Prior Bad Acts

by Tami Hoag

  Another volley of thunder rumbled overhead.

  Slowly, Carey began to let the knife slip down through her hand inch by cautious inch.

  As they stepped out, Dempsey turned her to the left, and she gasped.

  Karl Dahl had been handcuffed to the old iron railing on the stairs and hung limp from the cuffs, unconscious-or dead-his head covered in blood.

  “That’s what he had coming to him,” Dempsey said. “And that’s just the start of it.”

  “Oh, my God,” Carey whispered.

  Dahl’s eyes were half-open, his jaw slack. He wasn’t moving. She couldn’t tell whether or not he was breathing. There was so much blood, it looked as if someone had poured a gallon of red paint over his head.

  “Oh, my God.”

  This was what Stan Dempsey meant by justice. Her stomach rolled and cramped, and she leaned over, heaving, nothing coming out, her body trying to reject what she had just seen.

  “That’s justice!” Dempsey shouted, leaning over her. “That’s justice!”

  Now or never…

  Carey came up fast, the top of her head cracking hard into Dempsey’s chin. He took a half step back, straightening. Carey twisted toward him, bringing her right hand up into him with as much force as she could. The knife went into his belly so easily it shocked her.

  Dempsey folded at the waist and staggered backward, pulling himself off the knife Carey still held in her hand. He looked surprised. This hadn’t been part of his plan.

  He put his left hand where the knife had gone into him. Blood ran out over his fingers. In his right hand, he still held the gun, but limply, as if he had forgotten it was there.

  “You killed me,” he said in accusation. “I wouldn’t have killed you.”

  Carey stood there staring at him, horrified, unable to move.

  Without warning, Dempsey lunged at her.

  Too slow to react, Carey backpedaled, off balance, then off the landing. Stan Dempsey fell with her, came down on top of her, knocking the wind out of her. She tried to move but couldn’t.

  Dempsey groaned and tried to lift himself. Carey could feel his blood, warm and wet, soaking into her shirt.

  Hysterical, she scrambled backward like a crab to get out from under him. Dempsey was on his hands and knees. Trying to draw breath, tears blurring her vision, Carey rolled over, got her feet under her, and ran, adrenaline pumping through her like high-octane fuel.

  She ran toward the road, feeling out of control, feeling like her body was hurtling forward faster than her mind or her legs could go. Like running down a steep hill.

  A gunshot blasted behind her.

  She fell as if something caught her ankles from behind and yanked her legs out from under her. She hit the ground hard, bounced twice. Gravel dug into her palms, her elbows, her chin.

  She landed in a heap, like a rag doll, and lay there, still.

  In the back of her mind it registered very dimly that it had started to rain.

  63

  THEY CUT THE LIGHT Sand siren when they neared the road Tippen said would take them to the munitions building. Kovac cut the speed even though it went hard against his sense of urgency. Half an hour had passed since he had taken Carey’s call. A lot of bad shit could happen in half an hour.

  “Karl Dahl will go into the annals of criminal psychology,” Tippen said as they crept down the little-used side road. “He kills two women to get to the only woman who’s done him any favors in who knows how long. Digging into the dark labyrinths of his mind for motive will be like spelunking into hell.”

  Kovac said nothing. It didn’t matter to him why Karl Dahl would do anything. All that mattered was that he had. He had killed Anka Jorgenson. He had killed Christine Neal. He had killed Marlene Haas and her two foster children. And now he had Carey.

  “It’s up here on the left,” Tippen said. “What’s the plan?”

  “I don’t have one.”

  “Great. What do I tell our backup units and the ambulance?” Tippen asked. “We can’t go in there like the cavalry. Guns a-blazin’.”

  That was what Kovac wanted to do. He wanted to go in like a commando. But they couldn’t risk that. If they went in aggressively and Dahl felt cornered, there was no telling what he might do. It then became a hostage situation. If they went in quietly, assessed the situation and considered their options, they had a better chance of taking Dahl by surprise, getting him away from Carey.

  “There it is,” Tippen said, pointing off to the left.

  Kovac slowed the car. While it had gotten them out here faster than anything else would have, they couldn’t drive past in a police cruiser. He pulled over to where a stand of mostly naked small trees offered some protection, put the car in park, killed the engine.

  The building looked like a war ruin. It sat fifty yards or so back off the road in a wide-open patch of weeds. No cover. There was no way to go onto the property without being seen.

  “Shit,” he said. He rubbed his face with his hands, took a deep breath, and exhaled, trying to think. “We have to go in on foot. There’s no other way to do it.”

  He stared at the building some more, trying not to wonder what might be going on inside even as they sat there, trying to formulate a plan.

  “Sam,” Tippen said. “Look up ahead. We’re not alone.”

  An old pickup with a camper shell over the bed sat off the road on the access drive into a field down the road, partially obscured from view by another stand of small trees. Someone else who didn’t want to be seen from the building where Dahl held Carey.

  “Can you see the plates?”

  Tippen gave him a look. “Can you see the plates?”

  “Christ, we’re old,” Kovac said. “Bring the shotgun. Let’s go.”

  They got out of the cruiser, careful not to make noise doing it. Leaving the doors open, they made a dash for the truck.

  “Is this what they use for an undercover car in the sheriff’s department?” Kovac said sarcastically when they stood at the nose of the pickup.

  The truck had to be twenty years old. A Ford F-150. The once navy blue paint had faded over the years from sun and weather.

  As Tippen called in the plate number on his cell phone, Kovac looked in the window of the cab. There was nothing in it. Not so much as a gum wrapper. He looked in through the windows of the camper shell. A couple of duffel bags, a small Igloo cooler.

  He went around and opened the back to get a better look inside. One of the bags was long enough to hold a rifle. A luggage tag hung from one of the handles.

  Kovac went cold as he read it.

  “The truck belongs to a Walter Dempsey,” Tippen said. “Safe to assume he’s a relative of our man Stan.”

  Kovac popped the latch on the tailgate and dropped it open. He reached for the nearest of the duffel bags. It was unzipped. Inside was an assortment of tools-handsaws, screwdrivers, pliers… and a wood-burning tool.

  “Great,” Tippen said. “Double your maniacs, double your fun.”

  Kovac jammed his hands at his waist and paced around in a little circle. They didn’t know jack shit about what might be going on in that building. There wasn’t time to do reconnaissance, regroup, form a strategy. Carey was in there with two men bent on no good.

  “Fuck it,” he said. “Let’s go in.”

  As he rounded the front end of the truck, he thought he heard voices in the distance. He walked faster. When he cleared the copse of trees, he broke into a run.

  Someone was running toward the road.

  A gunshot cracked the air.

  The runner was Carey.

  She tripped and fell hard.

  She didn’t move.

  Kovac’s mind was going wild. Had she been shot? Had she been dropped by Dempsey and a hunting rifle?

  He didn’t look beyond her to see but barreled down what once had been a driveway. If the shooter had a scope, he was screwed, but he kept running.

  “Carey!”

  He dropped to his k
nees as he reached her.

  “Carey!”

  She lay facedown, crying weakly. Kovac put two fingers against her throat and found her pulse racing wildly.

  He bent down close and brushed her hair back. “Carey, it’s me. It’s Sam. Can you hear me? Just lie still.”

  Feeling his way gingerly down her back, he expected his hand to come away bloody from the gunshot that had dropped her. But he couldn’t find an entry wound.

  Headlights washed over them. Tippen roared in with the squad car, skidding sideways to a stop between them and the building, giving them cover.

  “Carey?” Kovac said. “Are you shot? Did he shoot you?”

  All she could do was shake, and cry harder.

  “I killed him!” she cried. “Oh, my God, I killed him!”

  Kovac eased her over onto her side, brushed her hair back from her face. His hand was shaking like an old man’s.

  “Shhh… It’s okay, you’re okay,” he said softly.

  He pulled his suit coat off and covered her with it.

  Where the hell was backup? Where the hell was the ambulance?

  She pushed herself up with one arm and tried to wipe her face with a hand that was covered in blood.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said under his breath. To Carey he said, “Lie down. Carey, lie down. Just lie down.”

  She shook her head. “No. I want to go home.”

  “Carey, lie down,” Kovac said more forcefully. “You’re bleeding.”

  She looked at her hand, confused.

  “It’s not mine,” she said, but she sounded disoriented, maybe delusional.

  “Goddammit, Carey, lie down, or I’m putting a knee into your chest and holding you down!”

  Still confused, she sank back down. Kovac grabbed the lower part of the man’s shirt she wore and tore it open. His hands came away bloody from the shirt, but he could find no wound on her belly.

  “It’s not mine,” she said again, sitting up. “I killed him.”

  Clutching Kovac’s arms, she fell against him, sobbing.

  Kovac put his arms around her and held her tight while she cried, telling her again and again, “It’s all right. It’s over now. It’s over.”

  He knew that that wasn’t true. It wasn’t over. Carey Moore couldn’t just go home and walk back into her life as if nothing had ever happened. She would have to be interviewed, would have to recount and relive what had happened to her here. She would have to be checked over by a doctor for injuries. If she had been sexually assaulted, she would have to endure the rape exam.

  God, he hoped that that wasn’t the case. She’d had enough trauma without adding “rape survivor” to the list.

  Tippen came around the back of the car. “Is she all right?”

  Kovac didn’t know quite how to respond, so he didn’t. “What’s going on? Where’s Dahl? Where’s Dempsey?”

  “Dead and dead. Dahl was shot in the face. Looks like Dempsey has a single stab wound.”

  “I killed him,” Carey said, still crying against Kovac’s shoulder. “I killed him. I killed a man.”

  Kovac stroked his hand over her wet hair. It had begun to rain in earnest. Thunder rumbled overhead. In the near distance he could hear the sirens approaching.

  “Shhh… It’s over,” he said quietly. “It’s over. You’re safe now. That’s all that matters.”

  64

  THE CHAOS OF what had happened after Kovac had arrived at the scene was a jumbled blur of color and activity in Carey’s mind. She remembered the police and sheriff’s cars arriving. The noise of men arguing over jurisdiction. The carnival quality of the lights from the cars and the ambulance. A paramedic had given her something to calm her down. It made her feel numb. All things considered, that was a good thing.

  Instead of letting all of it swirl around and around inside her head, she tried to focus on the sense of relief and of being safe as Sam Kovac had sat there in the pouring rain and held her. That was what she wanted now: to feel safe, to feel there was someone right there to hold her if she needed it.

  But that feeling also brought sadness as she realized she hadn’t had that kind of support in a very long time. When her father had been healthy, he had been her Rock of Gibraltar. David had never quite filled that place. He had tried to in the first years of their marriage but had gradually stepped out of that role. And she had gradually stopped wanting him to try harder.

  The red-haired nurse from Friday night bustled into the room to check her IV and make notes in a chart.

  “You know,” she said, giving Carey a stern look completely betrayed by the kindness in her eyes,“we’re getting pretty sick and tired of seeing you around this place.”

  “I promise this is my last time,” Carey said.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Numb.”

  “Good for you! Nothing like a little happy pill to take the edge off. I’m proposing the hospital put a gum ball machine in the nurses’ lounge and keep it filled with Valium. Everyone would be so much happier to do their jobs.”

  Kovac peeked in the door.

  “Is Casey giving you a hard time?” he asked, letting himself in.

  The nurse gave him an innocent look. “Who, me?”

  “The last time I was in her ER,” he said, coming to stand beside the nurse, “she stapled my forehead together with an actual staple gun.”

  “I did not!” Casey protested, then gave him a mischievous grin. “And if I did, I’m sure you had it coming.”

  “I can still see her leaning over me. She came at me with that gun, and she said, ‘There’s no other way to put it. This is gonna hurt.’ I still have nightmares.”

  Casey sniffed. “You should be so lucky to dream about me.”

  She turned back to Carey. “The doctor will be back to check in on you again later. Probably right after you’ve managed to fall asleep.”

  As she headed for the door, Kovac said, “That’s Casey. I call her the Iron Leprechaun.”

  “But not when I’m close enough to hit him,” Casey said as she left the room.

  Hair wet and sticking up in all directions, Kovac stepped up to the side of the bed. He had traded his wet dress shirt for the top from a set of surgical scrubs.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Dr. Kovac.” She tried to smile but couldn’t quite pull it off. “I don’t know. I’m sure that sounds stupid.”

  He shook his head. “You’ve gone through something horrible, Carey. It’ll take a while for you to process it all. And you can’t do that alone. I’ve already been on the phone with Kate. If she wasn’t looking after Lucy, she would have been down here at the speed of light.”

  Carey took a shaky breath. “Lucy. How is she? Is she all right?”

  “She wants her mom back. She’s scared.”

  “So was I,” Carey admitted. “I was so afraid he’d done something to her, that she was hurt or-”

  Kovac put a hand on her shoulder. “She’s fine. Don’t upset yourself thinking about what didn’t happen. You’ve got plenty of real shit to deal with.”

  “You have a way with words, Detective,” she said, trying again to find some small part of a smile. It was gone in the next instant. “He killed Anka, didn’t he?”

  Kovac nodded. “I’m sorry.”

  A profound sadness weighed on her. “I’ll have to call her family in Sweden. How do I tell her parents their daughter is dead because of me?”

  “You don’t,” he said. “She’s not dead because of you. She’s dead because Karl Dahl killed her.”

  Carey said nothing. It wasn’t going to be that easy for her to let herself off the hook.

  “So where was David through all this?” she asked.

  Kovac frowned. “He was at the house when I last saw him. With his lawyer.”

  “His lawyer?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “He didn’t have anything to do with this,” Carey said.

  “He didn’t have anything to
do with Karl Dahl taking you,” Kovac specified. “We’re still looking into the assault.”

  Carey watched him. He was looking everywhere but at her.

  “Do you know something I don’t?”

  “We might have found the twenty-five-thousand-dollar man,” he said. “We don’t need to talk about it now.”

  “You’ve just told me you’ve found the man you think my husband paid to have me killed,” she said. “I need to talk about that. Who is he? Can you connect him to a payoff?”

  “He’s the girlfriend’s brother. A porn actor by the name of Donny Bergen.” He hesitated, took a deep breath, let it out. “Carey, your husband is into some pretty ugly stuff.”

  “I know,” she said softly. “I came across some of it on his computer last night. It made me sick. I don’t know who he is,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “You don’t have to say anything,” Kovac said. “I shouldn’t have brought it up. You don’t need anything more on your mind tonight. You need to get some rest. I just came in to make sure you’re okay before I go.”

  “You have to go?” Carey asked him, feeling a little panicked at the thought. She didn’t want to be alone with the memories of the things that had happened.

  Kovac looked at her, tipping his head a little to one side. “You want me to stay?” The idea seemed to surprise him. “I’ll stay. I’ll stay as long as you want.”

  He sat on the edge of the bed, settling in. Carey looked away, embarrassed now that she’d said anything.

  “I know this will sound stupid,” she said. “I mean, I know I’m safe and that Lucy is safe, but…”

  Kovac reached out and pressed a finger to her lips.

  “It’s all right. I know. You feel like something bad could happen at any second. You’re ready to jump out of your skin. That’s normal.”

  “I told you I don’t make a very good victim,” she said. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “There’s no handbook,” Kovac said. “You have to feel what you feel. And it takes as long as it takes.”