Kovac tried to imagine Stan Dempsey lying in wait for Carey Moore in the parking garage, rushing out at her, knocking her down, hitting her again and again.
You fucking bitch! You fucking cunt!
The rage was there. Pent up behind that hangdog face and emotionless demeanor. Kovac grabbed a pen and a receipt from Domino’s Pizza and scribbled a note to see if the video geek could zoom in somehow on the weapon. If it was a police baton… that wouldn’t be a good thing.
Stan Dempsey lived maybe a mile away from Kovac. His house was a small story and a half with gray shingle siding and white trim. The yard was scattered with stray leaves that had drifted across the sidewalk from a maple tree on the boulevard.
Kovac went to the front door and rang the bell. The house was silent. No barking dog, no Stan. He rang the bell again and waited.
Where would Stan Dempsey go this early on a Saturday morning? The supermarket for his groceries. He struck Kovac as the kind of guy who would eat liver and onions… and hash… and all those kinds of food that normal people wouldn’t eat. Tongue… oxtail…
Still no Stan coming to the door. Kovac tried to turn the doorknob. Locked.
He could have gone for a walk. Maybe he’d gotten out of town for the weekend. An old fragment of memory made Kovac think Dempsey was a fisherman. Maybe he had a cabin on one of Minnesota ’s ten-thousand-plus lakes.
Kovac moved off the front step and went to the picture window that faced the street. The drapes were closed. He couldn’t see inside.
Around the side of the house, a lace curtain hung in a window that might have been a dining room. But the window was shorter vertically than the picture window, and Kovac wasn’t tall enough to look in.
He went around to the back of the house. A charcoal grill was in its place near the back door. Inexpensive white plastic furniture sat on a concrete patio. A single chair and a small table. A lonely tableau. Kovac grabbed the chair and went back to the window with the lace curtain.
What he expected to see, he didn’t know. But he hadn’t expected what he found. A small traditional dining room, the walls painted a weak mint green. A traditional cherry buffet. A traditional cherrywood dining room table… with an arsenal of weapons laid out neatly on top of it. And a video camera sitting on a tripod, pointed at the one chair pulled out from the table.
“Oh, shit,” Kovac said under his breath as his stomach dropped.
“Can I help you?”
Kovac looked over his shoulder to find a tiny old lady in a lavender flowered housecoat and slippers that had been made to look like white rabbits with floppy pink-lined ears.
“I’m a police officer, ma’am,” he said, getting down off the chair. He pulled his badge and ID out of his coat pocket and showed them to her.
She squinted at them. “Mr. Dempsey is a police officer too,” she said. “A detective.”
“Yes, ma’am, I know.”
“I’m his neighbor. Hilda Thorenson.”
He wanted to tell Hilda it wasn’t a good idea to approach a stranger who might have been looking to rob the place, but now was not the time.
“Do you know if Mr. Dempsey is home?” he asked.
“Oh, no. I wouldn’t know that. Why? Is something the matter?”
“Maybe,” Kovac said.
His mind was racing. Visions of Stan Dempsey eating his gun flashed through his head. He didn’t want to find that. He’d handled a couple of cop suicides in his career. He didn’t want to look at another dead cop and think: There but for the grace of God go I. He didn’t want to have to tell another wife, child, girlfriend that their loved one had chosen to end his life because the emotional pain of that life had been just too much to bear.
Family never understood the why of that. Why hadn’t their husband/wife/girlfriend/boyfriend/father/mother come to them to unload that pain? Why hadn’t he or she gone to a minister, a priest, a rabbi, a shrink for help? They didn’t understand that cops felt no one understood them but other cops. And still, cops didn’t confide in one another about the problems they had. They didn’t want to seem weak to their peers, didn’t want to give superiors a reason to look at them.
Kovac felt guilty all of a sudden that he hadn’t made more of an effort to get to know Stan Dempsey over the years. Maybe if he had, the guy would have had at least two white plastic chairs in his backyard.
“I need to get inside Mr. Dempsey’s house,” he told Hilda Thorenson. “I’m afraid something might have happened to him.”
The old woman looked alarmed. “Oh, dear!”
Kovac went to try the back door. Locked. Shit. He was too damned old to be kicking doors in.
“I have a key,” the neighbor said. “For emergencies. Wait here. I’ll go get it.”
Kovac watched her go at something slightly more than a snail’s pace. She had to be eighty if she was a day. Dempsey might have been in the house at that very minute, sitting on the toilet, trying to work up the courage to pull the trigger.
He had already been feeling desperate, trapped at a desk while other people took over the case that had pushed him to the breaking point. He would have been upset about Judge Moore’s ruling, maybe to the point of acting out against her. And Karl Dahl’s escape would surely have pushed him over the edge.
Kovac couldn’t wait for a key.
He went to the back door and blocked the screen door open. He grabbed a bug candle in a small galvanized pot and smashed one of the old glass panes in the door. Ten seconds later he was in the house, calling for Dempsey.
Without even trying to take in the scene, Kovac dashed through the small house.
“Stan? It’s Sam Kovac. Where are you?” he shouted as he pushed open the door to the small bathroom off the hall. Empty. Dempsey’s home office. Empty. He took the stairs two at a time, bracing himself mentally for the sound of the shot.
“Stan? Where are you? We need to talk.”
Bedroom one. Bedroom two. Empty.
Taking a deep breath, Kovac rested his hand on the doorknob of the bathroom. This was where they did it, often as not, in the bathroom, where the mess could be steam-cleaned.
Kovac pushed the door open.
Empty.
A second’s relief.
He ran back down the stairs and out the back door, nearly mowing down the nosy neighbor.
Garage.
Carbon monoxide.
But the small detached garage sat empty.
No Stan Dempsey. No car.
Shit.
“What’s happening?” the old lady asked. “Is Mr. Dempsey hurt?”
“He’s not here, ma’am,” Kovac said.
“Well, I don’t know where he’d go,” she said, as if she couldn’t possibly imagine Stan Dempsey having a life.
Kovac rubbed the back of his neck and sighed heavily. “Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to return to your home. The police will be sealing off this residence.”
The woman looked confused and frightened as she backed away.
“Oh, dear.”
“Thank you for your help,” Kovac said. He stood there until the old lady turned away and retreated, the bunny ears of her slippers bobbing up and down as she went.
The basement of the Haas home had been where the murdered children had been hung from the ceiling. There was a certain logic to thinking Stan Dempsey might have chosen the basement, might have hanged himself down there.
Kovac went back inside and flipped on the light leading down to the basement.
“Stan? It’s Sam Kovac. I’m coming downstairs,” Kovac warned, going slowly, taking one step at a time.
The basement was finished with knotty pine paneling, cheap green carpet, and a yellowed acoustical tile ceiling that had absorbed years of cigarette smoke. No walls divided the space. A laundry area in one corner. Storage took up one end. In the remaining quarter Stan Dempsey had set up his own command center.