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Carey pulled the wires loose and prayed for a ticket-happy cop.

47

LISKA WALKED INTO the war room, feeling troubled and anxious. She had called in a BOLO for Bobby Haas and Jerome Walden and for Wayne Haas’s Chrysler. There wasn’t much else she could do on that front. She couldn’t figure the boys for the abduction of Judge Moore. That had pro written all over it. But she kept moving the puzzle pieces of Bobby Haas’s life around and around in her mind, not liking any of the pictures she came up with.

The women in Bobby’s life hadn’t fared well. His mother had killed herself in front of him. The first Mrs. Haas had fallen to her death. The second Mrs. Haas had been murdered. Judge Moore had been assaulted, would probably have been killed if not for the car alarm scaring off the perpetrator. And now she was gone, vanished.

The idea of the boy’s being involved in any of that made Liska’s skin crawl. He looked so sweet, seemed so polite, so vulnerable. The fact that he had had so much sadness and tragedy in his life tripped the Mother switch in her and made her want to put an arm around him and comfort him. He wasn’t much older than Kyle, her firstborn. It was difficult for her not to look at Bobby Haas and see Kyle, and want to protect him.

He had told her Rebecca Haas had died of cancer.

The lie was like a stone in her shoe-small but irritating, something she couldn’t stop thinking about.

Why would he have lied?

Because he thought telling the truth to a cop would arouse suspicion?

Or was it just as Marcella Otis had said, that maybe Bobby didn’t want to think about his first foster mother’s violent demise? Lieutenant Dawes had suggested the boy might have felt like less of a freak saying his mom had died of cancer than being known as the kid with multiple violent deaths in his life.

“You’re just in time for the movie,” Tippen said.

Liska joined him, sitting on the end of the table as Elwood stuck a videotape in the VCR and turned the television on.

“Why so glum?” Tippen asked.

She shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that every day of my life is about death and depravity and the decline of a once-great civilization.”

“Oh, stop whining,” Tippen said. “It could be worse. You could be the sheriff’s deputy who didn’t cuff Karl Dahl to the gurney.”

“Any word on him, Dahl?”

“Nada. He’ll probably resurface years from now, found to be working as director of a shelter for homeless women and children in Milwaukee. Credited with orchestrating the decline in the numbers of street people.”

“Well, that cheered me up,” Liska said. “Excuse me while I go slit my wrists.”

Elwood hit the play button, and the television screen filled with black-and-white snow, then a bird’s-eye view of the lobby bar in the Marquette Hotel, date and time superimposed in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. The tape was clean, the picture sharp enough to easily make out faces. He hit fast-forward, racing through the tape to the time in question.

“There’s David Moore and his amour,” Tippen said, using a laser pointer to touch the screen.

“Eeww!” Liska said, wrinkling her nose at the sight of Moore ’s junkie whore girlfriend crawling all over him. “Get a room!”

Elwood goosed the tape ahead until Edmund Ivors joined the party, then goosed it a little more.

“Here he comes,” Liska said.

Slender guy on the small side, dressed in black, fine blond hair almost to his shoulders. He could definitely have passed as a woman, from a distance.

He walked up to the table, leaned down, and shook David Moore’s hand, presenting his profile.

Tippen sat up straighter. “I know that guy! That’s Long Donny. Long Donny Bergen.”

“Who’s Long Donny Bergen and why do they call him that?” Liska asked.

“He’s a porn star.”

“Oh, gross!” Liska jumped off the table and looked at Tippen with disgust. “Don’t tell me you’re a fan! I don’t want that in my head!”

“What?” Tippen asked, shrugging his shoulders. “The man is a star in his own right.”

“Oh, yuck! And here I thought I already knew too much about you!”

“We know why you know him, Tip,” Elwood said. “The question is: Why does David Moore know him?”

48

GINNIE BIRD’S brother.

Well, why not keep it all in the family? Kovac thought as he sped back toward the Moore house. David Moore wanted his wife out of the way, Ginnie Bird wanted Carey Moore out of the way, and she happened to have a brother willing to do the job for twenty-five thousand dollars. Neat and tidy. What a pack of mutts-David Moore, his junkie whore girlfriend, and her brother the hit man.

Donny Bergen was slender, with shoulder-length blond hair. The cops on surveillance had seen the nanny’s Saab come out of the garage Saturday night with the slender blond nanny in it. The car had backed out of the garage in the morning with a slender blonde behind the wheel and driven away from them. They hadn’t thought anything of it.

Moore would have given him the security code, which explained how Bergen gained entrance to the house without setting off the alarm.

Now the question of what might have happened to the nanny took on a more ominous tone. If Donny Bergen was willing to kill Carey, Anka Jorgenson might have been his first target. He might have killed her to get her car, to gain access to the Moore house via the garage.

One hand on the wheel, one on his cell phone, Kovac speed-dialed Liska. She answered on the second ring.

“What’s up?”

“Are you at the station?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“I need you to run a couple of names through the system for me. Virginia Bergen and Donny or Donald Bergen.”

“Donny Bergen is the guy on the tape from the hotel bar,” she said.

“I know. How do you know?”

“Tippen recognized him. He has a frighteningly extensive store of knowledge about the porn industry.”

“Porn?”Kovac said, confused. “What are you talking about?”

“Long Donny Bergen, porn star extraordinaire. What are you talking about?”

“He’s Ginnie Bird’s brother.”

“Their mother must be so proud. Now what?”

“Send someone to his apartment. If he’s there-which I doubt-pick him up for questioning.”

He gave her the address he had badgered out of Ginnie Bird.

“I’ll send Tippen,” Liska said. “He can get an autograph from his hero.”

Kovac could feel his blood pressure rising again. His head began to pound like a bass drum.

David Moore, you motherfucking son of a bitch.

David Moore, his junkie whore girlfriend, and her brother the porn star hit man. How much deeper into the shit could this creep go?

He didn’t delve into Moore ’s connections to the porn industry. At the moment, he didn’t care. His immediate fantasy was to drag Moore into a small room and beat the answers out of him, then beat him some more just on principle.

That fantasy played over and over in his mind, making him angrier and angrier as he drove back to the Moore house. By the time he pulled into the Moores ’ driveway, he was breathing hard, and his neck felt hot.

News vans had descended on the block again as news of Carey Moore’s disappearance had leaked. A mob with cameras, all of them shouting at once. They sounded like a cloud of locusts swarming. Kovac ignored them, stalking past the uniforms who stood guard at the door.

Inside the house, he turned and went straight for the den, where he could see David Moore standing in front of the fireplace. Logan stood with his back to the door. A third man was talking to Logan. Moore ’s eyes widened as Kovac came into the room, striding straight for him.