Prior Bad Acts

by Tami Hoag

  The smile slipped away. She didn’t want to put Lucy in a position where she might be frightened or upset because of the way strangers felt about her mother. That wasn’t fair to her child. Carey would end up giving her ticket to Anka, and the Moore family outing would be comprised of daughter, daddy, and nanny.

  Pushing the disappointment aside, Carey continued her search, methodically moving toward the back of the drawer, looking for David’s cell phone bill. She checked the amounts due on all the other bills in the drawer, looking for one in the amount of twenty-five thousand dollars. There wasn’t one.

  There was, however, a note written in David’s hand with a list of phone numbers and corresponding names. Elite, First Class, Dream Girls.

  Carey picked up the phone and dialed the last number, getting a sexy voice mail message.

  “Dream Girls Escorts make your dreams come true. Leave a message at the tone, and we’ll fulfill your fantasies as soon as we can.”

  Nausea churned in Carey’s stomach. Her husband was using the services of prostitutes, apparently on a regular basis. The fact that she shared a bed with him made her want to go and take a shower. The fact that she had no idea how long this had been going on or whether or not he had put her at risk made her angry. Their sex life had dwindled to nothing months before, but for all Carey knew David had established this habit long ago. Months. Years, even.

  This is unbelievable, she thought. This had been going on right under her nose, and she hadn’t seen it. She hadn’t looked for it. The truth was, lately she hadn’t cared what David was up to. She hadn’t wanted the distraction of caring. And he had to have known it. Why else would he have felt so comfortable that he would leave this list in a desk drawer where she might have come across it on any given day?

  Or maybe he had wanted her to find the list, either to get her attention, to hurt her, or to push her into taking an action he didn’t have the guts to take.

  Carey made a copy of the list and added it to her growing pile of evidence.

  Slowly, she swiveled the desk chair around to face the built-in cabinets and pulled open a file drawer. David was organized to the point of being anal. There was a file for everything-bank statements, receipts, paid bills broken down into smaller categories: electricity, gas, etc.

  The job of bill paying and record keeping had been assumed by David from the start of their marriage. He had taken on the responsibility willingly, and with an air of self-importance. He had a better head for business than she did. Lately, he had complained about being made to feel like a secretary, as if it was beneath him to write a check and stick a stamp on an envelope or click a few keys to pay bills electronically. And yet when Carey had suggested that Anka might like to do the job for some extra cash every week, David had accused her of belittling his role in the family.

  Carey had refrained from snapping back that his role in the family had become largely ornamental.

  She pulled the file with the paid phone bills and lifted out her husband’s last cell phone bill. There were a lot of calls to numbers she didn’t recognize, not that she had expected to recognize any of them. David had associates and acquaintances in his own world, and he rarely shared that world with her. A lot of repeat calls to one particular number. A lot. Maybe fifty or more on this one bill.

  She picked up the phone and dialed the number. A machine answered with a woman’s breathy voice.

  “I can’t take your call right now. I’m busy having fun. Leave a message. Bye.”

  A girlfriend, Carey supposed, but she didn’t feel anything as the thought crossed her mind. No jealousy, no hurt. It was as if she were looking into the affairs of a stranger.

  She ran the phone bill through the fax machine to make a copy, put the original back, and replaced the file.

  With the same sense of detachment, she pulled the credit card statements and receipts for David’s business account, sat back in the chair, and started going through them.

  Legitimate expenses, and plenty of the other kind. Restaurant tabs, bar tabs. Seventy-five dollars to a local florist. Fifty-three dollars to the same florist. Forty-five dollars, same florist. Sixteen hundred dollars charged as a gift certificate to a gym in Edina, ten minutes away. Some gift. Forty-three hundred dollars to Bloomingdale’s. Four hundred ninety-seven dollars to the Marquette Hotel. The receipt was dated the day before.

  “… Where have you been this evening?” Kovac asked.

  “I had a business dinner.”

  “Where?”

  “That new place in the IDS Tower next to the Marquette Hotel…”

  A strange, hollow feeling opened up in Carey’s chest, as if her ribs were being spread apart. While she had been lying in a hospital bed, David had been lying in a hotel bed with another woman.

  Setting that thought aside, she copied the credit card statements, then looked through the canceled checks. No twenty-five-thousand-dollar checks, but a monthly check to a property management company for thirty-five hundred dollars going back at least eight months.

  Housing for the girlfriend? His own secret hideout for entertaining prostitutes? That son of a bitch. He hadn’t made a profit on his business in four years, but he was shelling out thousands of dollars a month of their-her-money to keep a roof over the head of his illicit activities.

  Carey pulled a file of bank statements, looking for a deposit or withdrawal in the amount of twenty-five thousand dollars. Nothing listed for any of their accounts, but the latest statements were almost a month old.

  It was Saturday. She couldn’t call the bank and ask them. She knew David did a lot of their banking via the computer, but she didn’t know how to access the account.

  A car door slammed outside. Carey’s heart tried to jump out of her chest. Her hands were shaking as she shoved the credit card statements and receipts back into their file and put the file back into its place in the drawer.

  She stood up too quickly and her head swam. She didn’t care if David found her at his desk. She cared that she might frighten her daughter, looking the way she did. But when she pulled back the drape and looked out the front window, Kovac was coming up the sidewalk to the door.

  He looked like an unmade bed, thick hair standing up from a finger combing, rugged face drawn, mouth frowning. Like most street cops Carey knew, Sam Kovac had never been in any great danger of gracing the cover of Gentleman’s Quarterly. He bought his suits cheap, cut his hair cheaper. He was a no-muss, no-fuss kind of a guy. It was a safe bet he had never spent forty-three hundred dollars at Bloomingdale’s on himself or anyone else. And she knew without asking that he held nothing but contempt for the politicians and police brass who ranked above him.

  Carey imagined he hadn’t gotten any more sleep than she had. Maybe less. He had a case to run, and with a judge for a victim. The powers that ruled the city would be coming down hard on the police department. Not because any of them cared particularly about her personally but because of the media attention and because they had constituents to answer to.

  He didn’t look surprised to see her as she cracked the front door open before he could ring the bell.

  “Judge…”

  “Detective. I’m guessing you haven’t come for the all-you-can-eat brunch.”

  He blinked at her, taken aback that she still had the energy for sarcasm. “No appetite,” he said. “Do you have coffee?”

  “Yes.”

  “I need some. How about you?”

  “Make yourself at home,” Carey said dryly as Kovac brushed past her and went in search of the kitchen.

  “Where’s the husband?” he asked, snooping through the cupboards. He found the mugs on the second try. The coffee was already brewed. Half the pot was gone. Two mugs were resting upside down in the drainer rack at the sink. David and Anka. The morning paper had been left spread out on the breakfast table.

  “Out.”

  Kovac shot a look at her. Carey felt as if he could see past her clothes, past her external self, straight to the par
t of her that held her secrets. It wasn’t a good feeling.

  “You don’t like David,” she said, easing down onto a chair.

  Kovac poured the coffee. “No,” he said bluntly. “I don’t. Do you?”

  “He’s my husband.”

  Again the look, the flat cop eyes. Tigers probably had that same look in their eyes when they faced their prey. He sat down at the kitchen table with her and put one of the steaming mugs in front of her.

  “You didn’t answer me.”

  “I don’t have any reason to discuss my marriage with you.”

  “You don’t want to have any reason to.”

  Carey’s mouth pulled at one corner. “As you so graciously pointed out last night: There is no shortage of people who hate me right now. David only resents me. And he has an alibi.”

  Kovac didn’t say anything, though Carey knew what he was thinking. The cheating husband gives himself an alibi and pays someone else to do the dirty work. She would have categorically denied the possibility except for one thing.

  Twenty-five thousand dollars.

  “You have better suspects to look at,” she said.

  “I have other suspects.”

  His choice of words was not lost on her, but she refused to take the bait.

  The kitchen table sat in a nook with a bay window looking out onto the backyard, where the lawn was awash in fallen leaves, and Lucy’s swing set stood as a monument to childhood. Such a normal Saturday-morning kind of thing: sitting, chatting, having coffee.

  “He’s cheating on you,” Kovac said.

  Carey continued to stare out the window.

  “I don’t get it. You’re a strong, independent woman. Why would you put up with that?”

  She still didn’t look at him. “You have no direct evidence David is cheating on me… do you?”

  “Don’t try to play me, Judge. I’m not stupid, and neither are you.”

  Carey was silent for what seemed like a long time. Finally she said in a very soft voice, “Maybe I’m not as strong as you think.”

  It was Kovac’s turn to be silent. She could feel him watching her and wondered what he was thinking. That she was in denial? That she was pathetic for staying with a husband who had so little respect for her? She was past denial. On the other count, she pled the Fifth.

  “Karl Dahl is still at large?” she asked.

  “Yeah. That’s nothing you have to worry about as far as him coming after you,” Kovac said. “He’s got no reason to hurt you. You being his new best friend and all.”

  Carey ignored the jab. “Have you been able to enhance the video from the parking ramp?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Just why are you here, Detective?” she asked, arching a brow. “Not that I don’t enjoy your pleasant company.”

  Kovac let go a long sigh and looked at his coffee for a moment. “Stan Dempsey-the lead detective-”

  “I know who Stan Dempsey is. What about him?”

  “I went to his house this morning. You know, he’s never been right since those murders. I wanted to talk to him about yesterday. He’s got as good a motive as anybody to call you a fucking cunt and try to beat the shit out of you.”

  “And?”

  “And he wasn’t there,” Kovac said. “He had trashed the place. Shot up the furniture, tipped over tables, smashed stuff. Basically went ape shit, by the look of it. He left a videotape of himself talking about the Haas case, talking about his frustration, his anger. He went on about you, about your rulings. About how he needs to take matters into his own hands and make sure the guilty pay.”

  “The guilty,” Carey said. “As in Karl Dahl.”

  “And you.”

  “Did he threaten me?”

  “Not in so many words, but I have reason to believe he could be a danger to you, and possibly to your daughter.”

  Carey sat up straight, her pulse quickening. “My daughter? What did he say about my daughter?”

  “He’s aware you have a small daughter, and he thinks because of that you should be more sympathetic to the victims, for what they must have gone through,” Kovac said, but he didn’t quite meet her eyes.

  Carey slapped a hand down hard on the table. “Don’t treat me like a child, Detective! I’m not some naive little soccer mom. What did he say about my daughter?”

  He looked her in the eye then. “He wondered how differently you’d feel toward Karl Dahl if your daughter had been raped and sodomized and hung up from the ceiling like a slaughtered lamb.”

  A chill went through Carey like an icicle stabbing her through the back. Tears filled her eyes. The images from the Haas murder scene photos flashed in her head.

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered.

  The fear that had shaken her earlier came back. Lucy was gone. David was gone. Anka was gone. She had no idea where they were or what might be happening to them. Lucy was who she lived for, who she would die for. The thought of her being hurt, being tortured…

  She got up from the table and rushed across the room for the telephone. Dizzy, sick, shaking, she leaned against the counter and punched David’s cell number into the handset.

  The phone on the other end rang… and rang… and rang.

  “Goddammit, David! Answer the fucking phone!”

  Kovac stood up but didn’t seem to know what to do.

  Carey cut the call off and dialed again, in case she’d transposed a number the first time. But still David’s phone rang unanswered. The voice mail kicked on and informed her that the customer’s mailbox was full. He wasn’t there for her, just as he hadn’t been the night before, when she’d been in the hospital, and he’d been fucking some whore at the Marquette Hotel.

  “Dammit!” she shouted, and hurled the handset against the wall.

  She was crying now. Huge, gulping sobs. Fury and helplessness and weakness washed through her in waves, all of it crashing into her-the attack, the pressure of the case, the sense of being in it all alone, and now the knowledge that her child was vulnerable to harm because of her. She put her hands over her face and bent forward as if she had been kicked in the stomach.

  “Hey,” Kovac said quietly, touching her arm. “You need to calm down. Nothing’s happened. We’ve got an APB out for Dempsey’s car.”

  “How do you know he hasn’t been here already?” Carey demanded.

  “The uniforms outside would have seen him.”

  “Not if he parked up the street or around the corner. He could have been sitting there, waiting. He could have seen David’s car leave the garage. He could have followed them,” she went on. “Why didn’t you call me the instant you found out Dempsey was missing?”

  “So you could have been hysterical half an hour sooner? What good would that have done?” Kovac asked. “I immediately notified the units on this block.

  “There’s nothing you could have done that we hadn’t done already,” Kovac said calmly. “I didn’t want to dump this on you over the phone.”

  Carey’s anger dropped out from under her. She didn’t have the strength to sustain it. The worry and the fear were drowning out all else.

  “I want my daughter,” she whispered. “I need to find my daughter. I need to find David. Why can’t he be here just once when I need him?”

  Her voice cracked and she coughed, trying to hold back a sob.

  Kovac’s arm wrapped around her shoulders. “Come on,” he whispered. “Let’s sit you down. We’ll find your daughter.”

  “I can’t believe any of this is happening,” Carey said in a choked voice. For just an instant she leaned against him, needing to feel the solid support of someone stronger than she was. He smelled of sandalwood soap. The faint scent of cigarette smoke clung to his coat.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, embarrassed to meet his eyes as she stepped away from him. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Kovac said as he herded her back toward the table. “So, you’re human after all. Your secret’s safe with me.”
r />   17

  KARL FIGURED THERE likely were no homeless people in the part of town where he was headed. It was a sunny, warm fall day, warm enough that he could discard the ragman’s coat, which he did in a Dumpster behind a closed printing shop. He kept the matted dreadlocks and knit cap, though his head was itching something fierce and he couldn’t stand the feeling. He had no doubt that the ragman’s clothes were full of lice.

  He wanted a hot shower, and to shave himself. He imagined he could feel the hairs pushing their way up through the skin on his chest and groin. The idea made his skin crawl.

  Checking out his reflection in the printing shop’s barred back window, Karl was pleased enough. The ragman’s pants were baggy on him, on account of Karl’s not being a large man. If he had been a woman, he would have been considered petite. There really was no equal word for a man that he knew of.

  He put his hands in the pants pockets and slouched into a sort of lazy S profile. That was a good look, lazy, not in any hurry to get anywhere. No one would think he was running from the law if he didn’t move faster than a shuffle.

  Digging through the ragman’s cart, Karl found several pairs of sunglasses, some scratched and broken, some not. He tried them on until he had a good fit, covering the bloodred of his eyes, which would call attention and people would remember.

  He studied himself in the window and liked what he saw. But he wasn’t satisfied. He hadn’t changed the appearance of his jawline or his mouth, and a lot of people looked there first when they looked at somebody. Everyone in Minneapolis was looking at his picture on the news and in the paper.

  He had the five o’clock shadow. That was helpful, but not enough. He had the bruises from the night before. He reached into his mouth and took out his bridgework, leaving a couple of black holes in his smile. Better, but he still wasn’t satisfied. He rummaged through the junk in the ragman’s cart, looking for something that might spark an idea.