Her first stop after the press conference was the women’s prison to speak with Amber Franken, mother of the two foster children who had been killed at the Haas home.
Amber Franken was a skinny, ratty-looking dishwater blonde with a pasty complexion. Her skin was so thin Liska could see the blue tracery of veins in her throat. She had rolled up the sleeves of her shirt to show off sinewy arms lined with tattoos and old needle track marks. She was twenty-two. Which meant she had started popping out kids at the tender age of fourteen. The two children who had been murdered had been ages seven and five at the time of their deaths. A two-year-old girl had been placed by social services with a different family.
She swaggered into the interview room with a sour look on her face and dropped into a chair across the table from Liska.
“Amber, I’m Detective Liska from Homicide division.”
“I’m suing the police department for what happened to my kids,” she said, sneering.
“Yeah?” Liska said, uninterested. “Good luck with that.”
“And I’m suing social services too. They put my kids in an unsafe environment.”
Liska wanted to ask Amber what kind of environment she, a junkie whore, had provided for her children. But she needed the woman’s cooperation, and that required her to rein in her usually smart mouth.
Good luck with that, Nikki.
“Have you had any contact with your kids’ dad lately?”
Amber laughed. “That piece of shit? I haven’t had ‘contact’ with him since the last time he knocked me up.”
“Then why is he on the visitors’ log for having been here ten days ago?”
“Probably here to see one of his other sluts.”
Liska leaned forward, elbows on the table, and sighed. “Look, Amber, you don’t want to talk to me, I don’t want to talk to you. But we’re gonna sit here and enjoy each other’s company until you give me a straight answer.”
Again with the sneer and a snotty shake of her head. “I got nothing but time.”
“That’s true. But you can stay in this place for more time or less time.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means if you waste my time, jerk me around, piss me off, and refuse to cooperate with a police investigation, that’s not gonna look very good on your record when you come up for parole.”
The girl pulled back in her chair, her face mottling, eyes bugging out a little. “Are you threatening me?”
“I’m telling you the plain truth, Amber,” Liska said without emotion. “I’m doing you a favor telling you. If you don’t straighten up and at least pretend to be a good citizen, the parole board is not going to be all that anxious to kick you back out into the real world. That’s how it is.
“You’re pulling real time here. This isn’t county jail, where they’re happy to watch your ass walk out the door because they need the bed,” Liska said. “Unlike a lot of other places, the State of Minnesota has plenty of prison cells to go around.
“Am I getting through to you here? I don’t want to make things hard for you, Amber. I really don’t. I don’t even want to be here right now. I’ve got two kids of my own. I’d like to be spending time with them.
“I’m sure, as a mother, you can understand that. You remember what it was like. Your kids look up to you like you’ve got the key to the world. That love is like no other. That bond is stronger than anything.”
Amber Franken’s eyes welled with tears. She looked away, arms crossed tight, as if she was trying to hold herself together.
“You miss them, don’t you?” Liska said softly.
It didn’t matter how unfit a mother this chick had been; absence had erased the bad memories and left her with sweet, sentimental images of time with her children. Children she would never see again.
“I can only imagine what that must feel like, knowing that they’re gone. Knowing what they went through before they died…”
Amber began to cry in earnest. She put her hands over her face and sobbed, “I miss them so much!”
Genuinely feeling sorry for the girl, Liska sat patiently as the worst of the storm wore itself out. There couldn’t be anything worse in the world than to think of your children being tortured by a sadist.
After a few minutes, Amber pulled up the tail of her shirt and wiped her face and nose with it.
Liska tried again. “Why was Ethan Pratt here to see you ten days ago?”
Amber drew in a shuddering breath. “To talk about the lawsuits. He wants in on them, the rotten son of a bitch. Like he was ever anything more than a sperm donor. Fucking leech. I told him to hire his own damn lawyer.”
“Did he say anything about Karl Dahl’s trial coming up?”
She wiped her nose again, this time with the back of her hand, which she then wiped on the leg of her pants. “He said he’d want Judge Moore next time he got arrested, ’cause she cares more about the guy on trial than the victims.”
“Did he seem angry about that?”
“He called her a fucking cunt, if that’s what you mean.”
“That’s what I mean,” Liska said.
20
THEY BOTH HEARD the car roll into the attached garage. Carey Moore looked over at the door Kovac presumed was the entrance from the garage. Her expression was transparent, even behind the bruises and swelling. Hope, eagerness, a little apprehension.
Kovac rose before she could, went to the door himself, and locked it until he heard the voices-David Moore, the Swedish girl, a child. They sounded relaxed, happy. Kovac wanted to open the door and smack the husband’s smile off his face. Instead, he opened it a crack and gave them a flat, unfriendly look.
David Moore was unpleasantly surprised. “What are you doing here?”
“What are you doing leaving a woman with a concussion alone?”
“I checked on her several times in the night, Detective,” the Swedish girl said, trying to be helpful. “Mrs. Moore was fine.”
Kovac ignored her, holding his stare on the husband.
“We went out to breakfast,” David Moore said defensively. “I thought Carey should sleep in.”
A dark-haired little girl with big blue eyes sat comfortably in the crook of his arm. She had her mother’s directness.
“Who are you?”
“Honey, this is a police detective,” Moore said. “He’s here because of your mom getting hurt last night.”
She turned the look on her father. “Where’s Mommy?”
“I’m here, sweetie,” Carey Moore said, wedging herself in between the doorjamb and Kovac.
Lucy Moore took one look at her mother, and the blue eyes went liquid. “Mommy?”
“I look pretty bad, don’t I?” Carey said softly. Kovac stepped back a little and let her past. “I’m okay, though. Honest. It’s just scrapes and bruises.”
Lucy didn’t seem to know what to make of the situation. She gave her father a suspicious look, then turned it on her mother.
“You look scary,” she declared.
“I know.”
“You should maybe put some makeup on.”
Carey’s eyes glazed with tears as she smiled and tried to laugh, and reached out for her daughter. “Come on. You can help me with that, and tell me all about what you had for breakfast.”
The little girl wriggled down out of her father’s arms and went to her mother, taking her hand and leading her into the kitchen.
“I had pancakes with blueberries in them and lots of syrup. I like syrup.”
“I know you do.”
“And it doesn’t matter either, ’cause I brush my teeth.”
Kovac watched them go through the kitchen and down the hall. The mother-daughter thing touched him in a very tender, very well hidden part of his soul. He didn’t allow himself to examine the feeling. He turned back to David Moore.