9
NO ONE HAD WANTED to go near the Haas home on the north side of Minneapolis since the murders. Kids rode past it slowly on their bikes during the day, morbidly fascinated with the place and the idea of something as evil as murder. They dared each other to go up to the windows and look inside, especially the basement windows. Every once in a while some kid would take the challenge. More often, they all spooked and ran.
No one wanted to go near the Haas home, which was why Wayne Haas and his son from his first marriage still lived in it. The “For Sale” sign had been standing in the front yard for more than a year. No takers. The only people who looked, looked out of the same morbid fascination as the children who sat on their bikes out in front on the street.
No one wanted to buy a home where a woman and two children had been tortured and murdered, their bodies desecrated in sickening, unspeakable ways.
If any place should have been haunted, it should have been that house. The evil that had lived inside it that terrible day surely must have permeated the place-the walls, the floors, the ceilings, the foundation-the same way smoke from a fire could permeate, and never leave.
Wayne Haas was not a man of means. He worked in a meat-packing plant, hanging carcasses and loading trucks. He made a decent living, but he couldn’t afford to buy a different house without selling the one he had. And nobody wanted the house he had.
Kovac and Liska pulled into the cracked concrete driveway, which led to a detached garage. Erratic lights flashed in the front window of the otherwise dark house, indicating someone inside was watching television. Still, the place had a weird, vacant quality to it. The yard was bad, weedy and bald in spots. There once had been a big oak tree in the front, but the tornado that had come on that same fateful summer afternoon as the murders had torn it up by the roots, leaving the lawn naked and the house exposed. A photograph of the scene had taken up half the front page of the newspaper the next day.
“I couldn’t live in this house,” Liska said. “I don’t even want to go inside.”
“I’d live in a garbage Dumpster behind a fish market before I’d live here,” Kovac said.
He mostly didn’t believe in superstitions, but even he drew the line at living in murder scenes.
For one thing, in all his twenty-plus years on the job, he had never gotten used to the smell of death. There was nothing else like it. It hung in the air at a death scene, so thick and heavy that it was a presence. And though he knew logically that the smell would disappear shortly after the corpses had been removed and the cleaning crew had come through, he believed the memory of it never left and that every time he returned to the place, the stench would fill his head and turn his stomach.
Kovac’s second wife had never allowed him into the house wearing the suits he had worn to murder scenes. His “corpse clothes,” she had called them. He had had to take them off in the garage and leave them there and walk through the house in his underwear to get to the shower. Then, instead of sending the clothes to the cleaners or throwing them into the trash, she would box them up and take them to Goodwill. Like the disadvantaged people of Minneapolis didn’t have enough going against them, they had to go around smelling of corpses.
After the disappearance of three suits, he had wised up and kept a change of clothes at the station and made friends with the guy who ran the dry cleaners down the street.
Liska sighed. “Let’s get it over with so I can go home and lie awake all night feeling guilty that I had to question these people.”
Wayne Haas came to the front door looking like he wanted to hit somebody. He was a rawboned man with big hands and big shoulders from moving beef carcasses and slabs of meat. Stress and grief and anger had cut such deep lines in his ruddy face that it looked as if it had been carved of redwood.
“What the hell kind of show are you people running?” he demanded, glancing at the ID Liska held up for him to see. “It’s all over the TV. That murdering son of a bitch is running loose. How the hell could you let this happen?”
“I can imagine how you must feel, Mr. Haas,” Kovac started.
“The hell you can! You’re not the one walked into this house and found half his family butchered! And now the bastard is running around loose, free to kill-”
“Every cop in the city is looking for him,” Kovac said.
“That’s supposed to make me feel better? You people lost him in the first place!”
Kovac didn’t bother to tell him it was the sheriff’s office that had lost Karl Dahl, not the police department. Wayne Haas wouldn’t appreciate the difference. The only thing that mattered to him was the end result.
“You’re right,” Kovac said instead. “I’m pissed off about it too. It was the cluster fuck of the century. Believe me, my partner and I sure as hell didn’t want to come here tonight and tell you Karl Dahl escaped. We didn’t even want to come here to tell you about Judge Moore’s ruling on that evidentiary hearing.”
Haas shook his head and stepped back a little from the door. Kovac took advantage and moved inside. Liska, who was the size of a minute, slipped in behind him and around him and did a quick survey of the place.
“What’s wrong with that woman?” Haas asked. “How could she say what Dahl did in the past didn’t have anything to do with this? It just proves what a sick bastard he is. The jury should hear about it.”
“I know,” Kovac said. “I’m with you. The guy didn’t just wake up one day and decide to kill. These mutts work their way up to it.”
“It’s a goddamn nightmare,” Haas said, almost to himself.
“We can put a squad car on the street in front of your house if you’re worried about Dahl coming back here,” Liska offered.
Haas looked over at the television, where a reporter was coming live from outside the ambulance bay at HCMC. Amber, blue, and red lights from the cop cars and emergency vehicles gave the scene a carnival atmosphere. But it didn’t look to Kovac like any of it was registering on Haas. His mind had gone somewhere else, probably somewhere worse.
“I don’t want anything from you people,” he said at last.
“Mr. Haas?” Liska asked. “Is your son at home?”
“He went to a basketball game at his school. Why?”
Kovac grimaced and looked embarrassed. “This stinks. Believe me, we know it. If it was up to me, I wouldn’t ask, but we have to answer to the higher powers.”
Haas looked suspicious but said nothing, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“I’m sure you heard, Judge Moore was attacked in the parking ramp at the government center earlier tonight,” Liska said. “We need to ask you and your son where you both were at the time.”
“Get out of my house,” he said quietly, though the rage was building visibly inside him.
“It’s routine, Mr. Haas,” Kovac said. “No one really thinks you had anything to do with it. We just have to put it on paper.”
“Get out of my house,” he said louder. His neck was red, and Kovac could see a big vein pulsing on one side. “Get out of my house, goddamn you!”
He went to the front door and yanked it wide so hard that it hit the wall and rattled the front windows.
Bobby Haas stood on the front porch, looking bewildered and worried, brown eyes wide. “Dad? Dad, what’s wrong? Who are you people?”
“We’re with the police,” Liska said, but the boy was looking at his father as Wayne Haas raised a hand to his temple and gritted his teeth.
“Dad!”
“Mr. Haas?” Kovac moved toward him at the same time the kid did. Haas bent forward in obvious pain.
“Get him to a chair,” Kovac ordered, and he and the boy each took an arm and moved Wayne Haas to a worn green armchair a few feet away. Kovac looked at Liska. “Call an ambulance.”