Prior Bad Acts

by Tami Hoag

  Kovac could imagine Stan Dempsey sitting in that chair for hours on end, staring at the carnage. Images straight out of the darkest nightmares anyone could imagine. The brutality stark and cruel, frozen in time. The faces of the victims, blank and staring. The mind didn’t want to accept the idea that these had been real people, living human beings, only hours before the photographs had been taken. Or that in those hours prior to death, these people-this mother and two small children-had been subjected to unspeakable tortures, that they had experienced choking fear, that they had probably known they were going to die.

  If a person’s mind allowed those realities to sink in, then it became too easy to hear the screams, to see the sheer terror in those now-blank faces. It became too easy to see the events unfold like the worst kind of horror show.

  If a cop allowed that to happen, if he made a case like this one personal, if he allowed logic and procedure and a professional distance to be overrun by emotion and empathy and reaction… thereon lay the road to madness.

  A terrible feeling of foreboding lay like a stone in Kovac’s gut as he climbed the basement stairs. This time he took in everything as he went through the house.

  The kitchen was a mess. Cereal flakes were all over the counter, all over the floor, as if the box had exploded. Raisins were scattered throughout like rat turds. The milk carton had been overturned. Milk puddled on the counter and dripped over the edge.

  The cereal box looked to have been slashed several times with a knife. The countertop had received similar treatment-multiple stab wounds. The knife was not in sight, but there was some blood.

  Stan Dempsey lost his mind in this room, Kovac thought as he looked around at the chaos. A small television sat on the counter. The local news was running, but the sound was off. Karl Dahl’s mug shot and his physical description were up on the screen.

  Considered extremely dangerous.

  Do not attempt to approach.

  Call 911.

  Kovac moved into the dining room. From the dining room, he could see the living room, which was also trashed. The old brown couch had been shot to death. A floor lamp had been knocked over. The coffee table had been overturned.

  What the hell went on here?

  Kovac briefly considered the notion of an intruder, but the house had been locked up tight. No. This was Stan Dempsey’s rage. This was what had been building inside that homely, quiet, strange man in the months since Stan Dempsey had been called out on a triple homicide one stormy night in August a year past.

  The array of weapons laid out on the dining room table was impressive. Shotguns, a deer rifle, several handguns, some that appeared to be World War II vintage. Knives of various lengths and blades. An old leather sap-a leather sack filled with sand or buckshot. Coppers used to carry them in the old days before the Miranda rules had come down. A smack behind the ear could take down a big guy instantly if it was done right. Nobody carried them anymore. Not legally, anyway.

  And lined up neatly in a row above the weapons: medals. A Purple Heart. A Bronze Star. Several commendations from the police department. All laid out on display, as if Stan had fully expected people to come into his home. These were the things he had wanted seen, the awards that had marked his life into segments-the army, war, the police department.

  On the buffet behind the table stood a couple of framed photographs. Stan in a bad suit from the seventies and a too-wide tie. Standing beside him, a homely woman with beauty-parlor-blond hair teased and sprayed into a sheer helmet circling her head. A girl of maybe five or six sitting in front of them, the only one smiling, a black hole where one front tooth had been.

  The family. Kovac hadn’t known Dempsey had ever been married. It was difficult to picture. He had seen no evidence of a woman living in the house. No clothes in the closets, no woman stuff on the dresser or nightstand. The wife was gone, by either divorce or death. The little girl was grown and long gone by now.

  Finally, with a sense of dread heavy in his chest, Kovac looked at the video camera perched on its tripod, pointing at the lone chair pulled out from the table. He stepped behind it, looking how to turn the thing from RECORD toVCR.

  Stan Dempsey came on the small screen, walking in front of the camera, seating himself in the chair. When he began to speak, there was no emotion whatsoever. Very matter-of-fact. He talked about the things that had gone on in his life, how all he’d ever wanted to do was become a cop, a detective. He talked about how much he had loved the job over the years. He talked about a couple of cases he’d worked that he was especially proud of.

  In the background Kovac could see through the doorway to the kitchen to a cookie jar in the shape of a pig sitting on its ass on the counter. He looked up from the video screen, through the doorway into the kitchen. There was the cookie jar, a silly, stupid thing completely incongruous with its owner. A simple, normal thing completely in contrast to the creepy, dark tone of the videotape.

  The whole thing seemed surreal. Dempsey was too calm on the video. The kind of calm that came to people when they had made a difficult decision and felt at peace. He picked up a knife and stroked the blade lovingly while he explained what kind of knife it was, what its purpose was.

  He put the first knife down and picked up a broad, gleaming hunting knife with a deadly-looking serrated blade. He explained how it could be used to cut the throat of an animal, how it could be used to gut the animal, to skin the animal.

  He picked up a boning knife and explained the process of removing bones and cutting the meat from them. The job took a very sharp knife, he said. Stan talked about how he oiled and honed the blades of his knives himself and took great pride in his work.

  The hunting knife and the boning knife were both absent from the table now, Kovac noted.

  On the tape, Dempsey picked up a long two-pronged fork, the kind that came with barbecue sets.

  “Depending on how a person used this, ”Dempsey said in his flat, monotone voice, “this could be a very effective tool.”

  Jesus God.

  He talked about his guns, how the first two of the collection had been his father’s, his own pistol from WWII and another he had taken off a dead German.

  He talked about the Haas murders, how hard he had worked that case, the rage he had felt in the interrogation room looking at the man who had tortured and murdered a woman and two little children. He talked about how angry he’d been when the lieutenant had pulled him not only from the case but from the rotation, and stuck him on a desk.

  “… and now the judge has ruled Karl Dahl’s prior bad acts can’t be admitted into evidence. The jury might find that evidence too significant. The buildup to a triple homicide, the making of a killer. Judge Moore found that to be prejudicial and inflammatory. Well, that’s the whole idea, isn’t it?” Dempsey asked. “Are we supposed to pretend Karl Dahl was a damn Boy Scout before he butchered Marlene Haas and those two children? Of course he wasn’t. He was a criminal and a pervert, but the jury won’t hear about that.”

  Dempsey shook his head slowly. “That’s just not right. It’s not right for a judge to take away the prosecution’s case. Judge Moore’s decision puts Karl Dahl one step closer to walking on a triple murder, and she should be ashamed of herself.

  “I hear she has a small daughter. I wonder how differently she would feel if her daughter were raped and sodomized and hung up from the ceiling like a slaughtered lamb. I think she’d sing a different tune.”

  Holy Christ.

  Kovac felt sick.

  “Of course, it doesn’t matter now,” Stan Dempsey said.“ Karl Dahl is out, running around loose. Escaped. I don’t know how that could happen, but it did. And I have to do something about that. Someone has to take responsibility. That’ll be me. I’ll do that. The guilty have to pay.

  “The guilty have to pay…”

  The screen turned to snow.

  Stan Dempsey was gone.

  16

  CAREY WAS SURPRISED when she woke Saturday morning, beca
use she didn’t believe she had slept all night. She had hovered in the strange twilight between consciousness and unconsciousness, denied the rest of sleep, still subjected to the nightmares. She had felt as if she were underwater on a moonlit night, being held under by a hidden force. Dark images of violence had drifted before her, and she had fought to free herself from them, breaking the surface into consciousness, gasping for air, only to be pulled back under moments later.

  David had not come to bed. When he had walked her upstairs, he’d told her he would stay in the guest room so she could have the bed to herself and not be disturbed by him moving around. Carey thought he had probably been as relieved as she not to be sharing the bed. As much as she would have liked someone to comfort her, that someone was not her husband. David wasn’t good at taking the role of defender-protector. She was supposed to be strong and self-reliant so he didn’t have to be.

  Slowly, carefully, painfully, Carey eased herself up to sit for a moment with her feet over the side of the bed. A little dizziness buzzed around her brain, but not as bad as she had thought it would be. The next step was to stand, and she managed that. Both knees were sore from landing on the concrete when her assailant had knocked her down. She walked like a ninety-year-old woman, shuffling her way into her bathroom.

  The face that greeted her in the mirror was a horror. Black eye, bruised swollen knot on her forehead, stitches crawling over her lip like a centipede. Most adults would be startled to see her. The idea of her daughter seeing her this way for the first time upset Carey more than seeing herself had.

  Lucy was only five. She didn’t need to be told anything more than that someone had knocked Mommy down. If she had been a little older, Carey would have worried about what the kids at school might say to her, having overheard their parents’ comments. But at five, children were still mostly interested in innocent things that existed in their immediate orbit.

  An overwhelming sense of protectiveness rushed through her, and Carey wanted to take Lucy in her arms and hold her tight and not let anything bad come into her life. The things Carey had seen over the years, as a prosecutor, as a judge… The horrible things she knew one human could do to another for no reason at all… She wanted to shield her daughter from all of it.

  She thought of the two foster children found hanging in the basement of the Haas home and wondered if their mother had ever had the same desire.

  Moving in slow motion, Carey undressed, dropping the torn slacks and ruined silk blouse on the floor to be discarded later. She took a warm shower, wincing as the water droplets touched the torn skin of her knuckles and her knees. She supposed she should have called Anka to help her, but she was too private a person. David should have been there. Even if he thought she didn’t want him there, he should have been there to offer help and sympathy and comfort.

  She wondered what Kovac had made of the scene last night. He was a good cop, and a good cop was a quick study of people and the dynamics between them. He had taken an instant dislike to David; that much had been clear. He had all but accused her husband of having been with another woman when he should have been with her. The fact that that was probably true had been more than Carey wanted to deal with. And she knew Kovac hadn’t missed that either.

  She pulled on an old pair of baggy gray sweatpants and a favorite black cashmere cardigan sweater that had been washed and worn so many times it felt like a child’s security blanket wrapped around her.

  A quick peek out the front window told her the media had not given up interest in her. Vans from all the local TV stations were parked across the street, their dish antennae standing at attention.

  The radio car Kovac had promised sat at the curb in front of the house like a very large guard dog. This wasn’t the first time in her career Carey had needed police protection. Her life had been threatened more than once when she had been prosecuting gang murders. Going head-to-head with gang criminals and their sleazy attorneys was not about winning friends.

  Sitting on the bench was no different. A criminal trial always ended with one side unhappy, angry, bitter. The judge was considered a friend only by the winning team.

  Turning away from the window, Carey noticed for the first time that the house was silent. No TV blasting Saturday-morning cartoons. No sounds of people having breakfast. It was early, but Anka was an early riser, and Lucy was never far behind her, even on the weekend.

  She opened the bedroom door and listened. She could smell coffee, but it was so quiet she could hear the downstairs hall clock ticking. The door to Lucy’s bedroom was open. She could see a corner of the bed, already made. The door to Anka’s room was closed. Carey knocked softly but got no answer.

  She checked in the guest room, expecting the bed to be torn asunder. David had never made a bed in his life, or picked up a shirt or a sock. He left a room looking like it had been ransacked by thieves. There was no sign of his having been in the room at all.

  “Hello?” she called down the stairs.

  The house was empty. Everyone had gone, just left her without a word, probably assuming she would want to sleep in.

  Even knowing that was the logical explanation, Carey felt apprehension and anxiety swell inside. Residual effects of the attack. Irrational fear even while in a safe environment. The sense of dread that the people she loved were in danger and would be hurt. The fear that she was alone and her attacker would come back.

  “I’m coming to get you, bitch…”

  The memory of that low, menacing voice was like a finger tracing down the back of her neck.

  Carey shook off the sensation and slowly, carefully, painfully descended the stairs to the first floor.

  In the den she found evidence of David. He had spent the night on the love seat. A gold chenille throw was lying on the floor. A heavy crystal tumbler-empty, save for a desiccated wedge of lime-sat on the end table without benefit of a coaster to protect the antique that had belonged to her father.

  Carey picked up the glass and rubbed a thumb over the damp stain it had left. The glass had held gin. The slightly sour, astringent smell lingered.

  She was the one who had been beaten and threatened, and he was the one drinking.

  Exhausted from what little she’d done, Carey sat down in the leather executive’s chair behind David’s desk. The silence of the room rang in her ears, and dizziness swooped back in and around her head like a flock of sparrows. She waited it out, focusing on the items on the desk-the IBM flat-screen monitor, the telephone, the notepad.

  During one of her wakeful moments in the night, she had thought she heard David talking to someone. The memory came back to her now, and she wondered if it had really happened or if his voice had been part of a dream. Who would he have been having a conversation with at three in the morning? Had Kovac stayed that long? She didn’t recall his voice. Only her husband’s.

  She looked more closely at the notepad on the desk. David was a nervous doodler when he was on the phone. The top sheet of the pad was clean, but with some indentation marks. She couldn’t make out any words. But lying on top of the garbage in the leather trash container beside the desk was a wadded-up piece of the same paper.

  There was no hesitation. Carey felt no twinge of guilt. She reached into the trash and retrieved the note, handling it with the same detachment she would have used as a prosecutor examining evidence.

  Most of the scribbling on the page was of dark geometric shapes, boxes, rectangles, quadrangles. In the center of the page was a monetary amount, twenty-five thousand dollars, with three harsh lines drawn beneath it for emphasis.

  Maybe he had found a backer for his project after all.

  But if the note was related to the half conversation she believed she had heard, the call had come or been placed in the middle of the night. No business deals happened at three in the morning, unless David had suddenly tapped into investors in China.

  Late-night conversations in hushed voices were between lovers, or associates whose business couldn’t b
e conducted in the light of day.

  Twenty-five thousand dollars was a lot of money. Twenty-five thousand dollars in the middle of the night was a payoff, a bribe, blackmail…

  Carey folded the note and tucked it into the pocket of her sweater, and wondered what the hell her husband had gotten into.

  She stared at the telephone, considering the step she was about to take. She was about to open a door and walk through it onto a path that would very probably take her to the end of her marriage. But she had already conceded her marriage was over. There was no point in feeling nervous or hesitant or in dreading what she was going to find.

  Without allowing herself to feel anything-no guilt, no sadness, no anger-she picked up the handset and keyed the scroll button to the last call received. The mystery number. The caller who had asked for Marlene. The same caller who had whispered over her cell phone: I’m coming to get you, bitch.

  If David had been on this phone, the call had been outgoing.

  She touched the redial button, waited as the phone on the other end rang unanswered, then picked up and played a recording of the operating hours of Domino’s Pizza.

  Twenty-five thousand dollars was a lot of pizza.

  David hadn’t used this phone for any late-night clandestine call. If there had been any such call, it had to have been made or received on his cell phone.

  Carey opened the upper left-hand desk drawer. The drawer was a catchall for things they used day-to-day-extra check blanks, stamps, address labels, things they both used. It was where they kept tickets to events, and paper clips, and bills to be paid. No one using that drawer had an expectation of privacy.

  She walked her fingers through the different divided sections of the drawer. Tickets to an ice show. Carey smiled just enough to pull at the stitches in her lip. Lucy’s current passion was figure skating. She was looking forward to taking her daughter out.

  Had been looking forward to… The show was just two days away. It was doubtful either the bruises from the beating or the public resentment for her position on Karl Dahl’s prior bad acts would have faded by then.