Prior Bad Acts

15

KOVAC WOKE TO a pounding he thought was inside his head. The clock read 7:32. In the morning. On Saturday.

He rolled out of bed, naked as the day he was born, and went to look out the window. On the roof of the house next door, his idiot neighbor was swinging a hammer. The sound reverberated in the otherwise-still morning air like gunshots.

Kovac shoved the old double-hung window open. “Hey! Elmer Fudd! What the hell are you doing?” he shouted.

The neighbor looked over at him, hammer cocked in his hand like he might throw it. The guy was seventy-plus, with mean, piggy little eyes and more hair growing out of his ears than on his head. Not that his head could be seen. He wore his favorite red plaid bomber cap with the flaps tied up on top of his head. The ends of the ties stuck up like antennae.

“Getting a jump on the Christmas lights!” he said.

“At seven-fucking-thirty in the morning?”

The old man frowned deeply. “You’ve got a filthy mouth on you!”

“I’m not even warmed up,” Kovac said. “Are you out of your fucking head? Christmas? It isn’t even Halloween!”

“Shows what you know!” the old man shouted. “Farmer’s Almanac says it’s an early winter. Could be a blizzard by Halloween.”

“Could be I’m gonna shoot you dead off that roof if you don’t stop with the hammer.”

The neighbor gave him a face. “I’m within my rights. City ordinance says I can bang all I want after seven-thirtyA.M. ”

Dismissing Kovac, the old man teed up a nail and smacked it into his roof. Every year it was the same thing-the most god-awful array of mixed holiday messages filled the man’s yard, crowned his roof, hung from the eaves, lit up the trees. Santa Claus bringing gifts to the baby Jesus. The herald angel beaming down on an army of plywood snowmen. All of it illuminated with more wattage than the whole of Times Square. For eight weeks it was like living next door to the sun.

“You ever hear of common courtesy, you rancid old fart?”

The old man stuck his tongue out.

Kovac turned around and mooned him.

So began his day. A shower. The patch. Coffee. A couple of doughnuts, just to perpetuate the stereotype. The local morning news was all about Karl Dahl’s escape and the public outcry caused by it. The attack on Carey Moore was a distant second. Half the city probably thought she deserved it. Now that the newsies had all but announced her home address, there would probably be a steady stream of cars driving by to egg her house.

Or worse…

Kovac sighed, rubbed a hand over his face, and tried to decide where to start. He or Liska would have to speak to the judge’s clerk. See if she had any hate mail on file. Cross-reference the phone number from the two threatening calls with the judge’s phone logs. They needed to get a printout of any recently released felons Carey Moore had put away in her capacity as either prosecutor or judge.

They had to meet Lieutenant Dawes downtown at nine so she could impress upon them what her boss had no doubt already impressed upon her, and right up the food chain to the chief, who had already been read the riot act by the mayor, and the county attorney, who had heard it from the state attorney general. Kovac and Liska would be lectured on the gravity of the situation, like they were morons who hadn’t managed to figure that out for themselves.

Christ, how he hated the politics of the system. He had always wanted to line up the brass monkeys, ask those who hadn’t worked on the street in the last decade to take a giant step back, and have them drop into a big black hole.

If he could avoid that meeting, postpone it until, say, the case was solved, he would.

He needed to speak with Stan Dempsey.

Man, you are desperate.

Kovac had never balked at going after a bad cop. A wrong guy was a wrong guy, badge or no. He’d even toughed out a stretch working Internal Affairs a million years ago. He hadn’t liked it, but he’d done it. But Stan Dempsey wasn’t a bad cop. Kovac felt nothing but pity for the man.

Stan Dempsey was a guy who had plodded along through life mostly under the radar. A decent cop, but no one the brass would take notice of until they decided he was a liability. He was a guy who really didn’t have any friends, because he was odd and quiet and antisocial. Stan Dempsey would probably have been more comfortable working in the morgue than on the streets, but he was a cop, and that was probably all he had ever wanted to be.

Kovac doubted that anyone Dempsey had ever partnered with knew much of anything about him. But everyone knew Dempsey had lost it in the interview room when they had first questioned Karl Dahl for the Haas murders. Dempsey had exploded into a rage that was three times bigger than he was. Totally out of his head. It had taken two other detectives to pull him off Dahl. Ranting, eyes rolling back in his head, practically foaming at the mouth. He had had to be sedated.

Kovac tried to imagine Stan Dempsey lying in wait for Carey Moore in the parking garage, rushing out at her, knocking her down, hitting her again and again.

You fucking bitch! You fucking cunt!

The rage was there. Pent up behind that hangdog face and emotionless demeanor. Kovac grabbed a pen and a receipt from Domino’s Pizza and scribbled a note to see if the video geek could zoom in somehow on the weapon. If it was a police baton… that wouldn’t be a good thing.

Stan Dempsey lived maybe a mile away from Kovac. His house was a small story and a half with gray shingle siding and white trim. The yard was scattered with stray leaves that had drifted across the sidewalk from a maple tree on the boulevard.

Kovac went to the front door and rang the bell. The house was silent. No barking dog, no Stan. He rang the bell again and waited.

Where would Stan Dempsey go this early on a Saturday morning? The supermarket for his groceries. He struck Kovac as the kind of guy who would eat liver and onions… and hash… and all those kinds of food that normal people wouldn’t eat. Tongue… oxtail…

Still no Stan coming to the door. Kovac tried to turn the doorknob. Locked.

He could have gone for a walk. Maybe he’d gotten out of town for the weekend. An old fragment of memory made Kovac think Dempsey was a fisherman. Maybe he had a cabin on one of Minnesota ’s ten-thousand-plus lakes.

Kovac moved off the front step and went to the picture window that faced the street. The drapes were closed. He couldn’t see inside.

Around the side of the house, a lace curtain hung in a window that might have been a dining room. But the window was shorter vertically than the picture window, and Kovac wasn’t tall enough to look in.

He went around to the back of the house. A charcoal grill was in its place near the back door. Inexpensive white plastic furniture sat on a concrete patio. A single chair and a small table. A lonely tableau. Kovac grabbed the chair and went back to the window with the lace curtain.

What he expected to see, he didn’t know. But he hadn’t expected what he found. A small traditional dining room, the walls painted a weak mint green. A traditional cherry buffet. A traditional cherrywood dining room table… with an arsenal of weapons laid out neatly on top of it. And a video camera sitting on a tripod, pointed at the one chair pulled out from the table.

“Oh, shit,” Kovac said under his breath as his stomach dropped.

“Can I help you?”

Kovac looked over his shoulder to find a tiny old lady in a lavender flowered housecoat and slippers that had been made to look like white rabbits with floppy pink-lined ears.

“I’m a police officer, ma’am,” he said, getting down off the chair. He pulled his badge and ID out of his coat pocket and showed them to her.

She squinted at them. “Mr. Dempsey is a police officer too,” she said. “A detective.”

“Yes, ma’am, I know.”

“I’m his neighbor. Hilda Thorenson.”

He wanted to tell Hilda it wasn’t a good idea to approach a stranger who might have been looking to rob the place, but now was not the time.

“Do you know if Mr. Dempsey is home?” he asked.

“Oh, no. I wouldn’t know that. Why? Is something the matter?”

“Maybe,” Kovac said.

His mind was racing. Visions of Stan Dempsey eating his gun flashed through his head. He didn’t want to find that. He’d handled a couple of cop suicides in his career. He didn’t want to look at another dead cop and think: There but for the grace of God go I. He didn’t want to have to tell another wife, child, girlfriend that their loved one had chosen to end his life because the emotional pain of that life had been just too much to bear.

Family never understood the why of that. Why hadn’t their husband/wife/girlfriend/boyfriend/father/mother come to them to unload that pain? Why hadn’t he or she gone to a minister, a priest, a rabbi, a shrink for help? They didn’t understand that cops felt no one understood them but other cops. And still, cops didn’t confide in one another about the problems they had. They didn’t want to seem weak to their peers, didn’t want to give superiors a reason to look at them.

Kovac felt guilty all of a sudden that he hadn’t made more of an effort to get to know Stan Dempsey over the years. Maybe if he had, the guy would have had at least two white plastic chairs in his backyard.

“I need to get inside Mr. Dempsey’s house,” he told Hilda Thorenson. “I’m afraid something might have happened to him.”

The old woman looked alarmed. “Oh, dear!”

Kovac went to try the back door. Locked. Shit. He was too damned old to be kicking doors in.

“I have a key,” the neighbor said. “For emergencies. Wait here. I’ll go get it.”

Kovac watched her go at something slightly more than a snail’s pace. She had to be eighty if she was a day. Dempsey might have been in the house at that very minute, sitting on the toilet, trying to work up the courage to pull the trigger.

He had already been feeling desperate, trapped at a desk while other people took over the case that had pushed him to the breaking point. He would have been upset about Judge Moore’s ruling, maybe to the point of acting out against her. And Karl Dahl’s escape would surely have pushed him over the edge.

Kovac couldn’t wait for a key.

He went to the back door and blocked the screen door open. He grabbed a bug candle in a small galvanized pot and smashed one of the old glass panes in the door. Ten seconds later he was in the house, calling for Dempsey.

Without even trying to take in the scene, Kovac dashed through the small house.

“Stan? It’s Sam Kovac. Where are you?” he shouted as he pushed open the door to the small bathroom off the hall. Empty. Dempsey’s home office. Empty. He took the stairs two at a time, bracing himself mentally for the sound of the shot.

“Stan? Where are you? We need to talk.”

Bedroom one. Bedroom two. Empty.

Taking a deep breath, Kovac rested his hand on the doorknob of the bathroom. This was where they did it, often as not, in the bathroom, where the mess could be steam-cleaned.

Kovac pushed the door open.

Empty.

A second’s relief.

He ran back down the stairs and out the back door, nearly mowing down the nosy neighbor.

Garage.

Carbon monoxide.

But the small detached garage sat empty.

No Stan Dempsey. No car.

Shit.

“What’s happening?” the old lady asked. “Is Mr. Dempsey hurt?”

“He’s not here, ma’am,” Kovac said.

“Well, I don’t know where he’d go,” she said, as if she couldn’t possibly imagine Stan Dempsey having a life.

Kovac rubbed the back of his neck and sighed heavily. “Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to return to your home. The police will be sealing off this residence.”

The woman looked confused and frightened as she backed away.

“Oh, dear.”

“Thank you for your help,” Kovac said. He stood there until the old lady turned away and retreated, the bunny ears of her slippers bobbing up and down as she went.

The basement of the Haas home had been where the murdered children had been hung from the ceiling. There was a certain logic to thinking Stan Dempsey might have chosen the basement, might have hanged himself down there.

Kovac went back inside and flipped on the light leading down to the basement.

“Stan? It’s Sam Kovac. I’m coming downstairs,” Kovac warned, going slowly, taking one step at a time.

The basement was finished with knotty pine paneling, cheap green carpet, and a yellowed acoustical tile ceiling that had absorbed years of cigarette smoke. No walls divided the space. A laundry area in one corner. Storage took up one end. In the remaining quarter Stan Dempsey had set up his own command center.

Several freestanding bulletin boards were covered with photos from the Haas murder scene, photos from the autopsies. Copies of reports, copies of Dempsey’s own notes. He had taped white butcher paper to the wall above the bulletin boards with time lines sketched out-who was where, when; what time the bodies had been discovered; the approximate time of death as stated by the ME. Boxes on an old card table held copies of files on the case.

None of it struck Kovac as being particularly unusual. He had a basement full of old case files and notes himself. Most of the detectives he knew did. They hung on to them for various reasons-superstition, paranoia, in case an old case got overturned on appeal, in case the station burned to the ground and the originals were destroyed. He had laid out cases himself in his home office so he could ponder and stew over them in his off hours.

The thing that bothered Kovac about Stan Dempsey’s basement was the chair. A single straight-backed wooden chair sat front and center by the board with the photographs. An oversized red glass ashtray sat on the floor beside it, full of ashes and butts.

Kovac could imagine Stan Dempsey sitting in that chair for hours on end, staring at the carnage. Images straight out of the darkest nightmares anyone could imagine. The brutality stark and cruel, frozen in time. The faces of the victims, blank and staring. The mind didn’t want to accept the idea that these had been real people, living human beings, only hours before the photographs had been taken. Or that in those hours prior to death, these people-this mother and two small children-had been subjected to unspeakable tortures, that they had experienced choking fear, that they had probably known they were going to die.

If a person’s mind allowed those realities to sink in, then it became too easy to hear the screams, to see the sheer terror in those now-blank faces. It became too easy to see the events unfold like the worst kind of horror show.

If a cop allowed that to happen, if he made a case like this one personal, if he allowed logic and procedure and a professional distance to be overrun by emotion and empathy and reaction… thereon lay the road to madness.

A terrible feeling of foreboding lay like a stone in Kovac’s gut as he climbed the basement stairs. This time he took in everything as he went through the house.

The kitchen was a mess. Cereal flakes were all over the counter, all over the floor, as if the box had exploded. Raisins were scattered throughout like rat turds. The milk carton had been overturned. Milk puddled on the counter and dripped over the edge.

The cereal box looked to have been slashed several times with a knife. The countertop had received similar treatment-multiple stab wounds. The knife was not in sight, but there was some blood.

Stan Dempsey lost his mind in this room, Kovac thought as he looked around at the chaos. A small television sat on the counter. The local news was running, but the sound was off. Karl Dahl’s mug shot and his physical description were up on the screen.

Considered extremely dangerous.

Do not attempt to approach.

Call 911.

Kovac moved into the dining room. From the dining room, he could see the living room, which was also trashed. The old brown couch had been shot to death. A floor lamp had been knocked over. The coffee table had been overturned.

What the hell went on here?

Kovac briefly considered the notion of an intruder, but the house had been locked up tight. No. This was Stan Dempsey’s rage. This was what had been building inside that homely, quiet, strange man in the months since Stan Dempsey had been called out on a triple homicide one stormy night in August a year past.

The array of weapons laid out on the dining room table was impressive. Shotguns, a deer rifle, several handguns, some that appeared to be World War II vintage. Knives of various lengths and blades. An old leather sap-a leather sack filled with sand or buckshot. Coppers used to carry them in the old days before the Miranda rules had come down. A smack behind the ear could take down a big guy instantly if it was done right. Nobody carried them anymore. Not legally, anyway.

And lined up neatly in a row above the weapons: medals. A Purple Heart. A Bronze Star. Several commendations from the police department. All laid out on display, as if Stan had fully expected people to come into his home. These were the things he had wanted seen, the awards that had marked his life into segments-the army, war, the police department.

On the buffet behind the table stood a couple of framed photographs. Stan in a bad suit from the seventies and a too-wide tie. Standing beside him, a homely woman with beauty-parlor-blond hair teased and sprayed into a sheer helmet circling her head. A girl of maybe five or six sitting in front of them, the only one smiling, a black hole where one front tooth had been.

The family. Kovac hadn’t known Dempsey had ever been married. It was difficult to picture. He had seen no evidence of a woman living in the house. No clothes in the closets, no woman stuff on the dresser or nightstand. The wife was gone, by either divorce or death. The little girl was grown and long gone by now.

Finally, with a sense of dread heavy in his chest, Kovac looked at the video camera perched on its tripod, pointing at the lone chair pulled out from the table. He stepped behind it, looking how to turn the thing from RECORD toVCR.

Stan Dempsey came on the small screen, walking in front of the camera, seating himself in the chair. When he began to speak, there was no emotion whatsoever. Very matter-of-fact. He talked about the things that had gone on in his life, how all he’d ever wanted to do was become a cop, a detective. He talked about how much he had loved the job over the years. He talked about a couple of cases he’d worked that he was especially proud of.

In the background Kovac could see through the doorway to the kitchen to a cookie jar in the shape of a pig sitting on its ass on the counter. He looked up from the video screen, through the doorway into the kitchen. There was the cookie jar, a silly, stupid thing completely incongruous with its owner. A simple, normal thing completely in contrast to the creepy, dark tone of the videotape.

The whole thing seemed surreal. Dempsey was too calm on the video. The kind of calm that came to people when they had made a difficult decision and felt at peace. He picked up a knife and stroked the blade lovingly while he explained what kind of knife it was, what its purpose was.

He put the first knife down and picked up a broad, gleaming hunting knife with a deadly-looking serrated blade. He explained how it could be used to cut the throat of an animal, how it could be used to gut the animal, to skin the animal.

He picked up a boning knife and explained the process of removing bones and cutting the meat from them. The job took a very sharp knife, he said. Stan talked about how he oiled and honed the blades of his knives himself and took great pride in his work.

The hunting knife and the boning knife were both absent from the table now, Kovac noted.

On the tape, Dempsey picked up a long two-pronged fork, the kind that came with barbecue sets.

“Depending on how a person used this, ”Dempsey said in his flat, monotone voice, “this could be a very effective tool.”

Jesus God.

He talked about his guns, how the first two of the collection had been his father’s, his own pistol from WWII and another he had taken off a dead German.

He talked about the Haas murders, how hard he had worked that case, the rage he had felt in the interrogation room looking at the man who had tortured and murdered a woman and two little children. He talked about how angry he’d been when the lieutenant had pulled him not only from the case but from the rotation, and stuck him on a desk.

“… and now the judge has ruled Karl Dahl’s prior bad acts can’t be admitted into evidence. The jury might find that evidence too significant. The buildup to a triple homicide, the making of a killer. Judge Moore found that to be prejudicial and inflammatory. Well, that’s the whole idea, isn’t it?” Dempsey asked. “Are we supposed to pretend Karl Dahl was a damn Boy Scout before he butchered Marlene Haas and those two children? Of course he wasn’t. He was a criminal and a pervert, but the jury won’t hear about that.”

Dempsey shook his head slowly. “That’s just not right. It’s not right for a judge to take away the prosecution’s case. Judge Moore’s decision puts Karl Dahl one step closer to walking on a triple murder, and she should be ashamed of herself.

“I hear she has a small daughter. I wonder how differently she would feel if her daughter were raped and sodomized and hung up from the ceiling like a slaughtered lamb. I think she’d sing a different tune.”

Holy Christ.

Kovac felt sick.

“Of course, it doesn’t matter now,” Stan Dempsey said.“ Karl Dahl is out, running around loose. Escaped. I don’t know how that could happen, but it did. And I have to do something about that. Someone has to take responsibility. That’ll be me. I’ll do that. The guilty have to pay.

“The guilty have to pay…”

The screen turned to snow.

Stan Dempsey was gone.