by Tami Hoag
“What?” He looked more nervous than surprised. “Why?”
“Don’t pretend to be shocked, David. You don’t want to be married to me. I don’t want to be married to you. I don’t even know who you are anymore. But I do know all about your extracurricular activities with the prostitutes.”
He was actually stupid enough to try to correct her. “Escorts.”
“They’re women you pay for sex,” she snapped. “A whore is a whore, David. No euphemism is going to put a pretty face on that.
“How could you?” she asked. “How dare you.”
He rubbed a hand over his face and got up from the desk.
“It was just… business,” he said. “A transaction for a service. When was the last time you and I had sex, Carey?”
“When was the last time you were an equal partner in this marriage?”
He laughed without humor and shook his head. “And you’re wondering why I would go outside our marriage for attention.”
“Oh, poor, poor David,” she said bitterly. “You’re the victim. You’ve spent the last how many years contributing not one goddamn thing to this relationship-”
“So it’s about my failure to make money,” he said, moving a step closer to her. “Is that it?”
“Don’t try to make this about money. You haven’t been plugged in emotionally for years, you don’t care about anyone’s needs but your own-”
“I’m selfish?”
“Yes.”
“And how many years were you working eighty-hour weeks, Carey, never home, always too tired-”
“We were supposed to be partners,” Carey said. “Yes, I had a career. You had one too, once upon a time. And you can’t tell me I haven’t been supportive of that. I’ve been your biggest cheerleader. Even in the last few years, when you couldn’t get arrested, let alone get a film made, have I even once tried to discourage you?”
He looked away.
“Do you have any idea how exhausting that’s been, David? To have to carry your fragile ego around like the world on my shoulders?”
He rolled his eyes. “Well, I’m so sorry to have been such a burden on you!”
Carey looked away from him and crossed her arms over her chest. “I don’t want to argue with you, David. There’s no point in it. We’re done. It’s over.”
“Oh, Her Honor the Judge has spoken and passed sentence,” he said sarcastically. “I don’t even get to mount a defense.”
“How could you possibly defend what you’ve done?” Carey said, incredulous. “Fucking prostitutes every time I turn my back. How do you defend that? Paying out thousands of dollars a month for sex, for flowers and gifts, for four-star hotel rooms and an apartment I don’t even want to know what for, or who for. What can you say that could make any of that okay?”
He looked at her with narrow-eyed suspicion. “How do you know all of that?”
“I looked it up. For God’s sake, David, I’m surprised you didn’t dedicate a file folder just to your deviant secret life.”
“You went in my file drawers?”
“To look at our financial records. Am I supposed to have to get a warrant for that? You didn’t even bother to try to hide any of it. Your list of favorite escort agencies was in the drawer where we keep checkbooks and stamps. You had to know I would go into that drawer. You probably wanted it to happen, wanted me to find you out, because you obviously don’t have the balls to tell me yourself.”
He held his hands up in front of himself. “I don’t need this. I don’t need to be lectured by you, Ms. Perfect. Perfect daughter, perfect mother, perfect lawyer, perfect everything. What a fucking hypocrite! You think I don’t know you slept with someone else too?”
Carey took a step back as if he’d slapped her.
“Yeah,” David said with malicious glee. “You’re not so perfect after all. So don’t stand there and look down your nose at me.”
“Once,” she said. “Once. Because I was overworked, overstressed, and all I was getting from you was a shitload of whining that I wasn’t here to serve your every need.”
“Right. It’s my fault when you’re unfaithful, but it’s not your fault when I am?”
“There’s no comparison,” Carey said. “One night I turned to a man I knew and trusted because I needed comfort. You open the yellow pages and pick a number. And you say it’s just abusiness transaction. That’s beyond sleazy.
“Can you at least tell me you used protection?” she asked. “That you didn’t put me at risk? That you wouldn’t put your daughter at risk if she needed a transfusion or a kidney?”
“No,” he said with a smug look. “I didn’t. I wanted my money’s worth.”
Carey slapped him across the face as hard as she could. She’d never struck another human being in her life.
“You son of a bitch,” she said, glaring at him. “Get out. Get out of this house. Get out of my life. Just go!” she shouted, pointing toward the door.
“It’s my house too.”
“The hell it is. And if you think for one minute you’re getting anything out of this divorce, you are sadly mistaken.”
“Yeah,” David sneered. “It’s all for you.”
“For me and for Lucy.”
“You can’t keep me from seeing my daughter,” he said.
“You don’t think so? A Family Court judge is not going to be impressed with your hobbies, David.”
“I have been a very good father to Lucy,” he said, his voice trembling, tears coming to his eyes. “Whatever I have or haven’t been to you, Carey, you can’t say I don’t love my daughter, or that she doesn’t love me.”
Carey closed her eyes and sighed. “No, I can’t say that.”
“You can’t possibly believe I would ever do anything to hurt Lucy in any way. You can’t just cut me out of her life.”
“No,” Carey said with resignation. “I won’t do that.”
She didn’t really know what she would or wouldn’t do. Thinking about David’s having been with prostitutes made her want to never let him touch Lucy as long as he lived. Her misgivings about the twenty-five thousand dollars made her want him to be out of both of their lives forever. But now was not the time to say any of that.
In all the years she had known him, she had never known David to be violent in any way. But she didn’t know this man in front of her. He wasn’t the man she had married. He wasn’t even the man she thought she had been living with.
She thought of Kovac. Despite what she had told him, he was probably standing in the shrubbery, ready to smash the window in if he so much as imagined anything going wrong.
“I can be there before you hang up the phone.”
She thought of the two officers in the squad car out front.
Lucy was her ace. David wouldn’t do anything to her here and now, because he couldn’t get away and because he would never see his daughter again if he went to prison. Lucy’s guardians were Kate and John Quinn, a victim advocate and one of the country’s leading experts on the criminal mind. They would never allow David to be a part of Lucy’s life again.
And that knowledge only gave credence to the notion of her husband’s having paid someone else to do the dirty work for him.
“I guess I loved you once,” he said quietly. “I don’t know how we got here.”
“Please go now, David,” Carey said, surprised by how much what he had just said hurt her. “I guess I loved you once…”
“I could just stay in the guest room,” he said. “I don’t want Lucy to wake up and have me just be gone.”
“I’ll tell her you had to go away on business. I can’t have you here, David. I don’t trust you.”
“You don’t trust me not to do what?” he asked, his anger rising again. “That’s Kovac telling you he thinks I paid someone to have you attacked. How could you possibly believe that, Carey? You know me better than that!”
Carey stared at him. “I don’t know you at all. I don’t know who you are. The man I
married would never have done any of the things you’ve done. I have no idea who you are.”
“So that’s what you think of the man I am now?” he asked aggressively. “That I would pay someone to kill you? That I might kill you in your sleep myself? Jesus Christ, Carey.”
“You have to go now, David,” she said. “I can’t have you here. I don’t want you here. Don’t make me call the officers in from their car to remove you. It’s not like you don’t have someplace else to go.”
“You are un-fucking-believable!” he shouted.
“Please keep your voice down. Your daughter is asleep upstairs.”
Muttering curses under his breath, David grabbed the external hard drive from his computer and stormed out of the room and up the stairs.
Carey followed him, afraid she had pushed him too far. Her heart in her throat as David approached Lucy’s bedroom, she was struck by a fear that David might try to take Lucy with him. But when he stopped at the door to the room, it was only to look in on their sleeping child.
He was red in the face, fighting tears, breathing hard as he turned away and stalked down the hall into the bedroom they had shared. He jerked a suitcase out of his closet, tossed it on the bed, and began throwing clothes at it.
Ten minutes later he was gone.
Carey stood at the kitchen door to the garage and listened as his car started and backed out. She hadn’t known how she would feel after the big scene. She hadn’t known if she would cry or be angry or feel sick. She didn’t feel anything. She was numb. She had spent all her emotions confronting him.
Going back to the den, she walked back and forth across the room, physically holding herself together. She needed to call Kovac. She had told him not to come, but he was almost certainly there, if not in the front yard, then sitting in his car down the street. It touched her that he was concerned about her. She felt less alone.
Being a cop, Kovac was unshockable. Carey couldn’t even picture herself telling anyone else what David had been up to all this time. Not even her best friend. She felt stupid and embarrassed talking about it. Kovac hadn’t batted an eye. He had dealt with far worse than a cheating spouse.
Sitting down in David’s desk chair, she used her cell phone to call him. She had put his number on speed dial. He answered before the first ring finished.
“Kovac.”
“It’s Carey. I’m all right. David is gone.”
“You don’t sound all right.”
“I’m very tired,” she said, appalled at how weak her voice sounded.
“Do you want to talk about it? Do you want me to come over? I’m not that far away.”
“You’re in my front yard, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. You can tell me what to do,” he said. “But I’ll do whatever I want.”
She managed to smile a little at that-her own words tossed back at her. “Touché,” she said. “I really just want to go to bed. But thank you for offering, Sam.”
“I’m here to protect and serve.”
“I know.”
An awkward silence hung between them for a moment. Carey had the feeling he wanted to say something more, but finally he just said, “I’ll call you in the morning.”
Carey turned off her phone and tucked it into the pocket of her jeans, and sighed, hoping morning would come soon.
33
KOVAC FLICKED ON the dash strobe as he drove through the streets, trying to catch up to David Moore. He was betting Moore would go straight to the apartment he had been paying for. Even money said Ginnie Bird lived there.
He caught a look at the big Mercedes sedan sitting at the next stoplight and killed the strobe.
Moore went through the intersection and turned onto the ramp to the freeway. Kovac followed him, then stepped on the gas and blew past him, two lanes over. Moore didn’t know his car and wouldn’t be looking for him anyway. His head would still be in the scene that had just played out between himself and his wife, and on what he was going to do next.
Kovac exited the freeway and drove straight to the apartment building. It was a nice place in a pricey neighborhood. Fairly new building, landscaping, a gated underground garage. No doorman, though, no concierge.
He parked across the street, got out, and walked over to the entrance.
The tenant list was on a brass buzzer pad beside the door to the small lobby. Kovac went down the names.
Bird, V. Apartment 309.
As he debated whether or not to ring the buzzer, a white Lexus turned in at the drive. The garage gate groaned and rattled as it began to rise.
Kovac moved away from the building entrance, went back down the sidewalk, nonchalant, going for a stroll. The Lexus rolled down into the garage. He waited until the car had turned to the right in search of a parking spot, then walked down into the garage, ducking under the descending gate.
It was as simple as that to get into a building where residents believed they were secure. He checked the ceiling for cameras, but there were none.
He didn’t bother to hide, but walked over to the elevator as if he lived there, and pushed the button to go up. Ten seconds later he was joined by the driver of the Lexus, a tired-looking guy with a red, runny nose and a plastic bag from Snyder Drug.
“You got that bug that’s going around?” Kovac said.
The guy rolled his eyes. “I wish I was dead.”
“Drink whisky.”
“That helps?”
The elevator arrived and they got on. Kovac pushed the button for the third floor and glanced up at the ceiling of the car. No security camera.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “After you’ve had a couple, you won’t give a shit.”
“Good point.”
“Where you going?”
“Four. Thanks.”
They rode the rest of the way in silence and nodded to each other when Kovac got off on the third floor.
He didn’t go down the hall to Ginnie Bird’s apartment but stood there outside the elevator, waiting for the car to go back down and come back up, and the doors to open on David Moore. The hall was empty. Someone had taped a bright orange sign on the wall beside the elevator, inviting all residents to the October meeting of the renters’ association.
VOTING ON THE ISSUE OF CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS ON THE BUILDING EXTERIOR.
WE NEED A QUORUM! PLEASE COME!
Kovac considered writing his neighbor’s name and phone number on the poster as a source of expertise on the subject.
Maybe five minutes passed before the elevator rumbled as it descended, then rose out of the parking garage. Kovac stood in front of the doors so that when they opened, David Moore stepped right into him.
“Hey!” Moore barked, annoyed at the obstacle, then realizing the obstacle was Kovac. The look in his eyes went from annoyance to confusion to suspicion in a split second.
Kovac hit him hard in the chest with the heels of both hands, knocked him back into the elevator car, into the back wall, and followed him in.
“What the hell?” Moore said, trying to get his feet back under him.
Kovac grabbed him by the front of his shirt and shoved him into the corner.
“Listen, you sorry piece of shit. I know all about you and your girlfriend,” Kovac said. “I know all about your little tête-à-têtes at the Marquette every other week.
“What are you? One of those pervs that gets off on taking the chance of being caught?
“That’d be you, all right,” Kovac sneered. “You don’t have the balls to stand up to your wife. You want somebody else to tell her you’re out on the town with some fifty-bucks-a-blowjob skirt. You fucking coward.”
Moore pressed himself back into the corner, raised up on his toes like that would somehow make him a bigger man than the worm that he was.
“You can’t treat me this way!” he blustered, red faced, more afraid than aggressive. “This is harassment and-and brutality.”
Kovac curled his lip in disgust. “Call a cop, limp-dick. I’ve go
t twelve witnesses who’ll swear I was playing Parcheesi at the Moose Lodge in New Hope.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Yeah, I’m crazy,” Kovac said sarcastically. “I’m not the one meeting in a public bar to pay off the guy I hired to whack my wife.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“You make me sick.” Kovac all but turned and spat on the floor. “What’d you think, David? That everyone would just assume your wife was mugged, or that some nutjob did her because of Karl Dahl?”
“I didn’t do anything to Carey!”
“And you figured you were playing it smart to be seen in public at the time of her attack, that you were extra clever, using your motive as your alibi.”
“What motive?”
“Your little plaything you got this apartment for. A junkie whore too stupid to think you’re exactly what you appear to be-a loser with a big mouth and delusions of grandeur. You’re pathetic.”
The look on Moore ’s face was priceless. Kovac smiled like a tiger. He had opened both barrels of bullshit and actually hit some nerves. A little knowledge and a lot of attitude went a long way toward rattling people with something to hide. All the years of wading hip-deep in the excrement of criminal minds had taught him more about human nature than any Ph.D. in psychology could have.
David Moore was the kind of guy who needed to feel important, needed people to think he was smart. That he had to lower himself to the standard of prostitutes to accomplish that wouldn’t matter.
“You’re thinking, ‘How do you know all that, Kovac, you dumb son of a bitch?’” Kovac said, still smiling. “I know all kinds of things about you, Sport. I know about your taste for hookers. The flowers, the gifts, the expensive dinners, paying for it all out of the family funds. I know about your biweekly habit at the Marquette, Mr. Greer. You go there to pretend you’re a big shot, don’t you? Mr. Hollywood, the film executive.
“By the way, that’s lower than low, using your wife’s maiden name. Freud would have a field day with you and your issues with women, huh? What’s that all about, David? Your mother screwed up your potty training?”
Moore was silent, seeming to be holding himself very still, as if one wrong move and his whole alternate universe would implode on him.