liska asked. “You can’t drive yourself.”
“I’ll call a car service.”
“You don’t seem in any shape to go anywhere,” Kovac said, wondering where the hell this husband was. His wife had been assaulted. There was a better-than-even chance that the attack could have been an attempt on her life. “He’s out of town, your husband?”
“He’s at a business dinner. I can manage.”
“Does he know you’re here? Have you called him?”
“He’s at dinner. He turned his phone off.”
The jaw was tightening again. She didn’t want to talk about the absent husband. She would rather scrape herself out of a hospital bed, deal with a concussion, some cracked ribs, and an emotional trauma by herself, than try to find the one person who should have made it to the hospital before Kovac and Liska had.
“Where’s the dinner?” Kovac asked. “If you’re going home, you need someone to be there with you. We can call the restaurant, or send a couple of uniforms to tell him.”
“I don’t know where the dinner is,” she said curtly. “There’s no need to interrupt him. My nanny lives in.”
Kovac glanced at Liska and raised an eyebrow.
“I’ll drive you home, Judge Moore,” he said. “As soon as you’ve signed your way out of here.”
“That isn’t necessary.”
“Well, I believe that it is, and that’s what’s going to happen,” he said flatly. “You’re a target, and you’re smart enough to know it. I’ll take you home, see that your house is secure.”
Carey Moore said nothing, her gaze fixed stubbornly on her hands. Kovac took her silence as acquiescence.
“Good to know you haven’t lost all your common sense,” he grumbled.
“We can’t say the same thing about you, Detective, or you wouldn’t be treating me like this,” she said.
Kovac sniffed. “Like what? I’m not treating you any differently than I treat anyone.”
“I guess that explains your lack of advancement in the department.”
“Maybe,” he admitted. “But unlike some people, my career isn’t about ambition. It’s about catching bad guys.”
6
LISKA DISTRACTED THE press in the waiting room with a brief statement and a lot of “No comment” and “I can’t speak to that at this point in the investigation.”
Kovac rolled Carey Moore in a wheelchair through a warren of halls to a little-used side exit, where an orderly had brought Kovac’s car around. The judge had nothing to say as he helped her into the passenger seat and drove out onto the city streets.
“Where do you live?” he asked.
She gave the address in the same short, clipped tone she might use with an anonymous cabdriver. Her home was a short distance and a world away from downtown Minneapolis, in an area of large, stately houses overlooking Lake of the Isles. He had ten minutes-fifteen tops-to get something useful out of her.
“You’ll have one hell of a headache tomorrow,” he said.
She stared straight ahead. “I have a hell of a headache right now.”
“You don’t think that the attack seemed personal?”
“By definition, a physical assault is personal, wouldn’t you say?”
“You know what I mean. Leave the lawyer bullshit on the side, Judge. You’ve been in the system long enough to know better.”
“Oh? You don’t believe lawyers are too obtuse and egomaniacal to pick up on the fact that not all cops are mentally challenged?”
Kovac shot a glance at her. Every time they passed a streetlight, the harsh white light swept over her face, pale as a ghost.
“I think there wasn’t enough time between news of my ruling and my departure from the building for a disgruntled citizen to formulate a plan to kill me,” she said.
“Never underestimate the capabilities of a really determined scumbag.”
“I’ll stitch that on a sampler while I’m recuperating over the weekend.”
“People knew you were going to rule on Dahl’s past record today. Maybe someone anticipated the worst. I know I did.”
“So where were you between six-thirty and seven, Detective Kovac?”
“Doing a bunch of bullshit paperwork on an assault case you’ll probably dismiss next week.”
“I will if you haven’t done your job properly,” she said.
“Are you saying Stan Dempsey didn’t dot all his i’s and cross all his t’s on the Haas murders?”
“I’m saying my job is more complicated than you choose to believe. I don’t make rulings based on whim. Being a judge is not being a rubber stamp for the police department or for the county attorney’s office. I don’t have the luxury of bias anymore.”
Her temper was bubbling just under the surface. He could hear it in her voice. He’d been in the courtroom to testify when she had been a prosecutor. Cool, controlled, but with a sharp edge and an aggressive streak beneath the veneer of calm, she had been fun to watch. Exciting, even. And the fact that she was attractive hadn’t hurt anything, either.
She had known how to use her looks, too, in a way that was subtle, and classy. Many a man in the witness box had fallen for the trap and come away from the experience mentally eviscerated without even quite realizing how it had happened.
“You think I’m not appalled by the murder of Marlene Haas and those two children?” she said. “You think I don’t see those crime scene photos in my sleep? Those children mutilated and hanging by their necks like broken dolls? You think I don’t want their killer to pay? To pay more than this state’s justice system can dole out?”
There were tears in her voice now. She was wrung out, her ability to keep emotions at bay worn away in the aftermath of being attacked.
Kovac pushed at her limits. “Then why don’t you have the guts to do something about it?”
“I should make rulings in favor of the prosecution so they can be immediately overturned on appeal?”
“The buck has to stop somewhere.”
“It does. It stops with me. I want convictions to stand up on their own, not lean against personal prejudices, not be open to debate or attack.”
“So you let defense attorneys just have their way? You let these dirtbag rapists and killers have more rights than the people whose lives they’ve ruined?” Kovac said, his own temper rising.
“I do my job,” she snapped. “I’m going to be sick.”
“Me too.”
“No. I’m going to be sick. Now.”
Kovac glanced over at her. She was leaning forward and breathing too quickly. “Oh! Jesus!”
He swerved the car to the curb and hit the brakes too hard. Carey Moore pushed the door open, turned, and fell out onto the pavement, retching.
Christ, Kovac thought as he shoved the car into park and bolted out the driver’s door, this was all he needed, to be responsible for further injuring a judge. That could go on his record right above insubordination.
She was on her hands and knees, half in the gutter, half on the sidewalk, heaving. Kovac knelt down beside her, not sure if he should touch her.
“Are you all right?” he asked stupidly.
In a stronger moment she would have decapitated him for being an asshole. Now she simply drew herself into a ball, shaking, and, he thought, maybe crying. He began to wish he’d stayed behind with the press and let Liska drive her home. He barely knew how
to handle women when they weren’t crying.
Fumbling, he dug a handkerchief out of his hip pocket and held it out to her. He put his other hand on her shoulder.
“It’s clean,” he said. “Let me help you up.”
The judge took a blind swing at him. “Leave me alone!”
She took a couple of shaky breaths and pushed herself up, sitting back against her heels. “Just take me home and leave me the hell alone!”
A little way down the street, a couple of hookers stood outside a tattoo parlor, smoking Christ knew what and staring. The tall one in red took a couple of steps toward them.
“Honey? You need a cop?”
Kovac scowled. “I’m a cop.”
“I wasn’t axing you.” She took a couple of steps closer. NBA tall, with an Adam’s apple the size of a fist. Transvestite. “I’m axing the lady.”
Carey Moore held up a hand. “I’m fine. Thank you. He’s fine. He’s driving me home.”
“Looks like he’s been driving you with a golf club, sugar.”
“She was mugged,” Kovac said.
The transvestite sniffed in disbelief. Kovac dug out his badge and held it out. “You want to get in the car too? I can give you a ride to Booking.”
“For what? Standing up?”
“For pissing me off.”
“Kovac, shut up,” the judge snapped. “I want to go home.”
The transvestite went back to the tattoo parlor as Kovac helped Carey Moore to her feet. As wobbly as a newborn fawn, she tried to steady herself with a hand on the roof of the car, but started to fall again as her knees gave way.
Kovac caught her against him. “Easy. You should have stayed in the hospital. I’m taking you back.”
“You’re taking me home,” she said stubbornly. “I can vomit without a medical professional supervising.”
“You’re dizzy.”
“I have a concussion. Of course I’m dizzy.”
Kovac helped her ease back down into the passenger’s seat and squatted down in front of her so he could see her face in the glow of the streetlight and the neon in the window of the pawnshop behind him. She looked like she might have been an extra in Dawn of the Dead, but there was still a glint of determination in her eyes.