A table lamp cast an amber glow over leather chairs and the hand-waxed pine paneling. The judge slowly lowered herself into one corner of a dark green leather love seat. Kovac sat in the chair adjacent, moving it closer to her until their knees were almost touching.
“What time did the call come?” he asked, pulling his small notebook and a pen out of his pocket.
“One-twenty-two. I looked at the clock.”
“Your house phone or your cell?”
“Cell.”
“Can I see the phone?”
She handed it to him. Her hand was trembling.
Kovac brought up the menu and found his way to the call list. “Same number as the call to the house-the call asking for Marlene.”
“Were you able to trace it?”
“Prepaid cell phone. The modern criminal’s best friend. We might be able to trace it to the manufacturer, maybe to a list of places in the Twin Cities area where that manufacturer distributes. But you know as well as I do, that’s a lot of territory, and the damn things are everywhere. Tracking down this one phone… you’ll die of old age before we find the mutt who bought it.”
She stared into the dark end of the room as if waiting for a sign from another dimension.
“Who are you looking at?” she asked.
“I shouldn’t get into that.”
The judge laughed without humor and shook her head. “Excuse me, Detective, but I’m not your average vic, am I? I’ve been a part of the criminal justice system since I clerked for my father when I was a student. Here’s who I think you’ll look at: Wayne Haas, Bobby Haas, Stan Dempsey-”
“No offense, Judge, but that’s not even the tip of the iceberg of people who hate you right now.”
“You should check on the relatives of the foster children who were murdered.”
“I know my job.”
“I know you do.”
She looked away again, wrestling with something. She rested her forehead in her hand and sighed. “I’m not very good at being a victim,” she admitted. “I don’t know how to do it. I don’t know what I should feel, what I should think, what I should just try to shut out. I still can’t believe this happened to me.”
A tear rolled over her lashes onto her cheek. She caught it with a scraped knuckle and swept it away. “I only know how to fight. Go on the offensive. Make something happen.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that,” Kovac said. He wondered if part of the reason she wasn’t able to accept she’d been victimized was that she had no one to fall back on, no one to take the offensive for her.
“There isn’t a good time to tell you this, so I’m just going to do it,” Kovac said. “Karl Dahl escaped custody tonight.”
Carey Moore stared at him for so long without saying anything that Kovac began to wonder if she’d understood a word he’d said. Head injuries could have some pretty weird effects on people.
Finally, she said, “Escaped? What do you mean he escaped? How could he escape?”
“There was some kind of fight at the jail. Things got out of hand. Prisoners and jailers had to be taken to the hospital. Someone fucked up royally. Didn’t cuff Dahl to the gurney. He basically just got up and left when nobody was looking.”
“Oh, my God,” she said with the same kind of anger and disgust every cop in town was feeling.
A triple murderer was loose on the streets because some dickhead in a uniform had blown it. Kovac knew from experience it wouldn’t matter who the dickhead was specifically, and it wouldn’t matter which agency he worked for. Every cop, every deputy sheriff in Minneapolis, would take heat for it from the public, from the media, from department brass.
“The public will love it,” Kovac said with his usual sarcasm. “Now they have two branches of the justice system not to trust.”
Carey Moore closed her eyes but didn’t succeed in blocking out anything but the light. “Has someone told Wayne Haas?”
“I had that pleasure.”
“How did he take it?”
“How do you think?”
She didn’t answer him. Both her question and his had been rhetorical.
As they sat there in the Moores ’ beautiful den, it was so quiet in the house that the sound of a key unlocking the front door seemed as loud as a gunshot. Kovac had a direct view of the entry. He rose from his chair, at attention, and waited, feeling a strange mix of curiosity and aggression.
David Moore walked in, his tie askew, shirt collar undone. He was a good-enough-looking guy, Kovac supposed. Medium height, blondish conservative haircut. He might have been the athletic type once, but he was going soft, and his face and neck had a slight doughy quality that suggested indulgence. He wore a rumpled brown suit and a petulant expression.
In other words, in Kovac’s vernacular: asshole.
Kovac took an instant dislike to Carey Moore’s husband before one word came out of his mouth.
“Carey? What’s going on?” the husband demanded, coming into the den. “What happened to you?”
Not said with loving concern, but almost as if he was offended that she looked the way she did.
“I was mugged in the parking ramp.”
“Oh, my God.”
“Your wife was attacked, Mr. Moore,” Kovac said. “We believe it may have been an attempt on her life.”
David Moore just stood there like a moron, looking from his battered wife to Kovac. “Who are you?”
Kovac showed him his badge. “Kovac. I’m a detective with the Homicide division.”
“Homicide?”
“We also handle assaults. Assaults are the homicides of tomorrow,” he said with a hint of sarcasm he knew David Moore wouldn’t get. It was an inside joke. It always seemed like the department was more keen on solving the assaults, because there were more of them, and clearing them kept the violent-crime stats down.
Moore dismissed him, tossed his jacket on a chair, and finally went to his wife.
“Are you all right?”
“Does she look all right?”
Carey Moore gave Kovac the skunk eye.
The husband sat down on the love seat. “My God, Carey. Why didn’t you call me?”
“Why don’t you check your messages?” she said with an edge in her voice. “I did call you. I called you from the emergency room six hours ago.”
Moore had the sense to look guilty. “Oh, shit. My battery must be dead.”
“Or something,” Kovac muttered.
The husband looked at him. “Excuse me?”
“I have to ask you some questions, Mr. Moore. It’s just routine. Where were you between the hours of six and seven o’clock tonight?”
The judge glared at him. “Detective, this isn’t necessary.”
David Moore stood up, outraged. “Are you implying I might have attacked my own wife?”
“I’m not implying anything,” Kovac said calmly. “I’m asking you a question. Do you have some problem with giving me a straight answer?”
“I don’t like your attitude, Detective.”
“Nobody does. Lucky for me, I don’t give a rat’s ass.”
Moore flushed an unhealthy shade of red. He jammed his hands at his waist. “My wife is a respected member of the bar-”
“I know who your wife is, Mr. Moore,” Kovac said. “Who are you? That’s what I need to know. And so far, just from observation, I’m not coming up with a lot of flattering adjectives here.”
Moore drew breath for another diatribe of indignation. His wife cut him off.
“David, stop it. For God’s sake, just answer the man’s questions. He’s doing his job.”
The husband clearly didn’t like being chastened. He went a darker shade of red with embarrassment or anger, or both.
“Carey, he’s not being respectful of you.”
She looked away from him and shook her head with an I’m so sick of you sigh.
“I’m not trying to be a hard-ass here, Mr. Moore,” Kovac lied. “But it’s going on two o’clock in the morning. Your wife has been beaten, and she’s received two threatening phone calls since. I don’t have the patience to tiptoe around your ego.