There were lights on downstairs and in the detached garage. Wayne Haas’s car was in the driveway. She went first to the garage, thinking father and son might be there together, working on some project. Hoping for both of them that that would be the case.
A radio was playing hip-hop, something she heard enough around her own house to have learned to thoroughly hate it. A sure sign of going over the hill.
“Mr. Haas? Bobby?” she called out as she neared the side door.
The rain had stopped, but the grass was wet, and she could feel it soaking into the leather of her shoes.No good deed goes unpunished.
She knocked, looking into the garage through the glass panes of the old side door. The usual assortment of junk-lawn mowers, bikes, yard tools, paint cans.
Bobby Haas was sitting on a stool at the workbench that ran from wall to wall across the end of the building. He looked up from a book, slipped off the stool, and came to the door.
“Detective Liska? What are you doing here?”
“Can I come in? It’s getting really cold out here.”
He stepped back from the door to let her in. Liska automatically took in her surroundings at a glance-garden tools hanging on the garage walls, fishing rods that hadn’t been out in a long time. Bobby moved toward the long workbench.
“I came with some good news for a change,” she said. “Is your dad around?”
Bobby frowned. “He went to bed early. He wasn’t feeling well.”
“Is he okay? Does he need to go to a doctor?”
“No. I think he’s mostly just worn-out,” the boy said, looking sad. “He’s always worn-out.”
“You want things to be the way they were before,” Liska said.
“He doesn’t even want to try. He couldn’t care less about me.”
“I’m sure that’s not true, Bobby. Your dad’s in a bad place. He feels ashamed that you’ve had to be the strong one in the family, when he should be strong for you.”
None of this impressed the boy. He had run out of patience. Like every boy, he wanted to be the center of his father’s world. There was no greater disappointment than for a son to find out that he wasn’t.
“Yeah, well,” Bobby said, tears glazing his eyes, “I wish he would just get over it. It’s been more than a year and every day he still gets up depressed over what happened, and every day he comes home from work depressed over what happened. It’s like I’m not even there. He’s supposed to be my dad. What about me? What about what I need?”
Liska put a hand on his back and patted, offering the same silent comfort she had given her oldest boy the many times his father had disappointed him. Bobby Haas was trembling against the raw emotions rising up inside him. He was at an age when those emotions were suddenly bigger and stronger than he knew what to do with.
He stepped away from her and walked in a small circle, his hands on his hips. “He’s supposed to love me, not a bunch of dead people he can’t do anything about!”
Struggling to bat the tears back, to take the feelings that had burst free and shove them back inside, he walked his small circle, breathing hard.
Liska wondered what must have happened to spark all of this. A fight with Wayne? Or Wayne not having it in him to fight? The truth of it was, Wayne Haas was a broken man, and she really didn’t think he would ever pull out of it. It looked like Bobby had come to that realization as well.
The boy swiped at his eyes, embarrassed he had lost his composure in front of her.
“So what are you doing out here?” Nikki asked, trying for a more upbeat tone as she walked toward the workbench, where textbooks and notebooks were spread out beneath the fluorescent work light.
“Studying,” Bobby said. “I can have the radio on out here and it doesn’t bother my dad.”
“I’ll have to pass this idea on to my boys,” she said, checking out his books. Advanced biology, chemistry, psychology. “Looks like you’re thinking of becoming a doctor.”
“I want to be a forensic pathologist.”
“Smart choice.” Creepy choice, all things considered, but it was better than having him say he wanted to spend his life digging graves, she supposed. With the kinds of tragedies he’d had in his young life, it made a certain kind of sense. “Your patients can never sue you for malpractice. They’re already dead.”
“Right,” he said, managing a little smile.
“You’ve made yourself quite the office out here.”
He had converted some of the shelves above the workbench into bookshelves. On the work surface, he had put down a number of twelve-by-twelve marble tiles to spread his work over. Pens and pencils were neatly organized in mismatched cups and water glasses. A couple of stacking trays held notebooks and file folders. The level of organization was frightening to a woman whose filing system consisted of stacking piles of paper all over her dining room table.
Bobby moved between her and the bench as if he was worried she might try to steal his chemistry notes.
Liska considered it a triumph that she had gotten Kyle and R.J. to keep a path open on the floor of their bedroom so they could escape in the event of a fire. This kid kept his paper clips sorted by size.
“I should have you come and organize my kitchen,” she said. “But then I might be expected to cook.”
He had “in” and “out” trays labeled for bills and family finances.
“You pay the bills?” she asked.
“If I leave it to Dad, it doesn’t get done.”
Even as debilitated as Wayne Haas seemed to be, she thought it strange that he would give that responsibility to a seventeen-year-old boy.
“You don’t ever get to just be a kid, do you?”
Bobby shrugged and looked away from her. “It doesn’t matter. I’ve always had to take care of things myself.”
There was a bitter, ironic edge to his words.
“So what’s the good news?” he asked. “You said you have good news.”
“Karl Dahl was shot and killed this afternoon,” she said. “He won’t be hurting anyone ever again.”
“Good. So it’s over?”
Liska helped herself to a seat on an old riding lawn mower. “As far as Karl Dahl goes. We’re still looking into the assault on Judge Moore.”
“So she’s off the hook for siding with him now, ’cause he’s dead?” Bobby said. “She can go back to her life and do the same thing all over again?”
“Actually, she’s in the hospital,” Liska said. “Dahl abducted her last night. She’s lucky to be alive.”
Bobby couldn’t seem to muster up any sympathy. “If she’d just done what she was supposed to do, none of this would have happened.”
“Judge Moore didn’t let Karl Dahl break jail.”
“She would have let him walk,” the boy said. “He was supposed to go to prison, like, a long time ago. Maybe my dad could have had some closure and moved on if that had happened.”
“Life doesn’t always follow the plan, Bobby. Most of the time it just happens, and we do the best we can.”
Of course he wouldn’t go for that, she thought. This kid probably did an outline for a grocery list. He wanted everything neat and tidy and under his control. She couldn’t blame him. He’d had so little control over his own young life, he had to take it where he could.
On the wall at the far end of the bench, he had put up a coatrack and hung a variety of layers to put on when he started to get cold, in order of lightest weight to heaviest-a short-sleeved T-shirt, a long-sleeved T-shirt, a sweatshirt with a University of Minnesota logo, the black jacket he had been wearing the first two times she had spoken with him.
At least the clothes weren’t pressed and on padded hangers. The shirts hung crooked. He had tossed the jacket up on the hook inside out. Nice to know he wasn’t entirely perfect.
Liska stared at the coat, at the square white tag sewn into the back at the neck. About one inch by one inch. She frowned, but brought her attention back to the boy.