Prior Bad Acts

8

“YOU THINK SOMEBODY tried to kill her?”

“I can’t comment at this time. It’s not my job to speculate.”

Kathleen Casey made a loud raspberry.

Liska looked at the nurse sideways as she took a long drink from a can of Red Bull, raised her free hand, and lazily raised her middle finger.

Casey gave a weary chuckle. The press had cleared out as soon as they had realized they were never going to see or hear from Judge Moore. Liska and Casey had slipped into the lounge for a moment’s solitude.

“I hate the press,” Liska said. “It’s always like trying to explain to a group of four-year-old children why the sky is blue.”

“Because it is,” Casey said.

“But why?”

“Because God made it that way.”

“But why?”

“So he can weed out all the bad children who say ‘But why’ and send them to hell.”

Liska cocked an eyebrow. “Do I have to send Children and Family Services to your house, Casey?”

“Too late. I already got rid of the bodies,” the nurse said, then winced. “Bad joke, all things considered.”

An ambulance siren wailed in the distance.

Liska pushed her drink aside on the table and shook her head. “I think about what that Karl Dahl did to those children, and I can’t help but think of my own boys when they were that age. They were so innocent, so trusting. So vulnerable.”

She still thought of them that way, as far as that went. Kyle, her serious one, was almost thirteen, as he liked to point out every third day of the week. Almost a teenager, which still qualified him as a child, Liska reminded him.

R.J., her youngest, was still a little boy. He had inherited his father’s charming but frustrating Peter Pan qualities. It was a good bet he would be a boy until he was toothless and living in a rest home.

Nikki was fiercely protective of them both. If something were to happen to them…

“I’d go insane,” she said. “Stark raving.”

“Think about Wayne Haas,” Casey said. “How he must have felt hearing about Moore ’s ruling today.”

Wayne Haas would be one of their first calls, Liska thought. Kovac would handle him, mano a mano. He would side with Haas against Judge Moore. Damned liberal judge. He would try to be Wayne Haas’s pal, all in the attempt to get Haas to say something self-incriminating.

Liska would take the son, Bobby, seventeen. She would ask the question “Where were you between six-thirty and seven?” As if they hadn’t been put through enough. Now they would be questioned as possible suspects. They would be angry, feel insulted. Who could blame them?

But it couldn’t matter to her or to Kovac. Carey Moore was their victim. And Wayne Haas and his son had the biggest ax to grind with Carey Moore.

The siren was coming closer.

Liska looked at her watch. Kovac should be calling soon. They still had a long night ahead of them. All she wanted was to go home and hug her boys.

“Do you think Dahl will get off?” Casey asked. She was already moving out of her chair in anticipation of what the siren would bring.

“Not a chance in hell, Judge Moore or no Judge Moore. The only way Karl Dahl has out of this is to be beamed up by aliens.”

“We just sent a guy up to the psych ward who could probably arrange that.”

The sudden explosion of sound beyond the employee lounge jolted Liska out of her chair.

A bloodcurdling roar sounded, followed by someone shouting at the top of their lungs, “Hold him down, goddammit! Get on his chest!”

Casey nodded toward the door. “They’re singing my song.”

Liska followed the nurse into the work lanes of the ER. People were everywhere, rushing, shouting. Red-faced deputies, docs in green scrubs, EMT crews wheeling gurneys in from the ambulance bay. Liska grabbed one of the deputies by the arm and shoved her badge in his face.

“What’s going on?”

“Riot at the jail.”

An orderly yelled for them to get out of the way. Liska jumped back against the wall as a gurney zipped by, its passenger in an orange jail jumpsuit. Another gurney rolled in behind it, its passenger spraying the room with a fountain of arterial blood.

A third gurney sagged beneath the weight of an inmate the size of a walrus. He was strapped to a backboard with a deputy sprawled on top of him, trying to hold him down. Both of them had bloodied heads and faces. The inmate was bellowing like a madman.

A doc was calling for security, further restraints, IV Valium. Casey moved toward the big guy, with a syringe in hand. The inmate was bucking hard against the restraints and against the deputy. The gurney skidded sideways and slammed into a cartload of supplies. Momentum unseated the deputy, and he fell hard to the floor.

The inmate let loose another roar, and Liska saw a leg restraint pop like a string, and a boot the length of her forearm drop over the side of the cart.

Liska pulled her tactical baton from the pocket of her blazer and extended it with a snap of her wrist. Before she could decide whether to move in or stand back, the inmate flipped himself, backboard and all, off the gurney, landing on top of the deputy.

“Grab his arm!” Casey shouted, trying to move in with the needle.

Even as another deputy descended on the inmate, the inmate got his feet under him and came up, twisting and struggling against the remaining restraints. He had one arm free and used a fist the size of a five-pound sledgehammer to backhand the deputy, knocking him on his ass and sending blood spraying from his nose.

Liska couldn’t get close. The guy was staggering around with the backboard on him, like Frankenstein’s monster in a rage. A deputy standing between him and the doors to the ambulance bay drew his weapon.

The ER was full of staff and patients and people waiting in chairs; people shouting, screaming, a baby wailing. If the deputy discharged his weapon…

Ducking below the inmate’s line of sight, Liska dashed toward him and swung her baton. She felt the satisfying jolt of contact. She hit the floor and rolled. The inmate dropped to one knee, howling. A deputy barreled into him from behind, hit the backboard, and they both went sprawling.

The deputy with the gun rushed in and jammed the nose of it against the inmate’s temple. Every guy in a uniform was screaming, “Down on the ground! Freeze, motherfucker!”

Kathleen Casey rushed in as one of the deputies pinned the inmate’s arm against the floor. Liska winced as she watched the needle jab into a bulging, pulsing blue vein.

The inmate was crying and howling. “My leg! Oh, God! Goddammit! It’s broke! Get off! Jesus Christ!”

Casey stepped back, syringe still in hand. Liska got to her feet and straightened her blazer.

“Men are such wimps,” the nurse said with a sniff.

“Yeah,” Liska said. “Men drool, short chicks rule.”

She tapped the end of her baton against the floor, and it released and fell back into itself as she raised her hand. The deputies were rolling their monster over onto his back. He was quieting now as his heart pumped the Valium through him.

One of the ER docs dropped down beside the man, cut the bloody leg of the orange jumpsuit to reveal a jagged shard of shinbone sticking out through the skin.

“Shit,” Liska muttered, shoulders slumping. “Paperwork.”

Casey shook her head. “You don’t know your own strength, girlfriend.”

“Where’s Dahl?”

Liska’s head snapped toward the deputy who had asked the question. He was already moving toward the gurney down the hall.

“Dahl?” she asked, hustling toward the bed, her heart rate picking up.

One of the other deputies ran past her and down the hall, weapon drawn. Behind her she could hear someone get on a radio and call for backup.

“Dahl?” she said again, with more urgency. “Karl Dahl?”

The deputy near the gurney was cursing. It was empty, abandoned, the white sheet rumpled and stained with blood where its occupant’s head had lain. “Shit! Fucking shit! He’s gone!”