“Oh, my God, Mrs. Moore!”
“It looks worse than it is,” Carey said quietly. “Please don’t make a fuss, Anka. Is Lucy asleep?”
“Ya. Just a little while ago,” the nanny said.
Kovac helped the judge with her coat, and the nanny took it from him, but she never took her worried eyes off her boss. “But she is worried about you. She didn’t want to go to bed. And she made me leave on the light on the side table.”
The judge slid down onto an antique carved chair and closed her eyes for a moment. Kovac introduced himself to the nanny, Anka Jorgenson.
“You’ve been here all evening?” he asked.
“Ya.”
“Have there been any strange phone calls? Hang-up calls?”
“No. There was a wrong number,” Anka said as an afterthought. “About an hour ago.”
“Who did the person ask for?”
“Marlene. I told him there was no such person here.”
The judge opened her eyes at that and looked at Kovac. If she could have gotten any paler, she would have.
Marlene, as in Marlene Haas? Kovac thought. The woman Karl Dahl had opened up from throat to groin. He had planted fresh-cut daisies in the gaping wound as if she had been some strange and macabre sculpture in a surrealist gallery. Carey Moore was probably thinking the same thing.
“Was the caller a man or a woman?” Kovac asked.
“A man. He was very polite,” the nanny said as if that meant he couldn’t have been a bad person. “He apologized for the mistake.”
“Has anyone come to the door this evening?”
“No.”
“Have you heard any strange noises outside?”
The nanny’s eyes filled with tears as she looked back and forth from Kovac to her boss. “Do you think this man who hurt you will come here? Who is Marlene?”
“Just being cautious,” Kovac said. “Don’t open the door to anyone you don’t know. I don’t care if they tell you their mother is lying bleeding to death in the street.”
“You’re scaring me,” Anka said, sounding almost angry or resentful.
Kovac nodded. “Good. Does this phone have caller ID?”
“Yes,” Anka said. She picked up the handheld off the hall table, scrolled through the caller list, and held it out to Kovac.
“Can you write the number down for me?” he asked. “I’m going to help Judge Moore upstairs.”
“I can manage,” she said, using the table to help herself to her feet.
Kovac put an arm around her shoulders and guided her toward the staircase. “Stop being such a goddamn pain in the ass. I’m helping you, and that’s the end of it. You fall and break your neck on my watch, my head goes on the block.”
He wanted to pick her up, toss her over his shoulder, and carry her like a sack of potatoes, but he didn’t want to have to explain the complaint that that would bring to his lieutenant.
“Don’t even think of saying the word ‘coincidence,’” he warned as they slowly went up the stairs. “Marlene isn’t that common a name, and even if it was, the odds of someone calling here by mistake and asking for someone with the same name as the victim in a case you’re trying have to be astronomical.”
She didn’t say anything at all, but she stopped in the bathroom at the top of the hall, dropped to her knees in front of the toilet, and vomited again.
Kovac dampened a hand towel and gave it to her. She accepted it in silence and sat there on the floor for several moments with her face buried in it.
“Can I assume you have an unlisted phone number?” Kovac asked, sitting down on the edge of the bathtub.
“Yes, of course.”
“We’ll need to set up a trap on your line. This won’t be the only call you’ll get.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because the call came after the attack. If we’re talking about the same mutt, then he’s in this for more than your wallet.”
She didn’t look at him. She was staring at nothing, her expression bleak.
“You should lie down,” Kovac said, reaching out once again to help her to her feet.
She paid no attention to him and stopped at the door to her daughter’s room, which was adorned with a fanciful painted fairy touching a magic wand to a sign that read: “Princess Lucy’s Room.” Leaning against the doorjamb, she turned the knob carefully and peeked inside. Kovac looked in over her head.
Princess Lucy was sleeping the sleep of the innocent in a bed with pale pink sheets and a confection of white quilts and comforters and bed skirts. Cute kid. Maybe four or five, with a mop of wavy dark hair and a mouth like a rosebud. A small lamp with a ruffled lavender shade glowed softly on a table across from the bed.
Carey Moore watched her daughter sleep for a moment, her cheek pressed to the frame of the door, one hand pressed across her mouth. Kovac imagined she was realizing the decision she had made in her chambers today had ramifications that were rippling out far beyond the government center and beyond herself. Someone had reached out over a phone line and invaded her home, the place she should have felt most safe, the place her daughter should have been safe.
People never had a clue what an illusion their sense of safety was. A security system could be gone with the snip of a wire. A security building with a twenty-four-hour doorman still had a garage with a gate that stayed up long enough for a stranger to drive in behind a resident. A perimeter wall could always be scaled. Every e-mail ever sent could be retrieved with a couple of mouse clicks. One wrong set of eyes glancing at a social security number on a form, and an identity became a commodity for sale. One phone call and a sanctuary became a cage.
Kovac reached around the judge and drew the door closed.
“Let’s get you to bed before you fall down,” he murmured.
The Moores ’ master bedroom looked like it belonged in some five-star hotel. Not that Kovac had ever set foot in one. The places he stayed usually had disposable cups, one working lamp, and suspicious stains on the creepy polyester bedspread. He had, however, been known to watch the Travel Channel on occasion.
The room was a cocoon of heavy, expensive fabrics, warm, rich shades of gold and deep red, thick carpet, antiques, and spotlit art. Mementos were clustered on her nightstand-a silver-framed photo of a rosy-cheeked baby; a gold-leafed keepsake box with a top encrusted in tiny, exotic shells and seed pearls; a black-and-white photo of herself in a graduation cap and gown and a tall, handsome, well-dressed man with silver hair. Her dad, Judge Alec Greer. Neither of them could have looked more proud as they gazed at each other.
Kovac placed one of his business cards next to the photograph.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to track down your husband?” Kovac asked as the judge eased herself back against a mountain of elaborate pillows on the bed.
There were no photographs of Carey Moore with her spouse. Not on either night table. There might have been one on the bookcase on the far side of the room, but it couldn’t be seen from the bed.
“There’s no need,” she said quietly.
Kovac shrugged his shoulders. “Suit yourself. I just know if you were my wife and I knew you’d been attacked, I’d damn well be here. I don’t care if I was having dinner with the president.”
“You’ll make some lucky woman a good husband someday, then,” she murmured, closing her eyes, closing him and his opinions out.
“Well, I haven’t so far,” Kovac muttered as he left the room.
He was a two-time loser in the marriage-go-round. And still he knew enough to want to be with his partner if she was hurt and frightened. It was a husband’s job to protect and reassure. Apparently, Carey Moore’s husband didn’t know that.
The nanny was standing at the top of the stairs, wringing her hands, uncertain what to do.
“Has Mr. Moore called at all tonight?” Kovac asked.
“No, he hasn’t.”
“Is that the usual for him? He goes out, doesn’t check in with anybody? Doesn’t call to tell his daughter good night?”