Prior Bad Acts

18

STAN DROVE OUT of the city in the 1996 Ford Taurus he had owned since it rolled off the assembly line in Detroit. It ran well, got him from one place to another. He’d never seen a reason to trade it in. He wasn’t one to need status symbols.

Now that he had decided on a plan of action, he needed a base. When one of his fellow detectives came to question him at his home about the attack on Judge Moore-and they would-they would find the videotape, and they would be looking for him.

It had been important to him that he left it, that they found it. It was important everyone understood who he was and what he stood for and how he had come to be the man he was now. What this case had done to him. The overwhelming sense of impotence, sitting behind a desk; sitting in the office of a shrink, staring at the wall; knowing all the power to put Karl Dahl away or put him back on the street was in the hands of other people. People who didn’t understand what evil was.

In better days, Stan had been quite a fisherman. The lake had been his escape from the job and from the silent disappointment of his wife. He enjoyed the solitude, the time alone, without noise, without voices, without the pressure of having to interact with other people.

The country west of Minneapolis and its suburbs was marshy and peppered with lakes large and small and tangles of woods all connected by narrow, twisting roads. The lake Stan fished was too small to be of interest to weekenders with powerboats and too difficult to find for the casual fishermen. He had been fishing that lake for nearly forty-five years.

His uncle owned a small cabin on the southwestern shore. Nothing to brag about, just a little tar-paper shack with a small kitchen and a smaller bathroom with a tin shower stall. It had a tiny cellar and a screened porch where a person could sit on summer evenings without being devoured by mosquitoes. And there was a big shed where Stan kept his little fishing boat during winter and where his uncle’s old Chevy pickup sat.

This place had been Stan’s hideaway since he was a boy. His uncle was elderly now and had been in poor health for years. When he died, the place would pass on to Stan.

He stopped at a country store and bought supplies-food, water, cigarettes, toilet paper. The clerk was a fat girl with a ring in her nose and jet-black hair streaked with yellow in front. She had no interest in Stan. She looked right through him, same as most people did.

The lake was glistening like blue glass in the sun. The rushes and reeds had dried to a golden alabaster shade. The far shore was dotted with clumps of paper-white birch trees, their remaining leaves bright gold. Maples and oaks made up the woods beyond, an artist’s palette of reds, oranges, and bronze. As far as Stan could say, this was the most beautiful place on earth.

A couple of huge old trees anchored the yard of his uncle’s property and kept the grass thin and sparse. The cabin looked the same as it always had, with the exception of bars on the windows and the door. Places like this one-which were occupied infrequently and mostly on weekends-were a target for vandals and thieves. Local kids with nothing better to do with their time.

Stan unlocked the door and took his groceries inside. The place always smelled vaguely musty. The damp seemed to seep in through the tar paper and drywall and settle into the cushions of the old couch, which also served as a bed.

He went back out to the shed, unlocked the big padlock, and rolled the door open. He popped the hood on the pickup and hooked up the cables of the battery charger, then went back to moving in.

From the trunk of his car, he lifted out a couple of black duffel bags and took them into the cabin. Tools and things he had packed, not knowing what he might need for the job he was setting out to do. A couple of handguns. A couple of knives. Handcuffs. Duct tape.

In a part of his mind, Stan watched himself examine these items with a weird, calm sense of horror, but it was not so strong that he made any attempt to stop himself. His decision was made. For the most part, he went about his business methodically, on autopilot, as if this were routine and normal, preparing to take the law into his own hands.

After he had made himself a few bologna sandwiches, he chose several close-range weapons, packed his essentials, and left the cabin, locking up behind himself.

The pickup battery had charged. Stan loaded his stuff in the back, inside the camper shell that enclosed the truck bed. He drove the truck out of the shed, replaced it with his car, slid the big door shut, and locked the big padlock.

No place was ever fully immune to a break-in, but Stan knew from long experience that criminals were lazy and put forth as little effort as possible. Deterrents like locks and bars could make a thief or vandal move on to an easier target.

He wondered how things might have turned out if Marlene Haas had locked her doors that fateful day. Would Karl Dahl have moved on, unwilling to put forth the effort or risk being seen breaking in?

Or had he been too fixated, too bent on living out his fantasy, to let something as simple as a dead bolt turn him away?

Stan believed the latter. That Karl Dahl had lived out his dark fantasies in his mind too many times not to make them reality.

He now understood what that was like.

He felt exactly the same way.