“You spineless piece of shit!” Kovac shouted, jabbing an accusatory finger at Moore. “You fucking spineless piece of shit! You and your junkie whore girlfriend and her porn star brother are going to rot in prison till the day you die!”
Moore jumped back, knocking over the fireplace tools and tripping on them, falling against the wall.
Logan yelled, lunged, and grabbed Kovac, banding his arms around Kovac’s shoulders.
The third man ran backward out of the way.
Kovac kept on shouting, kept trying to move forward, struggled to break free of Logan ’s hold. “I’ll fucking nail your ass to the wall! You are done! You are over!”
“Kovac!” Logan shouted in his ear.
“I don’t know what he’s talking about!” David Moore shouted.
“Kovac!” Lieutenant Dawes rushed into the room with two uniforms behind her.
The uniforms joined Logan in dragging and shoving Kovac back across the room toward the hall.
Dawes was shouting in his face. Kovac was so angry, he couldn’t make sense of her words.
Out of the room, Logan pushed him back against a wall.
“What the hell’s the matter with you?” he shouted in Kovac’s face.
Kovac shoved him back. “This is all him!” he shouted, pointing at the now-closed doors to the den. “She’s gonna die because he didn’t have the balls to stand up and walk out-”
“That’s enough!” Dawes shouted at him. “Not another word!”
Kovac held his hands up, forcing himself to lock down the fury. He was breathing hard, sweating like a horse. Logan stepped back, doing the same.
Dawes glared at Kovac. “What is this about?”
“The girlfriend’s brother,” he said. “The third guy at the bar was the girlfriend’s brother, a porn actor.”
“I don’t care if he was the devil himself,” Dawes said. “What’s the matter with you, coming in here like that? What were you going to do? Beat David Moore to death in front of his attorney? You’re out of control, Detective.”
Kovac walked around in a little circle, rubbing his hands over his face. He was shaking as the rush of adrenaline recycled itself.
“Go home,” Dawes said.
Kovac looked at her.
“Go home,” she said again.
“This is my case.”
“You need to step back, Sam. Now.”
He held up a hand, still pacing. “I’m all right. I was out of line.”
“You were way out of line. I can’t have you threatening people. You’ll be lucky if Moore ’s attorney doesn’t demand you go before the civilian review board.”
“Fucking slimebag,” Kovac muttered. “What rock did he crawl out from under?”
“It’s Anthony Costello,” Logan said. “He crawled out from under a very expensive rock.”
Kovac shook his head. “Great. David Moore can have his wife kidnapped and murdered. Tony Costello can soak up Carey’s money to defend the asshole. And I’m the one in trouble. Yeah, that’s how the system should work.”
“You’re making this personal, Sam,” Dawes said. “You know better.”
Kovac sat down on the stairs, put his head in his hands, and let go a shuddering sigh. “I’m fine.”
“You need to take a break.”
“No.”
“Sam-”
“Don’t send me home, LT,” he said, looking up at her. “I won’t go. This is my case. Carey Moore is my responsibility. I won’t walk away from that. Don’t try to make me.”
He looked at Logan, standing near the front door. Logan was watching him with eagle eyes.
Dawes’s cell phone rang. She took the call, walking away.
“Twenty-five grand to a hit man,” Kovac said. “That should buy him twenty-five to life, right?”
“Can you connect Moore to the hitter through the money?” Logan asked. “Assuming that’s what’s going on.”
“I don’t know. We need to crack open Moore ’s books.”
“You think he’s mixed up in the porn business?”
“Looks like. Has to be how he hooked up with these people. Ginnie Bird, the brother. Ivors is involved in the movie business. Moore is in Ivors’s pocket. Fucking creep. Documentary films my ass.”
He stared at the floor and blew out a breath. His heart was still pounding like a trip-hammer. It was all he could do to keep himself seated on the steps.
“You’ve had worse cases than this,” Logan said.
Kovac looked at him sharply. “So?”
“So what’s with the big blowup? You know Carey that well?”
“I know she’s my vic,” Kovac said defensively. “I know she’s my responsibility. And I’m pretty damn sure that asshole in the other room made her disappear. Do I need something more than that? I’m supposed to care less because Carey Moore hasn’t been raped and eviscerated and set on fire yet?”
Logan held up his hands. “No. I just…
“Never mind,” he said, turning toward Lieutenant Dawes as she came back from her phone call. Her face was grave as she looked from one of them to the other.
“We’ve found the nanny.”
49
HER BODY HAD BEEN folded into the trunk of a late-model dark blue Volvo. She looked like a broken doll lying there, legs bent, her eyes wide-open, her head turned at an odd angle.
She was wearing a brown velour Juicy Couture tracksuit and a pair of pink Puma running shoes. Dressed for a Saturday night at home, kicking back to watch a movie and eat some popcorn.
“I-I didn’t have anything to do with that.”
Kovac looked at the guy, annoyed.
Bruce Green. Twenty-seven. Pasty white wimp with a mop of blond frizz that looked like he’d stolen it off the dead body of Harpo Marx. Bell-bottoms and a black and yellow rugby shirt. He dabbed a bloody handkerchief under his nose. His forehead was growing a big goose egg.
“I-I just glanced down,” Green went on nervously. “I-I dropped my BlackBerry, and-and when I reached for it, I knocked over my latte, and-and it spilled-”
“Shut up,” Kovac said sharply. He turned back to the uniform who had been first on the scene, Hovney, a woman built like the corner mailbox, with a face like the flat side of an anvil.
“He rear-ended the Volvo,” she said, “which was parked here at the curb. The trunk popped. The rest is history.”
Green’s car, a butt-ugly pea green square box Honda something-or-other, had suffered front-end damage. Pieces made from plastic had shattered and lay on the street.
The street had been cordoned off. Half a dozen squad cars sat at angles on either end of the accident scene.
Kovac pulled on a pair of gloves and tried to turn the nanny’s head. The body was in rigor. The second-shift surveillance team had reported the girl had left the Moore house around ten-thirty. She hadn’t lived long past that time. Rigor mortis would have begun to set in two to four hours after death. Full rigor was achieved eight to twelve hours after death.
The car was parked on the side street around the corner from the 7-Eleven, where Anka had supposedly gone to pick out a movie and buy some snacks, just past the alley that ran behind the store. The killer had probably initially parked in the alley, out of view. He had nabbed the girl, pulled her into the alley, killed her, put the body in the trunk, driven out of the alley, and parked at the curb. Then he had gotten behind the wheel of the nanny’s Saab and calmly driven back to the Moore house.
The car would have been equipped with a garage door opener. The keys to the house were probably on the same key ring as the keys to the Saab. He could have forced the nanny to give up the security code to the house system before he killed her. Or, as Kovac had speculated earlier, David Moore had simply given it to him, along with the twenty-five thousand dollars.
“I guess we can rule out the nanny as a suspect,” Liska said.
Hovney went on. “The plates come back to a Saab-”
“He swapped the plates,” Kovac said. Which meant the call that had gone out to be on the lookout for the nanny’s car had included the wrong plate numbers. “Whose car is this?”