“I did not!” Casey protested, then gave him a mischievous grin. “And if I did, I’m sure you had it coming.”
“I can still see her leaning over me. She came at me with that gun, and she said, ‘There’s no other way to put it. This is gonna hurt.’ I still have nightmares.”
Casey sniffed. “You should be so lucky to dream about me.”
She turned back to Carey. “The doctor will be back to check in on you again later. Probably right after you’ve managed to fall asleep.”
As she headed for the door, Kovac said, “That’s Casey. I call her the Iron Leprechaun.”
“But not when I’m close enough to hit him,” Casey said as she left the room.
Hair wet and sticking up in all directions, Kovac stepped up to the side of the bed. He had traded his wet dress shirt for the top from a set of surgical scrubs.
“How are you feeling?”
“Dr. Kovac.” She tried to smile but couldn’t quite pull it off. “I don’t know. I’m sure that sounds stupid.”
He shook his head. “You’ve gone through something horrible, Carey. It’ll take a while for you to process it all. And you can’t do that alone. I’ve already been on the phone with Kate. If she wasn’t looking after Lucy, she would have been down here at the speed of light.”
Carey took a shaky breath. “Lucy. How is she? Is she all right?”
“She wants her mom back. She’s scared.”
“So was I,” Carey admitted. “I was so afraid he’d done something to her, that she was hurt or-”
Kovac put a hand on her shoulder. “She’s fine. Don’t upset yourself thinking about what didn’t happen. You’ve got plenty of real shit to deal with.”
“You have a way with words, Detective,” she said, trying again to find some small part of a smile. It was gone in the next instant. “He killed Anka, didn’t he?”
Kovac nodded. “I’m sorry.”
A profound sadness weighed on her. “I’ll have to call her family in Sweden. How do I tell her parents their daughter is dead because of me?”
“You don’t,” he said. “She’s not dead because of you. She’s dead because Karl Dahl killed her.”
Carey said nothing. It wasn’t going to be that easy for her to let herself off the hook.
“So where was David through all this?” she asked.
Kovac frowned. “He was at the house when I last saw him. With his lawyer.”
“His lawyer?”
“It’s a long story.”
“He didn’t have anything to do with this,” Carey said.
“He didn’t have anything to do with Karl Dahl taking you,” Kovac specified. “We’re still looking into the assault.”
Carey watched him. He was looking everywhere but at her.
“Do you know something I don’t?”
“We might have found the twenty-five-thousand-dollar man,” he said. “We don’t need to talk about it now.”
“You’ve just told me you’ve found the man you think my husband paid to have me killed,” she said. “I need to talk about that. Who is he? Can you connect him to a payoff?”
“He’s the girlfriend’s brother. A porn actor by the name of Donny Bergen.” He hesitated, took a deep breath, let it out. “Carey, your husband is into some pretty ugly stuff.”
“I know,” she said softly. “I came across some of it on his computer last night. It made me sick. I don’t know who he is,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t know what to say.”
“You don’t have to say anything,” Kovac said. “I shouldn’t have brought it up. You don’t need anything more on your mind tonight. You need to get some rest. I just came in to make sure you’re okay before I go.”
“You have to go?” Carey asked him, feeling a little panicked at the thought. She didn’t want to be alone with the memories of the things that had happened.
Kovac looked at her, tipping his head a little to one side. “You want me to stay?” The idea seemed to surprise him. “I’ll stay. I’ll stay as long as you want.”
He sat on the edge of the bed, settling in. Carey looked away, embarrassed now that she’d said anything.
“I know this will sound stupid,” she said. “I mean, I know I’m safe and that Lucy is safe, but…”
Kovac reached out and pressed a finger to her lips.
“It’s all right. I know. You feel like something bad could happen at any second. You’re ready to jump out of your skin. That’s normal.”
“I told you I don’t make a very good victim,” she said. “I don’t know what to do.”
“There’s no handbook,” Kovac said. “You have to feel what you feel. And it takes as long as it takes.”
“That’s scary,” she admitted, then changed direction out of self-preservation. “What happened to Dahl? Is he dead?”
“Yeah. Stan Dempsey’s last act: He shot and killed Karl Dahl. When I heard the shot, I thought he was shooting at you, but he shot Dahl. Made sure he’ll never escape justice again.”
“And Kenny Scott? Dempsey told me he would do to me what he did to Kenny. What did he do? Is Kenny dead?”
“No,” Kovac said. “Dempsey roughed him up, tied him in a chair, and branded the word GUILTY across his forehead with a wood-burning tool.”
He rattled that off so matter-of-factly. As if it were something he saw every day of the week. Of course, he’d seen far worse than that. So had she.
“He told me he wouldn’t have killed me,” she said softly. “Dempsey. After I… he said to me, ‘You killed me. I wouldn’t have killed you.’”
Kovac put a big hand over hers. “You couldn’t have known that, Carey. You were in fear for your life. You did what you had to do to save yourself. For all you knew, Dempsey was gonna take you back to his nest and torture you the way Marlene Haas was tortured. I’d lay odds that’s what he had planned for Dahl. He had a whole duffel bag full of stuff-a hacksaw, an electric knife, hammers, a meat fork, knives. He had all that with him for a reason.”
Carey looked down at his hand on hers. Having just that much connection made her feel calmer.
“Have you ever had to kill anyone?” she asked.
“Once,” he said. “I didn’t want to, but I didn’t have a choice. Neither did you.”
Somehow that didn’t make her feel any better.
“Does he have any family?” she asked, dreading the answer. She didn’t want to know that he had been a father, a grandfather, a beloved husband…
Kovac shook his head. “Not close-in any sense of the word. A grown daughter in Portland, Oregon, who hasn’t bothered to return any of the lieutenant’s calls. An elderly uncle in very poor health in a rest home. The uncle owns a cabin out on one of the smaller lakes.
“Looks like that’s where Stan based himself after he split town. The property and the pickup were registered to Walter Dempsey, the uncle.”
What a sad, strange little man Stan Dempsey had been. Alone. Invisible to most people, even to those who should have been close to him.
“The job was all he had, wasn’t it?” she said.
“Honey, the job is all I have, but I don’t go around disfiguring people,” Kovac said. “Could someone have reached out to Stan over the years, tried to bring him out of his shell? I suppose so. Hell, I could have tried, and I didn’t. But he was a grown man. His life was what he made it. Right down to how it ended.”
“He didn’t put the knife in my hand,” Carey said softly.
Kovac hooked a finger beneath her chin and made her look up at him.
“No. He put you in a situation where you had to use it,” he said quietly.
He stared into her eyes, his face the portrait of a good and honorable man. “Carey, I would give anything if I could turn the clock back. If I could have gotten to the scene five minutes sooner and spared you having to wrestle with this. ’Cause I’ll tell you what: If I’d seen him threatening you, I would have blown his ass off the planet. And I wouldn’t lose a lot of sleep over it.”