Prior Bad Acts

by Tami Hoag

  “That’s enough!” Dawes shouted at him. “Not another word!”

  Kovac held his hands up, forcing himself to lock down the fury. He was breathing hard, sweating like a horse. Logan stepped back, doing the same.

  Dawes glared at Kovac. “What is this about?”

  “The girlfriend’s brother,” he said. “The third guy at the bar was the girlfriend’s brother, a porn actor.”

  “I don’t care if he was the devil himself,” Dawes said. “What’s the matter with you, coming in here like that? What were you going to do? Beat David Moore to death in front of his attorney? You’re out of control, Detective.”

  Kovac walked around in a little circle, rubbing his hands over his face. He was shaking as the rush of adrenaline recycled itself.

  “Go home,” Dawes said.

  Kovac looked at her.

  “Go home,” she said again.

  “This is my case.”

  “You need to step back, Sam. Now.”

  He held up a hand, still pacing. “I’m all right. I was out of line.”

  “You were way out of line. I can’t have you threatening people. You’ll be lucky if Moore ’s attorney doesn’t demand you go before the civilian review board.”

  “Fucking slimebag,” Kovac muttered. “What rock did he crawl out from under?”

  “It’s Anthony Costello,” Logan said. “He crawled out from under a very expensive rock.”

  Kovac shook his head. “Great. David Moore can have his wife kidnapped and murdered. Tony Costello can soak up Carey’s money to defend the asshole. And I’m the one in trouble. Yeah, that’s how the system should work.”

  “You’re making this personal, Sam,” Dawes said. “You know better.”

  Kovac sat down on the stairs, put his head in his hands, and let go a shuddering sigh. “I’m fine.”

  “You need to take a break.”

  “No.”

  “Sam-”

  “Don’t send me home, LT,” he said, looking up at her. “I won’t go. This is my case. Carey Moore is my responsibility. I won’t walk away from that. Don’t try to make me.”

  He looked at Logan, standing near the front door. Logan was watching him with eagle eyes.

  Dawes’s cell phone rang. She took the call, walking away.

  “Twenty-five grand to a hit man,” Kovac said. “That should buy him twenty-five to life, right?”

  “Can you connect Moore to the hitter through the money?” Logan asked. “Assuming that’s what’s going on.”

  “I don’t know. We need to crack open Moore ’s books.”

  “You think he’s mixed up in the porn business?”

  “Looks like. Has to be how he hooked up with these people. Ginnie Bird, the brother. Ivors is involved in the movie business. Moore is in Ivors’s pocket. Fucking creep. Documentary films my ass.”

  He stared at the floor and blew out a breath. His heart was still pounding like a trip-hammer. It was all he could do to keep himself seated on the steps.

  “You’ve had worse cases than this,” Logan said.

  Kovac looked at him sharply. “So?”

  “So what’s with the big blowup? You know Carey that well?”

  “I know she’s my vic,” Kovac said defensively. “I know she’s my responsibility. And I’m pretty damn sure that asshole in the other room made her disappear. Do I need something more than that? I’m supposed to care less because Carey Moore hasn’t been raped and eviscerated and set on fire yet?”

  Logan held up his hands. “No. I just…

  “Never mind,” he said, turning toward Lieutenant Dawes as she came back from her phone call. Her face was grave as she looked from one of them to the other.

  “We’ve found the nanny.”

  49

  HER BODY HAD BEEN folded into the trunk of a late-model dark blue Volvo. She looked like a broken doll lying there, legs bent, her eyes wide-open, her head turned at an odd angle.

  She was wearing a brown velour Juicy Couture tracksuit and a pair of pink Puma running shoes. Dressed for a Saturday night at home, kicking back to watch a movie and eat some popcorn.

  “I-I didn’t have anything to do with that.”

  Kovac looked at the guy, annoyed.

  Bruce Green. Twenty-seven. Pasty white wimp with a mop of blond frizz that looked like he’d stolen it off the dead body of Harpo Marx. Bell-bottoms and a black and yellow rugby shirt. He dabbed a bloody handkerchief under his nose. His forehead was growing a big goose egg.

  “I-I just glanced down,” Green went on nervously. “I-I dropped my BlackBerry, and-and when I reached for it, I knocked over my latte, and-and it spilled-”

  “Shut up,” Kovac said sharply. He turned back to the uniform who had been first on the scene, Hovney, a woman built like the corner mailbox, with a face like the flat side of an anvil.

  “He rear-ended the Volvo,” she said, “which was parked here at the curb. The trunk popped. The rest is history.”

  Green’s car, a butt-ugly pea green square box Honda something-or-other, had suffered front-end damage. Pieces made from plastic had shattered and lay on the street.

  The street had been cordoned off. Half a dozen squad cars sat at angles on either end of the accident scene.

  Kovac pulled on a pair of gloves and tried to turn the nanny’s head. The body was in rigor. The second-shift surveillance team had reported the girl had left the Moore house around ten-thirty. She hadn’t lived long past that time. Rigor mortis would have begun to set in two to four hours after death. Full rigor was achieved eight to twelve hours after death.

  The car was parked on the side street around the corner from the 7-Eleven, where Anka had supposedly gone to pick out a movie and buy some snacks, just past the alley that ran behind the store. The killer had probably initially parked in the alley, out of view. He had nabbed the girl, pulled her into the alley, killed her, put the body in the trunk, driven out of the alley, and parked at the curb. Then he had gotten behind the wheel of the nanny’s Saab and calmly driven back to the Moore house.

  The car would have been equipped with a garage door opener. The keys to the house were probably on the same key ring as the keys to the Saab. He could have forced the nanny to give up the security code to the house system before he killed her. Or, as Kovac had speculated earlier, David Moore had simply given it to him, along with the twenty-five thousand dollars.

  “I guess we can rule out the nanny as a suspect,” Liska said.

  Hovney went on. “The plates come back to a Saab-”

  “He swapped the plates,” Kovac said. Which meant the call that had gone out to be on the lookout for the nanny’s car had included the wrong plate numbers. “Whose car is this?”

  “The VIN number connects the car to a Christine Neal,” Dawes said.

  “Has anyone tried to contact this woman?” Kovac asked.

  “No answer,” Dawes said. “I’ve sent a unit to her home.”

  Kovac shook his head, pissed off at the unnecessary loss of life. If Anka hadn’t been involved in the plan against Carey-which she clearly hadn’t been-she had been nothing more than collateral damage, just one more person to get out of the way so the plan to nab Carey could go forward as planned.

  If Donny Bergen was the doer, it didn’t make sense that he would kill someone to get a car. Too risky. He wouldn’t have used his own vehicle, for the obvious reasons. But it wasn’t that difficult to boost a car without bothering a soul.

  “Was the car reported as stolen?” he asked.

  “No.”

  Kovac nodded. “Well, let’s hope Ms. Neal is on vacation.”

  50

  THE CAR SLOWED down and turned. Gravel crunched beneath the tires, and Carey’s heart began to pound hard at the base of her throat. No one was ever taken to a remote area against their will for any good reason.

  She tried the phone again, but still she had no signal, and her battery was starting to run low. The case of the phone had cracked when she had broken
the plastic light cover. Hands shaking, she turned it off and stuck it into the front pocket of her jeans once more. The tail of her shirt would hide the outline of it… as long as she was wearing a shirt.

  The car rolled to a halt.

  She had no weapon. Her physical strength, even with adrenaline fueling it, would be no match for a man bent on harming her. The car rocked as the driver got out.

  Her breath held tight in her lungs as she waited for the trunk to unlock, waited for the sudden blinding light as the lid opened, waited to finally see the face of her captor.

  But the trunk didn’t open.

  A car door opened again, but no one got in.

  Carey wondered where the hell she was. There was no traffic noise at all. No sound of human voices. All she could hear was the very faint squawking of geese flying south for the winter. She wished for their freedom, and thanked God that at least she wasn’t hearing the sound of a shovel digging a shallow grave.

  51

  CHRISTINE NEAL’S COTTAGE would have looked just as at home if it had been found somewhere on Nantucket Island. The small garage was empty. The front door of the house was locked, but a little hand-painted sign bade visitors welcome and announced, “Grandma Lives Here.”

  The uniformed officers had rung the doorbell and looked in the windows but had seen no sign of Christine Neal.

  Dawes gave the signal. “Break it in.”

  The house was quiet and smelled fresh, as if it had just been cleaned.

  “Well, this is weird right off the bat,” Liska said.

  “What?” Kovac asked.

  “Look at this place,” she said. “It’s so-so-neat.”

  At Kovac’s request, she had met them at the Neal home. They were both good detectives in their own right, but Kovac liked the way they worked a scene together. They complemented each other in the way they saw things, in the feelings they picked up, in the way they processed what they took in.

  “Not everyone shares your enlightened view of organization,” Kovac said as they walked around the living room, looking for any sign of something wrong.

  He had sent one of the uniforms to the backyard and one to the basement. Dawes stood just inside the front door, deep in conversation with the chief of detectives, trying to explain the debacle at the Moore house.

  “Not everyone has two boys and a homicide cop in the family,” Liska said. “Look at the pattern in this carpet. Freshly vacuumed. I’m lucky I cansee my carpet.”

  “Mmmm… You should tell Speed he can work off some of his delinquent child support tidying your house once a week.”

  “Ha. Two boys, a homicide cop, and an asshole. I would have the same house, but it would smell like sweat socks, cigarettes, and bad Mexican food.”

  They went into the kitchen, finding it equally immaculate.

  “The boys with him this weekend?” Kovac asked.

  “Yeah. I can’t wait to find out what useful skill he’s taught them this time,” Liska said. “The last time they were with him, he taught them how to pat down a hype without getting stuck with a dirty needle.”

  Kovac looked out the window over the sink, into the fenced backyard. A happy scarecrow hung on a post in a vegetable garden studded with orange pumpkins.

  “That’s Speed, always the model father,” he said.

  “He’s the only one they’ve got,” Liska said. “Hey, look at this. She’s a breast cancer survivor.”

  She stood in front of the refrigerator, looking at a collage of photographs. The life and times of Christine Neal.

  “I hope to God she’s visiting those grandkids,” Kovac said.

  The officer came up from the basement and said, “Nothing down there but wet laundry in the washing machine.”

  Kovac turned down the hall, checked out the bathroom-spotless-and continued on to what he thought might be a bedroom.

  The vacuum had been run in this room as well, right up to the white eyelet dust ruffle of the queen-sized bed.

  Kovac looked around the room. Nothing had been overturned or disturbed.

  He went down on one knee beside the bed and lifted the fabric.

  Christine Neal stared at him with sightless eyes.

  52

  “I DON’T GET IT, ”Kovac said. “Why kill this woman? Just to take her car?”

  “Maybe he knew her,” Liska suggested. “Maybe she could ID him.”

  “You think Christine Neal was into porn? Is there a whole over-fifty porn movie industry out there I don’t know about?”

  “I don’t want to know. I’m still reeling from Tippen.”

  Kovac huffed. “Please. Like you didn’t already think he was watching porn.”

  “Yeah, but hearing it from the horse’s mouth was too much.”

  They stood in the front yard, near Christine Neal’s house, waiting for the ME’s people to roll out the victim, cloaked in the anonymous black body bag. It would be the last private moment for Christine Neal.

  By day’s end the cops and the media would be dragging out the details of her life like entrails from a carcass. By the end of the next day, everyone with a television or a newspaper subscription in the metro area would know how old she was, who her family was, what her neighbors knew about her, how her coworkers felt about her.

  Kovac lit a cigarette, giving Liska a warning glare. She held her hands up in surrender.

  “Maybe the doer wasn’t Donny Bergen,” Lieutenant Dawes said.

  “It was,” Kovac snapped.

  “Why? Because you want to pin the plan on David Moore?”

  “It all fits,” he insisted. “The assault Friday night, Bergen showing up at the hotel bar dressed in black like the guy on the tape from the parking garage. Moore wanted out of the marriage, but he didn’t want to lose anything. Carey is kidnapped, murdered, and he’s the grieving husband, the devoted single father, inherits everything via Lucy.”

  Dawes’s phone rang. She sighed and took the call, walking away.

  Liska shifted her weight to her right foot, effectively moving closer to her partner. They stood at right angles, facing the house, their backs to the gathering mob of media and curious onlookers.

  Kovac stared at the house, raised his cigarette to his lips, knowing she could see the slight trembling of his hand. Their killer had murdered twice, senselessly. There was no reason to think he wouldn’t do it again. Especially if he’d been paid to do it.

  Christine Neal and the nanny had been just for sport. He could have stolen either car without harming anyone. Wear a mask, tie the women up, tape their mouths shut. They hadn’t needed to see him.

  “Sam, there are other possibilities,” Liska said.

  “Maybe there are,” he conceded. “But are any of them good, Tinks? You think this is going to have a happy ending? You know as well as I do more kidnap victims are murdered within the first few hours of the abduction than not. And those are the ones snatched for ransom. There’s no ransom involved here. There hasn’t been a call. There’s not going to be a call.

  “Let’s say it’s not Donny Bergen,” he suggested. “Who’s up next? Stan Dempsey? Your boy Bobby? You think either of those scenarios is going to end well? We’ve looked at two dead women inside an hour.”

  “You need to hold it together, Kojak,” Liska said firmly but gently as the ME’s people came out the front door with the gurney. “If Carey Moore is still alive, she sure as hell doesn’t need you writing her off.”

  Kovac squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed his forehead with one hand. What made a good cop was objectivity. Objectivity and dogged tenacity. He had made his career on both.

  He finished his cigarette, put it out on the front step, and dropped the butt into a jack-o’-lantern.

  Liska put a hand on his arm, drawing his attention back to her. The concern in her eyes touched him. “Are you gonna be all right?”

  Kovac forced a smile. “Remains to be seen, doesn’t it? I’d rather work ten murders than one abduction.”

  “You’d b
etter not be blaming yourself,” Liska warned. “That’s self-indulgent bullshit. I’ll have to kick your ass.”

  Somehow he managed to chuckle, not because he felt any better but because that was the reaction Liska wanted.

  “Let’s get back to work, Tinker Bell,” he said. “We’ve got crimes to solve.”

  53

  THE QUIET LASTED For so long, Carey began to think she had been abandoned. Maybe the car had been left on train tracks, and she was waiting as her death hurtled toward her. Maybe the car had been left in the back of a junkyard, and she would die of dehydration after days of suffering. Maybe anything.

  She felt through the broken pieces of plastic from the light cover to find a shard she could use for a weapon in case her captor ever came to get her.

  She wondered who he was. Stan Dempsey? Had he really gone that far off the deep end? He was a cop, for God’s sake. How could he reconcile hurting people, maybe killing people, with having served twenty-plus years as a police officer?

  Justice, Kovac had said. Dempsey was meting out justice as he perceived it. If he was performing an act of justice, how could it be a crime?

  She wished she could have seen the videotape he had made and left behind for his colleagues to find. What was his demeanor? What was his tone of voice? How did he look? How did he sound?

  How about it wasn’t Stan Dempsey at all? How about the note David had made to himself:$25,000. What if Kovac had been right from the start, and her husband wanted her out of his life badly enough to hire someone to do it?

  She wondered if Kovac was looking for her. Almost certainly he was. He would have called early, or come over and helped himself to coffee. But how would he have any idea where to look? She was the needle in the haystack.

  She thought about Lucy. Where was she? Was she afraid? Was she with David? Was she alive?

  Shoes crunched on gravel. A key slid into the trunk lock and turned.