“I’m sure it does,” Liska murmured. “I’m sure it does.”
68
THE JOURNAL OF Bobby Haas read like a Stephen King novel. The first entry was dated a couple of weeks prior to the murders. The boy had written about his anger over his parents’ discussions about possibly trying to adopt the “two little worms,” as he called them.
He wrote at length about his feelings of betrayal and rejection. Everything had been fine when it had just been the three of them. He had felt important. He’d had the undivided attention of his parents, particularly of his dad. Then Marlene had, in his mind, turned on him, rejected him. She had wanted something more-more children,other children. He wasn’t good enough for her.
Just like before,he had written.
Women didn’t love him. In his mind, every woman in his life had rejected him-his mother, the first Mrs. Haas, Marlene Haas. His vitriol directed at Marlene Haas jumped off the page. Women were selfish bitches-and worse-who ultimately became bored with him. Like a girl with a favorite doll, Marlene had tired of him and moved on to other, newer toys.
He hated her. He loved his dad. Marlene had been trying to pull Wayne ’s attention from Bobby, trying to ruin their father-son bond, which had clearly been the most important relationship in Bobby’s life.
The details of his planning the murders were chilling. The accounts of the murders themselves were horrific. He told about feeling powerful and invincible as he watched the realization of what was about to happen to her and her “precious little worms” dawn across Marlene’s face.
In the more recent entries, he had written about his attempt to kill Carey Moore, and his growing frustration that his father was paying more attention to Marlene and the foster children now than when they had been alive, and less and less attention to him. That wasn’t what the plan had been.
He doesn’t want to be alive. I’ll be doing us both a favor…
He had written pages about selenium poisoning, which conveniently mimicked the symptoms of a heart attack and wouldn’t show up in the standard basic toxicology screen.
How ironic that Bobby had turned around and done the very same thing he had accused Marlene Haas of. He had tired of their presence-Marlene, the foster kids, and finally Wayne, the father he had so desperately wanted all his life. They had worn out their usefulness to him, so he had broken them and cast them aside.
The diary of a budding serial killer.
Kovac knew the journal would be valuable to the profilers and the psychologists, who were always looking for more insight into the minds of murderers. But if not for them, he would have thrown the thing in an incinerator. The book was tainted with the evil that lived in Bobby Haas, and he, for one, wanted to put it somewhere that evil could never escape.
Processing the Haas scene had gone well into the next day. By five o’clock that morning, the story had broken locally, then hit the news networks. By eight, the media feeding frenzy was on.
The chief and Lieutenant Dawes, along with Chris Logan, had handled the press conference. Kovac and Liska had gone to their respective homes for a few hours of much-needed sleep. Not even his neighbor’s hammering had stirred Kovac.
He’d never felt so exhausted in his life. The job was sometimes, but not often, physically demanding. But it was the emotional exhaustion that left him feeling drained of all energy.
Why did it seem like the only time he spent with his emotions was during a crisis?
Because after the crisis had passed, he didn’t want to feel very much at all. It seemed the safest way to be. And the easiest. If he didn’t want to expend emotional energy interacting with people, it was easy for him to retreat. Being single had a great many advantages that way, compared to being married-at least compared to being married to the two wives he’d had.
Love just never worked out for him. His last wife had not only left him; she’d left the state, left the Midwest. At the time, she had only recently given birth to their first child, a daughter. But the marriage had been over long before the baby was born. Heartbroken, he had relinquished custody and had never seen his child again.
It wasn’t often he allowed himself to think about it, and he never spoke of it. What was the point?
It was only when he got a little too close to other people’s happy lives that he acknowledged the emptiness of his own.
His thoughts drifted to Carey. To Carey and Lucy, and what it would be like to be a family with them-something David Moore had stupidly thrown away with both hands. But he cut the thought short, because that wasn’t his reality.
Around nine in the evening, he dragged himself from bed, showered, put on some old sweats, and went downstairs to forage for something to eat. He sat down in the living room with nuked leftover pizza and turned on the Travel Channel so he could take a vacation without leaving his sofa.
Cabo San Lucas was looking pretty good. Of course, the show had been shot at a fabulous five-star resort. Kovac pictured himself crashed in a chair on the beach under a big umbrella, listening to the surf, bikini-clad señoritas bringing him exotic drinks all day long.
He had turned off his cell phone as soon as he had arrived home that afternoon, so as not to be disturbed. According to the voice mail woman, he had twelve new messages. He started to play each, deleting most of them before the message ended. Reporter, reporter, reporter. How they always managed to weasel out his phone number was beyond him. He had the number changed after every high-profile case, and still they managed to find him.
The PR person from the chief’s office called to tell him how he should dress while the world had its cameras trained on the department.
Note to self: Sell car. Buy Armani suit.
Jesus.
“Sam, it’s Carey.”
The final message. Kovac sat up straighter. Cabo faded into the background.
“I just wanted to check in with you.”
She sounded tired and sad.
“I saw the news… Just when I think this sordid case can’t get any worse, it does.
“Anyway… I’m home,” she said. “And I don’t know what to do with myself. Are you sure there isn’t aVictim for Dummies book out there somewhere?”
She tried to laugh, but failed miserably.
He played the message three times.
Just to hear the sound of her voice.
69
IT SEEMED STRANGE to be in the house. David was gone. Anka was gone. Carey felt their absence, listened to the silences where their voices should have been. With just Lucy in the house with her, she felt as if they were the last two people on earth.
She wouldn’t be able to sleep in her bed, the bed she had been dragged from in the middle of the night by Karl Dahl, the bed she had shared with a man she didn’t know. Lucy wouldn’t want to sleep in her own bed either. She had clung to Carey like a piece of Velcro since Kate had brought her home.
Carey had dragged pillows and blankets into the family room. Lucy liked to pretend she was having a sleepover or going camping. Playing pretend didn’t sound like a bad idea to Carey either.
Her daughter had yet to talk about what she had seen that night. Usually a chatterbox, Lucy hadn’t had much to say at all. Kate told Carey not to worry, but she worried anyway.
Carey knew how what had happened would affect her own life, make her see things through a different filter, temper her feelings. Her sense of safety and security had been blown out of the water. So many things about her life she had once believed in so strongly had dissolved beneath her feet.
If she felt that way, she could only imagine how helpless a child would feel.
And Lucy had the added upset of not having her father there, and not understanding why.
How was she supposed to tackle those questions? Carey wondered.Daddy doesn’t live here now because he frequents prostitutes. Daddy doesn’t live here because he’s secretly a pornographer.