“We need to talk.”
“Can I take my coat off first?” Moore asked, petulant.
Kovac turned to the Swedish girl. “You too.”
They went into the kitchen and sat down, and Kovac filled them in on the Stan Dempsey situation. The Swedish girl listened, wide-eyed. Stockholm in the dead of winter was looking better and better.
“You can’t be unavailable,” Kovac said, directing his comment at David Moore. “No cell phones turned off or ignored.”
Moore looked unsettled. “You think this guy is serious?”
Kovac refrained from asking him if he had always been this stupid or if it was a recent affliction. “I know he’s serious. You can’t just take your daughter and go off to do as you please. I’d be happier if she didn’t leave the house until the situation is resolved.”
“Should we leave town?”
“I don’t think your wife is in any condition to travel right now. She needs to get clearance from her doctor. If you just do what I’m telling you, you should be fine. I’ll have officers here around the clock.”
The nanny murmured something in Swedish. Oh, my God, or Holy shit, or Fuck this, Kovac figured. She shot a nervous glance at David Moore, who pretended not to see her. Kovac filed the moment away in his head. The nanny and the daddy? He remembered she had been defensive of Moore the night before when Kovac had asked about the guy’s schedule.
Lazy bastard. He couldn’t even put out the effort to get a mistress outside his own household.
“I have to go,” Kovac said. “You both have my card if you need me. If you need to leave the house, notify the officers out front, and tell them where you’re going and when you expect to be back.”
David Moore looked unhappy. “I’m a prisoner in my own home?”
“Yeah,” Kovac said. “Sorry it’s such an inconvenience to you to have the lives of your wife and daughter threatened.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know what you meant. You don’t want to be under my thumb,” Kovac said. “What the hell have you got going on that’s so damned important? You’re suddenly Mr. Ambition?”
Moore narrowed his eyes. “I resent that.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“I’m working on a business deal.”
“Yeah? Well, it’s the age of telecommunication. Pick up a phone; send an e-mail.”
Moore stared just to the left of Kovac’s head. He was going to do whatever the hell he wanted. Asshole.
“I’ll need your cell phone number too,” Kovac said to the nanny.
She recited it, and Kovac wrote it down in his notebook.
“I’ll let myself out,” he said, and left them in the kitchen, pausing in the hall to listen in case they were stupid enough to go lovey-dovey before he was out the door.
“I’m going to make a fresh pot of coffee.” Moore.
“I’m going to my room. I have studying to do.” The nanny.
Kovac waited for her at the foot of the stairs. She looked surprised to see him, but not alarmed.
“Anka, I need to have a word with you.”
“I don’t know anything,” she said. “I can’t believe this is happening.”
“They don’t have crime in Sweden?”
“Not like here. It’s crazy, evil, what that man did to that family, to those children. And now you say this other man, a detective with the police department, wants to hurt Mrs. Moore or Lucy?”
“It’s pretty scary stuff,” Kovac conceded. “Judge Moore is in a position that attracts a lot of attention, not all of it good.”
Anka looked away, clearly upset.
“Anka, I’m going to ask you something very personal,” Kovac said. “And I need you to answer me honestly. It’s very important that I have a clear picture of what’s going on. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes,” she answered, nervous, anxious.
“Do you have something going on with Mr. Moore?”
Kovac watched her expression carefully. Shock and offense.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “Mr. Moore is my employer.”
“He’s not more than that to you?”
“No. Of course not.”
The answer was a beat too slow, and she didn’t quite meet his eyes.
“You’re not sleeping with him?”
She gave a little gasp. “No! I’m going upstairs now. I have nothing more to say to you. Good day.”
Indignation. Outrage.
But she still didn’t quite meet his eyes.
21
KARL GOT OFF the bus at Calhoun Square in a trendy area of Minneapolis known as Uptown even though it was actually south of downtown. The neighborhood was full of nicely redone older homes, lovely yards, and established trees on the boulevard. It was an area of young upwardly mobile families, upwardly mobile gay couples, comfortably well-off retirees.
There weren’t a lot of people looking the way Karl was looking, but he planned to remedy that quickly.
He went into the Calhoun Square shopping mall, a collection of boutiques and restaurants tucked into an old brick building that had been converted from blue-collar beginnings. A bored girl at a kiosk on the first floor watched him approach, with a mix of disgust and trepidation. As he neared her, Karl thought she might run, but he held out a twenty-dollar bill and told her he needed a cap.
She eyed the twenty, and her greed got the better of her. She sold him a plain khaki ball cap and offered back no change.
As he went toward the men’s room, Karl looked over his shoulder and saw her stick the bill in her purse. The dishonesty of people in general made him shake his head.
He took the cap and went into the men’s room to discard the ragman’s hair and knit cap.
Because it was early, he had the place to himself, and decided he would take the opportunity to wash his face and head.
Removal of the cap was a painful process. The wool had knitted into the bloody head wound he’d gotten when Snake was pounding him into the cell bars. As he peeled the cap away bit by bit, the wound opened in several places and began to bleed again. He stared at himself in the mirror, thinking he looked like something out of a horror movie, a red-eyed demon up from hell. His lip was throbbing something fierce. Grotesquely swollen and red, it reminded him in a way of the folds of tender flesh between a woman’s legs.
For the briefest of moments, he imagined he could smell the musky scent of a woman who was ready for sex. He enjoyed that moment. Then he pulled his bridge out of his pants pocket, rinsed it off in the sink, and put it back in his mouth. There probably weren’t many people in this part of town who went around without teeth.
The ball cap went on with the sunglasses.
He neatly rolled the sleeves of his shirt halfway up his forearms. There wasn’t anything he could do about the filthy pants except roll the cuffs up. He took off his shoes and socks, threw the socks in the trash, and put the shoes back on. This would do for the moment.
Pulling the brim of the ball cap down low, he exited the bathroom, the building, and walked away into the neighborhood. Hands in his pockets, he strolled down the sidewalk like a man without a care in the world. Maybe he was just walking home from Starbucks. Maybe he’d been doing yard work, and that was why his pants were dirty.
As he walked, Karl scoped out the houses on this side of the block. Bikes on the front porch meant more than one person in the household. A couple or a family. He looked for the smaller homes-single story, or story and a half. The ones with large flower beds, now dead from the cold, told him perhaps the people, or person, who lived there had a lot of spare time. Older, retired maybe.
A small Cape Cod type of a house caught his eye. Blue with white shutters, and a picket fence around the front yard. A country-crafty wooden welcome sign hung beside the front door: “Grandma Lives Here.” Karl turned the corner, then turned again down the alley.